TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER I—THE BEGINNING OP MAX’S PILGRIMAGE

CHAPTER II—A WOMAN PAINTING

CHAPTER III—VOTARIES

CHAPTER IV—NANCY’S CORNER AND OTHERS

CHAPTER V—END OF MAX’S DAY OF DAYS

CHAPTER VI—A PAGAN UNDER THE ROOFS

CHAPTER VII—NANCY’S WINTER OF DISCONTENT

CHAPTER VIII—PAYNIM’S PROGRESS’

CHAPTER IX—SUMMER

CHAPTER X—SUMMER LIGHTNING

CHAPTER XI—CHILDREN OF AN HOUR

CHAPTER XII—MARY’S QUESTION AND ROGER’S

CHAPTER XIII—THE CREST

CHAPTER XIV—ANCHORAGE

CHAPTER XV—ROGER'S CHANCE

CHAPTER XVI—THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

CHAPTER XVII—THE CONSCIENTIOUS DISCIPLE

CHAPTER XVIII—IN FELIX DIDO

CHAPTER XIX—THE PYRE

CHAPTER XX—THE CHASM

CHAPTER XXI—NANCY DRIFTING

CHAPTER XXII—YOUNG RANDY

CHAPTER XXIII—OLD ROGER

CHAPTER XXIV—FROM DAWN TO DUSK

CHAPTER XXV—ANOTHER TWO

CHAPTER XXVI—“LOOK HERE UPON THIS PICTURE, AND ON THIS”

CHAPTER XXVII—THE RECKONING

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OP MAX’S PILGRIMAGE

He heard her voice for the first time over the telephone, and up to that time he had never seen her. Yet her name had been a household word in his home for all the four years since his marriage; and in four years a man grows accustomed, often sadly accustomed, to household words. But he was alone in New York, and a stranger; and the business which had brought him there was not going so well as he had hoped it might. Moreover, he had promised Jo that he would go to see Nancy.

There was a little delay in answering; but when at length her voice reached his ears, he discovered that it was a pleasantly pitched voice, though speaking now with some impatience. “ This is Anne Desmond. Who is this, please ?”

Max gave his name, and added an explanatory phrase. Her tone changed at once. “ Oh, of course I want to see you, Mr. Meredith, and hear all about Jo. Are you frightfully busy?”

“ I can suit your time, I think,” he answered. “ When shall you yourself be free ? ”

“ At what time does it get dark to-day ? ” was her unexpected reply.

He was still attempting to trace the connection when she had made her own calculation and announced the result “Suppose you come to see me at five o’clock today,” she said. “ That will suit you ? ”

“ Perfectly,” he assured her.

She gave him minute directions for reaching her. She lived a few blocks from a famous Square, in a century-old house which had been remodeled into what they called a “duplex” in this part of the country. He would find the house easily; then he was to ring the bell, and go in and walk upstairs. Her card was above her bell, and on her door as well; he couldn't miss it.

As the day progressed Max found himself less eager to go; he had a premonition that this call would prove a bag's end, and that he would adjudge it not worth the paying, far less worth repeating. He consoled himself by reflecting that if Nancy painted, or even lived among painters, he might at least obtain some light on a sort of life that was totally strange to him. He was man of affairs enough to distrust artists on principle; he would never see with their eyes, nor judge by their standards. Yet he had a lurking respect for their courage: it must be a fine thing to throw caution to the winds, and deliberately to dedicate one's life to the immediate pursuit of beauty. And their manners and customs would certainly be worth observation; his curiosity had gone unsatisfied ever Since advancing years had caused him to distrust the “ Vie de Bohême ” as an exact picture of manners.

He got downtown somewhat ahead of his time; and as he walked westward from the Square dusk was beginning to settle. The street was very quiet: first he passed a few wholesale houses of a minor sort, and then came rows of dwellings, most of them built of red brick, with beautiful little ironwork balconies that clearly dated from an era of craftsmanship. The simple solid building pleased. Max intrinsically; and it reminded him of the way they had built in the west in his childhood, before the fever for bungalows swept in from the coast.

One of these red brick houses bore the number Max was looking for; and he followed his instructions by ringing and entering. A flight of worn stairs took him up to a second door, with a card that corresponded to the one above the bell. Max rapped on the panel.

He was not kept waiting. A quick light step approached inside, and the door was opened by Nancy herself. “ Awfully good of you to come,” she said. “ You hadn't any trouble in finding the place, I hope ? ”

Dusk had fallen in the little room; and it was only partially dispelled by a crackling fire upon the hearth and a lighted candle on the mantel. As she stood back to admit him into the room, half of Nancy's face was in darkness; and the strong piling up of shadows about and behind hef threw her into a deliberate relief, flung her pointedly at the consciousness of the observer. The impression lasted but a moment, for when she had closed the door she switched on a lamp and extinguished the candle; but the moment was long enough for Max to feel that he was going to be interested.

“ Sit down, and enjoy my fire,” she bade him. “ Is it getting colder outside? We'll have a cup of tea, if you like tea, and you can tell me all about Jo. How long is it since you left home ? ”

Heard so, with no impertinent wire to cross, heT voice was deep and sweet, and as she faced him in the full light, with a smile upon her lips, Max got a two-fold impression of physical precision and mental control, as if she always knew what she was doing, and yet were somewhat aloof from the concerns in which she might express, or even take, an interest. He liked her aloofness, which he Imagined as a protection to her spirit; he liked her deep voice, and her economy of movement, and his own singular feeling of being at home in her presence, without needing to understand either her or her surroundings. Yet he wanted very much to understand them both; and as he reported faithfully on Jo's health and occupations, he was searching about in his mind for the information that Jo had from time to time dealt out about her friend.

He hadn't listened; but although his not listening left him at a loss for things he might just as well have known, he was hardly sorry. He recalled that Nancy was an orphan, and had gone to school somewhere with Jo, and had always been diligent in the pursuit of her calling. That would do for a beginning, to be sure; and half the fun of knowing Nancy Desmond, he saw even now, would be ferreting but for himself what was to be known about her.

He had a feeling that it wouldn’t be altogether easy to get track of what was most interesting in her; yet there were reflections of her personality even in the slightest details of her menage: in the arrangement of her sitting-room, for example, with its simple excellent furniture, its perfect neatness, its avoidance of ornamentation; or even the tea they drank, which was strong and very hot, and accompanied by sandwiches of rather substantial character. Nancy did full justice to them; and when she took the lead in the conversation, it was to speak of the personal topic of the keenness of her appetite. “ I didn’t have any lunch this noon,” she explained. “And when. I don’t stop for lunch, I’m always dying for my tea.”

“ I should think so I ” exclaimed Max. “ Do you often do without lunch ? ”

“Usually,” she admitted. “When I’m working hard, I like to keep On as long as the light lasts. Of course, living alone I can do as I please.”

“Is that altogether an advantage?” asked Max.

“In some ways, perhaps not But your work isn’t subject to interruption.”

“You don’t work here, do you?” he asked, glancing about the room: the only picture visible was framed, and hung over the mantel as if in a place of honor.

“No; I work upstairs. What was the attic of the original house is my studio now; I get all my light from a skylight, you see.”

This was getting some details at least about her: as to the maimer of her life and work she answered his questions candidly enough, if with a shade too much of explicitness. They built up a curious enough picture, to Max’s judgment; one didn’t imagine a woman living like that, or at least, if she lived like that, her manner of living wasn’t the important thing about her. But even if the details now vouchsafed were only in the penumbra of what he would like to know about her, Max was at the very beginning of the acquisition of knowledge. Some day perhaps even the details he now gathered would fit in somewhere.

“And when you are through with the work,” he questioned, “ you turn the key on it, and come down here? ” She nodded, draining the last of her last cup of tea. “When I am through with the day’s work, I like to get completely away from the sight of it — and the smell; then I can go back the next day with zest.”

“That doesn’t sound as if you really liked to work,” Max challenged.

“Who does? Say rather that I can’t get away from it. The life of a practising artist is a dog’s life: work until you’re so tired you can’t work any longer, then rest until you can begin again.”

“Yet you chose it,” Max reminded her.

“ And would again, of course,” she said. “ Not so much because I love it, as because I couldn’t be satisfied with any other.”

A singular look came over her face as she said that, a little drawing in of the lips, a little narrowing of the eyes; and it seemed to Max that she was conscious for the moment of an incompleteness in her life, growing no doubt out of an incompleteness in herself. She was firmly and finely made, young, good-looking, and highly vitalized; if she were living a dedicated life, perhaps it was partly in spite of herself. But Max had as yet no means of knowing just how purely dedicated her life was.

If there was a cloud in her consciousness, it was gone in a moment. “So much for what you may tell Jo,” she said. “ Now go on with what you were telling me. How old is the baby?”

“Three,” answered Max.

“To think of my never having seen her!” she ejaculated. “Jo’s baby! Does she look like Jo?”

“ No, I am sorry to say she looks like me,” said Max.

“You aren't really sorry?”

“ Of course not; but the handsome Sumners all regret that the child should resemble her ‘ foreign-looking' father”

“ Foreign-looking' ? I should say native — aboriginal,” said Nancy.

Max was unexpectedly embarrassed to find that she had already placed, and placed accurately, even his looks. “ Be that as it may, it's hard on the papoose,” he said, and he began to talk about Virginia. He had never connected Virginia with anything else in his life, not even permanently with the marriage from- which she sprang. Perhaps that was one reason why he was fond of her: Virginia was an oasis.

Nancy listened, and put questions to draw him on. She didn't say that she was fond of children; Max had noted that the people who were genuinely fond of them never did say so. But she seemed interested; and indeed now that they had exhausted Jo, there was no one for them to talk about but Virginia, unless they fell back upon Nancy herself. Max was not willing to talk about himself: from which it may be inferred that his had become a somewhat morbid frame of mind.

They presently paid their respects, however, to his impressions of New York, and to the plays that he had seen there. Nancy was fond of the theater, it appeared. Nothing else, she said, took her so completely out of herself. “ And it gives one ideas,” she added. “ Light on drapery, for one thing: they can do such wonderful things nowadays with light.”

“That reminds me,” said Max. “ I know it’s the idiotic qnestion of a rank outsider, but Fd like to ask where you get your ideas for pictures ? ”

“Where don’t I get them?” she retorted. “Idea is perhaps too intellectual a term to apply to what starts a picture: I call it the germ myself. I get the germ from something I see in the theater, or in the street, or in the country. Sometimes I fairly don’t know where I get it; it seems to come out of the air. It isn’t important where you get the germ; and of course the painter isn’t responsible for that. It’s the use he makes of what is given him that is the care of his artistic conscience.”

“Then what you call a germ,” suggested Max, “was known in the older days as inspiration?”

She smiled. “That isn’t flattering to us modems, is it? Can I illustrate? I’m working on a picture now, a dryad emerging from a tree. It was suggested by the fusion in my head of a beautiful old tree out where I go sometimes to paint and the brown skin of a model I found at the Art School. It was the color did it, you see — that and some flickering remnants of a youthful training in the classics.”

“ I should like to see it,” said Max.

“You may, some day. It hasn’t progressed beyond the stage of studies yet. It’s in my nerves now; soon it will be in my finger-tips. From them it will go to the canvas; then, for better or worse, I’m rid of it.”

“ And then ? ” suggested Max.

“Then? Then I shall begin another, of course. But don’t make me look that far ahead; it’s dizzying.”

“ Have you any pictures on exhibition now ? ” asked Max. ” One,” and she named the gallery.

“Is that your work?” he asked, nodding toward the painting that hung over the mantel.

“ Oh, no I ” she said. “ That was given me by the artist. It isn’t in the least like my work.”

Max rose to examine the picture, which he had previously remarked as the only one in the room. It showed the last glow of a November sunset, with bare boughs interlaced against the sky: an Inness subject, but not done in the Inness manner. Some highly nervous and terribly egotistic modem had projected himself into that peaceful subject, spoiling the serenity but adding a grotesque interest. The grotesquerie, however, was not a matter of workmanship; for the picture was worked out minutely and smoothly.

“That’s extraordinarily interesting,” said Max. “Is the artist well-known?”

“ Not so well as he ought to be. He wasn’t bora lucky; and the sight of him going so nearly unrewarded always makes me feel like apologizing for my own luck.” Nancy paused, bit her lip, and added, “ But I can’t think why I tell you all this.”

“ Then you can’t imagine how interesting it is to me,”said Max. “I know I don’t appreciate all you say; but it isn’t for lack of trying.”

He had of course been interested all along, though less by the little bits of things she said, sincere as they were and germane to her world, than by his perception that in the woman herself lay an essential interest, a visible comeliness and charm, with the backing shadows of things he couldn’t altogether make out. But his appreciation of her evidently cherished picture suddenly interested her in him. Previously he had been her friend Jo’s husband, a convenient go-between for news, and presumably a likable man enough. In liking that picture, however, he had stumbled upon an “ open sesame.” Leaning a little over the arm of her chair, and turning her face full upon him as she talked, Nancy abruptly proceeded to make friends with him.

They were at the best possible age for making friends, neither so young as to be distrustful nor so old as to prove indifferent. Max recognized the progress, and entered heartily into it; and there came to him even then a feeling that a friend so made might prove a rare and precious possession. He had few friends, and none of them women: his and Jo’s failure to achieve friendliness was by no means the least of their failures. And he could afford himself this luxury, if it should be actually offered to him: his maturity, his married state, the whole tenor of his decent and ordered life, assured him of that.

Although he had from the beginning recognized the turn his visit now took, Max was afterward unable to recall what they said, nor even much that they talked of, while some of their earlier quite insignificant remarks hung endlessly in his recollection. But then he had been alert to begin with; and now he passed from that alertness which is natural to a stranger and an alien, passed to a fusion so complete that it could leave behind no recollection save of itself.

It seemed like a sumptuous beginning; but of course there was no guarantee that anything would ever follow. If nothing did, then at least Max would be richer by having something to take away with him; and that was certainly more than he expected when he set forth to pay a duly call upon an old friend of his wife’s.

He rose presently to take his leave, having overstayed the limits of a polite call. She assured him that there was no hurry; and so to be sure there wasn’t. Max didn’t sit down again, however; but they stood in front of the fire, and the talk flowed gently and genially on for half an hour longer. Then he got as far as the door, and said he would come again if he might.

Indeed he might; Nancy for her part hoped he would. She was always at home at this hour of the day; or if he preferred to come of a Sunday — Sundays away from home were likely to be lonesome — he might find some other people here: a lot of them came on Sundays. “ They are quite advanced,” she said with her characteristic smile. “Are you familiar with the conversation of our advanced young people? No? Then it may amuse you.”

He promised to come back; but at the moment he halfintended to break his promise. Sumptuous beginnings might lead to nothing; sometimes one was even in duty bound to let them lead to nothing. Better keep what he had than by attempting to increase it ruin all.

Out in the air, however, he changed his mind. Not so much of interest was offered that a man could afford to let any of it escape him. Max was no boy, to go flinging his heart about and spoiling everything. His heart had no connection with the case, anyhow: what was involved was his mind, his mind and a certain sense of the picturesque and the significant that made him love his mountains.

She was picturesque, living alone in beauty and devotion; she was significant, and a little mysterious. He wondered whether she were altogether beyond a certain sort of interest, were indeed quite so manless as she seemed. It was as easy to imagine a man making love to a figure from the Parthenon frieze as to her; yet a curious interest might attach to making love to a figure from the Parthenon frieze. If Nancy stood alone she was an anomaly; if she was an anomaly, she challenged further investigation.

If any one had examined Max just then in the light of a street-lamp, he would have seen that it was for other reasons besides his swarthiness that the Sumners put upon Max the charge of looking “foreign.” He had at the moment a glow we northern nations do not possess, and a restlessness we distrust.

But as he pursued his way uptown, walking in order that his thoughts might not be interrupted, he began to wonder what Nancy was doing now. In fancy he saw her again by the fireside, as he had actually seen her an hour agone: saw her stoop and tend the fire, saw her extend the ministering cup to him; saw the kindness and humanness which linked her to other women, instead of the aloofness which separated her from them. As he saw her so, his own look grew quiet and wistful.

CHAPTER II

A WOMAN PAINTING

Nancy woke at her usual hour from her usual sound and dreamless sleep; unhappy is the lot, and stunted must be the growth, of the artist who cannot sleep. She had her cold shower and her breakfast; then with all things neat about her and her every hair in place, she went upstairs to begin the day’s work.

Her studio was essentially a workroom. There were cupboards around three sides, and a large table for the accommodation of what she might need from moment to moment. A fresh canvas stood on the easel, and her model presently arrived. Everything was ready for the day’s work; but the day’s work simply didn’t ensue.

She drew a little with charcoal, she dabbed a little with paint; she wondered at the stupidity of her model, and decided that it must be due in part to herself: one couldn’t expect a model to have brains. Finally she added one more to an appallingly large pile of studies, paid the girl for the rest of the day, and let her go. There were times when it was no use trying to work.

A few years earlier she would have gone on trying, and discouraged herself by the badness of work done under pressure. Her natural tendency was to drive herself; but of that Roger had done his best to cure her. Industry was one thing, and drudgery was another. She couldn’t account for to-day’s failure: she wasn’t tired, and an interesting picture was in its most interesting stage. But she didn’t have to account for it, and as she went downstairs it occurred to her that as it had come, she might as well avail herself of it. She would find Roger, and hobnob with him over reverses.

She took her hot bath now, in token that she was through with paint for the day, and presently stood arrayed for the street. Divested of her painting apron, and clear of the shadows which had backed her so interestingly in Max’s eyes, she stood forth as a personable young woman of middle height, thin but not slender, with rather large features and clear blonde coloring. Her hands were generous in size and sinewy in contour from her daily work with them; and her eyes were carefully appraising in regard to form and color, and rather blankly unresponsive to any other appeal. It may have been that curious blindness of hers, in a world where most eyes look to other eyes, which led Max Meredith to class her at once as an anomaly.

It was shortly before noon of a sunny day in early winter; and Nancy, who was not accustomed to being in the street at this hour, was seized by a holiday feeling as she sniffed the crisp air. She walked quickly along until she reached the Square. Within its precincts she loitered for a few minutes, casting upon the other loiterers an eye not wholly devoid of comradeship, though it would insist on making them up into little groups and noting the placing of shadows. Then she looked at her watch, and moved off toward the east; evidently she was timing her arrival somewhere.

Her destination proved to be an old brick building, devoted, as most of the buildings in that part of New York seem to be, to other uses than that for which it was originally intended. In the hall stood a dingy counter, with some pigeon-holes for mail behind it. The girl at the counter called Nancy by name, and Nancy responded; then she asked, “ Is Mr. Greene teaching to-day, do you know? ”

“He’s upstairs, in the woman’s life class. You know the way ? ” the girl inquired humorously.

“I haven’t forgotten it. I think I’ll go up; the class must be just on the point of dismissing,” said Nancy.

She took her way up the worn stairs — her own feet had helped to wear them — to the top floor, and halted before a closed door. It seemed to require a moment for her to get her breath; then she opened it a crack, and spoke to some one inside. “ It’s Anne Desmond,” she said. “ May I come in, please?”

She was confronted on the threshold by the potentate who had given her permission to enter, her friend Roger Greene himself. “ Come in and tell me what you think we have done this morning,” he bade her. “ I have only just finished my criticism.” His red pencil was indeed in his hand, and traces of its ruthless progress were visible on every canvas about the room, which was full of easels and girls in painting aprons.

Nancy’s gaze leaped over them to the model. “ Roger! ” she cried. “ What a stunning pose! ”

A lithe brown young man, naked except for a loin cloth, was standing at his ease, one arm thrown out at the level of his head and supported at the wrist by a bar. Roger’s eye followed Nancy’s, and he chuckled at her enthusiasm. “Like to do it yourself, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Of course, with most of the people here it’s as good as opportunity thrown away; but there are one or two promising people.”

“ May I go around and look ? ” she asked.

“ Suit yourself. They ought to be happy to hear your criticism,” he said noncommittally.

Nancy began to go from easel to easel, pausing at each, and sometimes saying a word or two before she moved on to the next. Roger perched on the edge of the platform and watched her with a look half quizzical and half proud. She was the brightest spark he had ever struck out in the routine of his teaching; and because her accomplishment was in the realm that he held sacred, he forgave her even her imbecilic admiration of himself. He couldn’t help wondering, though, what had brought her here at this hour of the day; and he promised himself the satisfaction of peppering her if she gave him the slightest opening.

The industrious among the students were taking advantage of the few minutes remaining of the class. A mouse-like girl near the front began to sketch Roger on a corner of her paper; her neighbor made a furious scratching with a palette knife. A belated fly buzzed somewhere near. Nancy’s low-toned comments did not reach Roger, and he began to feel sleepy. He would have liked to look at his watch, but that would spoil his pose for the young lady who had undertaken to immortalize him.

Suddenly a bell rang somewhere above their heads; and the scene sprang immediately into furious life. Roger stood up and smiled at the young lady who was drawing him, to show that he had seen all along what she was doing. The students made an immense clatter with their boxes, and writhed out of their aprons; Nancy retreated against the rear wall to be out of the way. As for the brown young man who had so lately been the center of attraction, he dodged behind a screen and reappeared two minutes later, fully dressed and looking quite like an elevator boy. But nobody cared how he looked once he had left his platform.

As the room emptied, Roger beckoned Nancy to his side. “Sit down, young ’un,” he said not unamiably. “What did you make out of all this clutter ?”

“There was one drawing that I thought of unusual promise,” answered Nancy. “ The others were creditable efforts.”

“ Exactly,” said Roger. “ The product of artisans.”

“Isn’t it conceivably the first step toward something better ? ”

“The first step toward nothing at all,” said Roger, “ is a competent and self-satisfied mediocrity. It is by its very nature incapable of stepping.”

“But if it were dissatisfied with its achievement?” she suggested.

“It isn’t,” said Roger. “You may take my word for that. If it were, it would find the situation intolerable.”

“ But the giants are so few,” objected Nancy. “ Unless we can train mediocrity, how are we to hope for progress? ”

“ Except in its grossest material forms, progress is a myth.”

“ Perhaps I shouldn’t have nsed that word. But it is only in the days when all men are to some degree artists that we find the great artist.”

“We must be careful,” said Roger, “about exaggerating the artistic atmosphere of other days. In any age it is the few who care for art, not the many.”

He was fairly off, then, on one of his excursions into the world of theory. He had forgotten his intention of peppering Nancy; he forgot lunch, and the press of his engagements, and his own weariness, and the irritation a few hours of teaching were sure to produce. He talked in bursts, as the words came to him, sometimes forging ahead with phrases beautifully minted, sometimes coming to a stand-still, and supplying by a gesture the ending that he couldn’t quite think out. He was not one of those bora talkers who can go on regardless of the audience. But Nancy was a bora listener; she was, moreover, a worker whose performance he respected. He talked to her, however, less for any benefit she might derive from what he said than for the pleasure it gave him to think things out in her presence.

He had need of some thinking, indeed, to reconcile him to the circumstances of his life: for he had been painting now half his years, and the choice and modest celebrity which he eventually attained was still in the future. He had known every sort of discouragement, family trouble, poor health, the daily drudgery of teaching when he would fain have performed, the bitterness of seeing others sail ahead while he remained stranded. Some of this Nancy guessed, and some of it was beyond her ken; but she knew that he liked to talk to her as well as she liked to listen to him. When he talked as he was talking now, his thin face all a-quiver with eagerness, running his fingers through his thick brown hair, quite absorbed in the matter of his speech and quite carried beyond the perplexities of every day — when he talked thus, Nancy had reached at once the climax of her week’s doings and the summit of her usefulness to him.

He gave her now a view of the selectness of art—he had no belief in its democracy; and from that he passed to the meaning of art in the lives of its devotees. He pictured it as the great reconciler, the be-all and the end-all of existence, the super-thing for which life itself is but the raw material. How long he talked neither he nor she had any idea. They were interrupted by the arrival of an early returner from lunch. On seeing them together, the intruder tactfully withdrew; but the spell was broken. Nancy rose to her feet, and Roger looked at his watch, a slave once more to time and the hour.

“ Are you leaving the building ? ” she asked.

“ Yes, I am. I’ll walk along with you, if you’re going. That reminds me, Nancy, you haven’t yet told me why you came.”

“ I didn’t feel like working. It didn’t come easily this morning. So I left it, and came away; that’s all.”

Having directly obeyed him in so acting, and duly reported her action, Nancy might perhaps have expected to be praised for her obedience. It appeared, however, that her course of conduct had desperately offended Roger. His mobile face became hard as a stone. “ What work did you leave undone ? ” he asked coldly.

“ I am on my Dryad picture, you know,” she hastened to remind him. “I have a lot of studies now; I got another this morning. But it goes slowly, and —”

“ Haven’t I told you not to befog yourself with studies ? ” he wanted to know. “ It should go slowly up to a certain point; that point passed, it can’t go too fast. You are simply puttering; I know that as well as if I had seen you do it. The remedy for this is to stop puttering, but to stop it in favor of work. Go home, and get to work.” Nancy swallowed hard. In view of the sunshine, and her own mood, and her expectation of for once lunching like a respectable person and having a week-day to herself, it wasn’t pleasant to be sent back to the galley: why, she had even cherished some vagabond thoughts of going to a matinfe! “ I’ve sent the model home,” she defended herself, “ and I’m hungry. I can’t begin to work when I’m hungry.”

“Get yourself a sandwich somewhere; and begin to work without the model. You’re too dependent on the model anyhow; it would be better for you if you couldn’t have one so often. And mind what I say: work means work on canvas itself. Let’s have no more of these puerile studies. You have the canvas ready, haven’t you ? ”

“ I never begin an important piece of work in the afternoon,” she said.

“ You mean you never have. It’s time you learned how to, then.”

He did know a good deal about Nancy, her characteristic failings as well as her excellences. His words came home to her now, not only because of the authority he continued to exercise over her, but because there was a manifest truth in the words themselves. She gave a little sigh.

“All right, Eoger, I’ll do my best. I only hope I shan’t make a mess of it.”

“You won’t,” said Roger confidently. “Even a mess would be better than nothing; but there won’t be any mess.”

She moved toward the door, and he walked with her. In silence he escorted her down the flights of stairs, past all the familiar rooms that had seen her timid but determined beginnings. He even took her to the doorstep, and stood there for a minute, bareheaded as he was, to watch her start. “ Good-by, Eoger,” she said quietly.

“ Good-by,” he answered. “ And, Nancy —”

“Yes?”

“It isn’t everybody I’d send packing in this way, you know.”

“I know, Roger. Good-by,” she answered.

It was as near an apology as he ever came, Even pow it produced something of a glow at the heart of his reverent disciple; but the glow was partly anger. It was all very well for Roger to settle things for her in this high-handed way: if disaster ensued, it would be her disaster. Because her problems were not the same as his, he needn’t take for granted that she hadn’t any, or that they were cobwebby things, like the confusions of a child. She obeyed, but for once she did not heartily acquiesce; the path of a disciple is not always easy.

After her sandwich she went promptly back, as in honor bound, to the empty studio and the accusing white canvas; and she fell to work with more than one regretful glance at her watch, because there were still hours of daylight when she would have liked to idle, when she had fully made up her mind to idle, and she wasn’t allowed.

Gradually, however, this preoccupation ceased to trouble her. She turned her back on her conscientious studies — the good of them was in her head by this time, or there wouldn’t have been any good — and squared herself to the canvas whereon the Dryad was to grow. The tree, here, and the body half-emerging from it; to get the placing right was in such a picture half the battle.

Dusk surprised her at her work; and when she could see no longer, she flung down her bit of charcoal and turned on her single electric light, to see if possible what she had done. “I think it’s going to come,” she said to herself. “ I wish it were morning, and the model here. I wish I didn’t have to leave this until I finished it. I wish I could pass from one picture straight to another: if there weren’t any in-betweens at all, and one could simply work and work and work —”

In-betweens there are, however; and thanks to Roger’s command and the success of his prediction, the in-between that night was particularly unpleasant. She was in a state of excitement that demanded relief; yet any relief beyond work was denied her, and work could not go steadily on. She was tired, as she often was; her head ached, as it sometimes did; and finally, she was lonesome. This to be sure was almost unheard of; ordinarily, for work or play, she found herself the best company in the world.

She dined insufficiently off what was in her own larder, and sat down in the dark without taking the trouble to kindle a fire. Even her guitar failed her to-night; it lay mute across her knees. “ I wish I had a wife,” she thought to herself, “ somebody to take care of the meals and the fire, and talk to me when Pm tired. I wish I even had somebody to talk to me when Pm tired. I suppose that would be a husband. Very well, then, I wish for a husband to-night; but let him beware if he lasted over until tomorrow, and interfered with my working hours.”

So far to be sure she had been amusing herself, making game even of her own loneliness; but now came unbidden die thought of the stranger who had sat with her yesterday at this time, and made the hour so pleasant. If he could come in and talk to her now, how his eager questions would relieve her dullness! He didn’t talk as Roger did; no one else ever could talk to her as Roger did. Roger seemed the evocation of her own conscience; this other man knew nothing of her proper concerns, never would know anything of them. Perhaps, however, she saw too little of people not strictly in her own walk of life; perhaps a man from outside could not only furnish an agreeable relief, but even help her to settle for herself other problems than those of her work.

She began to recollect his face as she had seen it in the firelight the night before. Firelight was kind to his brown skin, and the play of it worked along with the play of his features. She would like to draw him some day in just such a mellow light. Or apart from the question of light, as a matter simply of line —

Not for worlds would she have climbed the stairs to her studio again that night; but she lighted her lamp, and searched in her desk for a pencil. She drew a bold full-face of Max; his features were distinctive, and a telling likeness was easily possible. It pleased her when she had it, pleased her more, no doubt, than a second visit from the original would have done. Entering into the spirit of work, she drew him again, this time in profile; and then with a gleeful smile she drew him as the Sumners perhaps saw him, his irregularity exaggerated to grotesquerie. He made an admirable caricature; Nancy wished him in public life, for the benefit of the cartoonists. And having now worked him out of herself by the familiar channel, she thought no more about him. The drawings were stuck in her desk; and her incipient interest in Max bade fair to leave no other record of itself.

She had, indeed, no room for subsidiary interests in the days that followed. Her picture gripped her utterly. She painted at it from dawn to dark; its plan and intent, its absorbing detail, never passed from her consciousness. She worked Sundays, which was contrary to her practice; her sleep was broken, and she ate only because she still forced herself to eat. The ordinary business of life was neglected: her telephone went unanswered, her friends saw her not. She grew haggard and nervous, would jump at a sound, and scolded her model most unmercifully; but life was now yielding her the utmost of which it was capable. It was for the thrill of hours and days like this, and not for any pitiful accomplishment of results, that she lived.

Reaction came after two or three weeks of this high pressure. Nancy saw her Dryad on the canvas, complete in her essential features; and she hated her, because she was not the Dryad of the first beautiful conception. She thought of the work still to be done on details, with all the fine fury over; and she was seized by a nausea of the spirit. Her own tired face in the mirror, and the dust in her house, and her realization that she was committed for life, and by her own choice, to weeks like the past and hours like the present, confronted her mercilessly. She dragged herself back to her easel, bat she comforted her spirit by thinking, “Sunday must come in two or three days; and Sunday I won’t work. I’ll dean up the house, and have some people in to talk with me.”

CHAPTER III

VOTARIES

When Sunday came, indeed, she had long passed her crisis, and was absorbed in the working out of details. But except in crises, she liked to think that she lived a fairly normal sort of life. Once a week she could spend a day without working, and work the better for it afterward; once a week she even liked to see something of her fellow-humans.

A few of them, indeed, made it a habit to gather by her fire on Sunday afternoons, to drink coffee and talk art and radicalism. A few years ago Nancy had found their conversation interesting enough, though she hadn’t even then put her faith in it. With her growth into her chosen way of life, however, she had grown into the conviction that art is to be practised, not prattled, and that radicalism is the least of the artist’s concerns. But her coffee was excellent, and she listened well, even when she thought the talk piffle; so that on Sundays, except when she retired to her easel upstairs and left her bell unanswered, there were likely to be from three or four to a dozen people sitting about her fire, settling the affairs of the universe with a certainty born of practice, and suggesting somehow that they hadn’t any very important affairs of their own to settle.

It was to this gathering that Nancy had, some weeks before, in a general way bidden Max. She recalled that now with something of a shock: in the interim, for all she knew, Max might have concluded his business and left town, believing, if he thought of it at all, that her invitation was pure vapor. That was hardly a decent way to treat Jo’s husband: he might be bored, but he mustn’t be forgotten.

With a sense of relief, then, Nancy got him on the telephone and renewed her invitation. Max accepted; and thereupon she telephoned to Randy Payne to be sure to come. Rand never went anywhere alone, for one thing; and the conversation never dragged when he was there. Moreover, although his radicalism passed unchallenged, he was of a neat and even a dapper exterior; and in case Max proved squeamish in regard to the nonsense that was talked, the mere sight of Randy would reassure him.

Nancy was not the only person who was suffering that week-end from a state of reaction. Randy himself was in one of his infrequent collapses, and was wishing that he had had the courage to stick to his last and let issues go hang. He was but an indifferent painter; usually he preferred to ignore his ostensible work for flying “interests” with which he could entertain himself. Under these conditions it was penance for him to see Nancy, who was so patently all that he was not. In the mood of penance he came; and once there he proceeded to enjoy himself by refuting everything that anybody else ventured to say.

In a mood of reaction also came Max Meredith, half an hour after the talk had got under way. The intervening three weeks since he saw Nancy had not been unpleasant ones for him. He had learned that his camp under the walls of Jericho was likely to be prolonged; but he had learned also to enjoy the incidents of camping. But the incidents were poignant rather than varied, and he welcomed a change of scene. Besides, he was only at the beginning of Nancy Desmond; and as his camp, although it might be long, could not well be permanent, he was eager to get on with the story.

He found Nancy’s hearth-fire glowing most beautifully; and she made room for him beside her on a little seat drawn up at one end. He was introduced to the members of fhe little circle, and then suffered to sit and listen to them, an arrangement which suited him exactly. He not only could not have held his own in such a conversation as they were carrying on: if he could he would not have seen the good of it.

They were interesting people, though, judging by what met the eye. There was the glib soul whom they called Randy, a young man with sleek hair and pointed chin, who seemed to be everybody’s antagonist in whatever matter was under dispute. Next him sat “Bill” — first names seemed indigenous to this atmosphere — who spoke little and with a foreign accent, and was, Nancy whispered to Max, noted for his cartoons in a radical sheet. There was a woman journalist, serious and clever, and a strikingly pretty girl from the west, who was this season seeing life in the metropolis at the expense of a rich father. The three of them were shouting contempt at established institutions, apparently on the presumption that no one but themselves had thought about such things since the establishment; and Randy, on the opposite side from that he usually held, was protecting society from their strictures. They all talked at once, and they didn’t always trouble to listen to each other: so that there were times when the scene reminded Max of something from “ Alice in Wonderland.”

He looked sidewise at Nancy, who didn’t seem to take much part in the discussion. Nancy caught his eye, and smiled slightly. She evidently didn’t place much reliance upon their judgments. Neither did they, Max supposed; but the difference remained that they uttered them, and she didn’t. She was looking tired, Max thought; but she was charmingly dressed in a long dull blue blouse belted in at the waist, and her hair was done beautifully in her unvarying style, parted at one side, and knotted up firmly behind.

“Have you been working hard since I saw you last?” he asked under cover of the general hubbub.

“ Furiously. And you? ”

“ Reasonably. By the way, I have been to see your picture.*'

“You have?”

“Yes. Now you see I have something to judge you by.”

“Please don’t judge me entirely by that picture. It’s rather academic,” she said.

“Academic’? Who said “ academic’?” Randy Payne caught up the word, and at once threw it into the general conversation. “ To what did you apply that word, Nancy ? ”

“ To a picture of my own, with your permission,” said Nancy sweetly.

“ With my permission, if you’ll tell me who applied it first” said Randy.

Nancy looked like a child caught in a fault, and everybody laughed except Max. “ I knew,” crowed Randy. “ I knew. It was that old fox Roger Greene Third. You may take it from me, Nancy, that he would be academic too if he could. Not being able to achieve it, he takes refuge in being idiosyncratic.”

“That isn’t true,” said Nancy stoutly. “He is able to be what he wants to be; and I assure you I have some idea of what I accomplish without waiting for him to tell me.”

“That doesn’t prevent him from telling, does it?” argued Randy.

Nancy looked nettled; Bill intervened in the interests of peace. “What is the picture?” he asked.

“ It’s one Nancy has on exhibition at Morton Roulet’s,” explained Randy. “ It shows a double avenue of pines, which cuts the picture into panels with something the effect of a triptych. The foreground and the trees are very dark, and the sky is a wonderful luminous sky. It’s a most interesting piece of work, though the scheme ma' be a bit artificial.”

“I’m not at my best in pure landscape, I feel,” said Nancy, “though I must confess I love to get the atmosphere of outdoors.”

At that the conversation suddenly veered to painting; and instead of a bristling banality, it presented to Max a surface of uncommon interest. Even now Nancy said the least; and Randy, who painted in the most approved modem style of badness, talked the most and the best. But on the subject of shop Max found them all worth listening to; and he was sorry when Nancy’s exit toward the rear of the house and subsequent reentry with coffee and sandwiches put a period to this part of the conversation.

They passed to personalities then; and although the heroes of the anecdotes were for the most part strangers to Max, he was amused by what he heard of them. Under the influence of coffee and an enormous consumption of sandwiches, indeed, the whole party was reaching a high state of appreciation, when there came a knock at the door. The girl from the west, who sat nearest, rose to open; and all heads were turned to see who came thus belated.

A tall, very thin man, with blonde hair just turning brown, and a mobile and curiously attractive face, stood on the threshold. He was a stranger to the two women guests, apparently; but Randy greeted him jauntily, and Bill with respect. Nancy introduced him as Roger Greene; the group widened to give him room, and he was supplied with a cup and a plate. Nancy resumed her place beside Max, and Randy hastened to pick up the thread of the interrupted conversation.

The newcomer said little enough at first; indeed he seemed hungry, and gave most of his attention to his food. From the moment of his entrance, however, he became in some subtle way the center of the group; and he had only to turn on them the glance of his alert gray eyes to make himself felt. Max liked the fellow from the first, seeming to divine in him a precious enthusiasm. Randy did not like him; and the very presence ot the other man stimulated him to show off his conversational powers, if only in Roger Greene’s despite.

Roger presently finished his food, and plunged into the conversation; and for a time the discussion was fast and furious. Roger, nursing one knee between his clasped hands, said one word to the other’s three; but he had so far the best of it that Randy showed himself to be nettled. Whereupon the other ceased to pursue his advantage, and got to his feet. “ This is interesting, but it isn’t what I came for,” he said. “ Nancy, I want to see what you have upstairs.”

Nancy rose obediently. “If we may be excused — ” she said.

They excused her loudly, and she led Roger Greene off toward the back of the house; a moment later their footsteps were audible overhead.

“ So that,” said the woman journalist, “ is the Roger Greene whose picture Nancy honors with a place on her walls ? ”

“Oh, there’s nothing the matter with the picture, at least nothing much,” Randy assured them. “But she lets him criticize her work as if he knew what he was talking about.”

“Well, she gets ahead,” said Bill soberly. “He does know what he is talking about, though you had the misfortune to study under him and to dislike him. But what I have been wondering about him is — ”

“Is?” Randy encouraged him.

“Isn’t his influence with her to a considerable extent personal ? ”

“ By which I suppose you mean, isn’t she in love with him?” Randy interrupted with an air of disgust. “With him ? I should hope not. Why, he — ” Bethinking himself, he broke off sharply, and changed to, “ He has other fish to fry, I have no doubt. He simply sees that Nancy is the real stuff, and he’s mean-spirited enough to hang onto a certain authority over her, in order to get part of the credit.”

The woman journalist, whose name was Helen West, spoke again in her serious measured tones. “ I never saw him before to-day, but I have heard Nancy speak of him It seems to me that the whole relation between them is nothing but a case of discipleship.”

“So it is,” said Randy eagerly. “That was all very well at one time, too; but it seems as if now she ought to have outgrown it.”

“Give her time,” suggested Miss West. “Nancy is still in some respects very young for her age.”

“That’s true, of course; when you view the maturity of her work, you’re all too likely to forget it,” said Randy. He seemed actually relieved at the conclusion they were reaching.

The pretty girl from the west had followed their words with absorbed attention; to speculate on your hostess as soon as she left the room, and especially to speculate as to whether she were in love with some particular man, seemed to her very advanced and knowing. It was quite the sort of thing she might have heard at home, and would have disapproved there; but here everything was different. As for the other stranger from the west, whose presence they in the interest of their discussion had ignored, he was less interested by what they said than by what he himself saw. For he had wondered about possible masculine interests in Nancy’s life; and here on his second visit to her he was presented with two possibilities, and found himself inclined to reject them both. Randy evidently admired her; but Randy, Max decided, was a lightweight. The new arrival, on the other hand, sized up as the girl’s equal; but such was the general opinion of her acceptance of his authority that one was forbidden to suppose a girl of any spirit would have a lover on such terms. Masculine interest in her life even Randy and Roger might supply, Max supposed; but so far as they were concerned she remained essentially manlesswhich was quite in the picture.

The talk was now less sustained and voluble — it seemed to Max, indeed, that there wasn’t much left for them to say. Consequently they could hear the murmur of other talk over their heads, and presently footsteps recrossing the floor to descend. All heads were turned toward the door as Nancy and Roger entered, and Randy sang out, “ When are the rest of us to have a look, Nancy? ”

Roger answered for her. “ You’ll see it, Payne, when it’s finished. Meanwhile there’s no need to take the edge off: it isn’t complete, and the light I viewed it by isn’t favorable.”

His manner was more amiable than it usually was to Randy, but there was a suppressed excitement visible about him. “ He has been struck by that picture,” Max thought. Unless, to be sure, the picture was only a pretext, and — Max was ashamed of the suspicion.

Roger did not resume his seat; and when he began to look about for his hat, it seemed the signal for the breaking up of the party. In the bustle Nancy’s hand fell lightly on Max’s arm. “ Stay a minute,” she said. “You were late in coming; you aren’t in a hurry, are you ? ”

He wasn’t; he sat down again, and watched the guests go. Nancy closed the door on the last of them, and came and stood before the fire. As her smile of farewell faded, a curious preoccupation took its place; and now she looked not only tired but anxious, yet touched by some high resolve. She was thinking doubtless of what Roger said to her upstairs; and seeing her look as she thought of it, Max suddenly became ready to vouch not only for the purity of her discipleship but for the eternal worth of such all too rare relations.

She may have felt his eyes upon her; at any rate she suddenly looked up at him, lifted her chin, and bethought herself of how she had kept him. He only hoped she wasn’t going to begin by asking him about Jo, which would have been too pointed a way of thrusting him back into his pigeon-hole; and surely enough she didn’t Instead she smiled, made a motion with her head toward the closed door, and asked, “ Well?”

“ What do I make of them, you mean ? ” he asked.

“ If you like.”

“ I find them very entertaining,” said Max.

“ Randy would love you if he could hear you say that,” she assured him.

“ At the same time,” Max went on, “ the last comer is the only one who is the least on your level.”

“ The rest are very nice people,” she assured him.

“ They’re not big guns, you know; big guns always have enough to do minding their own business, and can’t devote j much time to the affairs of the universe. They are nice ! people, these; but I’m afraid I don’t care much about people.”

It evidently wasn’t much of a grief to her that she didn’t | care about people; something besides that wrinkled her brow and drew her mouth into a line. For she smiled again now and went on, “ If you want to see the sights in good company, let me recommend Randy to you as guide.”

“ Would Randy act in that capacity ? ”

“ Only too happy to be asked. I’ll ask him for you, if you would like to go. I’d offer to take you myself, but Randy would do so much better than I.”

“If you offered.to take me yourself I’d go,” said Max.

“ Do you know why ? Because Randy will show me the visitors’ Chinatown, or its equivalent; and you—”

“I could show you nothing better. If I showed you , what really interests me: little back streets full of foreign life, the water-front, some colorful things in the Museum, some street vistas and sky-lines,—”

“ That isn’t the way to make me go with Randy,” said j Max. “ You fascinate me already.”

“ Oh, I should like to have you go with me! ” she said politely. “ Only it won’t be the same. If you are really interested in my little corners of existence — ”

“Really interested.”

“ We can look them up together, of course. I shall be happy to take you.”

“When?” asked Max.

“As soon as my picture is finished. There!” she cried. “You see how it is. I must date from something so personal to me as that.”

“You needn’t apologize because your life has a center and a direction/’ said Max. “ You don’t really feel apologetic; but you talk in that way because you think I’m a rank outsider, who can’t take anything for granted.”

“ No, I don’t believe that’s so,” she said gravely, but not at all displeased. “You’re right in supposing that I talk so with an outsider in view; but that outsider is myself. ’I try to keep sane, that’s all. I remember so vividly,” she illustrated, “when Randy was in the exclusive-artist circle of life. Now he’s anything that’s advanced, especially if it’s not art at all; but then he was everything for art’s sake. And if you think this is awful,” she wound up, “ you ought to have known him then! ” They laughed together, but there was a touch of kindliness even in her ridicule. And it was with the purest friendliness, that friendliness which was after all the choicest thing about her, that she reiterated her promise as Max left His picture of her was building up nicely; but so genial were some of its elements, that it would scarcely surprise him if some day he abandoned the study altogether, and ended simply by liking her.

CHAPTER IV

NANCY’S CORNER AND OTHERS

Some weeks later they actually set a day for their excursion. In the meantime Max had seen Nancy several times, always at the hour of late afternoon. At that hour she was tired and quiet; but she seemed to welcome his society, and he knew that he enjoyed hers. Insensibly they had grown habituated to each other, though they were still strangers in many ways.

But this full day together was bound to be different, if only because instead of looking at each other in a chimney comer they were shoulder to shoulder to look at the rest of the world. In a high spirit of holiday, then, Max rang her bell on the appointed morning, and presently faced her inner door, waiting for her to open.

His knock, however, remained unanswered. The entire house was as quiet as a grave, and the spirit that lurked in its dusky halls was not altogether one of cheer. Max looked at his watch, and found that the hands pointed to eleven, which was exactly the appointed hour. He made a rapid mental calculation as to whether he could possibly have mistaken the day, and decided that he could not. He descended to the street, and rang resoundingly; then he came upstairs again, and settled himself to wait. It was probable that she wasn’t quite ready; and of course she had no one to open the door for her.

He had stood perhaps five minutes more, and was just deciding to give up and go away, when a hasty step approached inside, and the door was flung wide open. Nancy stood on the threshold, her garb a linen apron daubed with paint, her hair dishevelled, and her hands bearing marks of having this moment ceased work. There was anger on her brow; but it changed, when she saw Max, to surprise and then to consternation. She swallowed hard, but she said civilly, “ I'm sorry I shall have to keep you waiting. I shall try not to be long.”

She had forgotten all about the expedition on which he was building so high. “If you would rather not go to-day—“ Max suggested. “If it's in the least inconvenient for you — ”

“Oh, it isn't! I should be dreadfully disappointed if we didn't go.” Conscious of her appalling forgetfulness, and seeking about for some way of showing her interest in Max and his excursion, she hit upon the thought of asking him upstairs. “Should you like to see my studio, while you are waiting ? ” she asked. “ The light is good now, and the picture is finished.”

“‘The Dryad'?” he asked. “What are you working on now, if I may ask?”

“Some odds and ends,” she said, with a quick frown; the unimportance of her morning's task made her rudeness toward him less excusable.

“ I should like very much to see your studio,” said Max. “ I am flattered to be asked.”

“ Come this way,” she said.

She led him through her bedroom to a small back passage, and thence up a flight of breakneck garret steps to a bare room, lighted from above, with a large completed picture at one end and an easel, a wet palette, and a great disorder of brushes at the other. These last Nancy concealed in one of the numerous cupboards about the wall; to the former she directed his attention with a gesture. “ ‘ The Dryad,’” she said. “ Make yourself at home with her; smoke if you like. I'll be back as soon as possible.”

To be left in her studio at all was surely something; to be left there alone was rich. Yet Max had never seen a place less gratifying to curiosity. The absence of clutter was itself revealing, if you liked; so was the lack of any attempt to create an “ atmosphere.” This was a workroom, pure and simple; but even the traces of work were for the most part neatly stowed away. Max made a circuit of the walls, and discovered a total of three sketches pinned to cupboard doors. One was yellowing with age and torn about the edges; it showed a bit of street life, and was dated “ Paris.” He knew that she had once spent a year abroad; and this was evidently a memento of that year. The second was a landscape, done with fidelity and interest; but the third leaped beyond both the others, and would have claimed even an attention that was not deliberate. It represented a nude woman, dancing; and in her limbs, her flying hair, the smile on her half-seen face, there was a power which Max was not quite prepared to find in Nancy, and an abandon which altogether surprised him.

He came, then, with a sort of forewarning to the “ Dryad ”; and he stood for some time before the picture. The brown Dryad was emerging from the brown tree-trunk, but so partially that it was hard to tell which was tree and which spirit; and there were glints of green foliage above, and of golden sunshine down the creature's limbs, to the bronze of which Nancy had dared to give a greenish cast in the shadows. The thing was a Dryad, not a person posed against a tree-trunk; that was what impressed Max the most. He had expected to find it well painted; he was not so prepared to find it well imagined.

He returned, however, to the Bacchante; and there Nancy found him on her return. “

I like this woman,” he drawled, turning at her approach.

“I like that woman myself,” said Nancy. “She has happy lines, that woman has.”

“And I'm grateful for a private view of the other,” said Max.

“ She goes to the framer's to-morrow,” Nancy informed him.

“ And thence to the gallery of some wealthy collector?”

“ Well, probably not at once,” she said, laughing.

“And now,”—he looked her over from top to toe — “we are ready to start?”

“ Quite, quite ready,” she assured him.

She was looking very trim indeed, in a suit and hat of Lincoln green, and some tawny furs that swung about her shoulders, but left her throat free. Max handed her gallantly down her own stairs, and a moment later they were in the street, with the city before them wherein to choose their place of entertainment.

Nancy led him first to the Square, glittering from a light fall of snow the night before. They passed on across it, the snow crunching pleasantly under their feet, and came out presently at the Art School. There Nancy took him to the doors of many rooms, where young persons, and others not so young, were engaged at artistic employments which varied from mere drawing from the cast to painting the town blue: Max had hardly supposed that there existed in the world so much indigo as he saw that morning. “That's the go this year,” Nancy explained when he called her attention to it. “Heaven knows what it will be next year: not the same, though, that's all it's safe to predict.”

He had hoped for a glimpse of her interesting friend, Roger Greene, who, he understood, taught here; but it seemed that this was not one of Roger's mornings. They concluded their inspection, therefore, and passed on to lunch, which they had in a nearby restaurant in a queer little basement room, the walls of which were liberally frescoed by student patrons. “ Some of these drawings are really good,” Nancy informed him. “ Some of them are only affected.”

“You don't happen to be represented, do you?” asked Max.

“No,” she said, and then smiled suddenly. “It's only because I belong to a bygone generation that I'm not; I have been forced to yield to a demand for space. I was prouder of nothing, in my young days, than the length of time my drawing held its own here.”

Several people from nearby tables spoke to Nancy, most of them by her first name; but as she was with a strange man, her privacy was not invaded this time. The cooking, somewhat to Max’s surprise, was excellent; and they were waited on by an intellectual if untidy young woman in a sailor blouse. She was an anarchist, Nancy explained to Max; that made it nice, of course, if you wanted to send out for beer. “I didn’t know anarchy applied to license laws,” said Max.

“ Applies to everything,” said Nancy. “ Even to things that are out of drawing, which it naturally prefers to those that are in.”

“Do you come here for your dinner?” asked Max.

She shook her head. “ I used to. But you don’t have to get very far up the ladder to feel — ”

“Yes?” he encouraged.

“That you no longer belong to the glorious army of the young and not yet successful. You don’t feel it yourself, perhaps; but they read you out.” Her eyes rested on the nearest drawing, with a certain bleakness in their look; but a moment later she turned to smile at Max. “You come at a particularly uninteresting stage of my life-work,” she assured him. “ A few years ago I was a hopeful beginner; a few years hence, I may have something definite to show. Now I’m exactly in the dreary middle.”

“Perhaps that is the most interesting stage for an observer,” said Max. “It holds elements of both the others, don’t you see?”

“ No, but I hope you do,” said Nancy.

She finished her cigarette, and they went out once more into the crisp winter day. For a time she tried to act as the conscientious cicerone: she showed him queer little alleys in foreign quarters, and queer foreign people, and sky-lines and snow-lines. Max was not stupider than another when a painted picture was actually before him; but these materials for pictures left him unmoved. He saw the strangeness, and more often than not he saw squalor; but his sense of the picturesque was seldom touched by the things she told him pictures were made of. If she had had a pencil, perhaps she could have shown him; perhaps, though, she wouldn’t even have taken her pencil from her pocket. For after all it was of no importance whether he understood a little or a little less of an alien business. Nancy was enjoying the day for its own sake; and not the least part of her pleasure was Max’s society. She liked his long stride, and his deep voice with its burring it’s; she liked his quick response when he was touched, and his strong reticence when he wasn’t. She divined that he was not altogether happy, but he didn’t disgust her by telling her so; and she also divined that he was happier in her presence, though she didn’t commit herself to that, even in her private tribunal. Finally, he was big and dark, she small and blonde; he was man and she woman, and they had the endless hours of a bright winter day for their pleasure.

They gave up the foreign quarters presently, and went down to the harbor. When they had sated their eyes with it, they progressed by easy stages uptown, riding until they were near a point of interest, pausing there, and then riding on. Presently the points of interest all began to be the galleries of dealers; and they saw a fairly bewildering string of pictures, including Nancy’s own triptych. Before most of these Max was silent; but from that afternoon dated his belief in the decay of modem art.

The waning light surprised them before they had visited the last of the dealers; and they fell into discussion as to the final stage of their progress. Neither of them wanted to separate just yet; but Nancy proposed that they ride up and look at the Hudson, and Max insisted that they should simply go to the nearest place and have tea. He wasn’t so keen for tea in reality; but he had begun to find exasperating those glimpses of her which had earlier in the day proved so satisfactory. He wanted to sit opposite her with his elbows on a table, and look and look. Soon enough she would pass from him, leaving no substantial trace on his life; but she had given him to-day, and only now as the shadows were merging into twilight did he realize the worth of the gift.

Some faint instinct may have prompted her argument, or perhaps she found a queer pleasure in the arguing. At any rate, they discussed the matter as they strolled in the gathering twilight; and every now and then Max turned and looked at her, but Nancy’s eyes were always busy with the passing crowd which she never wearied of watching.

Suddenly she gave a little exclamation, and halted. Max followed the direction of her eyes, and saw that at her movement another couple had halted too, on the walk just ahead of them: a tall slender man, and a woman almost as tall, quietly but richly dressed. A second later Max had recognized Roger Greene, and Roger Greene recognized them both.

“Whither away?” he demanded. “You know Miss Allen, I think, Nancy? Miss Allen, Mr. Meredith.”

“That was just what we were trying to decide. We were blocked by a difference of opinion,” explained Nancy.

“ That is much our case,” said the woman who had been introduced as Miss Allen. “

As we all seem to be in the same predicament, suppose we join forces, and compromise ? ”

“ Meaning — ? ” Roger wanted to know.

“Meaning that we all go to my house for tea. It’s nearby, tea will be ready very shortly. Shouldn’t you like to come ? ” she asked.

In the uncertain light, very little of her face could be seen between her small close hat and the enveloping collar of her fur coat; but there was no resisting that voice. Max was susceptible to voices; and his ears had been filled all day by one that he found pleasant enough. But at these few commonplace words he capitulated to the stranger, so full and rich were her tones, so exquisite her enunciation, so poignant and unforgettable was the fall of her speech on the listening ear. “ Nancy ? ” Max referred the question.

Nancy looked at Roger. “ Do come,” he urged. “Break two deadlocks by your decision, Nancy.”

Thus urged, she and Max followed the other couple a short distance, and came presently to one of those city houses which are outwardly all exactly like their neighbors to right and left. They were admitted punctually to a soft dim interior. “ We’ll have our tea in the diningroom,” Miss Allen ordered. “ Meanwhile, I think there’s a fire in here.”

She led them into a paneled drawing-room, lighted by silver sconces such as Max had not imagined to exist outside of ornate fiction. There was a fire, to be sure, and they settled themselves in front of it. “ A wonderful day for walking, wasn’t it? ” remarked Miss Allen. “ On such a day, the temptation is to walk too far.”

Divested of her wrappings, and settled in an upholstered chair that set off her slim black silhouette, she proved to be a suave and graceful woman, with dark red hair and a very clear white skin. Her manner was as simple as her gown; but in them both Max recognized the simplicity of achievement, which can afford to be off-hand. Max wondered who and what she could be; he looked at Nancy, to get a clue from her behavior.

Nancy was watching her hostess, in frank gratification of the eye. Max’s glance wandered past the rich paneling to the windows, which were triply and marvelously curtained, and then returned to Roger Greene, who was standing with his back to the fire and discoursing on the benefits of a long walk. He was an attractive creature, and more attractive perhaps to a woman than to a man; but Max, watching him and then looking about the room, wondered what a woman like this, owner of a house like this, could mean by tramping about town with a poverty-stricken drawing master, a man who for all his charm showed in these surroundings as a little shabby and as making just a bit of an effort to seem at ease. Max didn’t get the connection; and he waited with interest for the conversation to throw some light upon it.

They were summoned to tea, however, before the conversation got very far; and they grouped themselves about a beautiful table in the middle of a gem-like dining-room all blue and silver eked out by dim green and misty lavender. “ I hope that you are hungry,” said Miss Allen to Max with a charming languid smile. “I always have rather a large tea, for on working days I don’t dine.”

“ That is the penalty of being an actress; your working hours are unnatural,” suggested Nancy.

“It is the penalty of having to stay thin,” said Miss Allen with a shade of regret in her tones. “ Even your appetite isn’t your own.”

So, Max thought, she was an actress: that accounted for the ripened perfection of her voice, and perhaps also for her choosing her friends where she would. In a case of such disparity of circumstances, though, one was likely to look for a romantic interest to account for choice. Max wondered whether such an idea had occurred to Nancy, and how she would like it if it did. He looked at her, sitting at his left hand and calmly demolishing muffins. She was apparently intent upon the pleasures of the moment, not the least of which for her was the sight of Miss Allen. Well, perhaps if you were a painter you were that way, even if you happened to be a woman, too. And as Roger might by good fortune come again into Max’s ken, and Miss Allen probably wouldn’t, Max followed Nancy’s example by turning his attention to her.

Her tea seemed to consist principally of a plate of salad, which, in spite of her statement that she was-hungry, she attacked but partially and fastidiously. She had long white hands, perfect as a statue’s; and from them the eye traveled naturally up her slender arms to her low bust and long graceful neck. Her profile finished the view fittingly, for it was perfectly regular and almost as white as marble. Seeing her thus at her languid meal, Max could almost have imagined that she was a statue but half come to life.

She turned to smile at him and utter some polite commonplace; and instantly the whole effect was changed. For if her skin was white, her lips were very red; her hair grew in the middle of her forehead in the most provoking little peak; and her eyes, which were gray in color, with a faint echoing gray on the lids, spoke what, you would of diablerie, of charm, of romance and daring, of disillusion, reillusion, love and the death of love. If this electric being chose a penniless young straggler for her friend — didn't Nancy see? didn't she get the inference?

A moment later his precious inference came near to being knocked asunder like a house of cards. Remonstrating against some far-reaching observation of Roger's, Miss Allen called him by a name that Max did not catch. Roger lifted an eyebrow, and appealed to Nancy. “ Did you hear that?” he demanded. “ The name that woman applies to me ? ”

“ Is it‘ Tertius' ? ” asked Nancy.

“It is. It's an unseemly relic of my childhood; and she resurrects it only when she wishes to annoy me. That is how I know when I am in disgrace.”

“ I always think of you by that name,” said Miss Allen sweetly.

“ You do not; and you use it only when you wish to recall what you think I may have happily forgotten. You see,” he explained to Nancy and Max, “ Mary Allen and I come from the same village in New England. That is all very well: one has to come from somewhere, and we both left there as soon as we conveniently could. But when I displease her, her mind flies back to the environment we both hated, and out comes the name to remind me.”

“ You always sign your name with a numeral three after it,” objected Nancy.

“ Partly as a way of distinguishing a plain name, and partly from habit. By no means as a mark of identification. Roger the First and Roger the Second are both dead.”

“ They were both superior men; they were successively the village doctor, and our family physician. Roger Second saw me into the world, and I dare say his father saw my parents,” remarked Miss Allen.

“They were probably much superior to their descendant ; but that isn’t the point It’s only when Mary thinks badly of me that she snubs me with that name. But I can always retaliate by telling her about the portrait I am going to paint of her.”

“Oh, I wish you would!” exclaimed Nancy.

“Well, he isn’t going to,” said Miss Allen shortly.

“She’s a subject, isn’t she, Nancy?” teased Roger.

“ She’s a subject to which justice has already been done,” said Miss Allen.

Then, and not until then, Max made a discovery which a woman would have made much sooner. Mary Allen was older than Roger; she was even considerably older. In the light of that discovery Max was at first inclined to scout his earlier suspicions; and then they returned upon him twofold. Miss Allen’s seniority wouldn’t prevent her falling in love with Greene; it would only prevent her keeping on terms with her own self-respect.

Max shook himself, and tried to follow what they were now saying. He was upbuilding a whole amorous history merely on Miss Allen’s strange seductive beauty. But he couldn’t discontinue as easily as he had begun it: there were too many anomalies here before his eyes and ears. He began to wish he hadn’t come: he was better off in the outer air than behind thrice-curtained windows. And at once he was asking himself whether Nancy didn’t feel the electricity in this atmosphere, or whether she was inconceivably used to electricity, and didn't mind.

“The new play is going well?” she was asking Miss Allen.

“ Very well. We hope to be able to keep it in town until spring,” said Miss Allen.

“Have you seen it?”

Roger asked Max. Max shook his head. “Well,” said Roger slowly, “I should hardly call it a great play, but it's certainly a most interesting exhibition.”

“You haven't seen it?” Nancy repeated. “You must, you know.”

“You have?” asked Roger.

“Of course I have. I haven't missed a play of Miss Allen's in — ”

“In more years than she cares to have you count, I dare say,” said Miss Allen. “Seriously, though, I do like this play: it gives me a chance for some very nice work. So I am glad that my public is good enough to like it.”

“ Oh, you and your public !.” exclaimed Roger.

“No. My public and I,” she corrected him.

They went at a little passage of arms on the subject of her playing. He railed at her, and she snubbed him; he sought her eyes, and she looked anywhere but at him. In a dozen little ways Roger betrayed not only the degree of their intimacy, but the fact of his infatuation; and if she betrayed nothing directly, the systematic character of her snubbing spoke for her — it was foreign to a nature at once gracious and high-handed, and in marked contrast with the silken consideration she showed to strangers like Max and Nancy. Yet Nancy was blind to it. But to be sure no one can see everything: and Nancy was absorbed in watching the play of shadow over that lovely face, and the provoking line of that red hair, and the subtle harmonies of the room that at once showed off and blended with the harmonies of its mistress; and finally she was listening to her friend Roger Greene deal authoritatively with a matter of art. On such a matter it wouldn’t have surprised her to have the whole world stop and listen to him.

Far from agreeing with his dicta, however, Mary Allen argued against them with a heat unworthy of her artistic maturity and serene faith in her own powers; and she was near an explosion of nerves when Roger suddenly yielded the field. “You say you haven’t seen this new play?” he asked Max. “Have you this evening free ? Have you, Nancy?”

“ And if we have?” asked Nancy.

“ You and I can take Mr. Meredith to see it We won’t object seeing it again — ”

“ Really! ” interjected Miss Allen.

“ And Mary will give the three of us a pass, of course. Then afterward we can all four have supper together somewhere.”

“ Shall we go into the other room for our cigarettes ? ” suggested Mary. She rose and led them back to where between the silver lamps and the sheen of the panels another scale of colors was run through as successfully as the one in the dining-room; and quite against probability, for it had seemed to Max at every moment during the last half-hour that the parly was on the point of breaking up, the three of them settled about the fire and lighted their cigarettes.

Miss Allen waved the cigarettes away — cigarettes are not for a golden voice; and instead of sitting down with them she began to wander about the room. Her movements were listless yet nervous: graceful each of them as the eye could desire, and every pause a pose. Max felt a pang of pity for a woman who in spite of her magnificence existed only in pleasing the eyes and ears of others.

There was evidently a thorn in her side that afternoon: Max could guess the name of the man who had put it there. But her ingrained habit of self-command came to her rescue; and after an interval which had probably not been long to any senses but Max’s, she approached the group at the fireside, and charmingly sought their pardon.

“ From six o’clock on I’m not myself,” she said. “ But when the strain is once over, I shall be happy to see you all again; I think it a fortunate idea of Soger’s, that suggestion of supper. So if you will all come with me — ” There was no resisting her when she wished to please; and Max at least had no desire to resist her. He hadn’t wished to see the end of this bright day, even when he wished himself and Nancy out of this overheated atmosphere. To add six or seven hours, and two or three entire changes of scene, to the story was fairly to give him the three wishes of the fairy-tales. It was overheated in him, no doubt, to feel so about this; but then there were presented to him points of interest which he could justify anywhere, things he liked to look on at and count off intelligently, in his role of the maturing looker-on.

“ Should you like to go? ” asked Nancy.

“ Indeed I should, if it won’t tire you too much.”

“Indeed it will fascinate me; there is so much to see a second time. One misses detail at first in general impressions.”

“ I’m glad my idea meets with approval,” said Roger, rising. “ And I suppose we’d all better be about our business now, and leave Miss Allen to hers.”

“ There isn’t the slightest hurry,” said Miss Allen. “ Indeed, I’d rather you stayed, if you won’t mind me; the interval between tea and going to the theater I am too apt to fill up simply with an agony of restlessness. Don’t leave me now; let me take you up to my sitting-room, and show you a picture or two that I have there.”

She seemed to cling to them; and on their acquiescing, or at least not refusing, she linked her arm through Nancy’s, and led her into the dim rich hall and up the stairs.

They made a picture in the faint light to the two men who followed: the tall red-haired woman in black, with her rhythmic and processional grace, and the blonde girl in Lincoln green, who charmed the eye because she had already intrigued the interest. It occurred to Max during that deliberate ascent that perhaps no other stair-case in New York held at that hour two women so interesting and so diverse, or two men whose position in regard to their women was more complicated and equivocal.

Miss Allen’s sitting-room was over her drawing-room; and the decorator’s hand had been stayed here by collision with the mistress’s personality. He had been suffered to provide jade-green walls and hangings, picked out with gold, and wicker furniture painted to harmonize. But the piano and the photographs on it, the books which lay piled about to be easy of access, the tall vases and low bowls of flowers, all belonged to the mistress of the room not only by title but by right of choice.

“ I keep most of my pictures huddled up here, where they won’t interfere with anything but each other,” she said. “Now how do you like that, Miss Desmond?”

She lighted a long ecclesiastical candle in a silver stick, and held it so that its light would fall on a particular canvas. Max’s eye dwelt in delight on her lifted arm and the long lines it gave her; then he looked over at Nancy. It may be conjectured that he had seen and passed erring judgment on enough pictures for one day. Watching Nancy, he saw her look the picture carefully all over; then she stepped back a little, and asked Miss Allen to hold the light lower; and finally she turned and looked at her hostess with a little smile, but she said nothing.

Roger laughed aloud. “ She hates it, and she’s too polite to say so,” he announced. “ Also, she’s too honest to lie. Take her away, Mary; don’t torment the poor girl”

“No, I don’t hate it,” Nancy hastened to correct him. “I don’t like it, but that’s because it’s entirely outside my range. I can't see why any one would paint so, that's all.”

“Well, Nancy, I picked it out for her,” said Roger.

“ I don't think you did,” said Nancy calmly. “ If you did, then what you have been trying to teach me all these years is nothing but lip eloquence, Roger.”

In her own jurisdiction she was perfectly competent, for even Max, that close and cynical observer, had thought Roger was speaking the truth; and now Roger with a second laugh admitted his trap. “ You have a gratifyingly good pupil, Roger,” said Mary Allen; she gave Nancy a look in which interest and respect blended with something not unlike pity. “That's my own bad taste, Miss Desmond,” she went on. “But here is something I think you can honestly like. And it was a present, too — the more shame to me.”

Nancy honestly did like it, and said so. “ And here's a caricature of me — good, isn't it? I paid real money for that.” And she laughed with them at the representation of herself eight feet tall and with hair like a flaming torch. It was the first time Max had heard her laugh, and the sound surprised him. Instead of being rich and mellow, to correspond with her voice, it was sudden, sharp, and rather rasping; but it was probably the only thing about her that had escaped cultivation, and simply on that ground it was interesting.

“ Here is a picture I have had for years.” Miss Allen drew them on in their tour about the room. “This one was given me by the artist, and that, and this.”

Nancy's eyes stole from the pictures so presented to Roger; he caught her glance, and shook his head. “I haven't ever given her a picture,” he said. “ The first I shall give her is her own portrait, when she has me do it.”

Miss Allen set her candlestick down suddenly, opened her desk, and scribbled on a card. “ Take that, Tertius, and go to see about your seats,” she said crisply. “Do you stay, Miss Desmond; I have half a hundred things to show you when we are once secure from interruption.”

Nancy demurred; but it was useless to demur. Roger went; and after he had gone Max and Nancy were alone for a silken half-hour with Mary Allen. She showed them several things, to be sure, interesting signs of her past richness and her present opulence. The most interesting thing she showed them, however, was herself when that disturbing presence was removed: herself so high-keyed yet so smooth, such a beautiful product of lavish nature and ripe experience.

Max was fascinated; he couldn’t imagine any one who wouldn’t be fascinated when Mary Allen had really made up her mind to please. Why she should care to please them was of course more or less a mystery; but then allowance must be made for the settled habit of pleasing, which probably carried its victim on to exertion even when the pleased objects weren’t worth her time. He was more surprised at Nancy’s evident enjoyment; yet it was of a piece with all he had yet observed both of her characteristic perception and her characteristic blindness. She wasn’t jealous of Roger’s feeling for Miss Allen, because she thought it parallel with her own; and Miss Allen’s occasional sharpness with Roger, indicative to Max’s eye of an interesting reaction in that lady’s own nerves, must seem to Nancy only the freedom allowable between equals.

Max wearied of the interview before they actually succeeded in bringing it to a close. Miss Allen finally sent them off in her own car, and on their departure conducted them herself into the hall, shook hands with them, and hoped smilingly that they wouldn’t be too much disappointed in the play. It seemed to Max that at the last her eyes rested on Nancy in a blend of pity and envy. Nancy was young, and therefore certain to be mistaken in important issues; but there comes to all of us a time when we can envy even the mistakes of youth.

They left her still standing in the midst of the dim rich hall; they were whirled smoothly away in her car, which with its leashed power, its quiet elegance, and its little luxurious appointments, was no bad symbol of its owner.

“She’s great, isn’t she?” asked Nancy softly. “She has all the glamour of greatness; I can’t help loving her glamour.”

“ I never saw any one with more,” said Max honestly.

“I hope she will do something for Roger some day,” Nancy went on. “ Of course they have only known each other three or four years; the time back there in the village, though they like to tease each other about it, doesn’t count.”

“You hope she will do something for him?”

“Yes. Let him paint her picture, and introduce him to people, and all that. Roger has wonderful gifts, but he hasn’t any luck. Success is so much a question of a start, you know; and he hasn’t managed to get the start. But of course that isn’t easy for her to see; she herself is so used to success.”

Out here with Nancy alone, the air blowing crisp in his face through the open sash, Nancy’s point of view was not only creditable but credible. Max wondered if he hadn’t after all imagined those complex reactions between Roger and Miss Allen. He was a provincial; and a provincial meeting a prominent actress is likely to imagine things.

He was grateful, at least, that Nancy didn’t imagine them; and then it struck him that to be grateful for a person’s limitations is to be three parts of the way toward idolizing that person. Well, it made no difference to him if he went the other part, and learned to idolize Nancy. Soon enough he would leave her forever; even his long bright day, with its hours of precious drifting communion, would shortly be over, unbelievably prolonged as it had been. Once over, it would not be repeated. Nothing about him would ever disturb her. He could have shaken her for her sweet denseness, if that very denseness hadn’t been what protected her and justified him, what kept him from having to remind himself that he was married, and from feeling a little ashamed when the recollection came unbidden.

All too rapidly the blocks slipped by; they turned at length into Nancy’s own street. “It’s an easy way for us to get home, isn’t it?” said Nancy. “It was sweet of her to send us.”

Sweet of her, Max thought, if only she isn’t feeling already that she has something to make up to you for. Then he shook himself: something had certainly got into his nerves to-day. He was reasoning like a sentimental and suspicious fool. He couldn’t have told why he was so sure of these things that he was sure of; but he would have been glad to ignore them. At least he had hours more before him, hours the very idea of which would bridge the short separation that was upon them now. Por he didn’t wish to let her go; it suited him to have her in the picture, no matter what the rest of it might be.

“You and Roger are both coming for me? You will be here about eight o’clock?” she asked on the doorstep.

“ About eight o’clock,” he repeated. Eight o’clock was an hour off; and that hour was longer to look ahead to than the whole day had been.

Suddenly he remembered how the day had begun by her forgetting her appointment with him. Oh, she was safe enough! and her safety kept him from a chance of doing anything worse than standing posted as a fool in his own imagination. And even that wouldn’t be for the first time.

A situation could scarcely be said to exist, when one of the actors therein was all unconscious of it. Back in Miss Allen’s car again, Max laid hold on the commonplace, and remembered that he and Nancy were essentially nothing to each other, and that what mattered in this life was not occasional flurries of the nerves, but the calm course of everyday conduct, for which he could not be impeached.

He felt soothed and uplifted; if conscience had unreasonably accused, she now in all justice acquitted him. He was on the point even of a mental apology to Roger Oreene and Miss Allen, who were doubtless quite as well-behaved in all practical points as he himself, whatever their fluttering and half-perceived inclinations might be.

This bracketing of the four of them brought an unlooked-for turn. It occurred to him suddenly that he had thought all sorts of things of Greene and Miss Allen; and meanwhile what had they been thinking of him? He had refused to accept the surface fact of their friendship; and unless he were accepted in that very surface way, what possible ground in Nancy’s life had he to stand on ?

CHAPTER V

END OF MAX’S DAY OF DAYS

Max came back to Nancy promptly, and found her ready for him; but Roger kept them waiting. There was nothing strange in that, as Roger was one of the people who go through life anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour behind time; but it gave them an added link that they should have to wait together for him.

They sat primly down with their wraps on. Nancy was all in tawny shades now; her one evening gown was demurely effective. It amused Max to see that she was actually excited at the prospect of the evening’s entertainment; but to be sure she lived a quiet, hard-working life, and she was evidently still at an age when a party is a party.

Roger arrived presently; and he too was metamorphosed by a change of clothing and an attractive prospect. These two radiant ones made Max feel quite superior, and a bit old; he took his pleasures more quietly. But to be sure he was intensely interested in what Miss Allen might do in her public capacity; and he was the only one of the three to whom the manifestation of that capacity was quite new.

“ We shall arrive with the crowd,” said Roger in extenuation of his lateness. “ I know you like to arrive ahead of it, Nancy; but there’s no point in that. You can watch the people come in, to be sure; but the manner of their coming isn’t worth your observation, and most of them would be unutterably dreary even at the crises of their fates.”

“Just the same I do like to watch them,” said Nancy.

“But I know my going early is a survival of the happy days when a party of us used to sit in the gallery and — ” “ Happy days indeed! ” scoffed Roger. “ The streetcar and the gallery for them as likes ’em; the limousine and the reserved seat for me, when possible.”

The privately owned limousine and the seat reserved on a pass, thought Max; and then reproved himself for beginning again.

“ Here we are,” said Roger, looking out the window of the taxicab. “ Don’t expect anything of the theater itself, Mr. Meredith; it dates back to days before decorative art was applied to theaters, and even the gilding has worn dim.”

“ I like it, though,” said Nancy. “ Even the shabbiness seems to me emblematic of solidity. It’s like the rich man who doesn’t have to dress well.”

“Art might be enshrined in a more fitting temple,” he still objected. “ But this is a place where we all went when we were twenty-one and sat in the gallery.”

They were indeed arriving with the crowd; and into the crowd they presently found themselves wedged, Nancy between the two men. Over her flaxen head Roger caught Max’s eye, and grinned; and that derisive yet sympathetic grin, embodiment of some such phrase as he was likely to speak directly to Nancy, drew Max more potently than Roger had yet drawn him. “ Go on, young ’un,” he seemed to say. “ Sic ’em! We oldsters know that you’re wasting your vigor; but we like to see the game spectacle. Sic ’em for us too! ”

“Now, aren’t these good seats? ” Roger wanted to know when they were in their places. “ Isn’t that a good overture? That’s one old-fashioned custom that I’m glad to see adhered to, the overture. It prevents your hearing quite so much of the inane conversation that you know is going on all about you. And isn’t that a fearful curtain? I try to keep my eyes off it, but that’s impossible. That grim fat female has haunted my dreams for years, with that everlasting bouquet which she’s always hurling and never succeeds in letting fly. Now, Nancy, seriously, don’t you think that curtain is a public nuisance ? ”

“ Close your eyes,” suggested Nancy.

“ I do,” he assured her, “ and they won’t stay closed.”

He began to look about him, however; and he named to Max several persons in the audience. It was evident that Roger was enjoying himself: the lights, the crowd, the feeling that this was an “ occasion,” all contributed to his elevation. Max was inclined to envy a happiness that could be so built upon pure sensation; it must be the devil, though, he reflected, when the sensations began to go the other way.

“ I wonder how you are going to like this play,” Nancy presently said to him.

“ He won’t dare not to like it, now that we have brought him,” said Roger with a chuckle. “ He will soon have a chance to find out, though; the overture is ending.”

It ended, and the lights went off in the house, so abruptly that Max had no time to learn from the program what the scene was supposed to represent. He gathered, however, from the first few minutes of the play, that it was a French provincial home, and that there was trouble in the air. A placid narrow life seemed to go on before his eyes; yet there was an overhanging sense of calamity conveyed by the looks and tones even of those characters who did not seem to feel it themselves. An alien element had entered their milieu, a man from the outside world, who could scarcely leave them as he found them. Max found himself keyed up to expectation and a certain dread: he could see the situation looming ahead, and he wondered how they would handle it.

Suddenly the little buzz and movement which always goes on in an audience was arrested for a moment, to be succeeded by a burst of hand-clapping; all eyes had turned toward one point of the stage. Miss Allen’s entrance was of course heralded; but Max, turning with the rest, was moved to cry out that there was a mistake somewhere. He knew Miss Allen when he saw her, and this wasn’t she.

The woman stood quiet for a moment in the doorway, and then advanced into the center of the stage. When She began to speak, it was Mary Allen unmistakably: the rich voice, the exquisite enunciation, were hers and no other’s. But she had done wonders with her appearance in that first act. The story required her to be only eighteen years old; and if she did not quite succeed in looking eighteen, at least her looks produced no* jarring note, and she relied on her acting for the rest. She wore a plain gray dress, ankle length, with sleeves that reached halfway down her wrists; her hair was parted, and plaited down her back. She stood, she moved, she seemed to breathe, with the gaucherie and timidity of eighteen, yet always too with some of its latent power. Eighteen, beating its wings against the narrow confines of its life — eighteen, awakening timidly at first to love — eighteen, learning to trust itself, even to trust itself to the edge of the precipice: this was what was before Max’s eyes. And he forgot that this was'an actress, and that he knew her and was to go out to supper with her at the end of the play; the proscenium arch disappeared; he lived in the scene spread before his eyes, forgetting even that he was Max Meredith, and therefore had no right to be there.

The scene ended when the girl left home with her lover, shipwreck in sight to every eye but hers. Only then did Max draw a long breath; he leaned back, for the first time in half an hour, and bethought himself of his companions.

Nancy had evidently been as much carried away as he; she smiled, a little shamefaced, and pretended to consult her program. Roger Oreene, on the other hand, launched forth in a torrent of words. He must explain to them what they had just seen; and to-night he found the secret of Mary’s art in an incomparable effectiveness. Another time he would have been calling on them to worship that same art as a gift straight from Heaven; to-night it was simply a bag of theatrical tricks, which he insisted on spreading before their eyes.

Max was rather irritated at him for so doing; he had been under a spell, and he didn’t choose to have it explained to him that he was a fool for going under. But because Nancy listened as if Roger’s eloquence were sweet music, Max listened too; and listening he became aware of the fact that Roger was arguing against himself. There was more than a temporary spell on him; Max was witnessing his last struggles to remain merely a critical onlooker.

The second scene opened in Paris some years later. Youth was gone now from the woman Mary played, and innocence, and illusion. She wore an evening gown of dull red, which left her arms entirely bare and contrasted sharply and not altogether happily with the color of her hair. The hair was piled on top of her head now: never in all his life had Max seen such hair or such arms. It was in the dull look of the eyes, though, that her impersonation now centered: the eyes that had looked on too much, and the hard biting speech that had replaced words of love. She was like a burnt-out torch, all her magnificence spent, but her significance trebled by what had gone. And for all her weariness, there was in her whole bearing a tenseness that foreboded something still to come.

Max grew interested during this scene in the young actor who played Mary’s lover. He was, the listener learned later, not wholly unlike the character he played; and indeed he died some years afterward in a madhouse. Off the stage he and Mary were not on speaking terms; but it was characteristic of Mary that she nevertheless employed him, because his support in such a part was the best she could secure. It was characteristic of the young man, too, that although he hated her, he always did his best when he actually played with her; indeed, with a lead like hers he found it impossible to refrain from doing his best. He showed the lover as a character in the beginning not greatly worse than the girl he had seduced, but now settling into a grossness beyond redemption; yet over all the hardness of his impersonation was always the glamour which distinguished his worth to Mary and the public from his private and personal debauchery.

The act ended with the ferocious quarrel and separation of the two leading characters: a scene played at a constantly quickening tempo, and with a final fury that must have left them spent. It touched Max the least of anything he had yet seen: it was the conventional climax of a three-act drama. As an exhibition of mere power, nevertheless, it affected him; and he couldn’t help feeling that whatever came after this would be in the nature of an anti-climax.

The audience, however, after giving their favorite a dozen calls, settled back as if the real event of the evening were still to come. By right, it seemed to Max, they should now have been thinking of supper and the evening’s end; they weren’t in the usual attitude of an audience after the second act. “How does this thing end?” he asked Nancy. “In a nunnery?”

“ The end is the best of all,” she said. Max was pleased with his own penetration.

The present entr’acte was short, and was not bridged by any conversation from Roger; perhaps he had begun to look ahead toward the evening’s end. In silence the trio waited; and presently the final setting was disclosed to their eyes.

Now indeed Mary transcended the actress whose equipment is merely for “big scenes” of unleashed power: a leashed power was hers, when she chose to use it, and an ability to suggest all the countless undercurrents which a lesser talent would have been forced to ignore in the interest of its single effect. She began, however, with a physical difference, as she had begun before. Now the all-important hair lay in shining coils about her head; and she wore a robe—it could not be called a gown — of iridescent material draped in great folds. It covered her to the throat; lengths of it trailed behind her as she walked; its amplitude encircled her arms. Not in many moons had Max beheld so much drapery on an actress; it must have taken considerable physical strength even to bear such a mass about. But Mary Allen not only wore it; she seemed to fill the very drapery with the spirit of her impersonation, so that the eye lingering on the lustrous lengths could not escape suggestion of the tortured soul within.

She had passed not only beyond love, but beyond disillusion itself; she was filled now with the mighty strength of despair, swept out of herself by the approaching catastrophe. She and (her lover played the scene between them. He had come at a summons, half in curiosity and half in disdain: and behold, the old enchantment began once more to weave itself about him. He sat on a couch in the center of the stage, his easy cynicism giving place at first to interest and then to rising excitement; she circled about him, in the fullness of a power which no longer pled or asked, but simply took. She would draw near to his fascinated eyes and his yearning arms; then she would be off again, filling the stage with her magnificence, drawing with her his reviving passion, and the mad combustion of her own despair, and the doom of them both.

Once she came quite up to him, paused momentarily, and kissed him, with a little quick kiss like a butterfly’s lighting; then she was off again on her restless round. Her lover watched her in fascination, in bewilderment, but in sufficient confidence so that he waited for her to come to him. She was his, after all; and in so far as he believed her his he was right. She was his finally, by the force of her own despair.

The circles grew smaller now; she was drawing in on him. Still he waited, waited, speaking low, watching her. Presently she came within his reach, and he put out his hands and caught hers. Their eyes met. Slowly he began to draw her down to him; slowly she came, her eyes never leaving his face.

Suddenly out of her swathing drapery one white arm flashed; with one swift sure blow she stabbed him to the heart. A moment longer he clung to her one hand. Then he sagged down at her feet, the miserable inert remains of what had made and then broken her life. With the hand his dying one had released she drew back her robe; and she stood looking down at him with all her horrible power frozen into immobility. But it was not in horror that she looked, still less in triumph; it was only in a strange and lovely calm, because the play was at last played out, and even despair had come to an end.

On her so standing, so looking, the curtain fell, only to be raised again half a dozen times. Finally she had to come before the curtain and bow; but Max turned his eyes away from her then, to keep that last lovely picture intact. It was not until the satisfied audience began to stir all about him that Max roused himself, and likewise got ready to go.

Nancy looked white and a little awed. “ That’s power,” she said softly, as Max helped her on with her cloak. “Did you see the way they stayed? I never knew that to happen before, except to her, it seems to me. That’s tribute.”

It seemed to Max, however, that not even the multitude’s forgetfulness of its supper was quite such a tribute to power as Nancy’s white face and quiet words. He looked across at Roger, as they got into the aisle; but Roger was excited and uncommunicative. He had seen the play before — so to be sure had Nancy; but he had his private reasons, doubtless, for looking ahead rather than back.

“Where are we to wait for Miss Allen, Roger?” Nancy asked as they reached the door.

“Bight here, I should think. She’s touchy about having people go back on the stage directly after a performance; and I didn’t order any taxicab, as I suppose she will take us in her own car.”

The lobby emptied under their eyes; in its deserted expanse they settled themselves to wait. By common consent they had drawn close to the outer door; even after it was closed, the situation was draughty and miserable. Nancy plunged her arms to the elbow in her muff; she was suffering from reaction, and looked very tired. Max himself was conscious of a growing distaste for this part of the evening’s festivities. Only Roger was pleasantly excited: spots of color burned in his thin cheeks, and he strode about the lobby in an impatience that would not permit him to stand still.

The theater employees left, the portico was darkened. The trio of watchers moved on into the outer air. It was snowing, and the air was very damp. Nancy shivered a little; and even Roger began to look anxiously about him. “She can’t be very much longer,” he hazarded. “If we could see her car, we might take refuge in it; but I can’t see it.”

“She hasn’t been long,” said Nancy politely. “We are all right here, Roger.”

They stood, damp and silent, in the gloom. The minutes lengthened; Max saw several other people come down the alley from the stage-door. This was anything but a promising beginning for a jolly supper-party; Max felt a rising tide of indignation against the woman who for reasons of her own kept them standing ridiculously here. “I think — ” he began. Nancy looked up quickly and shook her head at him; he lapsed into silence.

After what seemed some hours of cheerless waiting, a functionary in a cap approached from the direction of the stage-door; and addressed himself to Roger. “Mr. Greene ? ” he asked. Roger acknowledged his name. “ A note for you,” said the man, delivering it.

Roger tore it open, glanced it over, and thrust it into his pocket, his face crimsoned to the forehead. “She isn’t coming,” he said a little thickly. “ She finds herself very tired after her night’s performance, and prefers to go straight home.”

Max felt heartily sorry for the wretch thus made ridiculous; he fancied Roger would especially hate to be ridiculous in Nancy’s eyes. “We can console ourselves,” he hastened to suggest. “There are still three of us, and the night is young. We have only to find a taxicab.”

He was sure of Nancy’s backing; he hardly waited to obtain her consent. She spoke, however; and Max turned to her with a smile which as she spoke changed to a gape of amazement. “We’ll have to have the taxicab,” she said. “But I think I shall ask you to take me directly home. Miss Allen knows enough to know when she is tired; the rest of us might take a lesson from her.”

Roger turned on his heel, and went to look for a taxicab; Max remonstrated with her. “Can’t you see your friend is disappointed? Why not go with him, if only for a little while?” he asked.

“It is late now; I am tired; and to-morrow will be another working day,” said Nancy. The worst of her was that he had to take her statement at its face value. The humiliation offered to Roger was a lesser thing in her eyes than the consideration that a working morning must not find her jaded.

Max resigned himself humorously to her view; after all, she undoubtedly was tired after such a day. But he couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy for the poor devil who had thus been twice slapped in the face. He pitied him from a height, indeed: he himself had had a very lucky day.

Roger was silent all the way down to Nancy’s; Max and Nancy interchanged a few sentences. On Nancy’s doorstep the three of them stood together; and Nancy excused herself, not to Roger, who had been snubbed, but to Max, whose cup was, even without the denied drop, full to overflowing. “We can have another day together before yon leave,” die promised him.

“ I shall claim it,” said Max.

“Yes, do. I shall be more careful about keeping it promptly, too.” She showed a passing dimple. “ Goodnight, Roger.”

The two men stood alone on the steps. It had stopped snowing. “ I think I shall let the taxicab go,” said Max, “unless you want it.”

Roger shook his head. Max paid off the man, and returned to the silent figure on the steps. He wanted to be alone, alone in the indigo air of night with his own thoughts. But he was sorry for Roger; instinct told him that there was no chance of Roger’s not feeling everything to the quick. Impulsively Max said, “Well, our women have deserted us; but that is no reason for our not finishing out the evening, Greene. What do you say to our finishing it together ? ”

Roger shook his head; speech seemed to be almost beyond him. Suddenly he smote one hand violently against the door-post. “Damn women with careers!” he said in a half-choked voice.

He strode off the next moment, and Max watched him vanishing down the street in the opposite direction to that in which he lived. “ So say we all! ” Max addressed the retreating back; but Max smiled as he said it.

CHAPTER VI

A PAGAN UNDER THE ROOFS

In spite of her virtuous doing without a late supper, Nancy was tired when she faced her easel the next morning. It was a dismal morning, and she was not inclined to serious effort. She made a sketch of Mary Allen in the discordant red gown she had worn on the stage the night before; regarding it without any pleasure, she thought of the clever caricature of herself that Miss Allen had laughingly displayed. “ I wish she would allow Roger to paint her,” she thought. “ I suppose she doesn’t realize what it would mean to him. I’m glad Max had an opportunity to meet her. She’s a fascinating creature: she and her house are better worth seeing than most things. She isn’t very kind to Roger; but I suppose her habit of success has rather blinded her to some considerations.”

Her own habit of effort had blinded herself to some others; it did not occur to her that if she had tried she herself might have mended the end of Roger’s shattered evening. Yet Nancy had more sympathy than Mary with a side of Roger’s life of which she knew less. She hadn’t as much of his background as Mary; but she made more of what she had.

Roger Greene Third was by nature gay and irritable; life demanded of him perseverance and self-command. His declared ideal was that of a Greek gentleman of the best period: to swing a cane, and talk interestingly about intellectual subjects, and to have even his Aesthetic stimuli supplied for him by slaves. In actual practice, however, he not only worked at a difficult art unceasingly and with 03 little substantial return: what he chiefly asked of life was simply freedom to work harder. But his pictures did not sell; and he had to make not only his own living but that of his mother.

Mary Allen knew Roger’s mother, and regarded her with instinctive horror. Mrs. Greene was a resigned, religious daughter of the horse-leech, who had the best of reasons for hampering and half-strangling her son. Her demands upon him were exorbitant; but it was a matter of honor with Roger to fulfil them. He ignored her frequent hints that she would like to come and live with him; but he never denied her anything else, not even her pious subscriptions to projects with which he had not the slightest sympathy. He did not love his mother; and perhaps his unacknowledged consciousness of that failure made him all the more resolutely determined to be a good son to her in the things that were within his control. Personally he would have asked nothing better of life than to starve in an attic and paint as he chose; instead of which he did whatever he could get that would pay, and sent regular drafts to New England.

He kept this side of him quite strictly to himself; indeed he was more than a little ashamed of it. Nancy, however, divined that there were obstacles in his path besides his failure of early and easy recognition. She was right in supposing, however, that Mary Allen’s own habit of success blinded her to Roger’s difficulties; but there was in her viewpoint an element the mere presence of which Nancy never suspected, though the stranger Max had conjectured it at once. Mary did not care to see Roger’s life too fully; and she did not dare to.

She had met him three years before, on her first visit in more than a decade to the home of her youth. Roger was paying a conscientious and distressed visit to his mother; and it was small wonder that against the background they both disliked, but could not help intensely feeling, they should be thrown together, and by force of iheir common language in the midst of aliens make great strides towards intimacy. From the beginning Mary had known that in allowing herself this intimacy she was playing with fire; but she was not cautious by temperament, and she was upborne by the reflection that once they were back in their allotted spheres she should see little enough of him. Perhaps also she trusted her own essential invulnerability.

A little, however, may be too much. Restored to her own path she tried to forget Roger, and was surprised to find how much trying it took. Then she allowed him to see her oftener; she even sought him. So may a certain sort of affairs be put an end to; they die early, of a surfeit. But the more she saw of Roger, the more she wished to see of him; and lately she had found herself confronted by the fact that this was a real affair. It might even be the affair of her life; but that she would be long in acknowledging. Nothing about Roger was suitable for the position of her vis-4-vis; in the face of unsuitability, she was fascinated by Roger himself.

From her early frank delight in his society she passed to the use of snubs, and even of petty meannesses like her desertion of him before Max and Nancy. He felt the snubs, she didn’t doubt; but they didn’t do either of them much good. He recovered, and came back with the calmness of a man claiming what was his own; and Mary despised herself for the expedients to which she was driven, and saw in them only an acknowledgment of what she would have given increasingly more and more to be able satisfactorily to deny.

After the night when she had failed to meet him and his friends for supper, Roger stayed away from her for two weeks. Mary decided that he had at length nerved himself to a final break. She missed him acutely, but she tried to make herself believe that she approved the saner course of parting with him.. It was glorious winter weather; her new play was going famously, and her rdle in it delighted her; she was back once more in her town house, an extravagance some two years old, but still delightful to her. She had every reason to be satisfied; but she surprised herself with raw gusts of temper. At times she was very gay; in between she was wretched. And for two mortal weeks he never came near her.

As the fault was hers, she might have sought him and apologized; she would have, if the feelings she had hurt had belonged to a servant, or a member of her company, or her manager. If Roger had been only an ordinary man friend, she would have found means to let him know she was sorry, and missed him; sweet warm reconciliations were an integral part of life as she lived it. But Roger was Roger; she wouldn’t throw him a sop, and she couldn’t do anything more for him.

On the second Sunday she woke late, and unusually tired from her two performances of the day before. She had reached an age when she was no longer at her best in the morning; and her eyelids were more than ordinarily gray as they opened on the familiar walls of her beautiful bedroom. She hated the thought that it was Sunday. She needed her Sundays to rest in, but of late she had spent a part of too many with Roger; and she recollected how last week the day had dragged. This time she would make it her business to see that it didn’t drag. Only she hated to rise and set about it; she hated to think that the day had actually begun.

Her maid approached the bed to say that her bath was ready. She was a middle-aged Frenchwoman, black-eyed and of rather grim visage, silent, sure, and devoted to Mary, but quite above any facile enthusiasm. Mary turned on her side to get away from that visage. To an eye less accustomed than that of Thèrése she would have presented a picture of loveliness, her long limbs molded under the bedclothes, one bare arm half buried in her glorious hair, which she always allowed to spread loose upon the pillow. Th6rdse thought only that she seemed tired and impatient, and would need extra grooming to-day if she were to look her best.

Mary lay with her eyes closed, frowning, and Th6r£se stood attentively beside her. When she could bear this silence no longer, Mary submitted and sat up. Thermae gathered her hair up, and laid about her shoulders a dressing-gown of rainbow hues. “ Have my breakfast served up here; HI dress after I eat it,” said Mary, and passed into her bathroom.

Her tub was set at the level of the floor, in compliance with her luxurious whim. The water looked limpid and lovely; she made up her mind that water at least was a good thing in the day. She was just about to descend into it when Thèrése knocked at the door. “ I beg your pardon, Miss Allen, but Mr. Greene sent up word that he wishes to see you. I told him you weren’t ready for visitors, but he said he would wait.”

Over her shoulder Mary said severely, “ Let him wait, of course.” She would have hated to have Thèrése see the look that must have come over her face at the mention of that name. But when she had issued her order she rewrapped her gown about herself, and asked, “ What time is it, Therese?”

“ Eleven o’clock.”

“ It’s not so early as I thought; but he must have known that it’s too early to see me. 1, wonder what he can want ? ” soliloquized Mary.

Impulsively she ran back to her bedroom and snatched the pins out of her hair. “ Bring me some clothes, Therese,” she commanded. “ Anything; what I wore to the theater last night will do. And get my hair up somehow ; it doesn’t matter how, as it’s only temporary.”

ThSr&se knew enough to obey what her mistress meant rather than what she said; in five minutes Mary stood arrayed, simply indeed, but with a simplicity that was not unworthy of, say, the first<act of her new play. “I shall be back in five minutes; you can be finding me some good clothes. I’m going driving, and shall probably lunch out,” she directed as she left the room.

She descended the stairs, and halted on the threshold of her drawing-room. Roger was standing near the fireplace. He had lighted a cigarette to beguile tedium; and beyond tossing it into the fire-basket he did not acknowledge her presence. But the swift look that passed between them told as much as if they had run into each other’s arms.

The height of her tremulous happiness when she saw him warned Mary to cling to commonplace. “Well, Roger?” she said, advancing. “Abroad early, aren’t you?”

“Do you call this early? I have been roaming about for hours, waiting for it to be late enough so that I could decently come here.”

“You had an errand?” she suggested, advancing and standing near him.

“You think I hadn’t? As it happens, I have. My errand is simply to take you off with me for a few hours of fresh air and sunshine.”

“I’m not sure that I haven’t an engagement,” Mary demurred.

“I’m sure you have; probably three or four of them. But you are superior to such considerations,” said Roger.

“One can always telephone, of course. But, Roger,” she passed from conventional to genuine objections, “it may be late for you, but it’s early for me. I should have to keep you waiting an hour now before I could possibly be ready.”

“Nonsense! Ring for your hat and coat, and come as you are.”

“But I’m not suitably dressed,” she persisted. “I haven’t had my breakfast. I haven’t even had my bath.”

“You can’t persuade me,” argued Roger, “that you bathe as other women do, and then spend hours having yards of cloth wrapped about you. You simply come up clean and lovely, like the dawn. And if you must eat, walk into your dining-room and have your breakfast there.

FU come with you.”

She allowed herself to be swept along into the diningroom, where she rang and ordered her breakfast brought to her there. “I don't know what Thfrtee will say,” she protested. “ Or, rather, what she will look: she doesn’t say much, but she can look the rankest condemnation.”

“Hurry, hurry!” insisted Roger. “Don’t sit down; yon can eat faster if you stand. The day is wearing away outside; and here you are cabined, curtained, Bhut in to artificial heat, and lighted by electric light at mid-day. Come out!”

“Don’t flatten your mouth so when you say ’out,’ Roger; it flattens the sound,” she cautioned.

“I’m not a singer,” he returned, “though to-day my impulse is distinctly lyrical. Have you finished with that coffee?”

“ Heavens, no: I’ve only just begun. Won’t you have some, Roger ? ”

He shook his head, and turned to the attendant servant. “ Tell Thèrése to bring'down some wraps for Miss Allen,”he directed.

“Really, Roger—!” she protested when they were alone.

“I’d rather you gave the orders, but you won’t,” he explained.

“I suppose I’ll have to get them first. Do you want the car?” she asked with factitious meekness.

“ It’s a day made for walking,” he said.

“ Then we’ll walk. Where shall we walk? ”

“ Oh, downalong! ” said Roger vaguely. “ The important thing is to start.”

She rose, with a last bit of toast in her hand, and submitted to having her wraps put on. A minute later the house-door closed behind them, and they were in Roger’s trumpeted out-of-doors. It was a wonderful winter day, clear, cold and stimulating. They started with the mid-day sun in their eyes; and their feet rang merrily on the pave* ment. “ Oh, it is, it is — ! ” cried Mary.

“Isn’t it?” agreed Roger.

He spoke again when they had gone several blocks. “ Where were you last Sunday ? ” he asked.

“Last Sunday? Oh, that’s a year a-gone. Don’t speak of last Sunday! ” she answered. No other word of pardon passed between them.

They walked well together; they both had a long swift stride, which grew longer and swifter as they advanced. With the cold air playing about her limbs and striking her cheeks, Mary felt not only happy, but free. Things were perfect as they were; she might give Roger credit for recognizing their perfection. He had never spoken to her of love, and she was merely making herself miserable by supposing that he ever would. Of course he could Bee that that would bring in impossibilities: to make it a question of their loving would only be to spoil everything. As they were, they had all that even lovers could have: the world about them, the sun in their eyes, and open hours ahead of them in which to walk right into the sun. She stared unblinking at it, and kept its image when her eyelids fell. South and ever south, and presently up and up, straight into the sun —

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Must we have a destination?”

“Perhaps not, but I think we have. Where are you taking me, Roger ? ”

“You tell, since you have guessed the half already.”

“I think I shall go to your studio, Roger. I haven’t been there in a long time.”

“ Correct,” he acknowledged.

“ But I haven’t forgotten the way. And I think,” she said, looking about her to make quite sure where she was, “ I think, Roger, that I shall beat you there.”

It was a race between them from then on; and although he was at her heels when she reached the doorstep, he had to break into a run to do it. He had the advantage of years on his side; but her muscular condition was perfect, and it would take more than one good night’s sleep to relieve him of the handicap of chronic fatigue.

Roger’s studio was the garret over a wholesale house, transformed from its first estate by the introduction of a skylight and an inefficient steam radiator. It was cold in winter and hot in summer; the roof usually leaked, and strange odors came wandering up from below-stairs. It was also dusty, and in a state of chronic disorder, which was rather a point of pride with Roger: he could always find what he wanted, and wouldn’t have suffered anybody, especially any woman, to come interfering with his things. Mary, to be sure, could have been trusted not to introduce an element of order. She was used to having things picked up after her; and now her coat was flung in one place, her muff in another, her hat and gloves in a third, and Roger himself picked them up and laid them out of the way.

She looked about the dusty confusion with sparkling eyes, ignoring alike the fact that the floor had been swept in her honor and the normal poor little contrivances of the place, the bed made to do duty as a sofa by day, the screen that imperfectly concealed the wash-stand, and the spirit-lamp where in times of special stress Roger made shift with his own dreadful cooking. “ Show me the new things, Roger,” she commanded. “I recognize the old. There’s Homer, still, with dust among his curls and a black tip to his nose. There’s the jar we ate the ginger from — where did you get the bitter-sweet? There’s your lay-figure, and — oh, Roger, what a lovely little picture! ”

“It’s quite the worst attempt I ever made, Mary,” he said. But he followed her with evident delight as she made her way about the room, commenting freely on whatever took her fancy. Even the simplicity of her present turnout, an elegant and studied simplicity, was in odd contrast to this poor place; but she fitted in by virtue of her fundamental sensitiveness and sympathy, so that her most random comments did not jar. Even her loveliness would not have saved her if she had ever jarred.

She came presently to an end of her sight-seeing, and ensconced herself in a large old chair with a high back and great carved arms. It was Roger’s one good piece of furniture; he had brought it down from New England with him after one of his visits, in a distant hope that Mary might one day sit to him in it. She sat to him now, indeed, though not for him to paint her: her glowing hair was thrown out againBt the dark back, her hands grasped the arms, her knees were crossed as she lounged. Every line of her was perfect. Roger drew up a seat before her, and settled himself to enjoy.

He offered cigarettes; as she did not act to-night, she accepted one. His hands were near her face as he held a light for her; it may be that both of them remarked upon his steadiness as he lighted up himself. But she hardly seemed aware of his presence just then: she was watching the delicate smoke curve away toward the skylight, and she seemed to have no thought beyond it He was startled when she spoke from the depths of her reverie. “Who is that black man that little Desmond trails around these days?”

“ The one she had with her that day at your house ? ” “Yes. I think I have seen them together since.”

“He is a friend of hers from the west. I think she hasn’t known him long; but I really don’t know much about him.”

“ A little smitten, isn’t he ? ” suggested Mary.

“ I couldn’t say. I never heard him speak ten words.” “ Probably not, when you and little Desmond were there. How the child does love to listen to you! ”

“ She is my chief and perhaps my only disciple, Mary. It will be a sad day for me when she awakens,” said Roger quietly.

“ Awakens to what ? ”

“To the fact that she has nothing left to learn from me”

“She is curiously interesting, I find,” went on Mary. “Not the least of her attractions is that she doesn’t suspect she is interesting at all. Then she is very powerful, and very single-minded, and in some respects very young for her age. I am afraid that she will have more than one disagreeable~to awaken to”

“I am afraid so, too,” said Roger simply. “She is in an odd position where men are concerned.”

“You mean— ?”

“ What you probably mean by saying she is ‘ young for her age/ She is in a position of false invulnerability. Every man she has ever known, I suppose, has perceived her peculiar endowment, and has forthwith set to work to cultivate it. There is a lot of the schoolmaster in men, Mary, and it comes out not the least strongly when a woman is concerned.”

“ I have experienced that,” affirmed Mary.

“You? No man alive was ever an hour in your presence without wanting to make love to you, Mary.”

“ The girl wouldn’t be a bad one to make love to, Roger; and if I were you I wouldn’t be too sure that some one hasn’t tried.”

“ Perhaps a good many some ones have; but no one who could possibly count.”

“ Well, I hope the black man is a good sort,” said Mary. “She seems to be wasting a lot of time on him, and he certainly can’t teach her anything. He isn’t an artist, and he’s grossly ignorant, not only of anything he might teach her, but of anything she might conceivably teach him. What I can’t see, though, is why you yourself don’t cut in and capture her. She already adores you in her way; and she would make the sweetest sort of wife-person, Roger.”

“ A wife is all I need, of course,” said Roger dryly.

“ It would save renting two studios,” argued Mary, “ and look at all you two have in common.”

“Look at all we haven’t,” said Roger. “No, Mary Even if I wished to marry, I wouldn’t have her. I can get me a wife, I suppose, anywhere; but I can’t risk spoiling my chief disciple.”

“I almost believe that you’re in earnest, Roger,” said Mary. “ But the whole thing is so incredibly naive. In face of the fact that you are both young, and she is a pretty woman and you an attractive man — ”

“And she wasting her time on a black man, and I entertaining you to a cigarette when you will let me — ”

“ I’ll have a second, if you ask me,”fbaid Mary.

He lighted it for her without even remarking on her unusual indulgence. She had cooled him by her talk of Nancy. He didn’t like to have Nancy discussed; perhaps he especially disliked hearing her cpnnection with Max made a subject of conjecture. Yet Mary honestly believed that he wasn’t himself drawn toward the younger woman; now especially he could not be, as his thoughts were running in another direction. He kept a place apart, however, for his chief disciple; and this was a pree of sentiment of which Mary would hardly have Supposed him I capable. “ He must have had a lonely, time of it all these years, or he wouldn’t think/co much about a matter so trivial,” she said to hersfK. “Of course, he respects her; it’s a good thing there i$ some one to respect.” Roger left her and walked to thk opposite end of the studio. “Roger-—” said Mary sjfftly.

That soft full exquisite utterance of his name thrilled him, as she had meant it should; but he answered coolly over his shoulder, “Yes?”

“Are you going to offer me any lunch, Roger?”

He whirled about. “ After hurrying you through your breakfast, here I am letting you starve on my premises! Shall we go out, or have something brought in ? ”

“ Can we have something brought in ? I’m not dressed for restauranting, and I like it better here anyhow,”

His establishment did not boast a telephone; Roger went in person to order lunch. His withdrawal left Mary alone in the dusty place with its uncompromising white light. When he was there, the room seemed alive with him; but alone in it Mary shivered. Studiously simple as were some of her tastes, she liked to have everything Bmooth and fine about her. Roger’s senses were as delicate as hers, his ego as exacting; how did he manage to endure this perpetual dinginess?

Roger was young: that made the difference. Nancy Desmond was young, too. Waiting can be afforded only in the impatient season of youth; but even to the young it is not pleasant as it goes forward. Yet the richness of having everything still ahead is worth the impatience and the sickening doubt and the bitterness of hope deferred: Mary Allen, standing on the broad beautiful plateau where her own climb had brought her, envied Roger the strain and the bruises; and she envied Nancy something else.

Roger was not in the least in love with Nancy; Mary knew all too well what way his inclinations went. But when he cagfte to marry, she would make him a wife in a hundred. Wjhen he came to marry: that would be after he and Mary ^afilived through much that still lay ahead of them. He woilld marry, of course: Mary could fairly see the sweet little wife-person coming in here, and the dinginess departing. , And she suddenly loved the dinginess; for that was all Roger’s. She began to walk quietly about the room, noting the things she had not noted to Roger on her previous .excursion. There were all its shabby little devices for a kind of comfort; the sweet wife-person could improve on them all, but these were Roger’s, and the improvements wouldn’t be. There was the narrow bed with its denim cover and pillows; there was the wash-stand which was also a sink; and there were the writing-things on a corner of the great table where he ate his meals and kept his books and did his etching and engrav- ing on stone — at one time or another, Roger had an exper; uental finger in every possible artistic pie. Mary found a pencil, and wrote her name and the date on his engagement pad; he would find that when she was gone. And she looked up at the smutty-nosed cast of Homer, and suddenly buried her face in her hands.

Roger, returning accompanied by a waiter, found her seated with a portfolio in her lap; there was still an April look about her as she turned over his drawings. He was vexed at her making free with his drawings; but he loved her look when a storm had passed over her. He was tempted to provoke a crisis to-day; he felt that the hour was ripe. Yet if he let the day pass sweetly and sunnily, what a perfume and enchantment it would leave all about the place! If she didn’t come near it again for months, he would still see and feel her all about: the great chair would be Mary’s chair, the hundred little objects she had that day handled would fairly retain the impress of her fingers.

“I should like to hea» about some of these things, Roger,” she said without looking up. “ Some of them look as if they must have stories.”

Roger paused in his summary clearing of a corner of the great table. “A picture that requires a story to explain it is a very poor picture,” he informed her.

“ I knew you would say that,” she returned with a little smile. “But I mean something a little different. I am interested in what gave birth to these drawings: in you, to be sure, rather than in a strange art.”

Roger crimsoned. “ Suppose you eat your lunch now,”he said. “ I shall strangle you some day, Mary; but while my self-control holds out, I must remember my duties as host.”

She laid down the portfolio, and moved up to the table. “But I am interested in you, Roger,” she insisted. “I may be indiscreet in admitting it, but — ”

“ But you will never learn that there are some things which must be approached without a flippant jest,” said Roger. “I shall certainly strangle you.”

“Who is flippant now?” she asked.

“Not I,” said Roger stoutly. “That smooth warm throat of yours, Mary, and a firm grip about it, growing tighter and tighter—*”

She laughed, leaning with one elbow on the table. “ Well, lunch first,” she said. “ Oh, Roger! what a very nice lunch! ”

“ Do you like it ? ” he asked, showing his gratification.

The pains he had taken to suit her taste were worthy of some graciousness in return. Mary exerted herself to seem gay; and by a natural enough transition, she forthwith came to feel gay. An hour slipped by, and another; the waiter returned, and departed with their dishes. Still the talk flowed on, talk such as she loved, so evanescent as to leave no trace upon the memory, yet limpid, intimate, and even, where it had depths to sparkle over, clever enough. When she could forget the unhappy division that he created in her .being, no man pleased her as Roger did. It was proof of his worth, to be sure, that he could set her against herself; and his passionate energy, his worn good looks, his instinctive devotion to his own values and sublime disregard of everybody else’s, were all so many points in the attraction that drew her toward him.

He was, indeed, so much the masculine counterpart of herself that she must almost infallibly have loved or despised him; and she certainly did not despise him. But she hesitated about loving him. She had loved much in her time; indeed, she counted upon loving to supply her with the emotional flux that was, if the metaphor may be pardoned, the raw material of her art. It was half for this reason that she shrank from loving Roger: she would profit too immediately by the transaction. The other share of her reluctance was traceable to that difference in their ages which Max Meredith had tardily perceived.

It wasn’t that she had passed her prime, or needed to feel that she couldn’t keep Roger at her feet as long as / she chose to have him there. But when a woman began to love a boy, it struck Mary as the beginning of the end.

If Roger was not a boy in any accurate sense of the word, { she had only to recall the old life of the village to remember ! how much younger he was than she. Of course, the boy j Roger and the mature artist were actually two people in her mind; but when she needed to remind herself of i certain things, she found no readier way to do it than by resurrecting the memory of the village and the name by which the boy Roger had gone there. He was right in assuming that that name never appeared except in signal of her displeasure.

But to-day he had not been “ Tertius ” once; this had been one of those hours that stand blissfully unrelated to the past or the future, beautiful enough in their own right, and fleeting before one can weary of them. Already the brief afternoon was drawing along; and in the studio the light began to grow a little dim. Mary, enveloped in her coat for warmth, had returned to her great chair; j and Roger, as usual too restless to settle in one place, j came and went about the room, his approaches correspond- j ing roughly to the ebb and flow of the talk. ,

It ebbed, finally, away to nothing; and with it Roger | had retreated to the end of the room, somewhere behind Mary’s back. She lay relaxed in the chair, her eyes half-closed, little echoes of what they had just been saying pulsing through her in a rhythm which but added to the depth of her peace. She did not fear the silence; she did not fear anything, now.

Suddenly Roger came from behind, and stooped over her chair. She wondered what he was going to do, wondered it lazily, without caring to conjecture. She was conscious of every inch of him; she heard his breathing and felt his slightest movement, and magnified them in her receptivity. Yet she waited, quite at peace.

He stooped over her and took her hands; they lay quietly in his, but she did not look up. He kissed them both, back and palm and back; and she could feel his lips tremble upon them. Still she waited; she had never waited so.

Suddenly he dropped them, and backed away from her. “Not quite ready yet, Mary?” he asked.

A flood of anger came over her. He wasn’t satisfied with her dumb acceptance; he must have more and better, even if he postponed the taking. Yet his very postponement constituted an added claim upon her; and he knew it — he knew it.

She leaped up, aflame from head to foot; she laughed her rare discordant laugh. “It is about time we were moving on, isn’t it?” she said. “We have exhausted ourselves for the day; we shall shortly become banal.”

Her words fell with- their usual exquisite dearness; they fell upon ears which heard, and a mind which comprehended. “I feel that we shall,” said Roger; and instantly her own words departed from her meaning, and took on his.

It was apparent, though humiliating, that Mary had still something to learn in a field where not the least expert years of her life had been spent. She had still something to teach, however; and in her necessity she sprang clear of her early disagreeables, and dropped finally all her minor defenses. She spoke with a great sweetness, in which she mocked him; she looked full at him, and even in the half-light he could not fail to note the brilliance of her eyes.

“ But that doesn’t mean that you are to leave me,” she said. “ I trust you are not going to leave me yet, Roger ? ”

“ Not just yet,” he said.

But now it was her turn, and she made his words hers. “Let us find some other idlers, and get them to beguile our tedium,” she said. “ Let us have lights and wine and laughter, and forget how bored we are. If the laughter be that of fools, so much the better. The crackling of thorns is enough, when you know that there is nothing in the pot you so pretentiously set on to boil.”

“ I like your metaphor,” said Roger.

She seized her hat and gloves; she drew him with her to the street. And out in the open air, where it wasn’t even twilight, she thrust her hand inside his arm, looked at him thus at close range, and began to laugh again. “ You seem excited,” said Roger. She shrugged. “ And happy,” he added.

“ Indeed ? ” She would not trouble herself to deny it.

“ I love you most when you are like this,” he said softly.

“ ‘ Love/ ” she repeated with a curious accent.

“ Call it so,” amended Roger.

“ Call it so, if you think it puts you anywhere. They all call it so,” said Mary.

But she could not quarrel with him; and she could not help his postponing the issue. A moment before the other people on the pavement had been her allies; the light of day and the commonplaceness of Sunday afternoon had fought for her. But they fought to no purpose; the sea was rising about her, and she felt a deadly coldness at her heart.

She fell back on her philosophy, which was nothing more nor less than trust in the present. For the present he was checked, though not by her act; they were on their way to the oblivion of crowds, the laughter of fools, the taunting brightness of externalities. If it could only end to-night, so, now: she would end everything, only to have this stop in its course.

Yet nothing could stop it; and for all her wretchedness, she gloried in the inevitability of what faced her. She would have died to-night, only to stay its course; yet she would have died happily, because Bhe knew that in this one matter the first step involves all the others, and death itself is but a different fulfilment.

She felt herself borne along, toward the night’s recess and toward all that followed. The one man she had tried not to love, the only one she had been ashamed to love, and perhaps the love of her life: of what use was even the laughter of fools to her, now that she had taken that word into her heart?

She and Roger were walking uptown, as they had walked down; even now there was a sort of companionship in the common rhythm of their stride. Mary found more: she found a certain peace. Her fingers had dropped from his arm; but she looked sidewise at him, and found pleasure in the contemplation. He was looking straight ahead, his nostrils a little dilated, his cheeks flushed by the air and exercise. What a curious creature he was, compact of downright power and strange checks, outright actions and obscure reactions! He was meant for a conqueror, yet there was about him an habitual shyness, a shyness that was ready enough to veer off into boldness when he was once aroused.

She wondered if he enjoyed even interruptions from without, in the case now confronting them. Unless one enjoyed the torture as well as the triumph, love went very hard. She herself welcomed even the throes he caused her; but did he, in his sensitiveness and his obscurity, enjoy to the full a love which must bring with it not a little mortification? Mary shrewdly suspected that even now he would rather have been checked than have advanced with banners flying. It was a womanish way to feel, perhaps, but then Roger was not all conquering male; he had in him that streak of the woman which every artist must have.

She spoke at length, and was startled to hear herself spe^k; she planned a merry party, or what ought to prove a merry party, some imp of habit speaking from her lips. And Roger answered her, indeed, but he did not look at her. Had she conceivably hurt him? Or was he sure, so sure, and only waiting?

They turned into her own street; they drew near the commonplace pleasure of the evening, closing the intricate significance of the day. Mary hailed with relief the approach to her chosen ground. But if after all she had hurt him? If she were using him remorselessly for her own ends, and then refusing to subserve any end of his ?

It was an outrageous thought, for Mary was incapable of such a meanness. But under the sting of it she paused on her own doorstep, and sought peace with a touching candor. “Pm sorry, Roger,” she said, her lovely voice stumbling among its modulations, and all her effectiveness forgotten. “ If I’m sometimes not quite kind, I’m sorry.”

It was but another way of triumphing, to be sure; but Roger rightly felt that when she descended to simplicity she paid him a greater tribute than if she had come to him in her splendor. “It needed only your magnanimity,” he muttered. And cherishing the preciousness of the episode, but both a little ashamed of it, they welcomed the opening of the great front door upon the evening’s program of distraction.

CHAPTER VII

NANCY’S WINTER OF DISCONTENT

After that long daywhich they spent together, Max Meredith had always his interpretation of Nancy: an interpretation true or false, but at any rate illuminating to his judgment, and a guide to his own conduct. To his view she was a being substantive but incomplete, perfectly organized so far as she went, but blind to a whole department of human experience, and that not the least important department. He would have said that it was especially important to women, but here was this woman ignorant of it, yet the happiest he had ever known. Doubtless she had an awakening ahead of her; he could not imagine her growing old and at length dying in that curious self-sufficiency. But he dreaded that awakening; it might leave her a finer and a more complete character, but it vould once for all end the old Nancy. And that old Nancy, now that he had learned to understand her, he cherished.

To men as men she was blind, not from wilful spinster-hood, but from a lack of perception of their primary male-ness. Of sex as a great fact of nature she had some idea; even of its interesting irruptions in human society she knew something. She could, indeed, discuss in mixed company matters of which her grandmother would have blushed to think in the privacy of her chamber. But her knowledge had never come immediately home to her as a fact of experience; and on the three or four occasions when men happened to have fallen in love with her, she had hastily averted her eyes and mind from the spectacle of their abasement.

As to the men she knew at present, Roger was her adored master, Randy a pleasant if idle companion. Max himself she did not so accurately classify; since he had ceased to be Jo’s husband to her, she had thought of him as a friend, and that was all. She thought of him often that winter, for he stayed in New York and she continued to see much of him; but she thought in her usual fashion, in images rather than in words. She would have been surprised and not a little horrified to learn what it was that now gave the color to her mental life.

For the complexion of things was different that winter from what it had been. She dated the change from the completion of “The Dryad,” attributed it, when attribution seemed necessary, to the fact that she had now swung into her stride, and moved at length, not a promising beginner, but a mature artist. She lived these days in a perfect ecstasy of creation. Those curious nervous states which terminate in the production of an idea, or a germ, or an inspiration, as you choose to call it, followed one another in rapid succession; she alternated between the fury of achievement and the rapture of conception.

It was a state to which she had always looked as the ideal, though without supposing that it could ever actually come within her calm compass. Yet even its achievement left her at the mercy of chance and change. And change was bitterly present to her that winter in the defection of her friend Roger.

Defection was a harsher word than she ever applied to it; she tried to think of it less as change than as chance, and over and over she made excuses for him. Yet the glaring facts remained; and Nancy was not expert at explaining facts away. Roger used to oversee her work, dropping in now and again to give her the benefit of his advice and criticism; more than that, he used to come sometimes simply to sit with her after the day’s work was over, to exchange gossip and spin his eternal theories. Now his criticism had dwindled to a general approbation, which might be a sign that she had passed beyond the stage where she needed his checking over; but she wasn’t impeccable, and even in her present exaltation she missed the stimulus of his old sharp sayings. Of social calls he paid her only two after the Sunday when Max first met him; and on both occasions he stayed but a short time, and was constrained and unlike himself.

Even putting the most favorable interpretation on his behavior, even supposing that he considered her to have grown beyond him, Nancy was hurt. She hadn’t grown beyond him, she protested; and even if she ever did, she must still value and be unwilling to lose him. Her demand need never conflict with any other claim; what she asked was purely and simply her own.

But her own was denied her; and she was not without her share of natural hardness. She worked with an added industry, to show that she had deserved something other than a cut from Roger; and she welcomed another man at the twilight hour when Roger used to come for his tea. Max wasn’t Roger; but aside from that elementary defect he was a pleasant companion, and even had merits of his own. Moreover, he liked Nancy and was interested in her; and just now Nancy was grateful for a little interest and attention.

“ The Dryad,” to be sure, had made rather a stir when it was exhibited, and had not only sold to advantage itself, but had sold her “ triptych ” too. Nancy was not altogether indifferent to her own success; doubtless it fed the flame that now warmed her. The money it brought she thriftily put by; she had an income from invested money, and it was characteristic of her to live prudently within it. She did not underrate the practical benefits that come from succeeding; but the fact of success she scarcely appreciated. Roger had worked out the bearings of it pretty thoroughly — poor Roger, hungry from long denial; but Roger was no longer by her side to interpret for Nancy.

In a mysterious unrest, then, composed of elements both happy and distressing, but fused into an exaltation strange to her previous experience, Nancy’s hours were passed. Once she had worked with calm energy, rejoicing in the small triumphs that are the painter’s compensation, facing difficulties with interest, because they were to be worked out, and striving to learn from her failures. Now she worked with feverish energy, as if every day were to be her last. Her old sound sleep had left her; sometimes she lay wide awake for hours, sometimes she dreamed, and her dreams were deliriums of happiness, from which she woke unwillingly. And at the hour when she had been wont to sit quietly in the twilight, often by herself, she was seldom alone now, and often she was not in her own house at all.

Max Meredith had formed a habit of coming for her at that hour; and Nancy, who had perhaps been dressed and waiting for half an hour, would issue forth with him, and together they would take some endless stroll. Sometimes they stayed out for dinner; once or twice they even went to the theater together. But usually they walked sometimes with an object in view, but oftener for the sake of walking; or they rode on top of a bus, or on a ferry boat. They were so well acquainted now that they never tried to make conversation; and sometimes neither of them said a word for an hour at a time.

At other seasons they talked much; yet their conversation was as remarkable for what it omitted as for what it touched. Of the theme that lay closest to Nancy’s heart Max knew nothing, or at least felt that he knew nothing, and feared to bore her or excite her ridicule with dilettante banalities. On the other hand, there were sides of Max’s life to which they never referred. Nancy did not mention her old friend Jo with the freedom she had once used; and as for the project that had brought Max east, a matter of the utilization of water power, it usually remained undiscussed between them. He was assembling some of the backing which he had come in search of; but somehow it no longer seemed so important or so thrilling.

One afternoon in March they had come down to the Battery, intending to ride on the ferry and watch the lights come out in the tall buildings that made up the sky-line here. The spectacle of the water-front fading into shadow and then outlined in fire by the coming on of the lights never lost its charm for Nancy. Max liked it too, but less for the lights and shadows it showed him than for the way it carried his thoughts behind one window after another as they were successively illuminated, and then, when the lights in the tall buildings went out, scattered them to follow the dispersing people. It was a marvelous hour, this twilight hour of home-coming, and not the less marvelous to-day because the transient warmth of a very early spring day was succeeded by a raw chill that seemed to rise from the water.

They paused to-night in the Park. The sun had just set, and the sky before them was like a smoky opal, in which one star hung, very large and brilliant. “ I wonder what — Oh, there it is now!” said Nancy.

As she spoke, the old light in the hand of Liberty came on, and the lifted arm of the statue seemed to point upward at the star.

Max called Nancy's attention to it “How do you interpret that? ” he asked.

“ Why should I interpret it ? ” she wanted to know. “ I see it; isn't that enough?”

He turned and looked at her, humorously, genially, almost paternally. In such a look all their earlier relation flowered; but it was not a flower destined to a long or vigorous growth.

She stood with her chin lifted a little from her enshrouding furs, her eyes straight ahead, absorbing the scene: a figure fine in its reserve, perfect in its devotion to its own ends. A hundred times he had seen her so, the focus of all their surroundings; a hundred times he had been satisfied with the sight, and had looked away. This time it was as if a veil had been rent from before his eyes: only now did lie perceive the essential fact about her, and stand bewildered before his perception.

She felt his eyes finally, and turned to him with her little smile. “ Shall we go on board the ferry now? ” die asked.

“ Not to-night. Fve never seen this side of the bay before — to really see it,” said Max slowly. “I would rather carry the impression away with me, if you don’t mind.”

“Its exactly what you should do; I am proud that you know it,” she said.

They turned away together, and set out on the homeward journey. All the way Max was very quiet, very gentle with her; but he was often quiet, and Nancy respected his abstraction. He didn’t linger by the way, nor would he come in when they reached her door; and he left her without making an appointment for another meeting. He often did that, however; and the other meeting followed nevertheless as a matter of course. Nancy was not sorry when he left; the thrill of spring had carried her thoughts ahead, and she was projecting something of the summer’s work. With her usual “Good-night, Max,” she swung the door behind her; and Max was left alone on her doorstep, looking at the lights that were coming out behind windows all the way down the street.

He walked immediately back to his hotel, and sat down in the dusk in his lonely room. He wished to be alone, to make acquaintance with this strange thing that had come to him. A strange thing, yet what he had all his life more or less consciously been wishing for; and if it would not find the dwelling cleared and garnished against its arrival, at least it had not passed him by.

Nothing could come of it, of course; that fact alone was what made him free to give it welcome. Soon enough he would go away, and perhaps he might never look upon her face again. His renunciation was made for him; and if he dared not glance at the blank future, at any rate it was not incumbent upon him to do so. He and Nancy would go their several ways, and he alone would be wiser for the fact that he had loved her.

Late in the evening he turned on a light and began mechanically to open his letters. One of them was from his “backers” at home. At first he only gathered that they were pleased with his progress, and expected to learn more from personal conferences when he should return home. Then as he reread the letter it suddenly flashed upon him that they would expect him to return east again; and “ east ” no longer meant to him the land where one went for capital.

He went on out into the street. In a week, perhaps, he might leave here; but his absence would not be permanent, and even now his precious new possession was not inviolate. For the future suddenly pressed upon him, a future in which there was no hope; and this was a spring night, and spring in the city. In place of the burgeoning of inanimate nature, he had all about him the quickening of multitudes, people like himself, feeling it in their different ways, and even in passing reflecting some of it back to him. Now and then his eye was caught by a face in the crowd, a face happy or tragic, but filled with unrest; until presently it seemed to him that the whole teeming city walked with him, shared his secret, carried its own like mysteries. A wave of hot feeling swept over him, drowning his peace; its ebb left him desolate. The miracle of miracles had come to him. After the hot fits and rash experiments of youth, after marriage itself, and disillusion, and weary impatience, this had come to him. But he could no longer look it in the face.

He could get away in a week, perhaps; he would get away with his secret intact. Beyond that he dared not look.

CHAPTER VIII

PAYNIM’S PROGRESS’

All that winter Mary Allen had been in town; and Roger had seen more of her than ever before. He not only went to her house, but he took her about with him; indeed he preferred to take her about with him, and to have her company outside of her everlasting atmosphere of luxury. The late afternoon was peculiarly his and hers, the free time they both had between his day’s work and hers; so that his neglect of Nancy, who was also to be seen at this hour, came about very naturally.

He and Mary would walk together, and then go somewhere for tea; and then he would deliver her at the theater, and rush away to make up for lost time. He didn’t care to linger about the theater, even if she had cared to have him; he hadn’t yet absorbed that aspect of her. But there were seasons when he looked on their increased intimacy as a triumph, though a triumph not devoid of practical drawbacks. His dangling about after Mary not only took time and deprived him of other solaces: it was a great strain on his slender finances. Mary never would have thought of offering to pay for their teas, for example, and he wouldn’t have let her if she had; but exiguous as those meals were, they cost vastly more than Roger alone would have spent. Then there were flowers, chosen modestly and delivered effectively, but still flowers in winter time; and he needed new clothes, because shabbiness was out of place in her presence; and in such a matter as this, Roger hated to count the cost.

It was worth all it cost, though, in time or money or any other coin: worth it, that is, at times. There were other times when he augured the worst even from the absence of the old slights. Once he had at least managed to trouble her; now she had got him exactly where she wanted him, and would contrive to keep him there. And whenever he believed that, it was a dark hour for Roger. If this winter, with its sordid troubles and his sense of being held at bay in every direction, were the best life had to offer, then indeed life was nothing but a torment.

With the spring, too, she would leave him. She was already looking forward to her spring tour; she loved the “road,” unlike most actors, loved her provincial audiences, loved the change and even the inconvenience of travel. This year she doubtless looked forward to it as an avenue of escape; and such it surely was, unless he could make her his before she went. But how to make her his, in the crowded streets where they walked, or in the everlasting Park, or in her house, where the luxury oppressed him none the less because it was a luxury in such perfect taste?

He looked at her sometimes with a certain hostility; then he was amazed to find that now she had grown gracious, he himself had turned prickly. But at other hours his self-confidence would mount: he saw her then as a woman making her last stand, and admired her for making it, not only so bravely, but with such exceeding graciousness. Then he sent her little notes to greet her when she woke, or violets in lieu of a note; and he loved even the Park because she walked in it with him; and he loved the future better because, tantalize him as it might, it must bring her to him at last.

One evening they walked together as twilight deepened, in that very Park where they had made so many rounds. It was a chilly evening, but already there was in the air a hint of that Spring which Max Meredith had found so dizzying. They strode swiftly at first; then they strolled, and finally sat down on a bench to rest. The bench faced a walk and a thicket; they had often sat there before. They sat looking ahead of them, with half the length of the bench between; and it struck Roger suddenly that a year ago they wouldn’t have sat so. Mary was as a rule no stickler for the little insulating belt of air which is supposed in civilized society to surround the person and protect the personality. It was natural to her to take the hand of the person with whom she was speaking, to administer a pat when she'approved, and sometimes a miniature cuff when she did not; indeed an admirer had once said of her that she always went to extremes in talking with any one, and either kissed or cuffed.

Time had been when, if she didn’t either kiss or cuff Roger, at least she didn’t quite so pointedly stay away from him. Roger looked at that revealing length of bench, and suddenly knew that he had been a fool to doubt her. And just as he made that decision, Mary too looked around. With one accord they leaned across the space that divided them, and kissed; and the little song she had been humming, and had continued to hum, died then upon her lips.

Roger moved to put his arm about her; but she leaped to her feet. He had imprisoned both her hands, however; keeping them, and still seated, he looked up at her and laughed. Mary smiled, grew sober, then laughed outright, with her queer laugh that was always a surprise. “I didn’t mean to do that, Tertius,” she said.

“ Of course you did. You everlastingly meant it.”

“ Oh, very well! ” She shrugged amiably, and her hands relaxed in his, as if neither hand-clasp nor kiss were in the least important.

“ What’s a kiss between us ? ” Roger demanded.

“ Nothing. Nothing at all. Less than nothing,” she said airily.

“ What’s a kiss to the man you love ? ” he went on.

“ Love ? ” Again she laughed.

Roger’s laughter joined hers for a moment; but he did not release her hands. He held them tighter, indeed, and drew them close up against him; he spoke with sudden gravity. “

Marry me, Mary.”

“ Certainly not.” She snatched her hands away, and drew back a step. “ Certainly not.”

Roger got to his feet, bringing his face on a level with hers. “Why not?” he wanted to know.

“ Reason enough, I should think. The very idea is disgusting.”

He looked at her steadily in the dim light. “ Take me for your lover, then. Is that any less disgusting to you ? ”

Yes, but it's bad enough.” She forced herself to meet his eye, but inside her muff her hands gripped each other desperately.

Again Roger smiled. “At least, then, Mary, kiss me again as you did just now.”

“ You’ve spoiled that,” she 6aid.

“Mary,” he began, “it isn’t necessary for you to act as you do. ‘ Tertius,’ you say, and ‘ Tertius,’ you try to think; and everything that you would like to forget you keep reminding yourself of. It’s the village still clinging.”

“Very well,” said Mary. “But I’ll stop calling you Tertius, if that will convince you.”

“ Convince me of what? That you love me?”

“We won’t argue that point, or I may be late at the theater. That at any rate mustn’t happen, whatever else does. Come, Roger.”

With the width of the walk between them, they began to move homeward. Still they seemed to have the walk pretty much to themselves; and Mary turned to ask with a smile, “ Should you like me to love you between tea-time and a prompt arrival at the theater ? ”

“ No, I shouldn’t; but I could be satisfied with that until I got something better,” said Roger.

She held her muff up, to shield her face from the wind; their rapid steps took them every moment closer to the familiar round. Roger’s blood had been coursing royally; but at his perception that they were coming out soon, and no better off than they had been, he felt bleak. He had had enough of postponements; didn’t you ever get things, he wondered, while you still wanted them ? Mary wanted this thing too; but was life so long, or love so cheap, that she felt she could afford to wait? While she felt as she did, there was nothing more for him to do; and perhaps she would go on feeling so, or making herself believe that she felt so, until the lovely freshness of things was gone.

The dampness suddenly made Roger shiver. He was tired, and he had nothing more to hope from to-day; and Roger liked to hope things from the day, even though he was so very regularly disappointed.

A few yards from the Park entrance Mary unexpectedly halted, and turned to him. Roger too halted, wondering what she could have to say; he hadn’t expected her to say anything more. She came close up to him, and he felt her hand on his coat-lapel. Then he heard her voice, but it wasn’t like the voice of Mary Allen; it was low and tremulous, and sounded as if she had been crying. “Roger,” she said, “Roger darling—*”

He put his arm around her, but not closely: simply to steady her. “ Roger,” she said, “ some day I shall come to you, dear. I shall come quite softly and easily, when I do come, but I have to fight it off as long as I can.”

He touched his lips to the gloved hand on his lapel. “To lessen the regret?” he whispered.

“The shame, dear. The beastly shame,” she said.

He saw that, too; and with the seeing her love but seemed the richer to him. “ I can wait, Mary,” he said. “ You won’t let it be too long.” He let her go very quietly.

They met again the next day, apparently on the old footing. But something was between them now that had not been before: their love was acknowledged, even if it was not fulfilled.

In March she took her play on tour; and for a time their daily meetings ceased.

But the day after she left, Roger got a letter from her; and the next day another. Then he knew that a custom had been established, and that he should have one every day thereafter; and so the event proved. Beceiving his letter came to be the great event of his day; and if he did not like answering quite so well, answering being more or less of a duty, still even his own scratchings brought Mary nearer for the moment.

Mary wrote in hotels and restaurants and sleeping-cars, as she had time or as things occurred to her. She almost never finished a letter at a sitting: she would carry it about with her, and add a bit here, a bit there, and finally dispatch it, on the last mail that could reach him in time; thereupon she would begin another letter. Her letters were often long, and for a third person their interest would not have excused their length. But Roger loved every word of them: read and reread them, noted all that they said and all that they didn’t say, and carried one or two of the latest always about with him, to keep them warm, or perhaps to keep him warm. Dear little letters, that had lain beneath her pillow o’ nights, that were warm and sweet with her own warmth and sweetness — how could he help loving them?

They were love-letters in the truest sense of the word; yet there was never any mention of love in them, and there were no endearments. They began simply “ Dear Roger,” and they concluded formally, when they concluded at all; it not infrequently happened that she packed them off to him without ever bringing them to any conclusion. But they dealt always with him and with her, which is the proper business of a love-letter; and they asked him all about himself, and told him the minutiae in which a lover must fain be interested, but which concern no one else. Beading those hints of her days, Roger could fairly see her.

“ When I am happy,” she would write, “ yon seem near me. When I am not, I remember that you are actually very far away. Just now I am sitting in the sunshine, with a big bowl of roses on the table before me; and you seem so near that I could almost put out my hand and touch you.”

Again she wrote, “ It is raining to-day; and from where I lie I can see only gray behind the window-panes. I wonder if it is raining where you are. Somehow it doesn’t seem as if it could be gray there.

“ I am going to lie here now and read your last letter over until I feel warm and warmer. I love your letters, Roger. They might not tell much to any one else — such scraps of letters as they are; but I manage to get a good deal from them. This last was better than usual; and I’m going to read it until I’m saturated with it. Perhaps I shall go to sleep with it in my hand, and not waken until they call me to go to the theater. I hope I shall, Roger; I hope I shall.”

Or again, “My audience was magnificent to-night, Roger. I wonder whether those hundreds beyond the footlights ever realize what they mean to us: how it’s in them, so to speak, that we live.

“I gave a very good performance, and I’m tired in proportion; but as yet (half-past one) I’m too excited to sleep. I shall sleep presently, though; for just now I’m sitting here by the window, and looking down at the roofs outside, and thinking of all the people placidly slumbering under them. Bows and rows of people, ranks and regiments of them, all at this hour lost in unconsciousness. This is such a sleepy world, Roger, when you come right down to it; I sometimes wonder that we don’t all succumb to inertia in the beginning.”

Or again, “ There’s a feeling of spring in the air to-day, and I’ve come out to keep the spring-time company. I’ve walked miles into the country; but it’s cold out there, and I’m not so sure that spring is indicated after all. Well,

I may have come out to find spring, and not found it; but I surely found Mary Allen waiting for me out here. She said, ‘ Hello, Mary,” and ‘ Wake up, Mary,,” and ‘ Fling out your banners to the world, Mary.’ And I said, ‘ I’m awake, thank’ee; I’m awake.’

And whether spring has come or not, I believe in spring. I believe in spring — and may I never stop believing 1 ”

She never would stop, for hers was a spring-time spirit. Roger himself had always been accustomed to feel spring as a time when his physical powers were at their lowest; but now he was carried along by the spring-time of her spirit. He toiled desperately to get abreast of his obligations ; yet it seemed to him that in these days his life was at the flood.

In the heat of his toil, and perhaps also in the interest of his love affair, months had passed without his going near Nancy Desmond. But at an important spring exhibition, where a canvas of Roger’s own hung drearily unnoticed, and certain to come back to him in the end, a small picture of Nancy’s received a silver medal. It was a Titian-haired nude, the flesh painted with such exquisite tonality that it almost seemed to be painted on glass.

“ That’s a beautiful little thing,” said Roger to himself. “ Most of these others stand rebuked before such a piece of workmanship. I wonder though why she didn’t manage to have something a little more striking for this exhibition. It isn’t necessary, to be sure; she sold her ‘ Dryad ’ anyhow. I wonder if I can still see the ‘ Dryad’I have a mind to look for it.”

At the gallery of the dealer with whom Nancy sometimes did business, he found the “ Dryad” still present, with the “ Sold ” mark on her frame. “ It is your last chance to see that picture, Mr. Greene,” remarked a friendly clerk. “ It is going away to-morrow.”

So Roger took his last look; and he made it very long. He had passed beyond admiring the workmanship of the picture, and developed a personal affection for it. The creature was almost a woman; yet not only were the browns and greens of the tree an echo of her own tints, and its lines the prolongation of hers: she was actually not quite a woman after all, but the spirit of a tree. Aiter all the nymphs that weren't nymphs, but simply artists’ models, here was a veritable dryad; and he couldn’t help being astonished that it was Nancy who had painted it. Of course, she had been feeling her way for years toward this perfection; yet Roger was astonished to see how completely she had landed. He hadn’t expected quite that much of her; or else he hadn’t expected it quite so soon. The nerve of her, to go and land the moment he took his eye off her!

He gloried in her achievement, gloried in it undoubtedly more than she herself did; but he felt cheated because he hadn’t seen more of her in the process of achieving. Of course, that was his own fault; but however strong his other ties were just now, he was an idiot to have robbed himself of this delight. As if a man had so much in his life that he could afford to let such a thing go!

He wished to see her anyhow; he felt a vague uneasiness about some of her concerns. Nothing would happen that could damage her permanently; but he would be more comfortable if he knew just what was likely to happen. Now was as good a time as any for seeing her, and better than most; indeed, she ought to be feeling expansive just now, and ready to forgive him for his winter’s delinquency.

When he managed to leave the “ Dryad,” therefore, Roger took a bus downtown; and once started, he became conscious of a vast eagerness to see Nancy. There was no one else who could give him just what Nancy could: he had realized that abundantly on his last visit, when she seemed a little to withhold it. She might withhold again; yet even withholding, she was Nancy and no one else, Nancy, powerful, serene and cool, bearing always about her the delicate abstraction of great things going forward.

In his anxiety to get to her, Roger fairly pushed the bus downtown; and he walked along her street with mighty strides, fuming because in spite of his eagerness she might not be at home. For all that he knew to the contrary, she might even have gone out of town, wooed by spring-time in the country, or even seeking a few days’ rest.

Her windows, however, glowed faintly in the gathering dusk; and when he reached her inner door the familiar voice bade him “ Come.” Roger flung open the door, and stood once more on her threshold; and there she was, to be sure, in her usual chair near the fireplace, with a couple of sticks burning in the grate for company.

She looked up at him standing there, and jumped to her feet with an exclamation. “ Roger! Why, Roger! ” She put out one hand to him, and the other on her chair-back, as if to steady herself; and although he couldn’t be sure in the dim light, it seemed to him that her face had gone suddenly white.

There was no reason why she should be overcome at the sight of him; puzzled and observant, Roger took her hand and guided her back into her chair. “ Surprised to see a stranger, Nancy ? ” he asked. “ Were you expecting some one else?”

“ Oh, no! No, I wasn’t expecting any one at all. You startled me by — by materializing,” she explained.

“ Not any one at all, Nancy? Surely your friends have been flocking about you like homing doves lately?”

“ On account of the pictures, you mean? There have been a lot of people here lately, a lot of people, it seems to me.”

“ They’ve worn you out, have they ? ” he suggested. “ I’m soriy to be the last, Nancy; yet perhaps I’m not sorry, either, if it gives me the chance to have you to mvself for half an hour.”

“ It does, I’m sure. There won’t be any one else,” she said. Yet her eyes turned with curious persistency to the door through which he had entered.

“That's good. And shall you give me some tea?”

“Don't I always? Light the candle before you sit down, Roger. Open a window, if you feel that the fire is too warm.”

“ There is a window open,” objected Roger.

“So there is; I hadn't noticed,” she said.

The light of her little fire, and of her tall candle, was sufficient to show him that she was very tired, and shiveringly nervous: otherwise quite as usual, dressed becom-ingly, and coiffed with precision. “ Well, I've seen them,”said Roger. “ I saw your exhibition picture, and then I went and saw the ‘ Dryad.’ ”

“Meaning that you didn't like the exhibition picture? ”

“ Meaning that I love the ‘Dryad,’ and always shall. A picture to wait for, that is.”

“Ah,” said Nancy, “but you should see the one I am doing now!”

That was like her, exactly like her: with her, work once finished and out of hand was in a manner dead, and her interest turned to the next work. Roger eagerly seized the old note. “ I am going to see the one you are doing now in all its stages,” he declared. “You in a manner sprang the‘ Dryad’ on me; you shan't spring another.”

“You have been very busy all the winter?” she asked, not reproachfully, but as a simple question of fact.

“ I've been driven to death. But that doesn't excuse me; nor can it console you. You must have missed my characteristic comment.”

“Of course I have,” she said simply. “You must let me have some of it, some time when the light is better.”

“ I shall,” he said heartily. “ But in the meantime, let me have a look by the light of your single bulb.”

“ You'll get such a wretched impression,” she demurred.

“That was my first impression of the ‘Dryad,’ ” he insisted.

“Well, tea first,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry, Roger ? ”

She rose to put the kettle over, and began by turning on not only her shaded lamp, but an overhead light that Roger had never before seen lighted. The clear light confirmed Roger’s first impression: she was trying hard to be herself, but there was something the matter with her. She not only looked fatigued; she had grown thin during the last few months, and without actually fading she had lost much of the look of youth. Roger had always been amused by that incongruous look of hers; but he didn’t like to see her lose it. It seemed to him as if something ugly were encroaching here, where ugly things had no business.

As she passed him on an errand to the kitchen, Roger stopped her, putting out his hand to take hers. “Come here a minute, Nancy,” he said. “Whatever have you been doing to yourself?”

The concern in his voice brought an unexpected response from Nancy. Her eyes filled with tears — those steady blue eyes that he couldn’t have imagined weeping for anything under the heavens — and she turned away to hide them. As ashamed as a school-boy to be caught weeping, she hastened to explain, “I’ve been working hard, that’s all. I’m more or less done up.”

“ I’m not surprised if you’re done up,” said Roger cheerfully. “ You have a right to be. You might be hysterical, if you liked, after such a winter’s work. But let me see what you’re doing yourself up about now. Come! We have plenty of time before the kettle boils.”

She couldn’t resist his eagerness; she never could, for that matter, but it was doubly grateful to her now. She turned down the flame under the kettle, and led him upstairs. “Shall we take things in order?” she asked as they clambered.

“Strictly in order.”

She fumbled for the light, and turned it on. Her studio was bare as of old, and everything was in its accustomed order. “ Here,” she said, producing two small canvases from one of the cupboards, “ is something I did from the same model as my exhibition picture. There,” indicating the easel, “is what I am at work on now. And here are two or three sketches that may help to explain it.”

Roger looked at the small Titian-haired nudes, and then walked over to the easel, with the sketches at his hand. Nancy stood at his elbow, and began to elucidate. “ You see, this is a hill-top, and the children have come up here to fly their kites. There are three children, and I use them in profile or back, in the left foreground — here, you see. Then at the right I have this girl who is the principal figure, a girl about eighteen, fair-haired and slender; I want to make her look as if she could almost fly herself. She stands there with the wind blowing her garments and her face uplifted, you see: and just above her head the kites are beginning to float off. The kites are prismatic, and of course translucent: they give the color note.”

Roger examined the canvas, and referred to the sketches* “Are these all the studies you've made?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You're beginning to trust yourself, aren't you?” he suggested. “Those years of extreme painstaking were a wonderful thing, though. You have built yourself a beautiful technique, full and firm and elastic. And there is no use arguing, Nancy, a sufficient technique lies at the base of everything.”

“Yes. At the base of everything,” echoed Nancy.

Again Roger fell to the study of what was before him; and she stood quietly by, and waited for him to finish. When he did at length look up, it was to say, “ You know, Nancy, I like your work more than I can tell you. I won't try to tell. Prom now on, other people will be telling you how good you are.”

“Then won't you please,” said Nancy, “find a little fault with it? ”

“Would that be more like old times?” he asked. She nodded. “ Very well, then. I want to know how you're going to stand in your studio and get that background of sky. The kites trail across it, to be sure; but do you realize how important the sky is going to be in your picture?”

“But Fm not going to stand in my studio and try to paint sky. I shall go out after the sky, and bring it back with me.”

“And then — ” he went on. “Come on downstairs while we finish our discussion — we don’t want the kettle to boil over — and then — ”

He talked cheerfully on while they had their tea: it was something new for him to be consciously cheerful with her. Sometimes he sought inspiration by surreptitiously feeling in his pocket for Mary’s latest letter: the very shape of the envelope between his fingers made him feel warm and happy and full of life.

Under the influence of his talk, and of tea and food and tobacco, Nancy did indeed revive; but there was a curious feverishness about her now. She seemed to be perpetually forcing the note. Roger hesitated as to whether he would better ignore her state, or have it out with her. He felt a certain responsibility for Nancy: if he didn’t look out for her, there was no one who would. The odd thing was that she should need looking out for.

Helping himself to a fresh cigarette, he remarked, “

You seem to be worse than overworked, Nancy. What has it been, all work and no play ? ”

“No, indeed. I played more than usual this winter,” replied Nancy.

“ Too much play, perhaps?” he suggested. “ Have you been burning. candle at both ends ? ”

“There is a temptation to do that.”

“ There used not to be; I remember very distinctly how you once saved yourself for your work. Have you had too agreeable a playmate?”

“ I’ve played a good deal with Max Meredith this winter,” she told him. “I don’t know whether you would call him agreeable or not.”

“He never says enough to be disagreeable, certainly,”said Roger. “What has become of him now?”

“ He has gone home.”

“ He lives in the west ? ”

“Yes. Haven't I ever told yon anything about him, Roger? There isn't much to tell. He lives in the west, never waxes eloquent about anything except mountains, and has very naive ideas about painting. He married a college friend of mine, Jo Sumner.”

“ He told me he was married; I shouldn't have guessed it,” said Roger dryly.

She looked hard at him, to see what he meant by that; but Roger went on more lightly. “The next time he comes, see that he doesn't wear you out. You have your next day's work to think of, you know; and you really need some sleep.”

“ I don't believe he will ever come back,” said Nancy. “His business here wasn't successful.”

Roger hoped that he never would; then, feeling the talismanic letter in his pocket, he reproached himself for wishing to hedge Nancy in while he himself roamed the world over. After all, she would be none the worse for whatever happened to her.

“ You look as if you had been getting some sleep,” she remarked. “ I don't know that I ever saw you look so fit before.”

He was getting on superbly, better than he could tell her; he took refuge in the one-sidedness of their relation. “ I am getting on well; but it's you who are everlastingly forging ahead. And that's a hard thing for an oldster like me to realize.”

“Your realizing it is what makes me,” she said stoutly. “ And if I am forging ahead, Roger, I intend to keep on doing so; I can't imagine living in any other way. Don't think that because I'm tired now I have permanently slackened. A few days' rest and change is all I need to set me on my feet.”

He couldn't quite believe that last; but he did believe that somehow she would get on her feet again. Meanwhile, she hadn't altered with regard to him; and Roger perceived that with thankfulness. No matter what his other triumphs might be, he couldn't get on without Nancy.

“A few weeks' rest would he more like it,” he said. “ But if you feel a surge of ideas, or a strong impulse to be at things, don't hold back. The surge will wear itself out, and you can rest then. And after all, why do we have bodies except to wear them out?”

His touch of inhumanity was a tonic to her: the adjuration to get to work, the assumption that the work mattered and she herself didn't, was what Roger had been bringing Nancy up on for years. She grasped as eagerly as he at the fact that in a shifting world their relation at least was unchanged; and she also availed herself of the excuse he thus provided. “ A surge of ideas, Roger — that is just what I have,” she said. “In all my life before I never had so many; I am simply flooded with them. I don't promise that I'll ever execute any large proportion of them; I shan't be able to if the surge continues. But do you want to hear about them, such as they are ? ”

Roger did; and he not only listened to her ideas, but he proceeded to argue with her about them. This was the best thing he could do for her, as well as the most congenial for him: it took Nancy back to the things that she could rely upon, the fundamentals which were always, to her, like the good Christian's everlasting arms. And as she warmed to the discussion, Nancy gave Roger what other people might give in less degree, but she only in its full perfection. For the perfect disciple not only reflects but also reenforces the teachings of the master.

He stayed past the dinner hour; they ate another sandwich, and he stayed hour after hour, until midnight struck. And if the impatient Roger sat so long in one place, it was simply because he wanted to stay.

He left her finally, not as he left Mary Allen, tingling with vitality, hot with ideas and conceptions, rejuvenated with an energy not his own; but rather with a sense of new horizons opened out to him, faint horizons, like those of an early dawn, yet full somehow of promise and appeal.

Those wide cool horizons could mean much to a nature like Soger's, saving him from suffocation on the one hand, and from his own restlessness on the other. Decidedly, he couldn't spare Nancy. If she must some day go her way, as he was already going his, at least that day wasn't yet. It was Max's first virtue in Soger's eyes that he was married: that would settle things for a nature like Nancy's. In passing, though, he remarked the oddity of Nancy’s telling him so late that Max was married; it was significant, perhaps, that she was no longer able to ignore that fact.

She was suffering, it was evident; and she had more suffering ahead, from which neither Roger nor any one else could save her. In a sense Roger didn't wish to save her: she would be all the better artist for losing her touch of the cloister. Yet something weakly human in Roger continued to feel for Nancy.

With only that little cloud upon the wide horizon, he reached his own studio and turned on the light; and suddenly he was plunged into a depth of despondency. After the order and freshness that always seemed to surround Nancy, he was struck by the gloom, the disorder, the actual dirt, of his own quarters. He had once thought her prim in her arrangements; but either he had got to an age when he liked primness, or she wasn't prim after all, only in little things as in great, instinctively wiser and saner than he.

The lateness of the hour perhaps added to the grimness of Roger's habitation; and there was a ghastly chill in the air. He supposed he wouldn't have any more steam furnished him until some time the next fall; for a brief moment he thought wrathfully of moving. But this was as cheap a place as any he could get, and they were patient with him here when he happened to get a little behind in his rent. He was behind now. So even if he could have brought himself to face the complicated trouble of moving, he wouldn't move. It was better to stay and make the best of things: but at times one fairly forgot that there was any best to be made.

Yet this very garret was sometimes an enchanted place, fuller of dreams even than of cobwebs. And lately it had been full of a new magic. Here was the very chair in which Mary Allen had sat that Sunday afternoon, with her hair gleaming and her white neck outlined against its high rich back. Here at the end of the cluttered table he habitually sat to write to her; and he had her talis-manic letters, and a wonderful new photograph of her in character.” But neither dreams nor letters nor pictured eyes availed him now: he was cold and tired, and prey to a wretched sense of disillusion.

He went to bed because it was too cold to stay up. His teeth chattered as he clambered between the icy sheets; every inch of the dank surface that touched him gave Roger a fresh shudder. Yet even this was better than the hot nights which a few months would bring, nights when he should toss until the sickly dawn, and be always reaching out for a cool spot which he never found.

He lay open-eyed, stretched at his length, or as nearly at his length as the proportions of his cot allowed. This was the time consecrated to thoughts of Mary; hadn’t he often written her, “ The last thing at night, and the first thing in the morning— ” ? Or if he hadn’t written it, wouldn’t he some time ? Of course he would; it was part of the lover’s rigmarole, and it was true enough in Soger’s case.

He thought of Mary now, but the thought brought him no pleasure. And he had to force himself back to that bright image, for another kept coming to supplant it: Nancy looking with dull eyes from a thinning face, Nancy going on in mere doggedness, instead of with the old steady forthright interest, Nancy, finally, drawn away from him, wasting her time and breaking her heart. That wouldn’t hurt her, he maintained steadily; but he hated to have it break under his eyes. And if he deserted her now, she ought to hate him; he had a horrible feeling that he should desert her, if only to avoid the spectacle of her suffering; and he hoped that if he did she would hate him.

He turned and turned, trying to get away from the disturbing vision, trying to sleep; and he kept encountering fresh stretches of cold, and getting ever more widely awake. Another winter he would sleep between blankets: that would count as a blow to his self-respect, but his self-respect was always getting blows, small or great, yet somehow managing to survive. Meanwhile he might get up and read; but it was late now, and he had a full day ahead, and in a few minutes —

Suddenly out of his discomfort something seemed to body itself forth in the darkness, visible by its own light. It was Nancy's beautiful “ Dryad ''; and thanks to his long study, it returned to him with wonderful clearness. The sun-flecked dusky gold of the creature's body melted into the sun-flecked golden brown of the tree-trunk, just as it had on the canvas; he remembered even the greenish cast which Nancy had dared to give to the creature's bronze-brown hair. He saw every bit of brush-work; now, even as when he stood actually before it, he was struck by the audacity of the thing, its astounding workmanship, its beautiful final simplicity.

Presently, though, he lost the brush-work, and the canvas as well: the Dryad and the tree from which she half-emerged came before him in a medium of their own. Roger watched the flecks of sunlight move up and down her limbs, her lovely bronzed limbs, slender, strong, instinct with life and wildness. Lovely and warm and wild, shy and soft and ecstatic, she stood before him in her tree, and sun-flecks played over her body. And they came down, down, down to him, until they played over his own body too. Now at last he was warm; now he was once more akin to all beauty, and to all wildness, and to all life.

He closed his eyes; the Dryad was still before them, but she merged more and more into her tree. As she went, though, she drew him with her; and when he left the sun, he felt the tree close about him, and knew that he was safe. Safe and warm, with softness all about him: who would have supposed that the heart of a tree could be so soft ? But of course this was a dryad’s tree, and a dryad could make even the heart of a tree a grateful nook. So to be sure could some women. Women with hair of gold, women with hearts of gold, women you didn’t love, because even love 'wasn’t necessary with them, women whose hearts were all kindness and truth. Women with hair of gold, dryad safe in the soft heart of a tree, beauty always before a man’s eyes, kindness for him to feed himself upon —

Roger relaxed into his sheets, and slept.

CHAPTER IX

SUMMER

Max had actually left her with some abruptness, softened later by a letter written while he was on his way home, and another after his arrival. Haney answered them both at once, and sent her letter to his office, though she could scarcely have told why she did so. Max forced him- | self to wait a decent length of time before he answered; then he carefully edited all feeling, and as it seemed to ! him all sense, out of his reply. Nancy read it with some ! disappointment, and waited some time before she replied. I But when he had about given her up she did reply; and their letters continued at infrequent intervals all summer.

Max had no way of knowing that there was a change in her. Nancy didn't know it herself: she simply felt desolate and ill at ease. She wrote to Max that she was having a pleasant summer; and for the life of her she couldn't see why it wasn't a pleasant summer. She worked hard at “ Kite-flying ”; and often her studies, made as the picture progressed, took her into the open air, and kept her attention on the vault of the sky and the shifting and massing of clouds. Those were good days; and hours when she was absorbed in the intricacy and fineness of the work upon the picture itself were good hours.

But outside of working hours, and especially at the twilight time which had once been to her such a pleasant season of repose and the sense of accomplishment, her world seemed suddenly to collapse. She took to going out at twilight, and returning only at bed-time, to dining very slowly, and walking a great deal, and even to visiting people whom she had often promised to visit, without ever finding a time which seemed clear enough to do it in.

She didn't know what was the matter with her; but she had sufficient inkling so that she didn’t try to find out too definitely. Her desolation, thus turned back upon itself, came to affect her attitude toward her work. She was reaching a point of accomplishment which a few years before she would have deemed beyond her power; now she began to ask, what did her accomplishment matter? Her pictures might be good, might be significant — suppose some day they should even be great: after all the effort, the flux of sensation, the withstanding of heartbreaking disappointment, what earthly difference did the final achievement make to anybody?

That very question, “What is the use?” is the only one which it is forever forbidden to the artist to ask. To Nancy so asking had come Roger Greene Third, who had been her initiator into the artistic life; and it chanced that he found her at her lowest. Nancy made no attempt to conceal her state from him. In her weariness and loneliness she actually welcomed his knowing: she wouldn’t have resented his going deeper than she herself dared to go. His tacit sympathy, at once so understanding and so sharp, was precious to her; indeed Roger’s lack of tenderness in his relations with her may have been one of the things that recommended him in the first place to Nancy’s own cool nature.

As a matter of fact, Roger didn’t go very deep into the question of what was troubling her, less from delicacy than because he found the prospect of such delving unexpectedly distasteful. He did better, however: he carried her splendidly back into the region of the values they both knew and loved. After he had left her that first night, Nancy fell asleep happily and at once, although she had had no dinner, and had smoked more than was good for her. She woke thinking about a new trick of brush-work of which Roger had spoken; and she plunged into the day’s work with excited zeal. She had, at least for the moment, got her bearings again. Let her take her troubles standing, and ignore her weariness, which it wasn’t mannerly to mention anyhow.

Of course she couldn't remain permanently at the high point of that morning; and of course the reaction from that and subsequent high points was into a more distressing desolation. But Roger was standing loyally by her. For a month after Max left, he visited her twice a week or so, just as he had once been used to do. After that he came less often, but still with some regularity.

Nancy, who did not know how the currents of his being were now setting in one certain direction, could not realize the tribute that these visits implied. Roger, who detested permanence in most things, was even guilty of wishing that he might keep coming to Nancy all of his days. Yet it was not because of Nancy that he went about in the late spring with greater buoyancy than usual.

Nancy knew, indeed, that Mary Allen had returned to town in May. Roger made no secret of his seeing her, though he never lugged her name into the conversation. Nancy rather liked to talk of her, finding the older woman fascinating. She supposed that Roger found her fascinating too; and Mary was an old friend, and might, Nancy supposed, some day be useful to him. Nancy was not jealous by nature, except occasionally of other painters; and she was certainly not suspicious, even if she had not been fighting her own phantoms too steadily of late to have time for the phantoms of her friends.

Mary's return was for a short season of Shakespearean repertoire, which she had finished rehearsing on tour. It was a pet scheme of hers, but one which Roger distrusted. “Will your public like it?” he had written to her when the subject was first broached to him—which was not, he noted, until the date for the opening had been definitely set.

“They may not like it; but I'm sure they will be very good about enduring it. Anyhow, I mean to find out,”Mary had replied.

There was no question about it: Mary understood her public. They not only endured her Shakespeare: they kept her playing it until hot weather shut down on all serious endeavor. Whether she understood Shakespeare was another question. She attacked him zealously, every inch of her going into the endeavor. Every performance was made to center sharply about the character Mary played, even when the immortal text suffered severely; and in every case that center was a swirl of color, lyric, rhapsodic, impassioned, individual.

Roger Qreene gloried in all this strength and color; how should he not, when this work of the greatest of poets was simply a new medium in which he could love her? But to the exact and technical-minded Nancy, judging another’s art by the standards of her own, these were somewhat bewildering exhibitions.

The two of them discussed the matter, after Nancy with characteristic thoroughness had seen all three of the plays which composed the repertoire. Roger admitted that in Mary’s portrayal all three heroines were cousins, and each cousin simply Mary herself. “But what is the harm in that?” he demanded.

“ It isn’t Shakespeare, and it’s scarcely impersonation,” returned Nancy.

“ But it’s a very beautiful spectacle; you admitted that yourself just now. Isn’t beauty to your mind excuse for lack of authoritativeness? You are an artist yourself, not a scholar.”

“ Beauty is its own excuse, of course,” said Nancy. “ I felt that strongly when I saw Miss Allen in that play last winter, Roger. I saw it more than once, though with another actress in the chief part I should have been more than bored. She made a very artificial part instinct with life. But this is a different matter.”

“ Shakespeare is a sacred cow ? ”

“I hope not. But acting is an art of interpretation. Here she hasn’t interpreted. Instead she has made even the resources of her art, which I don’t in the least undervalue, subservient to her personality.”

“In other words, her greatest achievement is herself?” “ Perhaps it comes to that”

“ But wouldn’t you and I be glad, Nancy, if we could say the same thing about ourselves?”

“ No, I don’t think we ever should. But of course in our business we don’t appear in person; perhaps it’s rather that than our modesty which saves us.”

“ But shouldn’t even the classics be approached with an open mind?” suggested Roger. “To treat them as you would treat anything else is at least to keep them alive; but simply to venerate them is to relegate them at once to the museum.”

“But the classics aren’t the same as modem work, if for no other reason than that they have accumulated about them a body of tradition.”

“ A numbing body of tradition,” insisted Roger.

They would talk on thus hour after hour. Roger no longer supervised her work as he once had; and he saw that even in talking with him she was growing up, was learning to defend her own opinion when it happened to conflict with his. Yet he still gained the old satisfaction from their meetings. That alone would perhaps not have led him to continue them under present conditions; but he felt that she too was the gainer by their intercourse. She was not only glad to talk with him; she was coming week by week to seem more like herself, although she was physically very tired.

She finished her picture in August, in a great burst of work; it was then that her letters to Max ceased. Afterward she went into the country to rest for a few weeks; and she did not write to him again. She had written in the first place, perhaps, less because she herself was lonely than because she guessed that he was, and her hard work, the steady influence of her meetings with Roger, and finally change of scene and occupation, did much to efface him from her mind. His was still a blind unconscious factor in her life; if he had gone from her permanently just at that period, Nancy’s story would have been different.

When she returned home from her vacation, she found his letter announcing that he was returning to New York in a few days. But summer was over then; and during that summer much water had flowed under the bridge for certain of Nancy's friends.

CHAPTER X

SUMMER LIGHTNING

Although Mary Allen and Nancy appealed to different and in some respects opposed elements in him, Roger Greene never for a moment regarded himself as the scholastic donkey nicely balanced between two stacks of hay. He needed them on different sides, and they needed him; and so long as he gave each what she required, each was none of the other’s business.

Mary knew more about his dealings with Nancy than Nancy did about his dealings with Mary; but Mary, having drawn decidedly back from the distant future, declined to be jealous. She saw Nancy as an interesting painter who had bloomed under Roger’s hand; she commiserated his pupil, and hoped that he found some of the unpleasantness of his life justified by that blooming. And Mary made every allowance for Roger’s native enthusiasm. His was a nature that saw everything black or white: for him intervening shades had no existence. If a thing were good, he felt it to be great; if it weren’t good — and Roger was fastidious in his selection — it was trash of the worst description, and the existence of such trash was a personal affront to Roger Greene. In an age which, although it may not adore trash as consistently as Roger Greene supposed, has yet undeniably seen fit to make a cult of the slipshod and the inept, Nancy’s workmanlike qualities, her high endeavor and consistent industry, did indeed stand out as white. Roger wouldn’t have been Roger if he hadn’t appreciated them.

Perhaps Mary would have welcomed an actual counter-attraction to herself: a real rival she could scarcely imag ine, but somebody who divided Roger’s interest a bit might have kept him satisfied with what he had.

When she returned to him, indeed, simply being together after absence was enough for them both. Even Roger was happy only to drive and walk and lunch with her; only to feel her there beside him, silken, supple, delicately fragrant; to keep his eyes sedulously away from her for a time, and then to turn and look and not have her vanish; to have her even look back at him with serious sweet eyes, and then suddenly begin to. smile. This was enough for now.

He knew that Mary was happy, that she would even have preferred to keep their relation forever as it was now. Women are like that, and for the most part they never learn better, so that they force men to think their futility part of their charm. But among men the wisdom even of the half-wise knows that the year cannot be forever at the spring, nor love at its exquisite first blush.

In the spring days spring is enough; and even a Roger Greene may desire to hold love a moment in its May. But the May of the year was gone now; summer was upon them. And their love too was ripening toward its summer.

There was another and less romantic reason for the ripening of their love just now. Mary’s season had finally closed, and at last she had time to love him. It may have been for that very purpose, indeed, that she lingered in town for a few days after she had ceased to act. She had not set the day for her departure, though she expected to go to her cabin in the Adirondacks at some time during July. “That is my real home,” she said. “This town house is nothing but a convenience, and perhaps a whim.”

Perhaps a week after her company disbanded, she and Roger lunched together, and afterward went upstairs into her sitting-room, that intimate room which was all Mary. The day was warm, and the shades had been drawn to give an artificial twilight and coolness.

Roger had spoken at lunch of a full afternoon before him; but he lingered and lingered. He poured coffee into a glass full of cracked ice; he smoked cigarettes, and walked about and looked at the photographs. Presently he sat down near Mary, who bad stationed herself at one of the shaded windows; and there fell between them one of those silences which is itself an acknowledgment.

Feeling that it grew too deep, Mary rose, strolled to the piano, and struck a chord. Then she seated herself and began to play, and finally to sing. Roger followed her and leaned on the piano, but he did not look at her. He had picked a small vase off the table; and he held it in his hand and examined it curiously. It was one of those things which struck Mary’s fancy, and which she bought at once, and then discarded when they had ceased to please her. The vase was of a delicate grayish blue, and nearly transparent; on one side was a faint white decoration, almost the ghost of a decoration. It well repaid Roger’s scrutiny; yet he continued to look at it a long time after he had ceased to note its beauties: it had become for him a hollow shell in which Mary’s voice vibrated.

Her singing voice might indeed have been bodied forth as something not unlike that delicate vase: it was, as often happens when the speaking voice is powerfully developed, as faint as an echo, and as sweet. She always sang simple things, and sang them plaintively and charmingly; but even her singing had in it a hint of the histrionic, a suggestion that what she did at all she must do effectively.

Her singing always affected Roger, although he was given to assuring himself that the most remarkable thing about it was its giving him free a great deal of that for which the public was willing to pay, a highly wrought and conscious art. To-day she chose to render some Shakespearean songs. She seemed to know some arrangement of every song in Shakespeare; and she gave them to him one after another, not only affecting him with their inherent charm, but recalling to him her colorful impersonations of the weeks just past. She gave them to him, but she did not look at him; and on the other hand, she did not too pointedly look away from him. And Roger stood fingering a vase that he did not see, and listening, listening, listening.

Presently she began “ Take, oh take those lips away ” — he never heard the song afterward without remembering that moment. Roger drew an audible breath, came around the piano, and sat down on the bench beside her. She looked around for a moment, and smiled as she sang; then she gave herself up again to the music. He put his arm around her, and drew her toward him. He could feel her deep breath come and go, and the music seemed to throb through both of them. His own face, which was usually luminous and eager, had become quiet and tender.

Her head came presently to rest against his; still she continued to sing. Then she paused abruptly in the middle of a verse, kissed him swiftly on the cheek, and slipped to the very end of the piano bench, out of reach of his encircling arm. There she faced him, and smiled gaily; the hand that was farthest from him continued to extract an air from the keys.

Roger seized the nearest hand. “Well, adorable one?” he demanded. “ How soon are you going to find time to stop and love me?”

“Must I stop? I can only love running.”

“ Then when are you going to love me as we run ? ”

“ Do you care to be loved in some despicable remnant of a day?”

“Even between your breakfast and your music lesson, so be it that it were you who did the loving.”

“ Very well, then. Some day between my breakfast and my music lesson.” As if the topic were now settled and shelved, she rose to leave the piano.

A hundred times she had eluded him, though each elusion brought nearer the time when he would have to be met. Now she went to her desk, and sat down with her back to him as if to attack her correspondence.

Roger, deserted at the piano, got up and went slowly over to the telephone. Mary, pretending to ignore his movements, heard him order her car to be brought around. She faced about in her chair so suddenly that she knocked a heap of letters to the floor; Roger came forward to pick them up for her. “ Are you going somewhere, Tertius ? ” she asked pointedly.

“ You and I are going for a drive,” said Roger.

She opened her mouth to make an excuse, and couldn’t think of a plausible one; she thought of flatly refusing to go, but the words remained unspoken. “ Oh, very well, if you really care to go!” she said; and left the room without meeting his eye.

Behind the closed door of her bedroom, she discovered that she was trembling in every limb. Could it be that now — now— ? Surely not; surely she could still keep the situation at arm’s length, just as she had been keeping it. But to keep it so eternally would not be to keep love always at its spring-time, would be instead to let it wither without ever having ripened. There were times when she desired her love’s fruition more than she dreaded it. Yet when it came, whether that should be to-day or not for long, she would say good-by with regret to the spring-time that had made her a girl again.

She glanced in her mirror, and decided to keep on the frock she was wearing, which was of pale green linen with a fine white vine embroidered on it. She chose a little white hat, with a dark facing which set off her hair, and picked up a long coat and some gloves, in case it should be cool riding. Another look in the mirror assured her that she was not only well dressed, but that she looked quite as usual. Mary was reassured; yet she stole a glance about the room before she left, and could not help wondering what would be her state when she returned to it.

Roger had descended to the hall to wait for her; her car was drawn up at the curb, with her admirable chauffeur in the driver’s seat. She gave Roger her coat, and slowly drew on her gloves. “ You haven’t an overcoat, Tertius? ” she asked. “ It will be cooler driving.”

He did not answer. They seated themselves in the car, and the chauffeur closed the door upon them, and awaited an order. Mary turned to her companion. “ Where are we going, Tertius?” she asked.

“To the country. Where else on such a day?” he asked shortly.

“To the country, Ed. Choose any road you like,” ordered Mary.

She leaned back in her corner, and watched the buildings they passed. Roger looked straight ahead of him, apparently fascinated by the chauffeur’s back. And the chauffeur got them into the country as quickly as possible, and took them up a white ribbon of road. Mary often left the choice of a route to him. Ed had been in her employ as long as people had required chauffeurs. He was steady, silent, and reliable; he kept track of Mary’s possessions, lent her money when she forgot her purse, and always got her to the theater on time, even when she was late in starting. It sometimes seemed to her that she had only to think her commands to have Ed obey them; and now, to be sure, he took them down a pleasant and quite unremarkable road, simply a white ribbon which they were endlessly rolling up and which was still endlessly unrolled in front of them.

The air and the motion soothed Mary. She slipped off her gloves, and let them lie in her lap; once or twice she yawned. Occasionally she stole a look at Roger, but Roger never looked at her. If it had not been for the set expression of his face, she would have been quite at ease; but it wasn’t like Roger to be so quiet.

She was glad, though, that he had drawn her out into the country. That was his idea of a holiday; and it wasn’t a bad idea. She remembered his saying once, “ Our civilization, as I see it, is chiefly a means of defense against bad weather and old age. That has to be; but the taking of precautions should not make us forget to use a bright day when it chances to come, or to enjoy youth while it is still ours.”

Imagine her remembering a random saying of his, when there were so many important things that she daily forgot! But at least it was a characteristic saying. He was always holding forth about art and beauty and the conduct of life; so of course some of his sayings were sure to stick. Good, funny old Tertius! The sayings got pretty wild, at times; but his practice was probably mild enough. Mary tried to recall some of his sayings that he hadn’t lived up to, and could remember nothing in his practice that contradicted his precepts except his care of his mother. That wouldn’t help her much, as she wasn’t his mother.

Then she realized that she was trying to lull herself into a sense of security; yet she had once welcomed danger. Perhaps she still might, when it presented itself; but it was wearing to go on forever thus at the side of a strangely silent Tertius.

Perhaps Ed judged from their silence that they had been quarreling; or perhaps it was simply another instance of his tact. At any rate, he managed to bring them at an hour suitable for tea to an inn Mary had once called charming.

Mary welcomed the diversion, and protested herself starving. Roger, still without saying a word, followed her, and seated himself at the table she selected on a vine-covered piazza. He let her order the tea, without seeming to care what she ordered; and when it was set before him, he did not eat. That was as unlike him as his silence, for he had normally an appetite which corresponded with his energy rather than with his spare frame, and as a rule he was rather amusingly interested in his food.

What he did do was to make up for the aversion of his eyes in the car. He put his elbow on the table, and his chin in his hand; and while they sat there he did nothing but stare at Mary as though he expected to lose sight of her at any minute.

Mary was accustomed to being looked at: indeed it was her business to be looked at. Roger had always done his share of the looking, but he had never looked at her as he was looking to-day. Mary withdrew her own eyes, in actual embarrassment; then she wondered what she was in panic imagining. She glanced at him again, and discovered that his strange look was still upon her. She met it until she could bear the meeting no longer; again her eyes dropped.

They went back to the car presently. “ Go on a little farther, Ed,” said Mary. At least she showed Roger that she was not afraid. Still he did not say a word; she could not even be sure that he knew whether they were going farther on, or back toward home.

Well, this was a new side of her friend. She was accustomed to his luminous mood, when he seemed to gather and transmit all the beauty of visible things: it was this mood and look, she supposed, that made him the idol of sensitive youngsters. Of late she had grown familiar with his tenderness, had seen him convey to her the impression that he, who cared so mightily for things and so little for people, had singled her out, in a world otherwise divided between aesthetic values and practical annoyances, to enshrine in his heart of hearts.

But the very quietness of a being normally so restless was impressive. She wondered whether she had ever in her own work fully appreciated the effective quality of stillness. She had used it for shading, in contrast to her magnificent vitality; but she had never made a creation center in mere quiet. It would be an interesting thing to do; she made up her mind to watch for an opportunity to try it.

The white ribbon of road rolled up under their wheels, and was perpetually unrolled for them far ahead where it met the horizon. It must go on and on forever; if they could go forever on with it —

She turned to look at Roger, and drew a quick breath. His late odd intentness, like that of a man walking in his sleep, was gone: in its stead had come a shuddering ecstasy. Seeing it, Mary looked away; looking away, she still felt it By it she knew that her hour had come. She feared her own knowledge, and loved it; and Roger was none the less precious to her because he had suddenly grown a little terrible.

Still they went on in their enchanted silence; but now Mary waited definitely for it to be broken. And presently Roger gave the word to stop the car. “ I’m tired of sitting,” he said abruptly to Mary. “ Come. Let’s get out and walk for a while.”

Mary obeyed without replying; she only turned her head to say, “Wait here, Ed” as if there were anything else for Ed to do. Then she followed Roger as he clambered over a fence and set out full tilt across somebody’s meadow.

The meadow took them up a little hill; just across the brow of the hill it gave place to a grove. Roger went on into the grove, Mary still following, without a word said between them. It was a clean grove, and the walking was easy. All about them was the silence of a summer afternoon, and long shadows lay across their path.

Roger, striding on ahead, paused abruptly, turned to her, and held out his arms. “ Kiss me, Mary,” he commanded. “ Don’t make me wait.”

She went into his arms, and emerged with color in her cheeks, and her eyes a little bewildered. Roger laughed and caught her hand. Keeping it in his, he began to stride on through the grove. “ The day is young yet,” he said. “ Let’s see what is to be seen hereabouts.”

“Have you ever been here before?” asked Mary.

“Yes, but only for professional purposes; and that hardly counts. This is a singularly solitary stretch of country; I am glad Ed brought us here.”

“ It belongs to nobody else, so we take it for ours,” said Mary.

They emerged from the grove, and continued their reckless progress across country, careless of whose fields they trespassed in, oblivious of passing time, forgetful of the waiting Ed and the world he symbolized. Their joined hands swung between them; they moved as if they were parts of one machine; yet all the time they were conscious of being deliciously twain.

They sat down once, fairly out of breath; but Roger made a movement to draw her toward him. Mary jumped to her feet, though she did not wrench her hand free. “Come, come! We haven’t time to rest!” she cried.

Again they set out on their headlong progress; but now they went slower, and then slower still. Presently Mary noticed that their path was no longer flecked with sunshine. She looked up at an overcast sky. “Shan’t we be getting back?” she asked. “It’s going to rain.”

“ We’ve plenty of time,” answered Roger. “ If it rains, we can go in somewhere.”

Where they were to go was not apparent: they were in a lap of land between two hills, and out of sight of any human habitation. They still walked side by side, but not near each other. Mary’s head was bent, as if she were studying the ground before her; Roger looked alertly ahead and around, his forehead wrinkled as if he were trying to recall something.

Suddenly he grasped her hand, and began to draw her straight up the side of the hill at their right. Just at that moment lightning flashed; and when she looked inquiringly at Roger, she felt drops of rain on her face. She had left her coat in the car; a very small shower would wet her thoroughly.

She looked ahead, to see if possible where he was leading her. He seemed to be making for a spot where the green of the hillside was broken by a rocky ledge, with deep shadow a-top it. “What is that?” she asked.

“ A cave, I think,” answered Roger.

The rain had begun to descend in earnest; they quickened their pace. Running, scrambling, stumbling, they reached the shadow; and it was a cave, high enough for them to stand erect, and deep enough to protect them from the water. Mary gazed about her with pleasure. “How charming!” she commented. “Did you know this was here?”

“ No. I saw it from below, and thought it might be a cave. I hardly expected it to be so commodious.”

“ Sharp eyes you painters have. It’s very opportune,” she said. She turned, to behold the rain coming down like a gray curtain; a little of it splashed into their facies.

“Yes, it’s very opportune,” he repeated. “It’s like Dido and .Eneas.”

“ Tertius Greene! It’s not in the least like that! ” she cried.

He seized her hands, and they were very cold; her eyes were strangely dilated. Of a sudden his overpowering ecstasy seemed to seize her too. Her eloquent arms went around his neck; her breath was moist on his cheek.

It had grown darker in their shelter; the storm was at its height, and thunder crashed in their ears. They saw each other by successive flashes of lightning; both their faces were white as death.

“ Mary dear, take that thing off your head; I want to see your hair. Mary, your lovely, lovely hair! ” He buried his face in her hair, and again the thunder crashed. The mist of the valley seemed to be creeping up all about them, seemed to hush her into a hazy tranquility, seemed to lap him in the fulfilment of his dreams and desires.

“ Mary, my Mary — my own always —

“ Always.”

“Mary darling, mine now, mine—”

“Yours, Roger, yours.”

About them the storm wore itself out and abated; over on the high-road the faithful Ed smoked endless cigarettes, and waited for their return.

CHAPTER XI

CHILDREN OF AN HOUR

He came to her the next morning, before there would ordinarily have been any likelihood of his seeing her; and he waited in the drawing-room, as any other visitor might. She must have been expecting him, however; for he had not been waiting long when she appeared on the threshold, a gleaming spectacle between the heavy hangings. Roger stood quiet, waiting for her to make the first move; this was one time when he must take his tone from her.

He had not long to wait; for when Mary was assured that it was actually he, a spasm of joy seemed to go all over her. She crossed the room at a little stumbling run, as if she couldn’t get to him fast enough; and her arms were around his neck before he had moved from his original position. Now that her surrender had come, it was complete; to try to minimize it would have been beneath her.

Roger left her early that day; in the presence of his new-found joy he was almost timid. It was a joy so complete, indeed, that he could not realize its fullness; and its persistence must be a perpetual surprise to him. He had known other rare moments; he had always supposed that he would be perfectly happy if he could only live from peak to peak, instead of always finding himself either soaring to a fall or picking himself up, bruised and bleeding, for a toilsome ascent. But perhaps in this case he had looked forward so long to the supreme moment that he could not believe he was actually on the other side; or perhaps he was simply unable to credit that he could be so happy in the same world where he had been so tried.

At any rate, it was Mary, who had womanlike thought everything out to the bitter end, who had all along carried the burden of the future as well as of the present — it was Mary who now set the tone and led the way. The tone she set was that of gaiety and freedom, of gathering roses while they might. And once Roger had got used to the singularity of there being so many roses, he and she were as gay as two children, gayer, indeed, than actual children ever are: as gay as two children, say, in the childhood of the world. Roger found her the easier to follow because he was naturally gay when he was in love: this was his escape from the drain of art, from the problems of personal life. As for Mary, she had been accustomed for so long to taking gladness when it came in her way, to accepting it freely in the knowledge that she could let it go without regret, that she had a high-handed habit of happiness.

July passed, and August came. She spoke of going to her cottage in the Adirondacks, intending of course to take him with her. But their happiness was still so new that it had no need of distraction; and the summer would soon be over. Meanwhile they could not have been more alone than in a town whence every one they knew had fled. The lodge in the wilderness might do for another time.

Mary’s staying in town meant choice meals and long cool drives for Roger; this was unlike most of his frugal summers in town. She gave her practical favors without any idea that they were favors; she simply wished to have him with her. And Roger accepted her hospitality quite incidentally. He loved his power over Mary, perhaps, quite as much as he loved Mary herself; but he did not reckon his power in sordid terms.

In spite of the regularity of Mary’s hospitality, he spent a bad summer financially. He did neither teaching nor commercial work; and he profited by turning his present exaltation and excitement into the channel of his beloved painting. Mary might have resented that, if she had not perceived that he was too exalted and excited to profit as he might by a term of comparative leisure.

She wasn't jealous of his work, so long as she did not see herself sacrificed to it. On the other hand, she did lie not concern herself with any question of what she might il do for him. Outside her work she had very little sense i of responsibility. She hadn't even given Roger permission to paint his long talked of portrait of her. He didn't talk of it now, though that wasn’t the same as saying that he had ceased to think of it. But she was simply relieved that the project had fallen from sight.

Considerations as to his welfare were nothing, even in 1 his eyes, to the marvelous fact of her love. Now that he was at length hers and she his, it seemed as if she could never love him enough. She loved him subtly, deeply, bumingly; loved him humorously, wistfully, passionately; loved him with her mind and heart, loved him with her eyes, her lips, her voice.

Once in a blue moon she loved him very simply. Her means of expression were such a perfected product of years of discipline that it was not the least of Roger's joys to see how perfectly she could on occasion forget them. Up through her trained gestures, her tricks of tone and feature, would come some simple girlish wonder, some purely natural yearning, which made her as dumb and groping as if she had never learned her conscious art. At those moments Roger always felt for her a vague impulse of protection, as if she had been indeed the girl she seemed. He loved these moments best of all; yet it was only then that her love shamed him.

The usual thing, however, was for her to love him regally and with all the resources at her command. She gave him a rich training in taste, for Roger was not only a poor man, but fastidious to the verge of asceticism. There was nothing that Mary did not know about fabrics and draperies and jewels. Her house seemed so perfect to begin with that Max Meredith had scarcely dared to draw a long breath there; but under her attack it became simply an ever-shifting setting, in which each effect was finer than the last.

But her person had always been the true medium with which she got her effects; with her person she desired to get them now. With her person, indeed, she must get them, or perish — an unhappy fact which she was striving to blink. For she was beautiful, she was graceful, she was everything that should appeal to a painter’s eye; and of course she wanted to be beautiful. But she would have given something big if she could have afforded not to be. She had to use her beauty and her brains and her polish for all they were worth, simply to offset the fact that she was no longer young.

In that one summer, indeed, she upset for Roger’s sake many of her most cherished traditions, some of which seemed fairly a part of herself. She had gone on the stage, for instance, at a time when an actress off the stage was still supposed to look like an actress; and she had dressed as simply as a school girl. It was partly carelessness, in the first place, and partly audacity; the audacity that had led her to keep her supple body uncorseted in the days when corsets were synonymous with modesty, and to retain her plain New England name when a pseudonym went with every make-up box.

It had begun so, but it had grown into a cult. She had dressed for years with a certain effectiveness, but always in a low tone; she was too big a person to have to be pretty. It was not only her tradition, but her point of honor. But for Roger she dressed as carefully as she would costume a play; she bloomed into toilets that were often regal and sometimes astounding. For driving and the country she was still simple; but at sunset she would emerge in lohg folds of lovely fabrics, long chains of jade or turquoise or amethyst, faint tones emphasized by bold dashes of color, or shimmering iridescence that needed no emphasis. She liked to see his face when he noted her combinations. That was one advantage of his training: he didn’t always approve, but he always noticed.

This was only the setting, however; and although her intelligence led her always to give proper attention to the setting, she would have trusted herself to play on a bare stage and still achieve a result. When the result to be achieved was her happiness and Roger’s, she could even forget what she would like to forget; the perfection of the result was assurance of her success.

And here the result was perfect. Their days passed in a dream-like harmony, uneventful, yet never monotonous. They went often into the country: that meant real holiday for Mary, and Roger liked the fresh air and movement. During the day they would leave the car for long tramps; at night they usually rode, with his arm about her waist in the friendly shelter of darkness, and her face glimmering near him, now in eloquent oval, now in pure profile.

There were no milestones in that summer; the days were of a blissful similarity, and they were all gone before Roger and Mary had done more than breathe in their golden atmosphere. For of a sudden, and as it seemed all in the same week, everybody came back to town; and under the clear skies of autumn, the newly gathered people of Mary’s world paused to greet one another. The city which had been empty of all save their two precious selves was now full to overflowing. Roger returned to his classes; and Mary had to begin active preparations for her new play.

Ordinarily this was a season that Mary loved. She liked to meet again after absence her friends of other years, especially the warm-hearted, light-headed, short-remembering brethren of the stage. She liked, after the long quiet summer, to be once more busy from morning until late at night, hurrying from a consultation to a rehearsal, and thence to the dressmaker’s, and from there to another consultation, all the while feeling a role deliciously shape itself and round out in her mind, as rfiles never did shape themselves for her until a play was actually in rehearsal.

This year, however, she did not experience her old delicious eagerness, her old uprush of spirits to meet the autumn. She went back to work, indeed, with double zeal, for she had now to reckon with Soger's artistic conscience as well as with her own. But she was tired to begin with: she had lived hard that summer instead of resting. And she saw summer close with the knowledge that no matter what was to come, nothing else in their love would be quite so sweet as its first season.

Her days no longer belonged to Roger: their hours together were now stolen from the midst of pressing concerns. And instead of meeting people with the pleasure that was natural to her, and perhaps with a secret joy in the general homage, Mary was for the first time disagreeably conscious of the collective eye upon her.

This wasn't, of course, the first time that the collective eye had ever been so fixed, either in certainty or in conjecture. But it was the first time that Mary had ever objected to the stare. A woman's relations with men were her own business, she had always held; if people chose to stare, let them get what fun they could from the staring. But now she admitted to herself that they had at last something worth staring at: Mary Allen's intimacy with a nameless painter fifteen years her junior was indeed a spectacle.

In bravado she made her connection with Roger more unmistakable than it need have been. She dragged him into public places where she herself had never got accustomed to being, and where he would certainly rather not have gone. They sat together in noisy restaurants when they might have had the shelter of her house; she had him wait for her at her manager's office and at her dressmaker's in a way that humiliated and exasperated him. She even let him dangle openly after her at rehearsals, and on one occasion smuggled him into the empty theater to see her company stumble through their half-learned lines.

That last was a curious experience for Roger. He sat near the back of the auditorium; in the front row was Mary's little snub-nosed manager, a shrewd being who had a talent for never looking shrewd, and who favored Roger, whenever they met, with a curious glance from beneath his heavy eyelids. As a matter of fact, he was rather sorry for Roger, and just a shade envious of him; but he ignored him as a matter of policy. He ignored him now, hunching down in his front seat, with the fur collar of his overcoat drawn up about his ears. A door high up at one side had been opened a crack, and a long line of sunlight came slanting down, illuminating his scanty hair, and making still more ghastly the deserted air of the empty theater.

The stage was set with a table and several chairs, relics of former productions; the prospect closed in a brick wall. Mary sat at one side, talking very prettily with a veteran actress who was to be her mother in the play. The leading man had not arrived when the rehearsal began; but he strolled in presently, with an air of listless condescension.

Meanwhile the actors were going through the first scene, or at least the mechanics of it; and they postured, grimaced and delivered made-up lines with an obvious artificiality at which Roger was ashamed for them. When the cue came for Mary’s entrance, she rose, slipped out of her coat, and came forward as if she were an outsider who had dropped in, and were obligingly helping out. In the mixed light the irregularity of her full face was almost grotesque. Her hands hung at her sides, her voice used its thinnest tones, and several times she referred openly to the prompter.

When it came time for her to play a scene with her leading man, he was worse than she. He knew his part; but he delivered it as if his mind were on something very far away. The stage manager interrupted, and had them begin again: they were more hopeless still on a second hearing. He sat down, apparently resigned to the worst; and Roger reflected that the opening was only a week off, and grimly decided that he saw a failure in the making.

Then suddenly something happened. It was a well-written scene that they had been spoiling, though not better written than some that went before; but all at once it laid hold of Mary. She not only ceased to grope for her lines; she forgot that they were lines. She stood over the man, pleading with him in a tone that grew deep and vibrant as she went on; she laid her hand on his shoulder in a gesture of eloquent appeal. And the actor, who had for Mary a jealous dislike that almost approached frenzy, whose daily and nightly boast it was that he would one day spoil her big scene for her, kindled as he could not help kindling when her work came forth in its full authority. He exchanged his own boredom for the sullen wrath of the character, ripening to a burst of anger at the close. In that climax he left her. Mary took two or three steps after him, and then paused uncertainly, her face working, her hands half stretched out, as if to bring him back; then she turned slowly, her hands falling at her sides, her face setting in dull distress.

It was an effect, an illusion: the bare stage, the other actors standing about, the wretched hour that had gone before, only threw the strange fact into brighter relief. Yet Ben King, sitting stolidly in Roger’s line of vision, looked at his watch, and rose to go; and behind the footlights came the voice of the stage manager, “ If you could manage to let us have your face a little more there just at the last, Miss Allen — your profile first, and then your full face when you turn—” And Mary, who had a moment before been living in this phantom world, paused to argue the point with him.

She looked tired when she joined Roger at the close of the day: it was trying, she owned, when you were so close to your opening. Roger would have liked her to find him a tower of strength then; but his own nervousness outran hers, and brought him to a state of panic. Finally he even offered to go out of town until the opening was over; but Mary laughed at his panic, and assured him that her own strain was a part of her life, a part indeed which she would miss if she were ever forced to do without it. But to his horror Roger felt that she approached the ordeal burdened not only with her own role and the success of the play, but with him as well.

Hers was a gallant spirit, however, and secure in its own resources. In her self-confidence she even had him behind the scenes on her first night, to the horror of her manager. That gentleman had no objection to Mary’s admirers as admirers; he was used to them. What he feared was simply the effect on Mary’s nerves. He dared not risk a pitched battle then, however; and as the evening progressed, he even sought Roger out with one or two attempts at conversation. In the depths of his heart he was sorry for that young man.

He had no need, actually, to fear for Mary. She had wonderful nerves; her nerves,, fairly, had made her what she was. But to Roger the whole thing was like a nightmare. He saw scenes that he had beheld in rehearsal run smoothly forward now, heard the laughter and applause of the audience, and that most eloquent of tributes, their moments of dead silence; but he saw too, with the brilliant sight of fever, the sad artificiality of the whole thing: the raised voices, the rouged cheeks, the waiting in the wings for cues; and he wondered if anything at once so crazy and so puerile could actually be accepted by sane people.

Mary, indeed, was not so patently artificial as the rest: she never had to force her voice, and her make-up was light and very skilful. Yet even Mary moved a calculated number of steps at a given moment, used little bits of “ business ” that she had thought out with the utmost care, smiled when she had planned to smile, and cried real tears when a particular climax demanded it.

She came to him for a moment after each act, still glowing with her effort; and they had a few words together before she hurried away to change. Roger couldn’t do anything for her, or even say anything intelligible; her generous idea was simply to bring him her success in full hands. She was aware of his horrible excitement, however; and once she asked him if he wouldn’t rather go out in front. Roger shook his head; and she said soothingly, “You can see it from in front to-morrow night. You will like it better then.”

He didn’t like it now, but he wouldn’t have missed the experience. And indeed it pointed a contrast when he and she were at last alone, and had left the artificiality behind | them. He wished, actually, that he hadn’t seen how she was subdued to the material she wrought in. Yet if it had not been for her powerful histrionism he might never have loved her: be couldn’t, at least, separate her from it And that remembrance made the charm all the greater when she was sitting quietly beside him in the luxurious dusk of her car, with her triumph his to share, at least in her intention.

They had planned to have supper together at her house — a significant change from the days not yet a year gone when she did not even keep her appointments to sup with him. The meal was waiting for them; and Mary sent the servants to bed, so that they two might have the place to themselves. Before the drawing-room fire he took off her cloak; and there was discovered a wonderful new gown, white and silver and orchid. A spray of orchids was thrust carelessly into her loose girdle, and her slender statue-like arms were bare to the shoulder.

She put a fresh flower in his button-hole, and they sat down at the table. The glint of silver, the delicate petals j of flowers, the soft glow of lights under silken shades, the delicious stillness and intimacy of it all, and the beauty of her white arms and radiant hair, all operated to elevate Roger’s mood. About Mary there was an air of quivering and almost painful life, life at once intense and abundant. It was primarily a back-wash from the evening’s excitement, Roger supposed; but it helped to make them very gay.

And very gay they were. They sat a long time over their little table, and laughed extravagantly and talkedendlessly; they toasted the new play and each other. In their glasses the amber wine creamed and bubbled, and was drunk and renewed: it seemed to Roger no bad parable of such a life as theirs.

Finally Mary pushed back her chair and left the table; the room seemed to have grown hot and bright. She went to a window and opened it. Roger followed her, feeling the cool air pleasant upon his forehead. It was silent without, as well as within; the city had at last gone to sleep for an hour. Roger’s arm was about her waist, where it came to rest very naturally now. Mary's own arm stole presently around his neck; and the spray of orchids, loosened by her movement, fell at their feet.

She leaned on him a little, as if she began to realize how tired she was; Roger drew her close up to him, and kissed her. He was startled to find that her cheek was wet with tears. “Mary dear!” he protested. “On a night of triumph! ”

“ Yes,” she said. “ I don’t want to see to-night vanish; and it’s going, going.”

“ You can let it go,” he argued. “ Your life is simply a progress from one triumph to another.”

She shook her head. “No one’s is. And even if it were, and I knew that it always would be, would that make it any easier to leave to-night ? ”

Roger felt a chill at his heart. To-night they were here, with the lights and the flowers. But where had they been a year agone, and where should they be a year from now?

He tried to cling to her; but he felt her arm loosen, and she escaped from him. It was only to go back to the table, however, where she filled two glasses. Coming back with them, she kissed his cheek as she handed one to him. “ The almighty present! ” she gave him for toast.

It surprised him to find that she had even thus much of a creed: he expected to find her made up of complex reactions and unconscious shadings. This was a perfect creed for her; and in taking her to himself, Roger took her creed as well. Turning his back on the room where the lights were already paling, and the flowers drooping a little in the heat, he faced the chill of outdoors and the first glimmer of dawn. But he echoed her with spirit. “ The all-conquering present! The invincible present! ” They drank, laughed, inverted their glasses; they were both gratified and relieved by the little ceremony. In acknowledging their weakness they had also found their strength. In that sign they should conquer, for by that faith they must live: the present’s true children, the butter-fly progeny of an hour. So lovers should live, and artists must; and these two were both lover and artist in one.

CHAPTER XII

MARY’S QUESTION AND ROGER’S

Thanks to Mary’s bravado, her connection with Roger now carried along with it a broad, bright comet’s tail of comment and conjecture. Among Mary’s friends it was now understood that Roger Greene and Mary Allen were always together, and that one of them couldn’t very well be invited anywhere without the other. People were surprised at her succumbing quite so pointedly to her young friend, and astonished at what seemed almost like devotion on her part. But Mary lived in a world where the pairing of man and woman, though a prime topic of interest, was always more or less expected; and even the oddest pairing, or the pairing of the most invincible, excited no more than a secondary wonder.

The buzz was louder in Roger’s world, was loudest of all in the anathematized school where he was kept by his own bare needs and by the demands upon him. Roger had always been a great figure in the school. He liked these young people, if he didn’t like teaching them; and the real reason why he didn’t like teaching them was only that it left him no time for his own learning or strength for his doing. When it came to the concrete act of teaching, Roger forgot to hate. The very slightest contact with what seemed to him the real thing in performance brought out his flashing zeal; and he suspected the presence of the real thing oftener than he would have cared to have Nancy Desmond know. Not all the results justified his enthusiasm as hers had; but nothing ever worked a permanent cure in him. He was guilty of the rankest favoritism toward those pupils who seemed to him promising; and his favoritism by some curious turn served to increase his popularity even with the unfavored. As for the talented students, they adored him as only youth can adore.

They were also curious about him, as only youth has the energy to be curious. When rumor percolated to the school of his devotion to Mary Allen, Mary’s gallery receipts were at once swelled. They went in twos and threes and in droves to see her act; they drew her from memory, they drew her from photographs, they maneuvered a bit of paper into a little light, and drew her on the spot. They cartooned her, and they cartooned Roger and her together. A few of the more sensitive souls were pained at the specific form which the rumor took, and tried not to credit it; for another few, Roger walked henceforth in a halo of sinful romance. But most of his students were simply curious, and glad to have something so interesting going on almost before their eyes: and to the simply interested might be traced not the least part of the greatly inflated version of Roger’s adventures which went the rounds that winter.

There was one person in Roger’s circle who heard not so much as a hint or a dribbling of this talk: that person was Nancy Desmond. Nancy had never been the recipient of much gossip, especially of a scandalous nature: her interest in what was told her scarcely repaid the teller’s trouble. She would smile a little, and say nothing, and obviously not believe a word. Yet such a particularly choice and widely circulated rumor as this would certainly have reached her, even though her admiration for Roger was well known, or perhaps just because it was well known. But this winter all Nancy’s usual contacts with the world of studio gossip were in abeyance. Her success had closed certain doors to her, as she had not troubled to keep them open; her time was divided between furious work and that new friend of hers who did not blend with the old. In a minor way, indeed, she was herself a center of gossip; and she had her being these days in the middle of an open circle, which she did not even perceive, far less try to draw about her.

Roger would have been contented to let his comet swing along without quite such a tail; but the tail, he supposed, was a part oi Mary’s magnificence. He had still his old workaday self to reckon with; he must still work intermittently at his eternal pictures, the pictures that wouldn’t let him rest even when he neglected them. But the core and center of his days was the time he spent with Mary. Together they had entered a world which she opened for him; and although she could scarcely have gone into it without him, the ordering of it was hers. It was a colorful pantomimic Arabian night world, where his senses found always something to feed upon, and his mind was always empty: small wonder that he found it a grateful place. And when they tired of it, there was always the seclusion she could make so lovely for him, the seclusion all dim lights and exquisite fabrics and the scent of roses: and in the midst of the exquisiteness, herself mo£t exquisite, the woman to whom the setting was subdued.

There were times when to Mary herself it seemed that she now had a double drain upon her. But in general her love fed her art; and she had never acted better than she did that winter, when all the resources of her matured technique were at her command, and the life of her emotions was fullest and strongest. And when on leaving her dressing-room at night she found him waiting for her, or when awakening in the morning she was greeted by the little note he had stopped and left hours earlier, she would feel that she gave nothing, and that she was perpetually receiving at the hands of her beloved.

Soger had, indeed, built about her that beautiful little shelter which a man does build for his beloved, not so much for her sake or even for his own as because love thereto compels him. When he helped her into or out of her car, when he pulled down a shade to keep the sun from her eyes, when he said, “ I wouldn’t do that, Mary, if I were you,” or “ Are you tired to-night, dear ? ” or selected the flower that contrasted best with her gown, the attention was nothing in itself, to her who had all her life been used to attention, but the cumulative effect was great. “ You are my beloved,” he seemed to say to her. “ Who is so fit to do for you as your beloved ? ” And Mary, who had been so long and so essentially independent, and knew at the bottom of her heart that she must so remain, Mary, who felt herself to be actually and perpetually the stronger of the two, rejoiced in this beautiful shadow of tyranny. For was she not his beloved, and was not this the sign thereof?

His tenderness, indeed, was a thing that never ceased to fill her with amaze. Ordinarily Roger was warm only toward things in the upper ether, things that could be or had been painted or written or sung. He looked at the swarming facts of existence with an eye that instinctively selected only those that might serve him as material; his touch on the irrelevant others was as light and cool as his circumstances and his natural irritability allowed him to make it. But if the artist in him approved her, it was the natural man that loved her; a fact over which Mary never ceased to wonder.

The natural man, however, might well have wearied her if he hadn’t had the artist to second him. But swinging from one to another, Roger made her hours with him poignant and rapturous; and the spaces between were bridged by her quivering desire to get back to him, to drink again and again, with a thirst that was never sated, at this fountain that gave no promise of failing.

Yet there were times when she flew to her work with a passionate desire to bury herself in it, if that were possible, out of recollection of anything outside; and if it were not possible, then to pull the whole structure down about her ears, and even at the cost of ruin eternally to forget that luminous youth who had made himself too necessary to her.

That winter she had a long spell of such passionate reaction; and for a week she refused to see him or hear from him. This crisis of resentment, indeed, and this protracted punishment, Roger brought on himself by propos ing as an immediate measure what he had always taken for granted they would some day come to. He asked her to marry him. He realized that he wasn’t in any way her equal, and he didn’t wish to bind her; but if they were married, they would be freer than now to love as long as it pleased them.

He brought forth his proposal, and began the summary of his reasons therefor, one evening after the play, when they were together in her sitting-room, in soft light and stillness. He had been sitting on the edge of the low couch, and she in a big chair opposite, with cushions at her back and feet and beneath her outspread arms. She was in her gentlest mood, tired and peaceful; her eyes were soft as she looked at him.

But his logical summing-up of the situation was never completed. The single word “marry” seemed to act galvanically upon her. She was on her feet in a second, talking, gesticulating, sweeping back and forth; her cheeks grew very white, and her eyes turned from gray to green. Marry him? she asked. She wouldn’t marry anybody; she spit the word out diabolically, her whole face contracting in an ugliness of which he had not supposed her capable. But worse was to come: for when her rage had cooled a little, she found words, and many of them: and she drew a picture of him as Mary Allen’s husband which was thought out to the last detail. It was not only insulting and cruel: it was also quite annoyingly like what he could imagine as coming to pass.

He tried letting her go on, in the hope that she would talk herself out. Finding that useless, he was ill-advised enough to argue with her. In the end he was as angry as she. Even in his rage, however, he held on, until she finally turned him out of the house. Then she went to bed and cried until morning, haunted by the picture of Roger turning away, wounded and raging, and being swallowed by the darkness outside.

In the morning she looked for him, or for a note at least. Roger made no sign, however; but of course be would come to the theater. He did not come to the theater; and for three days she lived from moment to moment in the mere hope of him. Then her pride came to her aid. She denied herself to all callers, and would not even ask whether any one had come; and if she wished now for a note, it was merely for the steely pleasure of returning it unopened. If this were the end, so much the better; and even in the sick dread with which she faced that possibility there was mingled a gleam of admiration at his having been the one to end it. He was — she could not repress a wry smile at the thought — he was, whether for the moment or forever, actually cutting her.

Three more dfcys dragged their length along; then one night he waited for her after the play. He had taken his stand, not in the wings, as had been his wont since summer, but outside, near where her automobile waited at the curbing. Mary did not greet him, and be made no attempt to join her. But when she appeared he took off his hat; and he continued to stand with it in his hand after she was snugly inside the car.

The faithful Ed waited for the usual direction, but it was not forthcoming. Mary had turned her eyes away, but that did not prevent her still seeing the familiar blonde head, uncovered at her coming. She didn’t dare to look back, for by this time he would have turned away; but she couldn’t bear to go and leave him so. He had come only for a sight of her, a sight from the curbing, like a curious stranger.

Her throat filled, and she stretched out her hand toward the fastening of the door. It was her impulse to follow him on foot, to come softly up behind him and slip her arm under his, and then to ask his pardon in words because it was by words that she had injured him. But when she had at last found the fastening, and dared to look out, Roger was still standing where she had seen him. She raised her hand, and beckoned to him through the glass.

From opposite sides they tugged at the fastening, and impeded each other. Then the door flew open, and Roger gave the word to the chauffeur and leaped in beside her. As the car swung into motion they fell into each other’s arms; it took not a word on either side to ask or to grant forgiveness.

For Roger the whole affair was essentially a lovers’ quarrel: what he had suffered during the week of separation was more than made up by the joys of reconciliation, which were acuter, if anything, than the joys of their first acknowledgment. But it brought Mary face to face with something she would have given much to ignore. She had turned on him so mercilessly at mention of their marriage, not because the idea repelled her, but because it attracted her altogether too strongly.

There had been a time when she honestly felt that she could not marry: that to have a man perpetually at her side, always making demands on her, and fairly entitled to make them, would result in a divided interest and a spoiled life. Before Roger she had had other lovers, and they had stimulated and in a measure satisfied her: more important still, they had fed that stream of emotion from which she dipped the raw material of her art. Not one of them had interfered with her life’s true business, which was not loving, but acting. Yet because their appeal had been momentary, and to nothing deeper than her wonderful nerves and her keen senses, Mary had flattered herself on her clever policy, thinking that it was her conscious tact which stopped all her loves at a certain point.

If she had lived as much by policy as she flattered herself, she would have stopped the affair with Roger at its very beginning. Already Roger sometimes went beyond thrilling, and riddled her; and she foresaw that as rapture wore thin, unless she could dispose of him finally, the riddling would grow more complete. She wasn’t afraid of the riddling in itself; the very exquisiteness of what she suffered came to her as high proof of her own vitality.

But she was aware that at last she had reached the love which she wished to make permanent in her life, even if it meant marriage. But her own peculiar sense of decency forbade her marrying Roger.

The forked tongue of the world did not give her pause; nor did Roger’s poverty and obscurity. If she chose to marry an obscure man, she had the best right in the world to do it; her own talents and reputation put her above all need for making a notable match. But for all her courage, and the gaiety and warmth that were hers in so full a measure, there was one thing she could not do, and recognized that she could not. She could not outface nature.

She was now at the height of her power and beauty; she I could make youth itself seem raw by comparison. In her j fullest moments, when she drew on all the ripened resources | of her art, and felt that answering thrill for which she I lived come back to her across the footlights — in such | moments she felt as if she could go on so for a hundred I years. As she stood, indeed, she was more than Roger’s j match in vigor. But already there were signs — her weariness after the excitement of the play, her let-down feeling of a morning — that her present brightness was the glow of Indian summer. There was the long road ahead, the road downhill. She couldn’t let Roger start on it with her, for it was long before his time to go downhill. No mere tyranny of the calendar would frighten Mary: wasn’t she even now superior to the calendar? But nature itself was against her.

She felt herself forced now to go on as she had been going. And when taking the cash and letting the credit go had actually become a policy with her, instead of inclination figuring forth as policy, she turned her eyes from it in disgust. It was glorious that she and Roger, in their dedicated busy lives, had paused to take each other impulsively, and to love for a little while; but it was not so glorious as it would once have been.

Her policy was fixed, and Roger’s lips were sealed on the subject of their marriage. Yet there was one occasion ^ on which their elastic arrangement almost broke of its own weight. Mary’s new play had run on joyously past the holiday season; but managerial sagacity decided to k take it on tour in February. In ordinary years Mary did not resent going on tour; even last year she had welcomed it. The adoration of the provinces was as dear to her r; as the more sophisticated admiration of the metropolis, and she was amused and kept alert by the many small changes that traveling involves. She was indeed, in small as well as in great things, a bird of passage: change was & the breath of life to her.

But at this crisis she almost cast her wisdom to the winds, and decency and self-respect along with it. If r: she married Roger now, she could take him with her when she left town. He said not a word on the subject, and would not say a word; but Mary knew that if she had a mind to act on her impulse, she had only to stretch out a hand to him, and he would understand. Life was so short, and Roger was so dear, and other women did so much worse things; there was hardly a woman of her acquaintance, she supposed, who hadn’t done something worse. Indeed she could easily believe that society at large, and especially her own dear public, would regard a marriage to Roger as a fresh proof of her own eternal youthfulness, or at worst as an amusing whim. But she felt that she could never look herself in the face again if she did a thing like that. Her code wasn’t, for instance, like a code of the people in the New England village from which she sprang; but the demands of her self-respect were every bit as definite as the demands of theirs.

She went without him. She left New York in a flare of light and sound, giving a big party Sunday evening, and departing on Monday morning. Roger accompanied her an hour’s ride on her journey; but most of the time they were not alone. The members of her company were in and out of her state-room continually, and most of them she detained for a laughing word. They would have a bridge party as soon as he got off, Roger supposed. Meanwhile she sat with her lap full of yellow roses, which echoed in a paler tone the shade of her dress and hat; and the tint was caught again and deepened in the fur scarf that hung about her slim shoulders. The glory of her dazzled Roger’s eyes; her voice, creamier than her roses, her smile, like the dappling of sunshine on water, filled his senses and mocked his sorrows. She was going forth to triumph, always to triumph; she lived in the sunlight of popular favor, and wisely ignored the shade. Everybody loved her, having no choice but to love her. She too loved everybody: it was so well worth her while.

But just when Roger had fallen to resenting that same smile for everybody, that charm which each might taste, he would meet her eyes, the lids grayer than ever after her night without sleep; and mutely those gray eyes would shame him. Her charm was the public’s, her beauty was every passer’s-by. But her love was his, and she was leaving him; and she laughed only in order not to weep.

He received a note from her that same afternoon — the first, he realized with a thrill, since they became declared lovers. She must have mailed it before she left New York; even while he was reproaching her for her thoughtlessness, she had looked ahead, and tried to console his first blank moment.

Next morning there was a longer letter, mailed at a way station. She was going from coast to coast this time, and every week took her farther from him; but she arranged so that no day passed without its letter. Her dear fragmentary letters, sometimes short and sometimes long, but always artless — her dear queer letters, which told him nothing of importance, and yet reminded him of everything there was in the world, both told and untold — her letters were like a part of herself.

Roger cherished more than he Answered them. His own letters never had the naturalness of Mary’s; if he read them over he always hesitated about sending them. The satisfaction of writing to her was simply the knowledge that his scrawls would eventually come under her eyes; and often his faith failed him. He missed her so acutely that it seemed impossible she could exist in the same world with him. If he had ever known her, it must have been on some dream voyage to the moon. The core was gone out of his days: and that was rather more than he had bargained for. It was his nature to be either ecstatically on the heights or abysmally in the depths, either brimming with gaiety and self-confidence or writhing with discomfiture and rebellion. He was not used to the sensation of blankness.

He went, however, resolutely to work in the added time that was now his; and at Easter he found opportunity to spend a week with his mother in his native village. Much to his surprise, the surroundings soothed him. Usually he succumbed at the very beginning of his visit to an irritation that grew acuter as the days progressed, so that he had his choice between leaving before the allotted term of his visit and going mad. But this time, going with the full expectation of being irritated, and hugging to himself a knowledge for which many a fellow-villager would have given ten years off a gossipy life, Roger found himself braced and cheered by contact with things simple and first-hand.

Having, however, the temperament for which nothing as it exists is ever sufficient, he shortly wove himself a mythos about bucolic joys, a mythos as unlike the actual life of the good stupid villagers as his painting of Main Street in a winter dusk was unlike their view of that muddy thoroughfare. It was odd that he should be able to weave himself this mythos, he who had known the village life so well and had so'cordially hated it. But tramping the country by day, and sleeping in his boyhood room at night, he told himself tales just as he had when he was a boy, only in his youthful imaginings he had always gone forth to conquer the world, and now he pictured his peaceful and willing withdrawal from it.

He never dreamed that he could withdraw to his mother’s; and it would not do to withdraw alone. We go forth one by one to conquer; but a man must be much worse disappointed than Roger Greene before he will think of a solitary hermitage. A wife would be the suitable companion of such a solitude. Not a wife like Mary Allen, who lived by and in the plaudits of the crowd; but a wife pretty and good-tempered, a little younger than himself, and inclined by nature to look sweetly up to him. Would he have her a painter? He couldn’t imagine the perfect comrade unless she did paint. But if he granted her a painter, she always took on a great likeness to an actual woman back in the city. And although that woman was so deeply imbrued in her own affairs that dreaming of her need bring in no hint of practical intention, she spoiled the dream for him: he couldn’t make her image do as he bade it.

He needn’t keep at his wretched painting, though: he imagined himself taking a farm, and marrying a farmer’s daughter, and tying himself down to a little round of duties, to a few intense personal interests. This was a most refreshing dream, for he could never realize any part of it; and having lived on it and carried it about i the country with him for a week, Roger went back with renewed vigor to his work in the city. A heap of letters, all addressed in one hand, was waiting for him; and the second day after his return he went to see Nancy Desmond.

He found her alone, and in a rage of which he had not supposed her capable. Her blue eyes were blazing, and her answers to his questions came like blows of a hammer. What was she doing? Nothing at all. She never would do anything more, did he understand? Nothing, nothing. She was tired of painting, sick of the very smell of paint, sick most of all of herself, the painter.

She was going to slit every canvas she had ever touched, and break her brushes; she was going to open a bird-shop: teaching canaries to sing would be better than the life she was living.

“In a week you would be painting the canaries’ picture,” said Roger, laughing. “You can’t quit; but upon my soul I’d like to see you try.”

Her anger was a sign of vitality; and Roger laughed at it in the spirit of a young father who receives an unusually hearty kick from his offspring. She must be approaching a crisis; and he did not doubt her ability to wear through it. Some day far in the future she might even tell him about it, when they should both be old, and the very sorrows of youth should have taken on a golden hue in the distance. Meanwhile he began to tell her his dream of a farm-house on a hill. Perhaps she too had dreamed that dream; or perhaps it came from him to supply her need. At any rate, she took refuge in the conception; and before he left they were arguing contentedly about what books it would be best to take to that white hermitage. She was guilty at times of indulging him in his choice; perceiving that, Roger held it the healthiest sign of all.

CHAPTER XIII

THE CREST

Max Meredith’s friends and fellow-schemers for the utilization of mountain water power saw fit to send him east again in the fall, just as he had foreseen. His achievement was not all that he had hoped in the beginning, but normally he might have felt that its dwindling in the achievement was more than balanced by the interest of the actuality. He felt no interest in it now. Even the form it assumed during that second winter failed to arouse his enthusiasm. But his success gave him an excuse for remaining in New York; if affairs had not taken this precise turn, conscience would before long have routed him out.

Of course, it wasn’t as if he had shared the penalty with her. Nancy must like him, or she would not have continued to grant those scattered hours which he still spent with her, though less frequently than a year ago. But he could not imagine any actual place for him in that ordered and directed life; and his lack of imagination must provide the apology for his continuing to go to her.

Christmas had passed, and that second winter had come fairly to the bend that inclines it toward spring, when one day he went to her in a mood far removed from his usual reluctance and uneasiness. He had not actually been near her for a week, and he felt that he deserved well for his abstinence; also it was drawing on toward a year since he had made his appalling discovery, and he had not betrayed himself. On the whole he had earned an hour of her society; and it would make no difference to Nancy, because he did not come too often.

He walked down to her house, that he might stay in the open air, and also because walking would make him decently late. He threw back his shoulders, and drew in deep breaths of the raw air; and suddenly there came on his relaxed spirit the reviving breath of happiness. He almost feared to feel it; but Nancy nestled snugly in a corner of his mind, and nothing forbade his keeping her there. And he was on his way to her once more; and there were other days to come.

He found the actual Nancy in her living-room, though the lengthening day had not yet reached twilight. Even a man not blinded as Max was blinded might have been deceived by her cheerful greeting. But all day long she had been hoping that he would come, and dreading it. One day more she had trampled her sweet unrest underfoot, denied its expression, denied its existence, only to feel it pressing all about her, welling up within her. She could have cried aloud in agony; a moment later, she was plunged in hot disgust.

Then came his familiar ring and knock; and with her flutter settling to self-command, she opened the door to him. He appeared on her threshold, his color high, his eyes gleaming; he came like an embodiment of all she sought, like a splendid center for the life which had fallen so to pieces. He came as the deliverer; he stood before her, the well-beloved. And she had to trample underfoot not only her own nature, but all that he brought her by his coming. She withdrew her hand after a suitable interval, sat down at a discreet distance from him, with her back to the light. And she wondered if this could go on forever.

To-day Max was at no loss for words. A fountain within him had been unsealed; he talked and talked, in his queer way, and if she could have listened to his words, she might at length have gathered something about that project which had always remained so mysterious to her. But she did not understand his words; she trembled as if with the perception that at length he had come for her.

She left him, and went upstairs. She must be strong, if a crisis were indeed approaching; she must keep in mind the honorable past, the unblighted future. But her knees were going to water at the thought of what might impend. If he had come at length to declare himself her lover, what availed the laborious collection of days past or future, of dusty precepts or dull ideas?

She huddled down in a chair in her studio, looking desperately about her, as if help could come to her out of the comers. Help must come from somewhere without; her own strength was gone. If Roger would only happen in now, with his saving sanity, his light touch upon her, to lead her back to the values from which she was falling away! If Roger — Roger too she hadn't seen for a week.

He wouldn't come, of course ; but the mere idea of him brought with it a certain relief. Nancy rose, drew two or three deep breaths, and prepared to descend. On her way out she caught up an armful of drawings. If anything could avail her now, it might be the antagonism caused by Max's blindness where all was so clear to her.

The drawings were spread remorselessly before Max, gone over one by one; all too soon they were finished. Max sat back, having come through the ordeal better than usual. The breeze through a partly open window was chilly; Nancy shut the window, and stirred up her fire. Then she put over the kettle; and as it began its familiar song she tried to wonder at her own panic. Here she was in her own little room, giving him tea as she had a hundred times before, delighting in the little ministry, delighting in her pleasant intercourse with him. What had she found to be afraid of?

Max, thwarted in his attempt to talk about what interested, yes, still interested him, leaned back in his chair and watched her. It was sweet to see her ministering to him, sweet to be alone with her in the stillness, with the fire crackling and the kettle humming. He had just had one of her periodical exhibitions of her essential distance from him; but for all her alien power, how simple and housewifely she now looked, with her fair hair and neat waist and deft hands!

It took little enough, after all, to make him happy; for he was happy now in a sober twilit way. Nancy didn’t love him, and he was glad that she didn’t; as for his loving her, that was just as it should be. If he had not loved her, he would not be here now.

She handed him his tea, her fingers never for an instant touching his as she relinquished it. “A many cups of tea you’ve given me, Nancy,” he permitted himself to say.

“ Yes. And do you know, I had an idea in the beginning that you didn’t like tea.”

“I didn’t,” he confessed. They both smiled.

“But have you actually learned to?” she pressed the subject. “ Or are you still merely polite ? ”

“I never yet went very far out of mere politeness,” said Max.

She stirred the sugar into her tea, crushed the pulp from a slice of lemon, and drank the mixture at a draught. “I was very thirsty,” she said. “Here’s hoping I may fill you many more cups. Are you ready for a second ? ”

She was handling the situation now; and seeing her handle it, Max suddenly hated her, hated her for her damned adequacy, and for the well-ordered life that held no place for him.

“ I hope so,” he said. “ I’m not sure. But things are getting to the point here where I may be able to leave them to some one else.”

“ Max,” said Nancy suddenly, “ do you know, I think in a way it will be quite as well if you do go home, and if you go before very long?”

In his startled silence he heard a coal fall in the grate. “You mean— ?” he stammered.

“ I mean that, although I owe my own acquaintance with you to this project of yours, you have never seemed to me to fit into the life you have lived here. I know it is intended as an interval; but somehow I never like to think of you as a waiter upon doorsteps. In your own country you are different; I know you are. And I have an idea somehow that your own country needs you.”

“ Perhaps it does. I am sure I once thought so,” answered Max. Ah, she talked sense — sense, but how far removed from the language in which she might have truly spoken to him.

It was growing dark now, in spite of the flickering firelight. Nancy lighted a candle on the mantel, a duenna light that gave no real illumination; she threw a fresh stick on the fire, and it caught and blazed. The unsteady light brought out gleams of gold in her fair hair, and showed little shadows in her face. She reached for a cigarette and lighted it; Max lighted one too. For him there was a subtle communion in their smoking together; he wondered if she felt it.

No, she did not feel it; she smoked because she wanted to smoke. An impulse came over Max to seize the moment, and make her once if fleetingly his. He was ashamed of the impulse; he might take no pleasure in viewing his own conduct, but at least he clung to his shreds of decency. He would go from her in the end as he had come, leaving her at least no poorer for the experience.

But here in the silence and the firelight, with the valedictory turn she had given the conversation, Max was in no position for self-defense. His hour was drawing, to a close; but he felt that he must collect himself a little before he could get properly away. “ Isn't it a little warm here ? ” he asked.

“Is it? I had thought it was cold with the window open. But open it again if you like. I am actually indifferent to temperature; I simply like to see the fire blazing.” Nancy answered watching the smoke curl from her cigarette, which with feminine economy she was smoking to the tip.

Max flung open the window, and stood inhaling the outer air. Nothing had happened to change the mood in which he had come; yet already he had stayed too long. He would go, he must go, making her, as he could not give her what he would, at least this poor gift of his silence. He turned away from the window, and came up to her side to say good-by.

Nancy flung the butt of her cigarette into the fire, and, her arm still outstretched in the gesture, looked up at him. Her fair hair and seated figure and outstretched hand, her satin-smooth forearm, her whole air of strength and candor and unconsciousness, came rushing at him, obscuring everything else. He leaned over and took her hand, intending to shake it and announce his departure. She gave it freely, her eyes a little questioning, but with never a hint of mistrust Max seized her other hand, and drew her up to him. A choir of cherubim sang in his ears; he stooped his head, and kissed her.

He went through an eternity of bliss and then an eternity of shame before he took his lips from hers and flung her out of his arms. She sank back in the chair where a minute before she had sat so peacefully, and covered her face with her hands. The white marks left by his fingers returned slowly to the color of the surrounding flesh.

Max heard his own voice; he was surprised to find it so quiet. “ I didn’t mean to do that,” he heard himself say. .“It was a brutal thing to do. You must forgive me, if you can; I got a little beside myself.”

She did not move nor answer; he went on more rapidly, “ I didn’t mean to do that, but don’t misunderstand why I did it. You weren’t to know; but you will have to know now. I love you. I’ve loved you from the moment that I first laid eyes on you. You will hate me for telling you, but it can’t be helped. I would rather you knew that than thought — anything different. And once you’re over the shock of being told, perhaps you can put it out of your mind.”

She still sat as before. Max walked two or three steps toward the door, and turned for a last look at the bowed head. Must he leave her so? Better that, perhaps, than meet the reproach in her eyes. Two steps more, and he laid his hand on the doorknob. The closing of that door would mean the end of everything; but Max gathered himself together to open it.

He became conscious of a ridiculous detail: he hadn’t his hat and coal Coming back across the room to get them, he had to pass her. And as he approached, Nancy’s hands dropped, and she lifted her head and looked at him.

She said nothing; but there was no need for words. In a lightning flash, and with a completeness which atoned for all his previous blindness, Max saw. The situation had not spared him even its last dread beauty.

“ Nancy,” he faltered, “ Nancy, I never guessed — ” She found voice at last, a weary ghost of a voice. “ No, I don’t believe you did.”

“ There isn’t any going back,” he said.

“ There isn’t any going forward.” Her head sank against the back of her chair. “Oh, I am so tired, so tired!”

He came and stood beside her. “You have been keeping this to yourself, keeping it so that I never guessed. I can’t quite see even now how you happened to—-But those things do happen. At least I am glad to know. But it has been hard for you.”

“It hasn’t been easy for either of us,” she said. “I had hoped that you would get away without my showing you anything. But I don’t mind your knowing. It doesn’t really make things any worse.”

“Worse? Do you think that things are bad? I have come a very long and crooked path to reach this; and you yourself didn’t love early and easily. It is my fault, of course, that we can’t make this the core of our lives; but at least we are not going simply to turn our backs on it.”

“ What else is there for us to do ? ”

“You have your splendid life to live; and I want you to feel that if anything I have added to it. And I have enough to do, to earn your respect and keep my own.”

“And you are going home, for good?”

He winced at her words. Even now he did not understand her, but he clung to the course that must seem right in her eyes. His own desire was to stay, and to take, to be grateful indeed for any smallest fragment; but surely his strong and single-minded Haney would never have it so.

“If I know that you are satisfied — and happy — I shall manage somehow,” he said.

“I know you will.” She had only to acquiesce; she was finding strength for that.

He put out his hand to her, and she laid hers in it. “ I shall see you again before I go,” he said, “ but this is really good-by. I may write to you — not too often — just sometimes, when things are particularly hard to stand?”

“Yes, of course.”

They looked at each other over their linked hands. “ I am proud of you,” she said softly. That at least she meant.

“ You haven’t much reason to be,” he said. “ But you shall have reason some day. Finding you was the best thing in my life, Nancy; I shall never lose you utterly.”

On that note of high resolve he thought it best to close the interview. She had gently disengaged her hand from his; and a moment later he was back in the familiar street that must down all the glimmering future grow stranger and stranger to him. He carried with him the double glory of realization and renunciation; it would take him all the rest of his life to learn the strength of that glory.

But behind him, in the room which had grown dark and alien to her sight, his strong and lovely Nancy, whom he had left free to take up the splendors that were acknowledged to be hers, prayed only for death.

CHAPTER XIV

ANCHORAGE

“ Are yon planning to be in town this summer, Nancy?” asked Roger Greene Third.

He had met her on the stairs at the Art School, and turned to go down with her. “ Shall you be in town all summer ? ” he repeated.

“ Yes, I think I shall. I think I would rather stay j here,” she answered listlessly. Looking up at him she j asked, “ And you ? ”

“ I shall be here, right enough. There is no doubt about that,” said Roger, “ and no choice. Pm going to teach all summer. At the School part of the time, of course; and then I have two private students, wealthy ones, nobs with their own studios. I go to their studios, and tap at the door like a piano-tuner. They are fools, both of them; but I can nick them accordingly.”

“Oh, Roger!” protested Nancy, hurt at the idea of Roger’s going from door to door to teach and flatter fools, Roger whose gifts should have been acclaimed by an admiring world.

Roger chuckled at her expression, and pretended to misunderstand her. “ Perhaps you wouldn’t pay yourself extra for your pupils’ stupidity,” he said. “I shall, though. It’s the chance of a life-time.”

He accompanied her to the door-step, sniffed the air, | and looked at her. “ Shall I walk a bit of the way home with you?” he asked. “They can manage without me here for half-an-hour — that is, if you’re going home.”

Nancy assented in pleased surprise, and he went back for his hat. She stood leaning against the door-jamb as she waited, and looking down the street where summer had now taken the place of spring. Max had been gone three months, and had written twice; and every hour of those three months had found her in an attitude of stiff determination, living on her will — it seemed to her now that her will must be wearing thin.

She had always a welcome for Roger, however; and to-day he made her ashamed of herself. He was not only good to her, taking time this way to walk home with her; but he attacked the whole problem of his own life in a way that shamed her. He was even looking his best as he toiled on, keeping up hope against every sort of disappointment and discouragement. He made her ashamed of her own listlessness: had she not everything in the world but one thing?

She and Roger walked across the square in silence; in silence and with a lifting heart, Nancy kept up with her friend's long strides. If she could only keep up with him in spirit, gay, gallant soul! Roger took her arm at a crossing, and Nancy looked up at him and smiled. Roger smiled back, thinking how pretty she was under her wide summer hat, which cast such a soft shadow over her eyes and her cheek-bones. “This is much jollier than working on such a morning,” he announced. “A good angel brought you to the School this morning, Nancy.”

“ I was trying to get track of a model,” Nancy explained with her usual literalness.

“Have you something under way?” asked Roger.

“Nothing of any importance. But I have been going into the country almost every day to sketch, and I thought I should like a change.”

They reached her door-step, and she glanced up at him. “Have you time to come in, Roger?” she asked.

“No. But I have inclination,” said Roger.

He followed her through the dim hall, up the old stairs to her little gray sitting-room. It was cool and quiet, just as he had seen it last, except for a bowl of roses on the table. Nancy sat down at once, as if she were too tired to stand; but Roger took up his station under the one picture, studying it attentively. “ You still keep this old thing, I see,” he remarked. “Well have to replace it with a new one some day.”

“ You couldn’t replace that picture. You keep your hands off,” she warned.

“You actually wouldn’t exchange that picture for a better by the same hand?”

“Certainly not.”

“ ‘ The bold days when we were twenty-one ? ’ ” he suggested. “ I must have been as bold as the days themselves, Nancy. I didn’t know you particularly well when I came marching down here to bestow that gift upon you; and you were just the sort of young person I can imagine showing a man the door.”

“ Oh, I don’t know! I think you and I were friends from the beginning, Roger; I never remember having to get acquainted with you.”

He turned to look at her. She had taken off her hat, and sat with her head resting against the back of her chair. It was curious that some women always looked their best when they were dead tired; curious too that Roger didn’t find more pleasure in noting how the planes of Nancy’s face had lately come out more distinctly, and the shadows about her eyes intensified their color.

She lifted her head and bethought herself of hospitality. “ Cigarettes on the table, Roger,” she said.

He opened the box where they were kept, and helped himself* “Thanks. Will you — ”

“ No, thank you. Not this early in the day.”

“Wish I had a little of your moderation.” He picked up a magazine, and began to flutter over the leaves. “ Nice work Peabody is doing now,” he commented.

“Very nice,” assented Nancy.

“His marriage has educated him,” said Roger. “He was just in the ruck before, but now he has some individuality.”

“ His wife’s ? ” inquired Nancy.

“ I don’t go so far as to say that; but he has learned from her.”

“ I like them both. They are popular in the best sense of the word,” said Nancy.

“ They’re just a bit ‘nice,’ if you ask me; but I dare say you know them better than I.”

“ I don’t know anybody well. I don’t have time to.”

“Not even when you are resting your hand?” he suggested.

“ I rest my hand by sketching out of doors. Or rather I rest my head: it’s the head that needs resting.”

“ ‘Kite-flying ’ is enough for a year’s work; I’m glad no other big effort has yet followed it,” said Roger. “ That’s the way to get on: a lot of things that you can do well without too much trying, and then a big effort, and then a lot more little things.”

“ Ye — es, but one gets weary in the day of little things, Roger.”

“That’s all for the best,” argued Roger. “And the beauty of your big things — not only their points, but their inherent beauty — You won’t be spoiled by my mentioning that, will you ? ”

“ I have other remembrances to place beside it,” she said, smiling. “Considering all the years I’ve worked with your approbation in view, a little won’t hurt me.”

“You have worked from inner compulsion, of course, but I’m glad if I helped you. Have I been rattier a slave-driver at times?”

“ Nobody knows what you’ve been to me,” she said with a seriousness for which he was not prepared, and which she herself deprecated the next instant. “I’m taking a valedictory tone to-day, Roger.”

“ It was I who took it first, I think,” said Roger. “ What business have we to be going pathetically back to old times? It was you who started me, though. You don’t look very robust. I question, I seriously question, the wisdom of your staying in town all summer.”

“If I’m not very robust, I’d rather be at home than elsewhere,” said Nancy. “ I like my own little diggings, where I can put on my own slippers and take up my own guitar and light my cigarette and be answerable to nobody.”

“ You have the true bachelor ideal,” said Roger. “ See that you live up to it. Don’t try to build Rome during the hot months. Etch, or paint fans, or even give both eye and hand a rest, and simply think pictures instead of making them.”

“ I stand out for sketching,” insisted Nancy.

“ Sketching near enough to your slippers and your guitar so that you can get back to them every night ? ”

“Yes.”

“ Your love for the country is very limited, Nancy.”

“ The country is a good thing to put in pictures. But it isn’t even the best thing, when the pictures are mine.”

“ Perhaps you haven’t awakened to it yet.”

“Perhaps I never shall. But would you like to see some of my sketches? ”

It was the offer he had been waiting for; and she went at once to fetch them. “ I think they are all here,” she announced, returning with a portfolio, “except those I destroyed in my first rage.”

Roger spread the portfolio on the table, and began to turn over the sheets. “ There is always something embryonic about your sketches,” he commented presently. “I mean, you haven’t a touch and go way with you.”

“No. There is nothing facile about me,” rejoined Nancy.

Her own words sounded sharply in her ears: no, for work or living, there was nothing facile about her. Watching Roger turn over her drawings, oblivious of her in her work, her thoughts went back unbidden to the two letters she had had from Max since his departure, brief letters which she already knew by heart. The first had told only of his arrival. In the second he stated that he had seen his partners, and Jo, and Mr. Sumner, who breathed fire and smoke; he thought Jo inclined to take a reasonable view of things. He was well, and working hard; he was going to make everything come out all right.

Haney had answered him with false encouragement, false cheer, her heart like lead as she wrote, and tore up and rewrote. She could almost smile now at the effort she had put upon those two letters; and the effort may have been perceptible to Max, for he had not written again. She would have given all her concentration now for an ordinary woman’s power of getting through the day somehow, of cheating herself if need be. But the habit of her mind was not to be changed: she could dream colors and shapes, but not reconciling heavens for herself and Max together, nor easy readjustments for either of them alone.

But Roger was a refuge, especially when she was preyed upon not only by an intricate problem but by one of those periods of inaction which are so hard for the artist to live through. She looked now at Roger’s bent head, which for all that it was Roger’s, and so a thing apart, appeared to her now as everything must sooner or later, a set of planes and lines, and a color plan. She noted especially the touch of squareness in his jaw, and his short nose with its fine nostrils, and the amusing fact that his skin seemed but a lighter tone of the color of his hair. Roger wouldn’t be an easy subject: he was too mobile and fluid to be easily imprisoned in a picture. But he would make a wonderful picture, if he could be got.

Roger looked up suddenly, and caught her eye, not anxiously expecting his criticism, but acutely appraising him. He delivered his comment, however. “ You needn’t be ashamed of what you have here,” he said. “I know you won’t overvalue it, either. But there is a point or two, if you care to hear — ”

She moved around to his side of the table, and Roger began to explain his points. She argued a few of them with something like her old spirit, and Roger felt happier. Nancy couldn’t be stopped: even these “ embryonic ” draw mgs showed him proof of her progress, which accumulated power as an avalanche might, and yet unfolded as simply and beautifully as the petals of a flower. In that progress Boger had always taken delight, both direct and vicarious.

Toward that progress he had felt in some measure responsible ; he felt responsible toward nothing else in Nancy.

He didn’t resent her having to walk a thorny path; philosophically speaking, he thought it might be a good thing for her. But to see actual marks of thorns — and not even healed scars at that — made him uncomfortable. He still lacked a little of that fine hardness which he hoped one day to attain.

Their discussion had drawn near to a natural close, and Nancy was examining with a rueful smile a sketch which stood convicted in her own esteem, when they were startled by a ring at the bell. Nancy jumped, and blanched. “ It must be the postman,” she said, and went to see.

Did she always start at a sudden sound, he wondered; or had the postman’s ring become a matter of such moment to her? He didn’t care to know; indeed he wished himself somewhere else, and began to recollect that he had much overstayed his allotted time. He was ready for his farewell when she came back with a letter in her hand; but something, in her face stopped him.

“ You will excuse me, Boger?” she asked. Boger, decently desiring not to see too much, helped himself to a fresh cigarette, and strolled over to the bookcase. His young friend’s taste was for solid reading of a peculiarly uninspiring sort: perusing the titles of her volumes, Boger wondered what possible imaginative stimulus she could get from most of them.

There was silence in the room until, his cigarette finished,

Boger turned from the bookcase. Then he saw Nancy leaning back in her chair, with the neatly folded letter in her hand; her face was as white as if she had fainted. “ Nancy, mjr dear, bad news?” he cried.

No, No news in particular,” she said. She tried to speak naturally, but her lips seemed to be stiff; it was hard for her to form the words.

Roger came over to her and took her free hand. He felt her fingers press his convulsively; she laid her head down on her other arm and burst into tears. The letter fell to the floor, and lay with the postmark exposed.

It was, indeed, except for a woman who had lately learned to read between the lines, no letter at all; for such a woman, it was altogether too much, in its reticence and its determined cheerfulness. Yet Nancy might have weathered it, with a heart that was not yet too weary to be resolute, if Roger had not been there. But Roger was there, dear good Roger; and he had come up and taken her hand in his own, his pitying strong hand, without ever waiting to learn what the trouble was, simply letting her know that he was sorry. So Nancy sobbed; and she felt his other hand stroking her hair, lightly, regularly, tenderly.

Roger had, indeed, no need of looking at the tell-tale envelope to know what the trouble was. She was going very deep at last: life had her in its clutches. According to Roger’s code she was also going wrong: he held that love was its own justification, and the artist least of all could afford to deny his love. But he respected conviction, if not wherever he met it, at least wherever he met it allied with other things that he respected.

He felt an ache at his own heart as he watched her; but perhaps that was not so strange, either, when she clung to him as she cried, and her long sobs seemed to come to him through the hand that she held, and shake him too. How small she looked, with her strong face hidden! How soft her hair was under his hand, and how gracious the line of it along her neck! There must be pain in seeing her so, if only because she was the last woman on earth whom he could have imagined as giving herself away. It was to him that she made the singular exhibition, only becauseto her mind he was something between an embodied precept and a nice old gentleman.

It seemed to Roger as if he stood so for a long time, feeling her sobs and her softness and her strength^ but as a matter of fact it was only briefly that she clung to him. Perhaps the realization that she did so brought her to herself; at any rate she let go his hand, and sat up and wiped her eyes. “ I’m sorry, Roger,” she said faintly, “ I didn’t mean to make a fuss.”

“My dear girl, make all the fuss you like,” answered Roger. “ I only hope it did you a little good.”

She shook her head, but felt compelled to consider the point: with her grave good manners, she began to explain. “I didn’t do it to make myself feel better, and I doubt if it made me. I couldn’t help myself, and I’m sorry. It was seeing you just as you always have been — and you’ve always been so good to me, Roger — ”

The nice old gentleman, so shrewdly recognized by Roger, suddenly appeared as Soger’s own independent creation. For Roger, looking down at Nancy’s tear-stained face and wet eyes raised to him, backed away from her and drew in his breath sharply. He saw at last what her feeling for him was, saw that he had misunderstood its kind and underrated its degree.

It was no wonder that he had misunderstood, for her idealism underlay a hard, powerful, achieving character, and it was chiefly upon that that Roger had set himself to work. She had learned well the lesson that he had set himself to teach her, had come to worship the veiled mistress who doles out scant rewards and unending sacrifices, and who for all that is still the only one to be adored by the Roger Greenes of the earth and by their conscientious disciples, with such strength that Roger had rested in her perfection. The gods had rewarded an unwilling schoolmaster when they sent him one such student.

But he had never suspected her of turning upon him, and identifying him with the things he stood for. He had long been conscious of her admiration, had indeed rather reveled in it, as admiration of a high quality, and not altogether undeserved. But he was not prepared to have her worship him. And the love which she was even now denying made her lean all the more strongly on that worship. Perceiving all this in a flash, Roger Greene stood aghast.

He wanted to feel decently undeserving: only so could he get the full flavor of her homage. But he overshot the mark terribly. He felt not only undeserving, but absolutely unclean.

That was absurd, of course. Watching Nancy dry her eyes and put her hair straight, he tried to get back to his normal frame of mind. He only took life as it came to him, and interpreted it as he must; in the zones of his life which concerned her, he was sufficiently near to what Nancy thought him. He was high aspiring and conscientious; he had been able to open things to Nancy that she couldn’t have opened to herself. And where their lives diverged and their tastes differed, he had the fullest sympathy for her. Then why should he judge himself by a standard for which he had no regard, the missish standard which unaccountably continued to exist in Nancy side by side with the full-grown artist?

It wasn’t a question of judging, however. He simply stood rebuked. Before her candid adoring eyes he felt himself a beast He hadn’t ever asked her to look up to him but he knew now that he would feel it horribly if she ever came to look down upon him.

All this time he was saying soothing things to her: “ It was seeing a friendly face when you happened to be down. —You are tired out, and really ought to have a rest.— Or a change of scene; change is more important than rest.— I wish you would promise me to try being good to yourself— just for a month, if you think you can’t stand it any longer.” Quite the nice old gentleman, in fact.

She had recovered enough to be ashamed of her outburst; but she was still a little beyond herself. “ I am ready to promise anything, or at least to promise to try,” she said. “ I’m sorry I have behaved so, but perhaps it has done me good. I’m sure it has; and it always does me good, Roger, to think how you stand behind me. Sometimes just knowing that you are in the same world — ”

“Heavens! Do I have to stay that far away?” he demanded. The old gentleman in playful mood.

Nancy laughed outright. “ Don’t pay any attention to my idiocy, Roger. Don’t even listen to it, or you may hear more than you are meant to.”

He had already heard more than he could assimilate.

CHAPTER XV

ROGER'S CHANCE

That night Roger went as usual to his beloved; indeed he was more than commonly alert to her charm. He sought to be beguiled, if that were possible, or freed, if it were necessary. In Nancy's little gray room he had been for a moment swayed by a gust from another world; and after his first bitterness died away, it seemed to him that he had gone some distance, not toward hating Mary, but toward putting her delicately and deliberately behind him, like the fragrant but inevitably forgotten follies of youth.

Yet when the afternoon shadows lengthened, and he knew that she would be waiting for him, he went to Mary; and before dusk came he had realized that she was the greatest present reality of his life, and was not even on the road toward being forgotten. In Nancy's atmosphere he must admit the validity of what Nancy stood for, even when it told against himself. But when Mary flashed before him as the joyous climax of his day, setting her laughing lips to his, throwing one of her satin-smooth and steel-strong arms about his neck, perhaps, and speaking his name with the voice that was like the liquid murmur of a man's own heart—-then doubt died, and then was born the desire that brings its own satisfaction. Mary stood to him for lyric love, the love that comes flaminghaired and with its arms full of roses. Roger loved roses, desired roses, could never get enough of roses. Could he even dream a dream that Mary would not sooner or later draw down to herself, and fill with the scent of her roses, and with the opulence of her red hair? Could he have a longing that she would not some time feel and satisfy, and in the very satisfying lead him gloriously on to a new one ?

Couldn’t she at every turn defeat or reward him; and didn’t every reward proclaim him once more hers, and every defeat make him hers doubly, triply ?

Mary had come back to town as soon as her tour dosed, and had settled in her town house. There was no question of the Adirondacks this summer; Soger’s arrangements held him in town, and in town Mary stayed. She and Roger made little excursions into the country; but the focus of their life was Mary’s house. It was a convenient haven for Roger; but it was more especially a perfect setting for Mary. His heart always beat higher when he crossed the threshold into the dim rich hall; and if she appeared at the top of the stair-case, her very hair shadowy in the dimness, and then came slowly down to him, making a fresh picture on every stair, at that moment Roger tasted perfection.

A man could not pass easily back and forth between this atmosphere and Nancy’s; but he went to see Nancy along in July. He felt himself a wretch, because he had come now and because he hadn’t come sooner: because Nancy made him ashamed of himself, and because his shame didn’t go deeper. He half-wished that his impression of his last visit might be effaced; but although there was no repetition of Nancy’s outburst, he saw again that she still looked at him as she didn’t perhaps look at any one else At any rate, she still seemed to gather a certain strength from his very presence, that presence which she must think him so chary of bestowing on her.

She had been working doggedly, indoors and out, drawing and drawing and drawing, as if she had the rudiments of drawing still to learn. She brought some of her drawings for him to see, and waited with a certain anxiety for his word of correction or commendation. Then she made him tea, according to their time-honored custom; and when he left she said with a shade of wistfulness, “ Come again, Roger.” Her weary eyes showed how little she slept nowadays; her pale cheeks and thinning arms, and the big sheaf of drawings, bore witness to her constant struggle to be quite herself; and she was sufficiently herself to say only “ Come again, Roger.”

Roger promised, fully intending to keep his word, and managed nevertheless to break it. The word was broken, however, not because she divided him against himself; he admired her on the whole for being able to do that. But as a matter of brute fact, he was cruelly overworked that summer, and had to steal even the time he gave to Mary. He had got into debt during the winter: it wasn't through extravagance, heaven knew, but living expenses went right on, no matter whether your heart were full or empty, and his association with Mary had entailed first and last a good deal of expense. Then in the spring his mother had gone into a hospital for an operation, which was followed by a long trip for purposes of recuperation.

So that summer Roger not only taught his classes and his “nobs,” but worked ceaselessly at pot-boiling. With never a minute to do what he liked, he was always busy with the tools of his trade. A good deal of this was work which could be skimped; indeed he was expected to skimp, and paid on the presumption that skimping had taken place. But Roger hadn't an ounce of pot-boiler in his composition. In spite of his understanding and against his will, he had to put his best into everything. And he felt himself spent in the process, spent and wasted; he shuddered when he realized that he was nearing forty, and nothing better seemed to lie ahead of him.

He sometimes blamed Mary because, although she must see something of his difficulties, she never tried to help him. Perhaps he should have been glad that she didn't set herself to hinder; but he ground his teeth when he thought of his picture of her, long projected but never begun. It wouldn't have hurt Mary to let him paint it: the picture, if it were anything like as good as he might reasonably have expected to make it, would only have showed publicly a fresh aspect of her beauty and her never-dying charm.

It would have meant so much to him: notice, favor, a start in the right direction. And apart from any substantial advantage that might have accrued to either of them, it seemed to him that the highest possible expression of their union would be for him to paint her. But he no longer spoke to her about that picture; like their marriage, it had joined the category of the undiscussed.

He didn’t wish to be unjust to Mary. He supposed that early and unquestioned success must put one rather out of touch with people; and he wouldn’t for the world have had her suppose that he wished to profit vulgarly by his association with her.

It is impossible, however, to guess the whole truth even about those who are nearest us; and he was unjust in supposing that she maintained her silken composure without a struggle. There were times indeed, and these the majority of times, when it came of itself, being so steadily the habit of her life; but there were other times when she had to struggle to maintain it, half for his sake, because gaiety was the greatest thing she could give him, and half for very pride, and to keep her own heart from breaking.

For she knew in outline the trials of Roger’s life, and she divined the crosses of his temperament. She would have liked to do something for him, something great, something signal; and the best that she could do, take it all in all, was only to encourage him in silly gaiety, to raise with him the laughter which she herself likened to the crackling of thorns.

Sometimes indeed, when he came to her dead tired, raw with life’s bruises, she gave in for a moment to this ambushing necessity; then at least she could draw his head down to her shoulder, and hold him so in the quiet and the darkness. But at the very moment when the necessity might have become imperious, Roger would rally, and demand wine or food or kisses; and so the cloud would pass, and she would give him mere tangibility in place of a living sacrifice. For she was happy with him; and intellectual completeness or spiritual fullness was not necessary to her. But when she thought of herself in connection with him, even in the happiest hours of that second summer, it was not as lyric love that she was pictured. In her own eyes she was, when she paused briefly to think what she was, a woman enjoying the love of her life in the desperate knowledge that it must some day pass from her.

She saw more of certain circumstances than Roger guessed. He dropped down on her at all sorts of odd hours; and before her reluctant eyes was uncovered the under surface of his life. Commonly she ignored it; but when she must take them, those looks at the under surface were astonishingly painful. To see the luminous youth being kicked and cuffed about by fate, to watch the lines around his mouth deepen, and gray begin to creep into his hair — it was like watching a slow desecration, the ruin of something precious and privileged. He showed such unexpected patience, too: for instance, in his relations with his mother, in his refusal to complain even to Mary of her exactions and petty tyrannies, though he couldn’t always prevent Mary’s finding out about them. He was with all his weaknesses so much a man, and through all his troubles of a nature so gallant — she wouldn’t have had him otherwise. But he had won his spurs, and they ought to be given to him; it was time his qualities began to be recognized, and to bear a little fruit for their possessor.

One hot day he came to her late in the afternoon, utterly spent. Mary was seated at a table in her upstairs sitting-room, reading a manuscript play as she waited for him. She wore a sage-green gown, cut square in the neck, with a cluster of valley lilies pinned at her girdle. More lilies of the valley stood in a crystal vase on the table; and a little ivorry carving, which repeated and deepened their tint, had been placed beside them. Such harmonies Roger had every day offered to him; sometimes he remarked upon them, and sometimes he did not. Mary glanced up when he entered, saw how tired he was, and left him to his own devices. Roger crossed the room, kissing her in passing, and stretched himself on the couch that stood near the open windows; in two minutes he was asleep.

Mary, watching him over the edge of her play, saw that he slept. She went softly over to him, drew the shades, and took a superfluous cushion out from under his head. Roger, lying more easily and ceasing to scowl, slept with the stillness of the dog-weary.

Mary abandoned all pretense of other occupation, now that no eye was on her, and sat beside him watching him. How awfully tired he must be to sleep like that and not even to feel her near him, she whose slightest movement was normally enough to rouse him. How thin he was! Of course, he was naturally thin: Roger fat wouldn’t have been Roger. But you didn’t notice it when he talked to you, his features animated, his words streaming from him, his nervous hands always in play. Now he lay so still, with one arm thrown above his head; she could scarcely see him breathe. A shiver passed over Mary, a breath from the mortality of things young and fair, and all unready for death. It was followed by a quick, passionate yearning to do something for him, something great enough to count in a life as hard as his. It was much, to be sure, that he had her to come to at a moment like this; but it wasn’t enough.

She leaned with her elbow on his pillow, brooding wistfully over his slumbers. When her still watching grew at length too painful, she stooped with one of her warm impulses and touched his wrist with her lips. Instantly the arm that had been above his head came down, imprisoning her as it came; Roger opened his eyes, and drew her face down to his. “ Did you think that you could kiss me without wakening me?” he whispered. “How lovely you are, sweetheart, with that warm sunlight on your ivory skin and your ivory flowers! You’re Diana-like to-day.”

Mary, not moving enough to disturb his arm, found his cigarettes, put one in his mouth and lighted it for him. Roger, having got it going, drew her head down to rest on his shoulder. “ Comfy, dear ? ” he asked.

“Yes. And you?”

“ Perfectly happy,” he assured her. He stirred a little, and laid his cheek against her hair; then he finished his cigarette, dropping the ashes luxuriously on the rug.

“Have you had a hard day?” she murmured.

“Devilish day. Don’t speak of it; I want to forget that there are so many fools in the world as I have been up against to-day. I don’t want to remember anything, except that I’m here, and have you.”

“You’ll want your dinner, won’t you?” she suggested.

“ Oh, yes, presently! I shall want a very good dinner.”

“ And something to drink ? ”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Would you like something to drink right now, dearest?”

“No. Wine with my dinner is enough. Anything else plays the deuce with one’s work the next day.”

“Oh!” Mary laughed shortly. “Always our work — always and forever our work! ”

Roger laughed too, rubbing his cheek against her hair. “Always and forever each other, I should prefer to think. But you know very well, Mary, that if I actually interfered with your precious work, you couldn’t turn me out fast enough.”

Mary shivered. In some concern Roger put his free hand under her chin and lifted her face to look into it. “What’s the matter, Mary, honey?” he asked. “Has somebody been abusing you ? ”

His concern for her was sincere enough, and usually touched her; but just now it came as a reproach. “ Somebody walked over my grave, I think,” die said.

There was a pause. Roger yawned, and the hand that rested on her shoulder patted it slowly. “Roger!” said Mary sharply.

“Yes?”

“When two people — two people like us, I mean — love each other, their work, Roger — ”

Nothing else roused Roger like a chance to theorize. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, without releasing his hold of her. “When two people like us, by which I suppose you mean two artists, love each other, in the beginning their love refreshes them, and stimulates them in their work. My own belief is, Mary, that all the art in the world begins somehow between a man and a woman. Sex is as necessary to production as it is to reproduction. Most artists And it easy to love a little here, and a little there; and so the work goes on, and the exhausted spirit perpetually renews itself.”

“ And then, Roger ? ”

“Then? They either get tired of the affair, or they try to come between the beloved object and his work. That’s only natural, isn’t it?” He wondered in passing what she was driving at: Mary did not usually encourage him to theorize.

Mary was silent a moment; then she said gravely, “Yes, that is usually what happens. I can understand their tiring of the affair — most affairs get very tiresome; but when they haven’t tired, is that other necessary? They needn’t try to cut each other off from work, need they? Because they both ought to understand, and to know where the emphasis must come. I don’t say that I haven’t sometimes rebelled against the necessity of your work when it kept us apart. But I’ve only profited through you; and if you haven’t profited through me, it has been my own beastly disposition that’s to blame, not anything in the nature of the case.”

“Mary, you Shylock! Profit and loss, between us!” Again he used his free hand to turn her face to him.

“Why are you striking this trial balance to-day?”

“It is merely an impressive preface,” said Mary, smiling faintly. “I can't just go and do things, you see; I have to set the stage.”

What comes after the preface ? ”

“ An announcement that in case you still desire to paint my portrait — I'm going to let you.”

Roger stared at her for a moment incredulously, and then bounded from the couch in his excitement. “ Mary, you beauty, you world's wonder!” he cried. He began to stride up and down the room, dazzled by this sudden permission. “Oh, how I can do you! You were made to be painted.”

Mary, on her knees beside the couch, watched him with a rueful smile. Didn't he realize what the material was with which she purposed to pave his pathway to glory? Hadn't he a thought for what it would mean to her to have his critical painter's eye turned on her aging face, appraising every inch of her body? No, he hadn't even a hint. She was simply the most tempting subject that he knew, and he had always yearned to paint her, and had put his longing out of sight at her command, which he had never in the least understood. So now he did not guess that she was immolating her inmost pride for him.

But if he didn't correctly value her sacrifice, at least he appreciated the magnificence of his opportunity. Her coloring, her superlative grace, her wonder and wistfulness and power — what a picture he could make of her! A dozen poses, a score of costumes, suggested themselves to him on the instant; he had at once to thresh them all out with himself, and discard each in turn. And as his jaded mind responded thus magically to the unexpected stimulus, he allowed Mary to get to her feet unaided, and go, still unthanked, to order the wine for his dinner.

When she returned, however, she found herself seized at the door. “Mary, my darling, it's wonderful of you to let me do it! I know you never wished to; and perhaps it was natural for you to hesitate, thinking as you doubtless did that mine was a ’prentice hand. You won’t think that when you see the picture, I promise you. Don’t wait until then to believe that I love you; but then you will know that I do. You can’t help seeing it.”

Having made her surrender, Mary would have scorned to grudge either him or herself the fruits of it. She turned a smiling attention to his ceaseless chatter during dinner; and when they were alone in the dining-room she took her wine-glass in her hand, and came around the table to sit on his knee. Roger begged for a little poem of Henley’s that he loved to have at such a moment; and Mary obediently recited,

“ ‘ Fill a glass with golden wine,

And the while your lips are wet,

Set their perfume unto mine,

And forget

Every kiss we take or give

Leaves us less of life to live.’”

She loved the poem, for all its deadly applicability; but what Roger chiefly loved was her inflection as she gave it. She was all exquisiteness as she sat so, the shape and color and sound and odor of her all penetrating him, and yet all so delicately. She was delicate, from her flaming hair to her slender feet; yet she was so strong, so vital. She could have destroyed him, he sometimes felt, if she had turned her mind to destroying; and instead she chose to come and sit here and hold her brimming glass to his lips, as if for a symbol.

When at length they went up to her sitting-room he kept her at his side; and they sat in the darkness by the open window, and watched the buildings picked out in light. They often sat so, on that low couch piled with cushions; but seldom as long as they were sitting to-night.

Once she murmured, without turning her head, “ Aren’t you tired?” and Roger answered, “I’m never tired when “I hold you, Mary.” His cheek rested against her hair.

Indeed he was hot conscious of fatigue, he who had come to her so utterly weary. He was thinking of his picture, and of his indicible Mary; and again of his picture, and again of his wonderful Mary; and again and always of his picture. He wasn't tired; he surely couldn't have slept. But things shifted a little somehow; and presently he was aware that he was waking. The same summer breeze still cooled his forehead; but he reached out in sudden panic, lest he should find Mary gone.

She was still there; he drew her to him. “ I'm a nice companion for you, dozing off like an octogenarian,” he muttered.

“ You were so tired, dear,” she said simply.

He knew without asking that she hadn't been asleep; he took it for granted that she wouldn't go oafishly to sleep, as mere everlasting weariness had made him. What he didn't divine was that the warm sweet darkness had wooed her too, but that to-night she felt she couldn't by losing consciousness ever so beautifully miss one of those fleeting moments which it was granted her to spend at his side.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

The picture was begun at once, as Mary had foreseen that it would be. Roger threw overboard without a qualm everything, profitable or unprofitable, that might interfere with this new undertaking. Either he believed that it spelled success at last, or he was so fascinated that he didn’t care. Probably the second was the true explanation; for although Roger’s vision included all possibilities, he had got out of the way of expecting favors from Fortune. He had gone to painting in the beginning for the love of it, and kept on loving it when all he had for his pains was his labor and his own inner satisfaction. He didn’t despise success; but there were times, blessed times, when other things dwarfed it.

Roger did not proceed by careful studies, in the manner of his friend and pupil Nancy Desmond. His own method was simply to immerse himself in his subject until something in his brain touched off the gunpowder train that led to his hand; forthwith he fell at once upon the canvas, and began to paint like a fury. For a man of his temperament and a painter of his experience, the whole point lay in getting the attack.

In the matter of Mary’s portrait he was perplexed by the selection of pose, costume, and dominating mood; he had lived himself into this particular subject to his own bewilderment. He got copies of such of Mary’s photographs as he did not already own; he was already familiar with every line of her two famous portraits. Alexander had painted her seated and facing you, with her lovely long hands clasped on her knee, her eyes looking out of the canvas, a faint smile on her lips; her hair was drawn a little over her forehead, as if the painter had not quite relished the peak in the hair-line. Sargent had painted her some years earlier; and he had her in profile standing at one edge of the canvas, her right hand crushing a flower to her mouth, her left arm flung out across the canvas. Her draperies swirled off into nothing; her hair blended into the background, as if it were of no importance. It was her bare arms, with their exquisite contour and almost fiendish energy, that were the point of the picture.

One of these portraits showed a lovely celebrity on parade, the other a passionate, idiosyncratic, self-conscious artist. Roger, having advantages not possessed by either Sargent or Alexander, proposed to go a step beyond them, and out of the welter of his conscious and unconscious impressions to evolve for a world that might be struck, though it would probably fail to understand, a picture of Mary Allen the woman.

But how paint Mary Allen the woman, when he knew so many Mary Allens? After a week of frantic struggling, during which he was extremely disagreeable to Mary and almost unbearable to himself, Roger changed the question to why paint Mary Allen the woman ? After all, his business was not to surpass any other picture, but to get his own; and not'to set forth a thesis, but simply to get a picture.

Considering only her grace and coloring, he began to see his way more clearly; and in another week the picture was taking shape in his mind, much the same shape it eventually assumed on his canvas.

He had her have a costume made, he himself selecting the material and drawing the design. It was green of the shade of pale jade, very long, fitting her slender figure like a glove, and cut square in the neck. About her throat, and extending almost to her knees, he put a chain of jade and old-blue beads, picked out with occasional gold. He wished to have her sit in the old carved chair which he called hers; but to get her fine long lines at their finest and longest he decided to have her sit on one arm of it, with a hand on the other arm to support herself. He threw a strong, slanting light on her face and her long white throat and her marvelous hair, which blazed in the high lights, and in the shadows blended richly with the fine old wood of the chair-back. Shadowy by comparison with the light on her head, but clearly worked out nevertheless, were the lovely lines of her limbs and her supple torso, brought out by the trailing, clinging dress and emphasized by the fall of the Saracen beads.

Mary was inclined to jeer at the idea of being painted perched on a chair-arm—“and in this gown, Roger, I shall look long enough for two women.” But she gave him his own way in the matter, and admired the chain at least; he had designed that too. When in any connection Mary had made up her mind to yield, she was not one to be niggardly about details. She not only yielded; she did her best to understand his meaning, and to help him in every possible way. It was she, for instance, who insisted on the picture’s being painted at his studio, because there they would be secure from interruption; and she held to her decision, although it was blazing hot up under the roof on these July days.

Other things besides the heat taxed Mary’s resources in the time when that picture was being painted. She had never before seen Roger at work; and to watch him now at work on her, dashing along under a full head of steam, unconscious of his Mary except as a collection of lines and tints, hurt her curiously. This eager, intent man, who forgot both himself and her in his task — was this the true Roger, and her lover merely a passing, phase ?

Roger worked long days, thereby involving long days for her. Mary was strong, but between tenseness and suppression she taxed her strength prodigally. As the first hour of a sitting drew out to a second, and the second perhaps gave place to a third, she would sit with her eveiy nerve on the stretch, her back and her extended arm aching, a lump in her throat from sheer fatigue, and watch on the wall opposite her the old plaster mask of Homer, with the dust in his beard and the unchanging black tip to his nose. Meanwhile Roger, smeared to his elbows, would be working away, completely absorbed and blissful, and as unconscious of her as if she had been a lay figure.

Then perhaps, just as the lump in her throat was swelling monstrously, he would throw down his palette and come over to her in two strides. He would lift her bodily from the chair and carry her over to his couch, and make her lie there while he got lunch. Sometimes they had something sent in; but oftener she expressed a preference for the funny little messes which he cooked, and it delighted him to cook them for her. She always had to make the coffee, however, for he had discovered in her a talent for making coffee.

When they had finished their meal she must rest again; and he would sit beside her as she rested, and talk to her. But Mary never rested long. She would see Roger’s glance begin to stray back to his canvas; and she would jump up, protesting herself perfectly refreshed, and begin to rearrange her hair. Roger often demurred, but his demurs got fainter moment by moment; and when she at length went to her chair and resumed her back-breaking pose, he would follow, and fall to.

The afternoon hours were in point of fact longer than the morning: on these summer days the light was good for such a very long time. But they seemed shorter to Mary, because they led directly toward that blessed climax when work was over for the day: when Roger, with his head a little on one side, would step back for a last appraising look at the canvas, and begin vigorously to scrape his palette. That meant that in a quarter of an hour they would both be in the street, where the faithful Ed had been waiting for them, they did not know how long; they never descended so early that they did not find him there.

Then they would go for a drive, to cool them and fill their lungs with air. Leaning back on the cushions, seldom saying a word, rarely looking at each other, they rode and rode, as day died and night came creeping upon them.

It was always with regret that they gave the word to turn back; yet when they reached Mary’s house their quiet was succeeded by a grateful gaiety. She would rush away from him at the beginning, and return in a surprisingly short time bathed and coiffed and freshened, the spare gown of the portrait exchanged for something soft and intricate, akin to what she had worn the night before, yet subtly different. Then they would dine, on plates of things green and mounds of things icy, at a glittering and flower-decked table.

They always drank wine with their dinner, although in all likelihood neither of them would have had it if alone; Roger was abstemious perforce, and Mary because for an actress who has a voice and a physique to preserve, abstemiousness is only common prudence. But it wasn’t the wine, well as they liked it, that they both remembered afterward. Roger, questioned as to what composed those little dinners, would following his recollection have answered flowers: yellow roses strewn upon a white cloth, crimson roses lifted in a crystal vase above the bare shining wood, sweet-peas like a myriad delicate butterflies hovering over a crystal bowl, smilax twisting out among the knives and forks from a mound of violets in the center.

Many things Roger took for granted; but he used to remark upon the flowers. It pleased Mary when he remarked upon them; those table decorations were executed by Th6r£se, who had a nice talent for arranging flowers; but they were all planned by Mary, ordered before she went to Roger in the morning, imagined, perhaps, during the long hours of a night when she was too tired to sleep. She was glad that Roger loved her flowers; she wanted, always, to bring him roses in full hands. She had loved flowers herself; but her flowers meant no more to her now than the food she sent away untouched, or the wine she sipped without tasting it. For Roger now lived in a complex of things and sensations, centering to be sure about Mary and her portrait; but Mary ate and drank only Roger.

After their protracted dinner they sometimes went in search of amusement: for when Roger was working hard, and things were going well, evening often found him keyed up to a pitch where excitement was grateful. He wanted to go somewhere where there were crowds: if strangers to him, so much the better; if obviously pleasure-bent noisy fools, none the worse. He wanted to take Mary in his arms and dance. And Mary, marble-white under her delicate rouging, could dance on and on, so long as his arm was about her and his desire led her.

Perhaps Roger would perceive her weariness, and tax her with it. Mary, even if she had just been resenting his lack of perception, would deny that she was tired. But Rogers conscience would have its say; and the next evening or two Mary and Roger would spend quietly.

Sometimes they stationed themselves by her sitting-room windows in the summer darkness, and watched the stars above the line of the roofs; and the fragrant darkness seemed to find its own expression in Mary’s wonderful voice, never more wonderful than in these hushed halfconscious moments.

Or they would call her car — they called it even late at night. They gave directions to start off into the country ; and for hours they would ride on, without destination and careless of direction. They did not ride during these evening hours as they were wont to ride at sunset, side by side and in silence; now his arm was always about her, his cheek against her hair, his voice in her ear. And in spite of her weariness and her underlying consciousness that all this must pass, and a great deal of her life remain to be lived when she and Roger should meet as strangers — in spite of fatigue and forebodings, and occasional resentment of her friend’s callousness and lapses, Mary lived these days to the full, and the taste of them was sweet on her lips, even when her lips were wet with her own tears.

That very summer there was a little while, indeed, when •he almost believed that the unbelievable had happened; and all the magnificence and terror of life seemed to descend upon her then. She was mistaken, of course, and she was glad that even Roger had no suspicion of her mistake. Yet that blinding moment when she had been hurled off her feet, when existence as she had known it seemed to sink far away below the level of her sight, and the things within combined with the things without to rise up and call her woman—that moment was for all its terror the sweetest that Roger ever gave her; and Roger never knew.

His own love for her seemed to reach a climax that summer. A climax — and the climax precedes the waning. Was he, Mary sometimes wondered as she sat holding her pose and watching him, painting her out of himself ? That quick hard glance at his model, his absorption as he turned back to his canvas, his swift pacings to and fro, sharp brushings-in and impulsive rubbings-out, all showed her an alien Roger, electrical still, perhaps, but not in her direction: intent for hours at a time, in her otherwise magic company, on something besides her magic self. He still loved her, to be sure; but would he end by loving only her beauty, or — not even loving her beauty, but only his own rendition of it?

Just when Mary, weary, wistful, beginning in spite of herself to droop in her position, had decided that the end of all things must come soon, and had raised her eyes to the dreary, dirty face of Homer — just then, doubtless, Roger would throw his palette in one direction and his apron in another, and come striding over to seize her. His gray eyes would gleam into hers, his lips touch her cheek; he would pick her up bodily, because he knew his strength was sweet to her. His remorse was sweet, too, as he cried, “ Here I’ve tired you all out again, like the brute that I am! Why didn’t you say something? Do you want to die at your post, like Casabianca? If you die at your post, how will the picture ever be finished? Mary, you fool, you angelic little fool! There, lie still while I get you something to eat. So. Close your eyes — that’s right. What do you want to eat, Mary? Little sausages in tomato sauce?

Mary, lying with her eyes obediently closed, her tired limbs gratefully relaxed, would know again the sweet eense of being taken care of, would feel that now at least he loved her, come what might. And she would open her eyes long enough to say, “ Little sausages will be delicious, dear, and I am hungry. Will you please give me a drink of water before you begin?

Roger brought the water, and held it for her while she drank. For an hour, perhaps, he would be always about her, solicitous, ridiculous, lovable. Then in spite of himself his eyes would begin to stray toward his canvas. So she would shake him off, and get to her feet with one of her swift graceful movements. Nine times out of ten it was she who gave the word to get back to work; but she never gave it until she saw his thoughts turn workward. When they did, however, she never tarried. She could make any effort that was demanded of her — how else had she got where she now was? Only she couldn’t go with any eagerness to meet an effort when it brought about a result like the exchange of Roger’s solicitude, the feeling of him near her, taking care of her, thinking perpetually of her, for his quick hard glance across space, his silence, his absorption, his creative hand.

The progress of the picture Mary watched curiously. Her cultivation of her own art had given her a general appreciation of other arts; and if she had seen the painting first in a completed state, her judgment would not have been unintelligent. But she got her own effects so viva voce, so in person and directly, that she couldn’t see an , effect ahead when a man spent day after day daubing with paint, and seemed to produce nothing but a blur.

Roger surprised her once or twice standing before the i canvas and studying it in bewilderment. “Looks like a mess?” he suggested. “Wait a bit, dear, and see how it looks later.”

She waited a bit, waited quite a bit, and it didn’t look any more intelligible. It looked, indeed, like confusion worse confounded; and she began to have lurking doubts as to whether anything would ever come of it. And then one day, when she glanced at it only in passing, she suddenly saw. She wheeled to face it and stood gazing, her lips a little parted, her breath coming quicker. When Roger, advancing to begin the day’s work, found her so, she signaled him with her hand to be quiet. He stood watching her, seeing reflected in her face the understanding that was dawning on her. At length she turned, , wide-eyed. “This justifies everything, Roger,” she said solemnly. “ This is the answer.”

For a space they stood so in silence, scarcely breathing, she lost in wonder because she had seen, and he in admiration of her for seeing. And it was borne in upon them both, with the clearness to which things attain only in supreme moments, that this thing called art, which the multitude looked upon as a filling for idle moments, was to them the justification of love, the inner meaning of life; and in the light of their vision not only art, but love and life itself, took on its everlasting significance.

So they stood, with their sacred hush upon them. Suddenly color flooded Mary’s cheeks. “Oh, my darling,” she whispered, “am I as beautiful as that?” And in lovers’ caresses, lovers’ assurances, their moment of holy rapture faded; but the recollection of it would sometimes come back to each of them, even years later, and figure as a morning glow when the remembrance of their lover* ing had faded to a simple outline.

From that time on Mary found herself feverishly interested in the picture. Hitherto she had simply indulged Soger's wishes in the matter; but now she was almoat as much concerned as he for the ultimate product. She felt for some reason a little ashamed of showing Roger just how interested she was; but she kept a sharp, surreptitious watch over its growth, seeing it gain in harmony and perspicuity and charm as Roger came down to details. And along with her passion for the picture, she felt a growing respect for Roger, the electrical one, whom she had always suspected of working by darts and slants, set himself, when once he had his outline in mind, so squarely to his task. He theorized so eloquently that she had been given to suspicion of his performance; but it now appeared that his precept sprang from his own solid practice. The germs of paintings were a matter of inspiration, if you chose to call it so; but given the germ, the artist’s own responsibility began. The fact that the original idea inevitably lost some of its rainbow coloring when & man came to get it definitely on canvas was no excuse for slacking. Roger would have preferred to live among the rainbow dreams, of course — who wouldn’t ? — but the necessity for production was upon him. And for a product that was not finished up to the limit of the producer’s ability he had no mercy. The rainbow glory was vouchsafed to few; upon every man to whom it did come it laid an obligation.

Mary herself, although she was considered a finished actress, had never achieved such perfection of detail: she had always preferred to sweep things before her by main might. But in the years that lay ahead might would not be so strong within her, nor the emotion that fed it so easy to come by. Now Mary had a vision of a fine fullness of detail, a subtle cmd wonderful finish which should not merely make up for any diminution of power, but fairly outstrip crude power itself. Here was Roger, whom for all her affection Mary recognized as no giant: look at the result he was getting! Mary, perched on her chair-arm, watched with a new eye his absorbed toil; whenever she left the chair, and thought he was not looking, she studied the picture with hungry attention. She smiled sometimes at the delicious irony of the situation, that young Tertius Greene should be giving her a new light upon art. Yet it was truly as she had said to him long before, all men did teach the woman artist; and perhaps Tertius was fated to attain his very best when he was influencing others, though he would fain have been simply a hearty practitioner.

July had passed before Mary took to watching Roger in this way; and in mid-August, with the picture still a long way from completion, the beginning of another season loomed before her. Mary’s decision was simple. The picture had to be finished, of course, and finished now: if the opening of her season had therefore to be postponed, so much the worse for her season. Her new play lay in her desk, unstudied; Mistress Mary had other business afoot.

Approaching her manager to tell him her decision, Mary found him with plans all made for rehearsals and a date set for the opening. He treated her decision as a caprice, refusing to take it seriously; she would be on hand when the time came, he was convinced. Whereupon, instead of sweetly giving him a more or less good reason, as was her usual practice, Mary quite unexpectedly lost her temper.

She stormed about his office in rage that he would not soon forget, her voice in its deepest and most powerful tones, and her expressions terse and fearfully pointed. He stared at her aghast for a moment; it was years since he had seen her anything but silkenly good-natured, and he had had time to forget what lay within her velvet glove.

But for her temper as temper he cared nothing; he was used to having tempers lost at times. Only, after his first gasp, the sight of her white-faced, flashing-eyed, loosing at him such a torrent of emotion as she was now accustomed to loose nowhere but in her work, took him back to other days and another Mary. Overwhelmed by this curious backwash he stood passively beside his desk, the pudgy, ridiculous little man who had once been so much to her. Suddenly it struck Mary that he and she were in the same boat, and that barring his outline he was not so ridiculous after all, nor even so unreasonable.

She stopped before him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “ Give me a month to rest, after I finish what Pm doing now,” she said. “ That’s all I ask, Ben. You can see that I’m not fit to undertake a new season as I am. You can’t drive me, and it isn’t worth your while to try.”

“But suppose I give you your head; what guarantee have I that you’ll be any more ready to begin a month from now?”

“ The picture will be finished,” said Mary simply. “ I’ve spent the summer posing for it; and it is going to make the sensation of the year. It is capable of doing so, and you and I, sir, will see that it does. It is going to be reproduced in every magazine and newspaper in the country,” said Mary sweepingly. “You will have that done for me — for me and for the advertising. It isn’t as if you couldn’t begin the year with something else. Put something else in ahead of me, and have everything in shape when I’m ready to begin rehearsals. I’ll be ready on the day; and when we do open, we’ll have a season — oh, such a season! ”

There was no course open to him except to acquiesce; and in spite of himself he looked softened. Whereupon Mary in her most regal manner, like a queen conferring a decoration, stooped a little, for she was taller than he, and kissed his forehead. Although the beauty of her act was somewhat spoiled by her kissing him too high up, and thereby reminding him that the line of hie hair was receding year by year, the little man couldn’t help being absurdly gratified.

And then the two of them sat down and for an hour talked business, solidly and sensibly, and discovered anew that each respected the other’s brains. He had, indeed, so complete a respect for Mary’s brain that he found himself pitying the painter of that important picture: the young man was obviously on Mary’s mind; but when the time came for her to get him off, off he would go, either into utter oblivion or, if she suspected that she had further use for him, into some convenient niche where he could continue to be useful. Ben King reasoned from his own experience.

Mary communicated to Roger the new date set for the opening of her season: it would give him more than time to complete the picture. Mary had expressly bargained for more than time, indeed; she wanted “a month to rest in.” But at that the season would open all too soon; for now that the picture was drawing toward completion Mary discovered a wish to prolong not only the star-lit evenings, but the weary days in the studio. Yet the days held every one some prick for her, if it were no more than her perception that to him the picture was his picture rather than her portrait. Of course she had expected that; yet she couldn’t help wincing sometimes at a fresh proof of his detachment. Roger was a cool customer, of course; but need he be so cool to her?

Then perhaps in the midst of her depression he would show her that he wasn’t cool at all; or she would simply laugh at herself, and so clear the atmosphere. And she had something to look forward to besides simply going back to work; for when she extracted from her manager that promise of a month to rest in, she promptly made Roger agree that he too would “ loaf.” Together they would idle for a whole glorious month: after that, come what must. Mary, posing until her lips set in a hard straight line, or dawdling about the room when he gave her a “rest” and then forgot her, would turn her mind resolutely ahead to that paradisiac month.

During a final week Roger was constantly on the point of finishing his picture; but he always found something more to do. This last prolongation wrung Mary’s nerves; it seemed to her as if the accursed thing never would be finished. For three days she was in a state of acute impatience; then she fell back on humorous resignation, and forbore to quarrel any more. After all, the end would come some time, she supposed; but it was a good thing she wasn’t Roger’s wife. Year after year of this could result only in getting permanently on a woman’s nerves.

Just when she had made up her mind that the picture would either remain permanently incomplete or encroach on and perhaps obliterate their cherished month, Roger set to work one morning with more than his usual briskness. That portended a long session, Mary thought; and her attention wandered. She was no longer sitting for the picture; she was presiding, or hoping to preside, at the completion of it. So she strolled about the studio, and presently settled herself with a book. It was a yellow-covered French novel, and proved more entertaining than she had hoped. As the room was very quiet, she read on for some time, undisturbed by the slight noise of Roger going about his work.

Suddenly he startled her by dropping his palette. “ There, that’s finished! ” he cried, and backed away from the canvas with his eyes upon it.

“ If 8 finished ? ” echoed Mary doubtfully, looking round at him over her shoulder.

He nodded and held out his hand toward her, without taking his eyes from the picture. “ Come here and look at it,” he said.

She came across the dusty floor, holding up her long dress from her slim feet; there was a little eager smile on her lips. She was lovelier now than his picture, lovelier than when she exhibited her beauty to the public gaze, I lovelier than even Roger was used to seeing her. But her loveliness was wasted on Roger, who never turned his I head.

For once he had finished a piece of work without disgust and discouragement. He had now grown up to his full artistic stature; and for once he had been able to work with his mind on nothing but his work. And the completed picture was better than he had actually expected to make it, almost as good as he had hoped. The simple and rhythmic composition, the subdued, harmonious and exquisite coloring, the success of his manoeuvers to center interest in the face, and yet use even the remotest detail to contribute to the feeling of personality — all was just as he would have it. This was an achievement.

Mary halted beside him. Roger put his arm around her and drew her to him, but did not turn his head to look at her. Mary, recognizing a certain communion in the act, looked at the picture with him. With her hand resting on his shoulder and her cheek against her fingers she gazed; in silence she recognized his artistic power and valiancy, and her own share in bringing them to this particular fruition. She waited for him to pay the tribute of the spoken word: Roger had a way of putting things.

Finally she felt the little gathering of himself together that so often preceded speech. “ It's good,” he said. “ It’s really — good.”

“It's marvelous,” Mary whispered. She felt his arm tighten about her, and with half-shut eyes she turned to look at his eager face. It was coming now, the tribute, the reward. Roger unlocked his lips; with a little shiver of ecstasy she listened.

“I wish,” said Roger, “I wish Nancy Desmond could see this. By George, Fm going to get her to come and look at it before Fm many days older. I want to know what she thinks of it.”

Mary broke away from him, and walked the length of the studio; and as she walked he heard her laugh. Roger looked at her somewhat anxiously; he saw no reason for laughter, and suspected hysteria. “ Are you tired, Mary? ” he wished to know. “ I think you must be. I’m afraid I’m not always very considerate of you.”

She faced him with mockery on her lips, though there was a little shadow in her eyes. “ I hope that some day you will get you a wife, Roger,” she said. “ And I hope that when you do, you will be very considerate of her, and very affectionate. And I hope that when you are most affectionate, you will always have a feeling that she is looking at somebody else over your shoulder.”

CHAPTER XVII

THE CONSCIENTIOUS DISCIPLE

All summer Nancy Desmond had fought with the beasts. With no prospect of change, her determined course lay before her, narrow, level, and very, very long; but she asked no more than to get fairly into it, the beasts once subdued. Once fairly there, what she had to learn was to keep her head erect as she walked: as time went on, to spare a glance for the flowers in the fields alongside; and finally even to smile at the flowers as she passed.

Courage would come more easily than smiling; courage was helped by even the dreariest effort. She had her trained will to back her, and the channel in which it was wont to run. She worked every day; and although her work now seemed to her singularly fruitless, she gathered a certain strength from the familiar properties of her trade, from the sight of canvas and the smell of paint and the day’s familiar routine.

It was the spaces that were not crowded with work which opened the flood-gates to all that she was trying to put out of mind. At night she lay down in the knowledge that the hours to come would bring her not rest, but remembrance, longing, the anguish of realizing that he had gone from her. In the morning she would awake slowly, heavy-eyed and weary, recalling at first only that there was something overhanging her, some dreadful reason for her not springing forth clear-eyed and eager to meet the opening day. She would lie looking at the ceiling, dreading to remember, yet feeling that she ought to try; then of a sudden remembrance would come sweeping over her. That moment of returning knowledge was each day’s worst. Yet somehow Nancy not only lived through it, but perversely drew from its very anguish courage to rise and go about the day’s business.

With the twilight hour and the cessation of work came a crisis less overwhelming than the morning’s, but teeming with refinement of torture. The beautiful twilight hour had once been her favorite of the twenty-four. Then, with the consciousness of a good day’s work behind her, she could pause before seeking diversion or rest, could dare to face an empty hour and to savor her life thus reduced to its elements. But now she feared empty time, dreaded to realize what her life was, hated, even while she caressed it, the recollection of those happier twilights that she and Max had idled away together. She had been so contented then, so free to devote herself to passing problems as they presented themselves, so willing to live every day on the same terms as the present. Now she was no longer at peace, nor even at home, in the little gray room she had loved.

After that summer morning when she had chanced to meet him at the Art School, she hoped that Roger Greene might feel somehow that she continued to need him, and might come to her again as he had during Max’s previous absence, when her need was so much less. She did not see him for more than a month, however. Then he came in one afternoon for a brief stay, and told her that he was working very hard. His assertion was confirmed by his looks: he was thinner than ever, very bright-eyed, but very restless and uneasy. Nancy rushed to his defense in her own mind: Roger had his own problems to face, and it was asking too much to hope for help from him. If he had known how much good his mere presence and random talk did her, he would have made the effort to come, surely, in spite of the pressure of his own concerns. But she could not appeal for help, and after all it was a satisfaction to her to know that Roger Greene existed in the same world. To add to his responsibilities would have been the last thing she wanted. How worn he looked; and yet not defeated, never defeated, her brave, persistent Roger! She desired all good for him, she believed that all good would somehow come to him; and in the bottom of her heart she also believed that ultimately matters would arrange themselves so as to give her increasingly more and more of Roger. Even apart, they would always have understood and respected each other; but how could there continue everlastingly to be such distance between them, when they were drawn together by their perfect sympathy in a world where sympathy was all too rare?

When Roger the perfect comrade didn’t come to her, she ceased to care whether the rest of her friends did. They had, indeed, come increasingly less for the last year; the little circle which she had once held together had disrupted of itself when Max claimed all of her small social faculty. She didn’t wish them to think that she didn’t still like them, or that because she was getting ahead a bit they weren’t good enough for her now. Tentatively she looked up one or two of them; and Randy Payne, who had recently established himself in new quarters a few blocks from her, came once or twice to see her. But the light-hearted among the group now seemed to Nancy light-headed as well; and the serious were all making a great pother about nothing. And few as they were, they were still too many.

She came to crave isolation; and it seemed to her that a sea of humanity beat against the door of her little apartment. She had once taken a cool delight in people; now she dreaded to face them. One or two well-meaning souls, seeing how worn she looked, even came consciously to “ cheer her up.” From that last indignity Nancy fled in despair.

She took to going regularly into the country or out to some of the beaches for the day. Although she made sketching her excuse, she didn’t sketch much; but the long solitary days, spent in the open air and sunshine with a pretense of employment to salt them, soothed her nerves if not her sonl.

They were enough of an escape so that at the beginning of August she considered packing a few things and going to the country outright for what remained of the summer. She did not go, however; she distrusted her own ability to stay after she got there, and knew that failure would humiliate her. Her quiet rooms inexorably drew her back every night. She might be better away; but here she felt more like herself, even when that self was in its present unhappy condition. Also, although she did not confess as much, she felt nearer to Max. The place had a thousand associations with him; and there was always the active possibility that a letter might be waiting for her when she returned.

It might be waiting for her: her having been away all day at least doubled the chance that it would be. But as a matter of fact it seldom was. Day after day Nancy was disappointed in her natural desire to hear from Max; day after day she was bitterly disappointed, and yet proud that Max wasn’t yielding to his presumable desire to write often. If only, whispered foreboding, if only something disastrous hadn’t befallen him. For there were many ways that disaster might come: his confession had showed her that; and if it did, Nancy felt that she never would hear. She could imagine circumstances under which Max would feel that no course remained for him except to make his sacrifice complete.

But sometimes a letter was waiting for her; and instead of turning from her mail-box with two or three things that didn’t count, Nancy would race upstairs with the one that did, and blame her hasty climb for the high beating of her heart. For a moment she would stand fingering his familiar square envelope, rereading her own name written in his dear irregular scrawl. Then she would slit the envelope, and pass from the region where he addressed Miss Anne Douglas Desmond to that where he called her Nancy; and for the turning of a page and perhaps a second page she was briefly with him.

Those letters of Max’s contained nothing to make a woman’s heart beat high. They were painfully matter-of-fact epistles; hadn’t he, writing them in the office after everybody else had left, gone over each a dozen times in order to make it sufficiently bald and flat? Hadn’t every word from “Dear Nancy,” his stereotyped beginning, through to “As ever, Max,” his invariable ending, been subjected to scrutiny in order to make it not only such as a stranger might read and be none the wiser, but such as the recipient might read without blaming herself?

But he couldn’t edit all meaning out; even “Dear Nancy ” in his writing might be enough for a young woman to yearn over. And she thrilled to what he told her, though it was a simple and somber tale: be was trying to pick up the pieces of his life, and fit them into some kind of order. That he had it in him to make the attempt Nancy had never doubted; but that he should make it so simply and earnestly, and in his earnestness feel that she had seen the straight path and set him in it — this was the wonder and the delight; and this was what made his letters a source of strength to Nancy herself.

She kept all Max’s letters — surely she was justified in keeping them. They were not many, after all; and she never opened the little drawer where they lay except to add a fresh one to the little pile. Perhaps the merit of her abstention was lessened by the fact that she already knew those letters by heart. Yet the mere sight of his writing, sprawling black across the sheet, would have been a consolation to her, would sometimes have seemed almost like the touch of his brown hand. She had no other relics of him, no photograph, not the most paltry gift. Yet night after night, when she would have crawled a mile on her bare knees for a sight of him, those letters lay in the next room to her, undisturbed in their locked drawer.

The very feeling of them under her pillow, where her fingers could have been around them as she went to sleep, would have been a boon to her; but if Nancy was a Spartan with Max, she was no less severe upon herself.

Her work was beginning to exert something of its old strong pull upon her. She did not even look ahead toward anything big; but she continued her sketching with gratifying results. She was gaining in facility and lightness of touch; and she produced some charming sketches, full of the sunlight of early autumn. Nowadays she seemed always to desire sunlight; and she certainly welcomed even a trivial and temporary escape from her own severity.

In her usual character of conscientious disciple she had an opportunity to exhibit them to Roger Greene — an opportunity which, for reasons that will appear, she did not improve. He came in one morning, after two months' absence, before she had a chance to be off for the day. Nancy was naturally delighted to see him; and Roger was as brisk and heartening as the autumn morning itself. He looked tired, to be sure; but when didn't he look tired? And this morning he was radiant through all his tiredness.

The cause of his radiance became manifest in the first five minutes. He had done something that he wanted her to see. “You’ve been working on a big picture this summer? '' asked Nancy. If he had, that accounted for more than one thing.

“ Well, the canvas is large,” said Roger, smiling.

He stood near the window, pulling at the curtain cord, and watching her. Nancy, who had been interrupted at breakfast, had offered coffee; when he declined, she proceeded to finish her own before it cooled. Roger's eye was gratified by her, sitting cup in hand in her spindle chair. The early hour became her, and the intimate action, and her manifest pleasure at seeing him; all things common and human seemed akin to her just now. Roger had always felt her wholesomeness, but it had never struck him so forcibly as it did just now — perhaps because he had never before seen her at breakfast.

“ Have you any more coffee there ? ” he asked abruptly. “ Because if you have, I think I’ll change my mind about taking some.”

“ I’llhave more in a jiffy,” she answered, getting up and bestirring herself at once. “ There isn’t any left, but you profit by that; you will have fresh.”

“You never make too much?” Roger wished to know. “ You carry the great principle of parsimony in art over into life, I perceive. But how do you know that you yourself won’t want a second cup?”

“I suppose I guess that before I make it.” Nancy’s attention was on what she was doing.

“Nancy, do you always, unfailingly, know your own mind?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Nancy promptly. Then, his query seeming to penetrate deeper, she changed her answer to “ No ”; and a moment later, as if fearful of giving herself away, she went back to “ Yes.”

“A remarkable answer: full, but somewhat contradictory,” commented Roger. “ ‘ Yes ’ appears to predominate; but I should say that the fact of a ‘ No’s’ entering at all vitiates the ‘ Yes.’ ”

“ I wasn’t listening,” Nancy apologized.

“ I can’t blame you for that. Psychology at the breakfast hour — ”

“Is that what you call it?” Nancy demanded. “It sounded to me like a flat personality.”

“A flat one, eh?” Roger chuckled. “I love the way you come back at a fellow, Nancy.”

“Do you like marmalade with your toast?” asked Nancy, her mind once more on arrangements.

“ I like it, but I’m not used to it,” said Roger.

Nancy set forth marmalade. She herself breakfasted off a tray, or often simply from a plate held in her hand; but for Roger she propped up a leaf of her table, and spread a breakfast cloth. It was of heavy homespun linen, and her dishes were a bine and white English ware. Everything about her was simple but excellent: simple, as beoame a busy woman, and excellent, because of her artistes passion for quality. She looked very pretty as she busied herself over the household task; her neat bright hair, her soft silk blouse, with its tie that matched her corduroy skirt, and its sleeves that showed her forearms, her absorption in her task, and deft performance of it with no wasted motions, all spoke of simplicity, and wholesomeness, and a busy life.

She set down his coffee before him. “ Aren’t you going to have some with me?” he asked.

“ I have had mine,” said Nancy with her usual firmness. She seated herself at the table, however, to keep an eye on her little electric toaster; and as it was working to her satisfaction, she leaned her elbows on the table and looked at Roger.

“ Nancy,” said Roger solemnly, ” the coffee that I make myself is excellent, but yours compares most favorably with it. Your toast, moreover, is heavenly, and your marmalade a luxury indeed.”

Nancy smiled. “Well, come to breakfast again,” she suggested. “And now, tell me about your picture.”

Vanished in an instant the charming domestic flavor of the scene; without taking her elbows from his breakfast table, Nancy was transformed. She was the most devoted of disciples, the most interesting of fellow artists; but just for a moment Roger regretted her change of front. Then he said across his coffee-cup, “It’s a portrait of Mary Allen.”

For a second he had perversely hoped that he could get a spark out of her, that for once she would condescend to act like a real woman, and be just a little jealous. But if she flushed now, it was with generous sympathy; and she said, “Roger, how wonderful! Just what you have always longed to do! Is it full-length ? ”

“ Absolutely, from her feet to her hair.”

“Oh — h — h, Roger, that hair!” breathed Nancy.

“ Yes. She is a fine subject,” Roger acknowledged.

Fine? I should say she was I I should think you would be crazy with delight to have such a subject. But perhaps you have got over that. How long have you been at work on it?”

“ About two months, I think.”

“ And is it finished ? ”

“Finished, completed, done.” Roger drained his cup, and symbolically turned it upside down in his saucer.

“ I can believe that it’s done, ” she assured him.

“ And as it’s done, I want you to see it,” he said.

“When?”

“ When you have time.”

She looked only to be sure that he had finished his breakfast; then she jumped to her feet. “ This moment,” she pronounced. “

How long has it been finished?”

“Only since yesterday. You’ll be the first person to see it.”

“ Then it hasn’t much longer to remain unseen.” She pulled on her soft hat, picked up her gloves and coat; in her eagerness she was willing to leave Rogers dishes and crumbs still on her table. Her neatness, order, housekeeping instinct and practice, were all subordinate to her controlling interest in life. It was charming that she had them; but it was after all more charming when she forgot them, especially when she forgot them because of work of his.

They set off at a rapid pace in the crisp morning air; and Nancy talked as they went, plying him with questions. Roger, striding along beside her, seeing her sc pretty and so competent and so furiously interested in what she was talking about, recognized her charm as equal on the whole to her productive powers. Indeed, although he had often stormed at women who were artists, he knew in his heart that he preferred them to any other women. It wasn’t only that he respected their product, although in the case of the two women artists he knew best, he certainly did respect it But he also found that their work in art gave them a certain flavor, a shading, a mysteriousness, perhaps, that made other women seem a little flat. Doubtless, too, the conquering male in him was flattered by knowing that a woman who had a secret chamber in her soul, a sanctuary the significance of which he above all appreciated, should choose to lock that door from the outside, and come to him.

It was not as a conquering male, however, that he approached Nancy; and as he walked beside her now he began to feel a creeping nervousness. He had an almighty respect for Nancy’s opinion, to begin with: too much respect, in fact. He was like a father who should stand in awe of the critical judgment of his child. But that alone wouldn’t have been so bad: Nancy was kind as well as critical, and had a fixed habit of looking up to him. And his picture could stand her strictures; his picture was good. But he had a queer feeling sometimes about her personal directness and simplicity, her—- well, her innocence: that element in her which made the students at the art school hesitate about repeating horrid gossip to her, that instinctive withdrawal of herself which made her live alone, in cleanliness and simplicity, unwed and very probably unloved. Such a nature had its uses; but for the ends that Roger valued it was all wrong. The artist should take life whole; his view-point must be all-embracing, not eclectic. Nancy conquered, thanks to her native power and her astonishing industry; but her accomplishment didn’t disprove the wrongness of her scheme of life. Not the least feature of that wrongness, of course, consisted in her ability to make Roger, though infrequently and incompletely, feel abashed.

Their brisk walk brought them to Roger’s studio; they mounted, and stood within. It was the first time that Nancy had ever been there alone with him; but Nancy's thoughts were not on sentiment, any more than they were on propriety. She had come for the picture. From the threshold she looked for it; and she walked straight over, and stood in silence before it. Roger went to the other end of the room, and laid down his hat; then he came back, and stood near her.

She didn’t appear to notice him. She walked backward and forward, got the range of the picture, examined details that took her eye; finally she stationed herself at the best distance, and stood, her head a little forward, her breath coming slowly, and simply looked and looked.

At length she turned wide eyes on him. “ It’s wonderful,” she said. “ It’s wonderful. It’s completely ‘ done/ and if 8 completely charming.”

Electric waves seemed to go over Roger; and he warmed and expanded. He was about to become modest under praise when Nancy, looking again at the picture, resumed, “ If s charming, but it’s not authentic.”

Instead of warming farther, Roger boiled over. “Just what do you mean by ‘ not authentic ’ ? ” he demanded.

“Principally I mean that it doesn’t look like her,” explained Nancy.

“Who says it doesn’t? Who said it did? And who said it had to?” he snapped.

“ It doesn’t have to, of course. It’s very beautiful, and can afford to stand on its merits. But you have treated your subject as a bit of decoration; and a portrait, properly so-called, should be like its original.”

“I haven’t treated it as a bit of decoration at all; its decorative value is very slight, as you could see if you knew anything about decoration. If you want a likeness, get a photograph. Get a photograph and tint it, do. But so long as you employ a painter, let him subordinate likeness to effect.”

“Oh, ifs effective! It’s quite lovely, and Miss Allen ought to be delighted with it. Ifs a tribute to beauty, and beauty itself as well. But when all is said, Roger, art springs from nature, and can’t afford to get too far from its source.”

“ It doesn’t, and it can,” said Roger flatly.

She sat. down where she could continue to look at the picture, happening to choose the very chair whose counterfeit she looked at. She was a great contrast to the chair’s quondam occupant, but a pleasant spectacle for all that, with her capable hands resting quietly on the massive arms, and her grave, interested face turned, now toward the picture, and now toward Roger.

Roger walked up and down in front of her. Their discussion proceeded briskly, now broadening to generalities, now narrowing to concrete examples, ever and anon plumping down on personalities. They were both enjoying themselves. Roger was never happier than when he lost his temper over art; and Nancy loved to lead him on. Most people who cared to discuss art didn’t know anything about it; and of the few who both knew and could set forth their knowledge, nobody else showed Roger’s fervor, or took his high tone. Roger took it with very few people. But with Nancy he was never too shy or too indifferent to soar; in the years that lay behind them he had, it seemed to Nancy, imparted to her most of what she knew. Or at any rate, by his help she had clarified her own knowledge, both in the discussions and afterwards when she thought over what he had said: he had made her conscious.

There was nothing that she and Roger couldn’t discuss, it seemed to her, and pretty much nothing that they hadn’t. But each topic in turn led Roger back to the one great subject of which he figured in Nancy’s eyes as the High Priest. He had talked to her of life: and it proved that he had always in mind the artist’s life. He had spoken of love, which he seemed to image as a great destructive force: and his discursions all came to a point in the qnery, what use could the artist make of love? He had managed to graft many of his theories on her mind, where some of them sat rather quaintly; for what he directly imparted had not in the least transformed the nature of that mind itself.

It was some time since they had had one of their lengthy discussions, but the old spell must have been as strong as ever. They prolonged their talk as if neither of them had anything else to do all day. Roger did most of the talking, now as ever; and as he talked he moved restlessly about the room, plunging his hands deep in his pockets and snatching them hastily out, changing the position of some small object on the table, giving a few touches to the sheet on his drawing-board. Nancy sat in the great chair and listened, in grave and happy silence. She had something the sensation , of a traveler who has come into port after a long and perilous voyage. Remembrance of peril heightened her appreciation of safety; remembrance of chaos made but a splendid background for Roger’s ordering of the world.

He had given her a cigarette soon after she sat down, and held a light for her; from time to time he resupplied her. He filled a pipe for himself, but he didn’t keep it going. Such an audience was better even than a pipe. She was more on a level with him than she used to be; yet the old adoration had not died. It would die some day, perhaps; she would rank Roger the guide as a part of her past. But he was glad it had not happened yet; it meant much to him now, even as it had in all these troubled years, to have this candid and powerful spirit looking to him for guidance and approval.

On that beautiful September morning, however, nothing could have been farther from Nancy’s mind than discovering the clay feet of her idol. She was building him a little higher even, thanks both to her new background and her direct recollection of Max Meredith. When, for instance, Roger held the match to her cigarette, his hands hollowed to protect the flame from draughts, the action brought his hands close to her face. Nancy had never noticed the proximity in the old days, though he had doubtless held half a hundred matches for her; she noticed it now because she wouldn’t have let Max come so close to her. But Roger was different. It wasn’t only that she didn’t love Roger, nor he her; there was, she felt, an intrinsic difference in the men themselves. Poor old Max was rather horribly awake to the suggestions of closeness; but with Roger, though his antennae were all out and he was in general so quiveringly alive, she felt nothing of the sort.

Her conclusions indeed were right enough, even if her premises were all wrong. There was no danger of Roger’s making any present advances to her; he preferred her as she was. But if she ever showed him a changed Nancy, let her beware, especially as that day would come, in the natural course of things, after he had ceased to wear another woman’s livery. Just now he was entering on the glorious month that he and Mary Allen had reserved for each other.

Not even in Mary’s company, however, did a morning go so fast as this one. Roger was startled when Nancy, rising to go, held the dial of her watch before him for justification. He would have liked to prolong the interview, though he had an engagement to lunch with a certain person; indeed he went so far as to suggest luncheon to Nancy. Nancy shook her head, however: she had idled enough for one day. It was too late to start out sketching, but she could utilize the afternoon at odd jobs, writing letters, putting her belongings straight —

“I don’t believe your belongings ever were crooked,” objected Roger.

“ I haven’t even washed my breakfast things! ” she insisted.

“ And I dragged you away from that all-important duty, simply to look at a picture?”

Her eyes lingered on the picture, as if she were loath to leave it. “ You do like it, even if it isn’t authentic ? ” he teased.

“ Well, it isn’t ! It isn’t in the least authentic! ” Nancy gave him a saucy little smile; as the two of them stood side by side, her head came just to his ear.

“ Is that a nice way for you to talk to me?” he asked, smiling himself.

She began to look steadily at him then, and her eyes grew grave. “Roger,” she said unexpectedly, “if you aren’t doing anything very important this afternoon, try to get a nap. You look awfully tired.”

“ A nap ! ” Roger hooted at the idea.

“ I mean it,” she said. “ You look as if you had nearly reached your limit.”

“Not nearly,” boasted Roger. “Not nearly.”

“Then take a nap in celebration, if you won’t admit that you’re human, and that a big thing takes it out of you.”

“You consider it a big thing?”

“ It’s very lovely,” she said simply.

“How about your own big things, Nancy? What is to be successor to ‘ Kite-flying ’ ? ”

“ I don’t know; I haven’t thought.” !

“ Then isn’t it about time that you began to think ? ”

“It will come in time, I suppose. As yet I haven’t quite gathered myself together.”

“ Don’t let it go too long,” he warned her. “ In between you may improve in all sorts of ways; but every so often you must gather yourself together.”

Should she admit to him that she still planned, that she couldn’t keep from planning, but that she had no courage to begin? She had been excusing, herself on divers grounds from another big undertaking: it seemed that there were times in life when one had to wait and endure instead of undertaking. But as she looked up into Roger’s gay tired face, as she saw once more his friendly eyes and heard his friendly counsel, her excuses seemed to herself to lack validity. After all, whatever her personal relations were, she was still a painter: that fact was her refuge. Let it not become her reproach.

Nancy swallowed hard, and took a resolution. “Yes, Roger, I’m going to do a big picture this winter.” She paused, and then added with a solemnity that startled her own ear, “ The biggest ever.”

On her way home she went to select her canvas. She decided definitely that as soon as the weather grew too bad for out-of-door sketching, she could begin a new picture: blue water in the foreground, with three winged shapes on its brink, and between their wings the deep blue of a sky that gleamed with prismatic changes through their transparency. It mightn’t turn out as well as “ Kiteflying ”; but to her it might be just as important.

She had a curious sense of being restored to herself, after some separation. There were many things in life besides love; and at least two of them were stand-bys, which was just what in her case love could never be. The first of the stand-bys was work, and the second friendship. And in this case of hers, when it came to a question of the standbys, just as surely and definitely as work meant painting friendship meant Roger Greene.

CHAPTER XVIII

IN FELIX DIDO

Nancy began to see light ahead. Her old calm enjoyment of things was gone, perhaps never to return; but she no longer plodded in a treadmill. Her faith had been restored to her. »It seemed to her that Roger Greene had restored it — which made at least the thousandth benefit i that he had conferred upon her. She could smile at herself for her belief in his agency, could see that she almost made a superstition of him; but at any rate the faith was there, and sometimes she felt like apologizing to Max because she was getting on so well. He, poor fellow, must pull his life forward by main might. Hers still held bad quarters of an hour, and some of them were very bad indeed. But for hours at a time she now found her life so livable that she forgot to consider whether it was livable or not. Emerging from the wretchedness of her summer, she began to think that she was getting off easy.

She was still employed at her outdoor sketching, striving to imprison the last of the September sunshine; but the picture which was to figure forth on the newly purchased canvas was already taking shape in her mind. A long, slow, only half-conscious cerebration and visualizing of her subject, then many conscientious studies, and finally work on the picture itself, at high speed and sometimes at terrible tension — that was Nancy’s method. With this new picture she was as yet only in the first stage; but now that she was mature enough in her work to know that the others would surely follow, the first stage was in many ways the most delightful of all. It was in itself enough to insure content when brought into the freshness of the open air and the brooding calm of the early autumn days.

One superb morning early in October she planned to start early on a sketching trip: there would be few more of them in the declining year. She was sleeping better lately: not so well as she should, but well enough so that she had taken to setting her alarm, just as when there had been classes to “make,” and a healthy young body was still enamored of its bed. On this particular morning she felt the old delicious sleepiness of twenty and a mind at peace; she put out her hand to still the alarm, and then closed her eyes again, and turned in bed, and stretched luxuriously. She would have liked to lie so for an hour; and to-day her nerves and perhaps even her conscience would have allowed it. But the country called her, the country and those lovely little woodland sketches in which she was becoming so proficient. She had always painted out-of-doors during the summer; but in previous years it had meant to her merely a change of subject and conditions. Lately she was learning really to love the country: Max had forced her whining ego back to the broad bosom of Mother Nature.

[Recalling the country lying under the autumn sun, Nancy got up hastily, to have it over with, and splashed about in her cold tub to waken herself thoroughly. Half an hour later, her coffee drunk, she was hurrying for her train, her sketching kit in the bend of her arm, and a packet of sandwiches in the pocket of her long coat.

It was one of those perfect still days that come in the fall in northern latitudes, when the flux of nature can be imagined as briefly halting and turning around to admire itself. The country opened wide arms to Nancy; and Nancy herself was in exactly the right mood to enjoy it, neither depressed nor exultant, not wholly idle, yet not driven by the demon of incessant industry.

She strolled and sketched and strolled, stopped about noonday to eat her sandwiches, and then strolled again and sketched again. Then with a glance at the declining sun she decided that she would have time for another sketch, one more of those inconceivably rapid things which she was doing to limber up her painstaking technique. But first she would go on a little and find a scene that tempted her. She picked up her kit, and looked musingly about her.

She was in a patch of woodland all but strange to her. It offered her wood and rock and fern, all in some abundance ; it offered, too, as beautiful a wildness and apparently as impenetrable a seclusion as if it had not been just on the edge of an insistent and noisy civilization. All day she had had a feeling that she had been here before, a long time ago; yet she could not recall when it might have been. Now as she began slowly to make her way forward, casting her eye about for a point of vantage, she suddenly recollected. She and Roger Greene had come out here several summers ago, in company with two or three other people, to spend a day sketching. Roger had been in a dreadful mood that day, and had nagged Nancy about her sketch until she had tom in up in wrath; whereupon he had abruptly come to himself, and gone off for a little walk with her alone, and talked as only he knew howto talk.

The events of that far-off afternoon cleared themselves in her memory; she recalled that she and Roger, strolling and talking, had come in the heart of the wood on a small natural amphitheater, and had there in imagination staged a woodland pageant. It wouldn’t, she remembered, be big enough for more than half a dozen actors to disport themselves in; but the fancy took her now to make a sketch of it.

With that objective in mind, she pushed on more rapidly. After some searching, and one or two false turnings, she at length drew near the place she sought. She saw the opening in the trees; and pushing on through the underbrush she received the light of the setting sun full in her eyes. For a moment she paused, dazzled; then as her sight cleared, she stood still for another reason.

She had expected when she reached the amphitheater to find the scene all set for her; but she had not expected to find actors on the spot. In this remote glade, indeed, it seemed as if no one should be, except perhaps the ghosts of the youthful Nancy and her preceptor. Yet directly opposite her, on a tiny rise of ground, was a group composed for Nancy’s benefit. It was a man and a woman, with the first leaves of autumn blowing about them and the level rays of the sun lighting them resplendently.

So charmingly were they grouped, as if actually for her eye, that Nancy’s first sensation was pure gratification. The woman was seated, her discarded hat lying on the ground beside her; the man was half-reclining in her lap. Their arms were about each other, and her head drooped over his. The grace and abandon of the grouping was perfect; and it was only after her first gratification that Nancy felt a pang because they were lovers. Happy lovers they must be, for had they not each other? She might have watched them for a long time without their knowing or caring; so absorbed in each other were they that they were quite unconscious of the intruder. But she gathered herself to steal softly away, and lingered only for one more look at them enlivening her amphitheater. This strong focus of human interest made the unrelieved bosom of Mother Nature seem rather bare behind her.

Just then the sun, reaching a cleft in the branches, illuminated the little group afresh, and turned the woman’s hair to a burning aureole. It must have shone too strongly in her eyes, for she lifted her head and spoke to her companion. The low words did not reach Nancy, near as she was, but instead of turning away, she moved nearer, in curious fascination. There was something in that movement of the head, something in the graceful droop of the woman’s figure, something especially in that illumined hair — something — familiar. Not so long ago she had seen that same hair painted, with the very kiss of the sun upon it.

She was so close to them that with a few more steps she could have reached and touched them. The woman spoke again, and straightened as if she were about to rise. Her companion lifted himself on his elbow, looked at her, and then encircled her with his arms and drew her down to him. In that moment of time Nancy had seen his face.

Then indeed she drew back to the protecting undergrowth, but not soon enough. Not soon enough, although there was no need for caution so far as they were concerned. They wouldn’t have heard her now; but she had seen his face. Seeing it she had recognized it, though there was upon it a horrible strangeness. From that strangeness Nancy fled; yet she fled too late, for she carried it with her in her too perspicuous eye.

In the shelter of the undergrowth she turned, and began to make her way she knew not whither. Anywhere, so long as it was away — anywhere — anywhere. When she had gone a short distance she broke into a run.

Her breath choking her she ran on and on, stumbling, recovering herself, stumbling again. The sun went out of sight; sometimes Nancy apparently looked about her in the darkening woodland, sometimes she ran with her eyes closed. But looking or not looking was all one; she could not see her way. Wherever she looked she saw nothing but Roger Greene’s face at that horrible moment, and the gesture with which he drew his love to him, the gesture of the lover, the conqueror, the man whose right is unchallenged. Her closed eyes could not exclude him.

But her eyes were closed for the most part now; and she ran on and on, always with that choking in her throat. From the feeling of the ground beneath her feet she knew that she must have left the wood behind her and be traversing a plowed field. She floundered now among the hummocks of earth, but she kept on. Then the plowed field gave way to a meadow; there was grass beneath her feet. At the edge of a second wood she ran full against a tree, recoiled and fell. She lay where she had fallen; she wished for nothing more than to lie so, face downward upon the earth, until conquering numbness made an end.

But the numbness wouldn't stay. There came back to her in horrible flashes Roger's face, wearing that awful look like an animal in its longing; and then she would fight and fight to remember nothing, to be nothing, only to lie where she had fallen, and let it all end there. But it wouldn't end; by degrees, instead, her strength came back to her.

When she presently opened her eyes it was quite dark. She drew a few long, painful breaths, and the whole thing rushed over her again with horrible fullness of detail. She sat where she had fallen, and drawing up her knees rested her head upon them. Then she cursed her painter's memory, which imprisoned every significant look that came before it, which recomposed in all vividness the picture she had run so hard to get away from, and bore inevitably with her.

She hadn't been used to fight facts; but here was a fact too dreadful to acknowledge, yet borne in upon her by the evidence of her senses, by her own instincts. The very brutality of the way it had been hurled at her gave her for a moment a fleeting hope; once she had got over the shock of that horrid revelation, perhaps she would find nothing was changed. But even as she strove to clutch the infant hope it fell dead at her feet. She did not accuse Roger, nor his lovely accomplice, nor even her own suffering mistaken self. But all the dear past, and the strong powerful present, and the men and women who walked the earth with her, seemed to look at her now with goblin faces.

Merely to relieve her torture, Nancy rose and began to walk. Then she discovered of a sudden that she was very tired; she was bruised and shaken by her fall, and her hands and face were scratched. Night had come on, and she did not know where she was.

She set her mind to the three-fold problem of finding a road, and then finding the station, and getting a train back to the city. Her mind responded to these concrete points; but her fury of realization had been succeeded by a daze. She tramped across the fields to a high-road, and down the road until she came to a station; but she wasn't aware that it was Nancy who was so tramping, alone in the darkness, all bruised and tired. She drew long breaths, exhaling unsteadily; she interpreted signs along her path, and lights when she came to them; but her chief concern was not to yield to the grotesque impulse which prompted her to lie down and go to sleep by the road-side.

There was no other passenger waiting in the little station when she reached it; and for a moment it seemed to her like a haven. She was glad to see by the station clock that it was not so late as she feared; her watch had struck when she fell, and stopped. She had time to wash her face and straighten her hair; and when she boarded her train she was not in appearance very different from the Nancy who had boarded a similar train the evening before. She sat with her head against the back of her seat and her eyes closed: if only she could be borne on so forever!

Arriving in the city she walked through the station, and paused a moment outside. As she stood there the city seemed to gather itself and rise at her, as if it would grip her by the throat. It often did gather itself so, especially when she returned to it from without; and however tired she was, she was used to open her arms to it and take it to herself, hers in its passion and complexity, its splendor and squalor and picturesqueness. But to-night it rose as if to strike her; it was an alien city. She did not belong here or anywhere; she was homeless, and she was alone.

She remembered dully when she had faced the world as an orphan, and when the first pictnre she had submitted for an exhibition had not been hung, and when she realized that she loved Max Meredith, and could not have him, and could not stop loving him. All these had been hours of darkness: at each she had felt utterly forlorn, dejected, alone. But she had always got courage to go on; and even from the beginning she had always known that she must get courage. She had to go on; the way was on, on, on. Now she felt no desire to go on, and no obligation. Her standard had fallen into the dust, and she was too weary to lift it and try to cleanse its smirched folds. The effort would be pitiable, and useless; and it was beyond her strength.

She got home somehow, and passed in through the doors where she had gone exultantly out only twelve hours before. So many evenings she had come in here to the peace and seclusion: these rooms had been blessed by her work, gladdened by her joy, made a part of herself by all the small intimacies of her daily life; and of late they had been almost desperately endeared to her by her grief. But now she hadn’t any home; and she never would have again. She hadn’t any life, in the sense in which she had been wont to visualize her life. It was all shattered, but unfortunately it was not gone; if she moved, she would hurt herself on the broken pieces.

Nancy locked the door behind her, let her clothes lie where they fell, slipped into bed in the darkness. For a long time she lay without moving. Sometimes a shudder would go over her; then she was quiet again, in the calm of absolute blackness. Presently she drifted into a dull heavy sleep, and lay so until morning.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PYRE

She woke slowly, passing from unconsciousness to a sort of dumb earth-agony, such as some long-dead mother of hers might have felt, back in the dusky past, when they brought home to her her beloved slain in battle. But as realization came, at first by degrees and then in a swift horrid flood, she quickened to a modern woman whose faith is dead. She was equipped with strict standards, an artist’s nerves, a keen mind — in short with the best possible apparatus for torturing herself; yet from that at least it now seemed to her that she had refrained, even under recent temptation. Had she not her work, at once an extension of the ego and a release for it? Had she not always the sense of guiding her life, if not in untroubled waters, at least with an eye intelligent for storms and shallows, and a hand firm to avoid them?

Yesterday’s fine weather had been succeeded by rain and wind, woefully suggestive of'coming winter. At least the question of working out-of-doors was settled; but Nancy, emerging from her bath, glanced at the lowering sky, with some idea of setting forth to look at mist. There was no zest in the idea, however; and instead of going out she lay down again on her bed.

Rest, however, was as much beyond her as effective action; and when her body was quiet, her hideous thoughts raced all the faster. She took refuge in routine: dressed carefully, made and drank her coffee, and put everything straight in her two rooms. She made the task last as long as possible, when it could by no means be protracted farther, she ascended resolutely to her studio. There it lay, bare, neat, cheerfully suggestive of work; the big new canvas was awaiting the picture she was to put upon it. And here she was, getting into her apron to begin work. Nothing had altered beneath her eyes; nothing was changed under her hand; nothing forbade her going on just as she had planned to go. Nothing was changed, except the complexion and constitution of the world.

With a vague feeling that to view her past performances might relieve the sickness at her heart, Nancy got out and began to sort her summer’s drawings. Many of them were ephemera, simply keeping her hand in, or getting some slight effect that she wished to mark; but others were finished enough, and some of them were astonishingly good. Nancy acknowledged their merit, and viewed them without enthusiasm. What booted it to smear paint a little more pleasingly than one had smeared it a year ago? She who had dedicated her life to smearing sat with her product scattered all about her, and wondered what in the name of all folly had possessed her ever to make such dedication.

One question is forever forbidden the artist to ask: “ Is it worth while ? ” Only once before had Nancy ever asked it Some values were forever fixed; skepticism in regard to them would be mere insanity. Her native strength had done much to fix values for her; but who had taught her to trust her native strength ? The very man whom to-day it shamed her even to think of.

He had done so much for her, that was just the worst of it. Having done so much, he must continue to do; if he couldn’t, consciously or unconsciously, do good any longer, he must sooner or later, she supposed, do her evil. It was incomprehensible that he should; yet he couldn’t simply drop out.

Drop out ? Roger Greene, out of her life ? He was out, perhaps, or it needed only this to enable her to get clear of him. Their connection had not been so dominant or conclusive, except in her own mind; and he had been seeing less and less of her lately — his absences were now baldly explained. She preferred to stand clear of entanglements, would sacrifice a great deal, if need be, for freedom; freedom was necessary to her, and to the work she had to do. Let her make this last sacrifice. She had sent her lover away; she had only to cut Roger off too, and she would stand alone, devastated but free.

Yet to cut Roger off was just what she could not do. Even alienation from Max had brought her closer to Roger. She had shown him that she needed him — she winced at the thought; and in spite of his own troubles, in the very midst of this new preoccupation, Roger had responded truly and delicately, had given her exactly what she needed.

She couldn’t cut him off; then why not keep him? Yesterday’s scene rose before her in all its vividness, mid she was shamed and sickened. But surely that first disgust and shame would pass; when it had passed, why couldn’t Roger be to her exactly what he had always been? She didn’t ask him to come to her as man to woman; she would have been distressed at the bare idea of his so coming. Soger’s distinctive feeling for her was essentially unchanged, and it was in its way a pure and perfect thing. Even in the light of yesterday’s revelation, she could recall no instance in which Roger had exceeded with her the limitations of simple friendship and brotherly good feeling. She wasn’t the keeper of his conscience; why should this transaction hurt her so, when it had no relation to herself ? The manner of the revelation, indeed, was horrid; she might be expected to feel some shock to her nerves, some horror in her heart, some ugly little thrill, even, of sheer woman’s jealousy. But in all this what was unbearable ?

She rose from her scattered drawings, and began to walk about the room. She sought an answer to her question, as if she could hew one out and take comfort therefrom. And there came an answer, indeed, but one devoid of comfort: for now she saw yesterday’s revelation, not as affecting her own future relations with Roger, but in the backward light it threw, the light on things she had seen through all the years she had known Roger, and had hitherto failed to interpret. Hints connecting him with one woman and another, chance meetings, fragments of gossip half-heard and less than half heeded — she interpreted them now: in the light of this revelation she wove them together, no longer daring to doubt that Roger had gone to lengths, had all along been going to lengths — Doubtless everybody knew it but her.

Again she remembered yesterday, and how she had seen what no one should have seen, not even the object of his passion — as that object, to be sure, probably had not. If it could only have been the last thing Nancy ever saw, she would have unhesitatingly given the teeming future, even as she had had perforce to give the rich past. The torturing thoughts deserted her now, going down in mortal hurt. She stopped in her weary walk, sank where she had happened to stop; the waters seemed to close over her head.

Then hour after hour the agony went on. She would come to herself a little, seeing only bleakness where once all had been so friendly; stung to restlessness, she would rise and begin to walk about, sometimes up and down the middle of the room, but oftener keeping close to the walls, as if they would somehow shelter her. For a moment she would feel relief, would even dare to lift her head and draw long breaths; then her little renewal of strength went to reenforce the tide that came sweeping back over her; and once more she was overwhelmed.

Nightfall surprised her there, shivering with cold and weariness. She collected herself a little, and went downstairs; there she got into a warm dressing-gown, and drank some tea. The warmth revived her. “ I shall take care of those drawings to-morrow,” she promised herself. “ Tomorrow I shall rise and go about my business. I shall get through somehow. I shall get through.”

She looked in her mail-box — nothing there; she heated water for a bath. She had not turned on a light; her aching eyes shrank from the glare. But she was sick of stumbling in darkness. She went back to her living-room, and took from the mantel a candle, in the very sconce which had presided at so many interviews with Max. Under her spurting match it glowed up into a friendly little light, which was almost like a voice in the quiet room.

As she turned about, shading the flame with her hand, she found herself face to face with Bogeys picture, that fascinating study of bare boughs against the sky which he had given her all those years ago. And her light illumined not only the canvas, but the lost-past day of its bestowal.

He had not only given it to her; he had, as she perceived at once, painted it for her, rendering in the late light she loved a design at once austere and intricate. The whole transaction was a sort of adoption. He didn’t present his students, even his favorite students, with his works: such an honor was reserved for his disciples. And, made conscious by that act, the dear days of discipleship had followed. Standing there before the picture, Nancy relived them in a flash, felt again their sustaining enthusiasm, their unwavering faith.

Of course, discipleship couldn’t last forever; her own had waned of late years, though she hated to acknowledge it. Discipleship belongs to youth: but surely the perfect disciple may hope to grow into the perfect comrade.

Or might once have hoped to; but that too was taken away from her. Yet was it, indubitably? Roger was, if not the shining one her young imagination had pictured, still in his own way very much a man. He had sublime faith in the ends for which he and Nancy both worked, a faith indeed that had often shamed her own; he had extraordinary patience in the face of ill-success, though he was not of a nature originally patient. If he lived up to the tenets of his own faith, there was no obligation on him to live up to Nancy’s. Why, then, when the first disgust of her discovery had worn off, couldn’t she work round to some feeling that would still leave her a little of Roger? The sum total of his misdoings, if it had been true of some man with whom she had rubbed shoulders at the Art School, some man she had met casually about town, would certainly not have appalled her. Some men were that sort; and though a woman might not like it, she would not go out of her own way to pay attention to it.

Yet Roger wasn’t “ that sort,” and so to be lightly dismissed. Roger was the focus of her young idealism; and her idealism was of a piece with the rest of Nancy, not facile, but tenacious, slow growing, deep rooted, and difficult of destruction. Being all that he was, Roger needed to be all the more, if her demands were to be satisfied.

The satisfaction of her demands, however, was nobody’s care. This picture was as perfect in its own right as it had ever been; if it no longer stood to Nancy for an ultimate perfection, that was simply Nancy’s loss. Simply her loss, but a loss that tarnished the very beauty before her eyes. Slowly Nancy went over every inch of the canvas, as if she scrutinized it for the last time; then she turned away and left it, taking with her her little circle of light.

Another day brought with it an aching longing for Roger’s actual presence, as if the sight of him and the sound of his voice could alone dissolve this oppression. Yet she had only too much of Roger about her. Her studio in particular reeked of him; sitting in the midst of her scattered drawings Nancy realized that no spot on earth, not even his own premises, would have for her so many associations with him.

She stowed her drawings hastily away, and went downstairs. Avoiding her sitting-room, because his picture dominated it, she took refuge in her bedroom. In lieu of work she spent the day at little feminine employments, puttering things which had long awaited her leisure. Another day she would go to work in earnest; meanwhile, she could make herself believe that she was not wholly wasting her time.

Then came the blessed twilight hour, and with it something like healthy hunger. She had not eaten anything for two days; she was glad to find the thought of food grateful to her. This was the first sign of returning sanity; others would follow in due order.

Nancy changed her clothes, because that was her custom at this hour of the day; then she wandered as far as the doorstep, ostensibly to look for mail. She stole a glance up and down the street; at this very moment Roger might be rounding the corner. He was always staying away from her for weeks together, and then descending not only with eagerness but with actual impatience to see her. If he came to-day, she would be angry, of course; he wouldn’t have any business to come to-day. Tet it was never possible to be so angry face to face with him; and surely getting his point of view —

She flushed hotly at the thought; didn’t she already know enough, know too much, about his point of view? She despised her own supineness. Yet she waited to get her tea until it was actually dark; and once or twice as she waited she went to the window, and looked at the sky and the sidewalk and the houses opposite, with lights coming on in their windows. Finally she set out one cup and plate, and got tea most punctiliously; but when she sat down to it, her new-found appetite had completely deserted her.

She acted like a woman without self-respect. Was it possible, she wondered, looking at herself in her mirror, that she had actually fallen a little in love with Roger? The idea was grotesque. She knew what love was, knew all too well. But even if there had not been Max, she wouldn’t have loved Roger; even if some day she ceased to cling to Max, she would never turn to Roger in that way. She was not jealous, except for Roger’s integrity. She could have borne to see him married, asking nothing but that he marry for the good of his own spirit. If his wife were not a cat, she could have gone on giving to Roger and taking from him, just as she always had. Then why, by an affair that was very little different so far as she herself was concerned, was she so distressed, so broken in spirit, so thoroughly shamed?

Principally because she was an ineradicable Puritan. Roger, coming from a line of Puritans who had propagated themselves for generations in a prim New England town, was by some curious quirk a Pagan; he might retain some of the characteristic virtues of his stock, but its essence was not there. But Nancy Desmond, not only a woman on her own but a modern without ethical affiliations or much of a conscious code, a practicing artist, moreover, and a painter chiefly of the nude, was fundamentally and inevitably a Puritan.

She had made sacrifices to her Puritanism; and now, too late, she began to wish she hadn’t. If she had only concentrated everything on Max, and flung it splendidly away, instead of having it snatched from her a bit at a time! Poor Max! How unhesitatingly she had sacrificed him, and how simply he had accepted her decision, just because it was her decision; and how many times, setting the two men side by side in her mind, had she failed to forbear a little comparison, and comparison never redounded to Max’s credit. Yet in the very days of Roger’s self-indulgence, there was Max making his brave struggle in the name of righteousness, making it without the consolation of much illusion or the hope of much reward.

But she couldn’t think the mere words “ brave struggle ” without also thinking of Roger, himself the bravest of stragglers, and that too without the protecting armor of a thick skin. Nancy remembered how good he was to his ravening mother, how conscientiously and illuminatingly he taught his hated classes, how devoted he had been to his own work, and how constantly he had fostered and encouraged hers, rejoicing without a shadow of jealousy over her success. Then she remembered his face as he had turned to his lore and raised his arms to draw her down to him. The cloud blotted out the blue; with a shudder of loathing, Nancy covered her face, and her fingers pressed her eyeballs as if they would wring out the traces of that shame. Roger with his passion upon him — Roger, to look like that I * Yet the next day found her waiting for Roger again, and hating herself because she waited. She had, to be sure, formed a habit of taking her dilemmas to Roger. He didn’t always pass on them, indeed he often wasn’t told of them in so many words; but the light of him always seemed to clear things up for her. Of course it was absurd to think that the light of him could clear this thing up; this thing was, indeed, a signal that his day as an illuminant was over, and that henceforth if things were ever to be cleared up, she must clear them up unaided. But she had lived him too deeply into her life to oust him now. There was scarcely a sketch in her studio that she hadn’t his word upon; ready in its place stood the great bare canvas which she was to cover at his command. He had always been so wonderful with her: so intuitive, so unsparing, yet fundamentally so kind. She couldn’t have got anywhere without Roger; she still needed him, in order to be able to get farther. And she could never go back to him now, simply and trustfully, as one goes to a master. That was all over; yet if he came to her even now, came as he was wont to come, and talked eagerly about the things they both loved, surely she might forget, if only for a quarter of an hour, the shame of his huge unconscious betrayal.

The days went by without bringing him. She ascended to her studio every morning; the habit of work had left vestiges, although the possibility of work was beyond her. She would put on her apron, and stand before her canvas an hour at a time. Then without having touched it she went and sat at the other end of the room, and leaned her head against the wall. Hour after hour she would sit so, or turn over old drawings, or begin daubs that shamed her, and were torn up without ever being completed. At length she would descend, and drink her tea, and lie down in the darkness to another wasted night She had not even hired a model lately; and when chance visitors came she did not answer the bell. It was better to have no spectator of her hateful humiliation.

It had not been thus after Max left her; then she had at least tried to reconstruct her world, had even at length tried to reconstruct it more carefully, perhaps with a feeling that she had something to make up to herself for. But there were things that couldn’t be made up for; there was even, it appeared, a point at which one ceased to try. But of course it was impossible to work when you didn’t sleep; and since the deep slumber of that night after her last return from the country, sleep and Nancy had been strangers.

The idea of Max was dull and cold within her: a thing to be resented, and no more. Yet she wished for a letter from him; she was angered at his not writing, though she knew it was just what he would have wished her to be proud of. A letter presently arrived, one of those letters he wrote when he simply couldn’t keep any longer from writing; it was couched in a transparently cheerful strain, telling her of his work, his prospects, his plans. Nancy read, and misinterpreted; knew that she misinterpreted, and wilfully kept on. “He has no further need of me; he is doing very well without me,” she said to herself. She answered after a long interval, and coldly; she had a malicious hope that her letter would hurt him.

Cold weather came, and the short days of which she had once husbanded every minute. A short day or a long was all one to her now; she needed no light for work, and all lights were the same to the thoughts that lagged or scurried. Sometimes she was for a few minutes quite feverishly alive; then she would unfailingly recreate, in horrible fullness of detail, that scene in the woodland. But for the most part she sat in a lethargy, staring straight ahead of her, Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, recalling perhaps in a vague way some half-forgotten incident of her childhood, or some insignificant face she had seen in her goings and comings. Then with a long shuddering sigh she would partly rouse herself, and make some miserable pretense of a meal, and throw herself face down on her bed, not sleeping, not thinking, as nearly as possible not breathing. She never wept, and she had almost forgotten the sound of her own voice.

Then one day Roger Greene did come to see her; and she chanced to be away on some trumpery errand, the first time in a fortnight that she had passed her own door. Roger left a note in her mail-box, telling her that he had been there, and would come again; Nancy stamped with vexation when she found it. It was cruel that she had missed him, when she asked only for the sight and sound of him: she was willing, she thought, to forego every scruple and forget every hurt, only to have Roger actually before her, tired and gay and enthusiastic, coming to refresh her and to be refreshed, just as he used to.

She attached no particular value to his promise to come again; she was incapable of trusting the future even to that extent. A fortnight later, however, he fulfilled his promise; and Nancy did not let him in. Leaning against her door with only the wooden panel between them, longing with all her soul to put her hand to the knob, and open the door and draw him in, she stood quite motionless, scarcely even breathing, lest a sound should betray her presence.

Roger rapped three times, and then gave her up. She heard him descend the stairs, half-running, and bang the outer door. Still she did not move. She stood rigidly defending that last citadel, a woman who could not weep, and had forgotten how to pray.

CHAPTER XX

THE CHASM

All the month that they had reserved for each other, Mary Allen lived for Roger, and for him only. It was a trial of her powers as well as a tribute to her love; and she emerged once more triumphant. Roger, who had in his secret soul rather dreaded the prospect of such an extended tête-a-tête even with her, found that as usual she justified her own self-confidence. He did not have to look hack, and as usual she kept him from looking ahead. She made him more than happy, raised him in fact above himself: she created the very perceptions and desires which she satisfied. She was the soul of wine and movement and color, the heady intensification of every joy, the brilliant living denial that existence was essentially anything but joy.

From all that she emerged triumphant; and she emerged completely. Their month over, for two weeks she refused to see him at all. She would send for him when she had a moment to herself; but she had a new part to concentrate on, a company to help direct, a thousand details to attend to. The date for her opening was set, all preliminaries arranged except those which required her own attention; in justice to everybody involved, she mustn’t be distracted.

Roger acquiesced in her decision, somewhat sulkily, though not actually believing that she could stick to it. He was something of a wreck after his tremendous effort on her picture and his subsequent month of Mary undiluted: and in a condition of irritable nerves and empty mind, he found himself with nothing to do, and apparently with no resources. He hadn’t gone back to the school: it seemed to him that he never could go back to the school. He was in no mood for original work, having neither the energy nor the zest; and in spite of his ideal of the Greek gentleman swinging a cane, he didn't know how to waste time agreeably. So for two weeks he kicked his heels in a rage of ennui, and planned scathing things to say to Mary when she should whistle him back.

When at length she did whistle him, he could not obey the summons fast enough. She sent Ed with a note, “Come for half an hour”; and it seemed to Roger that he could have walked faster than the assiduous Ed got him there. But he reached her house at last, and its great door swung behind him. He stood in the familiar hall; and when his eyes grew a little accustomed to the dimness, he saw her standing at the head of her staircase, watching him and waiting. Aching with the beauty and the burden of her, he set an impatient foot upon the stairs; and a moment later he had joined her, and her arms were about his neck.

She sobbed a little as he held her. “I’ve missed you so, Roger — I've missed you so,” she whispered. “I didn’t think I could hold out.”

“ I don’t see why you should,” said Roger rather savagely.

“ Why, dearest, if you could see what I’ve been doing! ” She drew away from him, and began to defend herself; and most of that precious half-hour was occupied by her explanations, and by her finding proofs to lay before Roger’s unwilling eyes. “If it hadn’t been absolutely necessary, I shouldn’t have done as I have, Roger. But you can see that I haven’t wasted the time.” She wasted some then, however; and if Roger was amused at her conscientious exposition of what she had done, he was also vexed by the completeness with which her course had been justified in her own eyes.

He saw her only for other half-hours until her opening night; and even those snatched half-hours were not free from interruption. She was so pressed with work, however, that he exerted himself to be of service to her: it was only decent that he should. He was not pleased with the services he was able to render: now that her portrait was finished, her painter had become once more her cloak-holder. He had wearied long since of this aspect of his relation with Mary, and not the least of the summer’s pleasures had been his managing to forget it, even at some risk of rudeness. But now he was once more forced to take it into account, drawing what consolation he might from the reflection that she was used to having her cloak held, and could reward him richly when she came to take it from him.

He went to more than one rehearsal that year, and observed with interest the alternate flashes of imaginative warmth and indolent taking things for granted by which Mary worked herself into a new part. Rehearsals were longer than usual that year, because the time assigned to them was short. The pressure left Mary often dazed and cold, with tired lines that emphasized the irregularity of her face. Her hair was brushed straight back from her forehead, exposing her singular hair line; and she wore whatever would go most easily on and off. But although she did not as a rule scorn artifice, she could on occasion afford to do without it: Roger, seeing her these days, reflected that she would still have been beautiful if reduced to her skeleton.

When her opening night came, he was on hand ridiculously early. Every one now took his presence as a matter of course; the door-tender let him in without question, members of the company greeted him with friendly nods, and even the manager, sunk deep into the fur collar of his overcoat, grunted at him as he passed. Roger went to Mary’s dressing-room and waited for her there. When she arrived he exchanged a few words with her, and withdrew to the wings, where he found a chair as little as possible in any one’s way. It would have been like this, he reflected, if he had been Mary’s husband: like this, only worse, and permanent.

Presently began about him that bustle with which he was now familiar, but which he had never learned to understand. People passed and repassed him, intent on their own concerns; apparently they knew what they were about, but the effect on Roger was of inextricable confusion. He was glad they paid so little attention to him; he would have been shamed by observation of his state, which was nothing less than blue funk. His lips were white, his hands icy, his feet like lead; now and then a wave of giddiness would sweep over him. He felt that he could not have stood, yet he was never quiet; chained to his chair, he shifted his position constantly, with the restlessness of fever. His condition could not have been worse if he had expected to face the audience himself; yet it was to be faced, not by him, but by one in whom he had, humanly speaking, all confidence. But how she must feel when she faced it!

He heard the overture begin, heard the distant polite murmur of the house as it filled. The stage-manager gave a final direction, the stage was cleared of all but the actors who wee to begin the play; the manager retreated to a point of vantage. The overture ceased, and the curtain rose. The opening lines fell on his straining ears; a moment later Mary Allen advanced into the wings, to wait for her cue.

Roger left his chair at last, and took a step or two toward her. She motioned him with her hand to keep away. Her eyes were fixed on that little group under the bright lights; she was biting her lower lip, and one hand strayed restlessly in the long fur of her muff. As her cue approached he could see her take one or two deep breaths; then she shook out her muff, raised her chin slightly, and stepped upon the stage.

Her appearance was the signal for the usual burst of hand-clapping, which, she averred, she never more than half heard, though she could scarcely hare proceeded without it. She bowed slightly in acknowledgment, once to the right, once to the left; then definitely she began her impersonation, which had been for a moment kept waiting.

Again, as Roger saw and heard them from the wings, all the rest of the actors seemed affected and absurd: their voices were raised to a shout, their facial expressions, proceeding under their heavy make-up, were exaggerated, their gestures a matter of contortion. Mary alone seemed to look, move, and speak naturally, betraying only by the turning of her face and by a little greater fullness of voice her consciousness of the fact that she was appearing before an audience. Roger wondered, not for the first time, whether a histrionism so complete didn’t inevitably dominate her even when she was off the stage; not that that mattered if it did.

Mary’s lines in the first act were largely comedy; she gave them with an almost dry delicacy, warming once or twice to sentiment. The audience was politely responsive and decently expectant, as an audience should be during a first act: fuller effects would come later. Mary came off the stage still smiling; she did not have to wait for the curtain. As she passed Roger she flecked his face lightly with her gloved fingers, “It goes well, Roger?” she suggested.

“Very well,” said Roger politely. It did, indeed; but in his nervousness he felt shiveringly apprehensive.

During the intermission he stayed where he was, knowing that Mary had a complete change to make. She had worn a winter street costume in the first act; for the second she emerged, hair and arms and hands all free, her body swathed in silver tissue and cloudy lace. The play was in three acts, and of the fashion she usually affected; so that in the second act she had an opportunity for the sort of thing she did best, and was always expected to do. She unleashed herself in a burst of power and fury; and at the fall of the curtain she had a dozen recalls, and took them with charming cordiality. Roger had a feeling, however, that something was wrong: the play wasn’t going as they had expected it to go. He wondered if she felt the same thing, and saw that she must when she passed him by with averted eyes and a little scowl. He noted that her manager followed her into her dressing-room.

Roger himself took a few steps in that direction, and then halted. He was a rank outsider in the matters over which she and the fat little man who had just gone to her put their heads together. If nevertheless Mary wanted him, she could send for him.

She did not send for him; and she swept by him for the third act barely in time to make her cue. She was dazzling to look at, magnificent to listen to; she pervaded the scene, and did her utmost to make the play. But making that particular play was an Herculean, even an Augean task. As the act wore on, to the anxious sense of the man standing in the wings, even Mary began to force the note, to try to make up in fury what was lacking in significance. To see her struggle so hurt Roger worse than if the entire house had simply risen and hissed her. But in the midst of his pain he felt a huge tenderness, and a saving realization that it would be his task to console her, that in his arms she must forget that for once her resources had been insufficient, her effects had somehow failed to reach their mark.

Roger left his post long enough to go to Mary’s dressing-room and get her cloak from her maid; he was glad now even to assume the cloak. Thèrése laid it over his arm and then stood expectant at the dressing-table; in her dry way she too looked unhappy. “ Are you waiting to-night, Thèrése? ” it occurred to him to ask. Mary’s custom had been to let Therese go home ahead of her, partly no doubt so that she herself might go home when and with whom she pleased, and partly to have everything ready when she arrived for the change that wound up an evening.

“ I am waiting to-night, Mr. Greene,” answered Thèrésse. Something in her look as she said it reminded him of the way Mary’s manager looked at him, though there wan no possible physical resemblance between the lean dry Frenchwoman and the pudgy little man.

Roger went back to the wings and waited, the fur-bordered Thèréhad arranged it. The play screamed itself to an end. In the final picture Mary’s beautiful arms went impulsively, with the effect of a final lovely surrender, around the neck of the young actor with whom she was not on speaking terms. They dropped in all haste, once the curtain was safely down. Mary, somewhat relieved by the number of calls she had received, passed back to her dressing-room.

For a few minutes Roger watched the collapse of the canvas world where his thoughts had so lately moved. Then some of the actors began to emerge from their less important dressing-rooms up an iron stair; and Roger faced about, and watched her door. It was blankly between him and his love, but presently it would open and let her out, his in her disappointment and chagrin more than she had ever been in her triumph.

What seemed a long time passed then; but the door did finally open, and Mary emerged. She was not alone; and she did not pause and look for Roger with delicious eagerness held in check by her late disappointment. She was in animated and rather angry colloquy with her manager, who walked by her side. She was wearing a long plain coat which she used sometimes to slip on at rehearsals; her eyes were fixed on King’s face, and her thoughts on what he was saying.

Side by side the two of them turned sharply to the left, and passed out to the street. Following them came Thèrése, who paused to switch off the lights and to cast & glance of rather scornful pity at Roger Greene, left standing absurdly with Mary’s cloak over his arm. She didn’t even offer to relieve him oi it: she was a prudent woman, and preferred to ignore awkwardnesses.

Roger’s first sensation was of utter incredulity. Mary had visibly passed him without even a look; but in the nature of things she could not be leaving without him. In a moment she would either come stealing back or send the faithful Ed, from whom Roger was never ashamed to take a message. Didn’t the noncommittal Ed adore her, and the dry Thèrése, and the pudgy shrewd King? And didn’t she permit their adoration, and use it, and have Roger use it? Against the black thought that she used him as well, Roger counseled himself to patience; and he tried as the minutes went by to persuade himself that they were not going so fast, and that there was yet time for her to return.

But she did not return; and he presently had the scene to himself. The door-man, making a last round of inspection before he locked up, was spectator of his ignominy. Before his inquiring eye Roger fled, rolling the badge of his servitude into the smallest possible compass, without regard for wrinkles. He would not leave it here; he purposed to confront her in the morning with this proof of his thoughtfulness and her own unbelievable neglect. He could have endured being quarreled with, coquetted at, neglected capriciously; he was not, he hastened to remind himself, in any way the equal of the woman who had become so dear and so necessary to him. But he could not endure being simply forgotten. She forgot him, to be sure, only at a crisis and under pressure; but hadn’t he ignored his own work, hadn’t he even now fairly deserted it, for the sake of being with her?

He went back to his studio, blank and dismal at this hour, and began restlessly to walk the floor. Not thus had he planned to spend these hours, alone in this half-lighted place with his gnawing thoughts. His picture of Mary, beautifully framed but not yet disposed of, smiled at him in its fascination; and he eyed it in black wrath. He had done all that for her; and look what she had done for him!

Once the telephone tinkled — he had had a telephone put in lately, solely for convenience in talking to her. He started toward it eagerly; but the tinkle failed to develop into a ring. Smiling grimly, Roger resumed his walk.

Most of the night he paced back and forth, smoking pipe after pipe, alternately writhing over the evening’s discomfiture and planning to-morrow’s revenge, when he should cast that hated cloak at her feet, and tell her exactly what he thought of her conduct, and make a little scene that should either bring the wretched woman to her knees or free him forever from her hated thralldom. He was sore in every nerve. He had been not only wounded but made ridiculous; and he retained enough of his Anglo-Saxon heritage so that ridicule found the joint in his armor.

At ten o’clock he rang Mary’s bell, prepared to wait until she should emerge after her protracted night. She was already in her sitting-room, however; and Roger was bidden to step thither.

Her manager was with her. In the morning light he looked jaded and puffy; but Mary, beautifully negligee, was as fresh as a daisy. “ You know Ben King, Roger? We are having a counsel of war. We have decided things aren’t as bad as we had thought,” she told him.

“ The notices are encouraging,” said the manager, nodding toward a heap of opened newspapers.

“ Or, at any rate, they are polite, as if they dealt with the failings of an old friend,” said Mary. “We have called a rehearsal for two o’clock, and we still have hopes. Last night was awful, though,” she added with a grimace.

Awful, indeed, thought Roger; but he couldn’t find anything to say. He stood with the cloak awkwardly bundled under his arm; he couldn’t make a scene before a third person, and he was unwilling quietly to relinquish his gage of battle, the bringing of which dramatically without wrapping had cost him a taxicab. But he had a clammy feeling that even if a third person had not been there, his scene would never have come off as he had planned it in the night watches. Mary was, and always would be, too much for him: forever and forever, strong, supple, lovely creature, too much for the like of him. After the evening’s defeat and what must have been a wretched night, she had caparisoned herself for the day, and was looking forward to a heavy rehearsal and a night that might well be, under the circumstances, more trying than the last. And she was glad to see him, which was just now a farther point of irritation.

She motioned him to a seat near her, and her eyes fell on what he carried. “Mercy, my cloak!” she ejaculated. “ What did I come home in? Some rag, I suppose. Bing for Thèrése to take that, Roger; or put it down anywhere. Have you had breakfast?”

“ Yes, thank you,” said Roger stiffly, though as a matter of fact he had not.

“I’m glad you came while Mr. King is here,” Mary continued. “ He wants to talk to you about your picture.”

She smiled at her manager; and he, taking his cue, said promptly, “Indeed I do. I have intended ever since I heard of it to make you an offer for that picture, Mr. Greene. I’m sure I am a suitable person to have it; and I shall want it reproduced, if it is as good as — as I hear it is.”

Roger was tempted to say that the picture was not for sale; but he checked the childish retort, and looked at Mary. She smiled. “ Shall we let him have it, Tertius ? ” she asked confidentially.

Roger thought that King winced, recalling perhaps the days when “ we ” on Mary’s lps had been wont to include himself. But turning to look at the stout little man blinking in the morning light, he decided that he was spreading his own sentiment over a most unlikely subject; in disgust at his own silliness he tried to meet Mary’s mood. “ How much can we hold him up for?” he wanted to know.

“ Til tell you,” said Mary, quite as if King weren’t there at all. “ We’ll send the market price of the picture up before we give him a chance at it. I’ll give a party for the picture: what I suppose you would call a private view, but not too private. We’ll have everybody come and look, the few who really know what is what, and the many who would like to have it supposed that they do.”

Soger’s eyes sparkled at the prospect, but he demurred, “Haven’t you trouble enough already?”

“ Not half enough! ” she protested. “ If this be trouble, I court trouble. You’ll see, though, that it will be larks.”

“ Well, some time, perhaps — ”

“ Some time soon. I’ve been planning this for weeks,” Mary announced. Then she added a touch of veritability by declaring, “I have even the place selected. It is the one hotel ballroom I know that isn’t either gaudy or fulsome. The picture will queen it from one end; our friends will come, see, believe; the good work will be begun.”

She hadn’t been planning this very long, for she had never before breathed a word of it; but if it were impromptu, it was none the less amazing for that.

“ You have set your hand to the plow,” commented her manager, in a tone of resignation.

“I have; and you know what that means, don’t you, Ben?”

“ Yes. It means that you will sell me the picture at your own price. Please remember, though, that business isn’t what it used to be,” said King.

“ Oh, it will be better again. It is going to pick up, beginning to-night,” Mary assured him. “ Even this picture will help it; it will rep luce charmingly.”

“I’ll take your word for that,” said King, rising.

“ Stay for lunch, Ben,” invited Mary.

He shook his head. “ I’ve things to see to.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mary; but she rose promptly, to keep him from changing his mind.

King shook hands with Roger, and nodded to Mary.

“ Do, please, get to rehearsal on time. We have an awful lot to do this afternoon.”

She nodded brightly back; as the door closed behind him she spoke softly to Roger. “Ben is worried, and I can’t blame him. I think myself that last night’s effort is doomed to the store-house. How puffy he looks this morning.”

“ He undoubtedly spent the night thinking about yotir affairs,” said Roger with some asperity.

She took the rebuke in the best possible spirit. “He has thought to some purpose, too. He is as astute as they make them, though you might not guess it, meeting him casually. Shall we have our lunch here or out, Roger ? ”

“I am to substitute for Mr. King?” suggested Roger nastily.

“ I don’t know in what respect. I asked him too, though it was gracious in him to decline,” said Mary, unruffled.

He sank down on the deep-cushioned couch. “This is as good a place to eat as any,” he said.

Mary turned over the pile of newspapers, and then began to read her mail. “Do you think different costumes would help that play ? ” she asked.

“ I’m sure I’m no judge,” answered Roger.

“I’m sure you are, when you care to be.” Mary slit another envelope. “ Shall we have the car at one o’clock ? ” she asked.

“ If you like.”

She finished her mail, and ordered luncheon and the car. Then she withdrew to dress. Alone in the familiar room, with nothing to feed his indignation, Roger began to be ashamed of his bearishness. Then he recalled last night’s misery, and stiffened: he would have this out with her, by heaven!

Returning equipped for the day, Mary found that he had not moved. She came over impulsively, and sat down by him. “ Roger,” she said softly, “ Roger darling — I’m sorry.”

This was the thing that had always touched him: her simplicity struggling up through her massed conventions. It touched him now, but he steeled himself. He had had warning of what their relation would come to; he had now not only sufficient pretext for asserting himself, hut a spur in his side as well. He sat erect, summoning his reserves; the movement brought him closer to her. Desperately Roger recalled last night; resolutely he turned his mind to Ben King, whom she had once loved, and now coolly used. Mary drooped against him with a little inarticulate murmur; and his nerves yielded, if his reason was not convinced. He kissed her.

The next moment he thought hotly that she had bribed him to a reconciliation: he remembered her offer to do something for his picture. Roger pushed her away from him, and got to his feet. As a matter of fact he had for the moment forgotten about the picture, and her intentions in regard to it; but how could he tell her that? How be sure of it himself? He had taken a great deal from her, taken freely because it was freely offered. But suddenly he felt enslaved and miserable. In another hour he would eat her food, as he had eaten it a thousand times before; but now for the first time he resented its being hers.

He began to walk restlessly up and down. Mary settled herself, and followed him with her eyes; in them was the look they had only when she loved him best. She was guiltless enough in intention; she gave freely of her magnificence, grudging him her picture no more than she grudged him his lunch. How could he tell her that he had suddenly perceived his bondage — how, especially as perception of bondage is the first step toward a desire for freedom ?

He stood at the table and turned over the open news papers, seeing the beloved name in print, and the beloved personality quaintly stereotyped in “notices.” Mary had caught the key of them: they were indulgent. It must be horrible for her to feel herself indulged, when her wont had been to take by storm. He mustn’t make it any worse for her. She needed a friend, indeed; and where in her life of admiration and of essential loneliness was she to look for a friend, if not to him ? But how to he a friend to her? As well dream of being a friend to the lightning. He could only admire, and appreciate, and wonder.

He turned cheerfully back to his enslavement; in token of his submission he began to discuss her project for his picture. He found fault with her plan, to be sure; but she met his objections easily, and carried her points against him. It pleased him to see her do so; he couldn’t have endured being chronically sorry for Mary. But that was his good fortune; for it appeared to him now that he never need be. She not only carried her points about her new plan; she was now sedulously attentive to Roger. She called for him after her long rehearsal, and had him behind the scenes again that night Indeed she summoned him to her dressing-room for a few minutes between acts; and she carried him home to supper after the play. She was so very good to him that Roger suspected she was making up for more than the slight she had put upon him; he feared, incongruous as the idea was, that Mary was beginning to take him as a duty. But his suspicions pointed out no practical course open to him; so long as she took the trouble to be a perfect mistress, no bondsman on earth could ever get free from her.

For a harrowing fortnight she carried a double burden. But her play was finally cobbled into a half-success; and that left her free to turn her attention to his picture. She clung tenaciously to her idea of a private view, seeming to attach a mighty importance to it; and although he couldn’t see why it should be so important to her, Roger was compelled to admit that on general grounds her idea was a good one. Early in December, therefore, the promised “ party ” actually took place. The next day the picture as a matter of course was sold to Mr. King.

CHAPTER XXI

NANCY DRIFTING

Nancy Desmond had but the one outlet. Until now | that had been sufficient; and under ordinary circumstances she might have lived a lifetime without discovering her need for any other outlet, or her peculiar personal inability to supply such a need. She was possessed of no easy emotionalism; she could not weep nor rage. Under strain she simply grew tenser and tenser; when the tension became unbearable, she took refuge at her easel, and painted until she was weary and perhaps disgusted, but certainly relieved.

Breakdown in her work, therefore, struck at the roots ! of her being. She still believed that work was life's alchemist; she still made sporadic attempts to do what had once been as natural to her as breathing. But the flickering impulse soon died down; her palette was heavy in her hand, and the smell of paint sickened her. She would sit down in her study to rest for a minute, and remain so for hours, with her head resting against the wall, looking dully ahead of her. Sometimes she turned over and tried to sort her old drawings. But the spectacle of what she had once done was a torment rather than a solace, and she soon desisted.

Her nights were worse than her days. When she slept, she dreamed horribly; and worse than dreams were certain half-waking imaginings, in which she played the doubtful part of heroine. After such a night she would arise perhaps in the gray dawn, with throbbing head and heavy limbs, to face that perpetual blankness; and at such a time the horrible thought came to her that she was going mad.

At first it touched her only in passing; but it returned again and again, and ever more strongly. It frightened her, and she fought against it. People didn’t go mad simply from disgust and shame; she knew that for Nancy Desmond at thirty to talk of going mad was simply to yield to panic. But as the days went on and brought no relief, as they brought indeed an accumulation of horror, she was thrown perpetually back to that one idea. If she wasn’t going mad now, she soon would be. At some of her worst moments she hoped that she might, feeling that even to be actually and definitely mad would be a relief.

Belief in her hypothesis grew upon her until she conceived her condition as a horrible secret, which she must be ever on the alert to screen from observation. She never went out except after night-fall to buy her little supper. She left her telephone unanswered, and muffled her doorbell. Her mail collected on her desk, and often there was a week’s dust on it before she broke the seals.

Max’s infrequent letters she still selected and read. She felt that she ought to be interested in them: not so long ago, she remembered, she had been even painfully interested in all that came from that source. But now she could not remember at the end of a sentence what the beginning had been; and when she laid the letter down, ahe sometimes tried to remember how Max looked, and failed. With a desperate effort she would piece his looks together bit by bit, brown hands, wiry black hair, dark face and incongruous light eyes. And having painfully got him assembled, she would wonder blankly why she wanted to remember him: what had he been to her, that she should consider him so very important?

Roger indeed remained with her, a concrete fact, though hideously distorted. For an hour at a time, as had been her habit in other days, she would go over her many conversations with Roger: hadn’t she, by subsequent joyful meditation, fairly committed them to memory? But they came to her now, not as something recollected, bnt as if she heard them afresh; and they were delivered, not by the old dear-eyed Roger, flaming with precious enthusiasm, but by a strange leering creature that was Roger and still was not, a Roger whose mouth turned up at the comers, and whose hair grew to a point on his forehead.

Then gradually she lost the conception of Roger, or of this demon that was partly in his shape. For a long period — how long she did not know, but it stretched over many brightenings and fadings of light — she felt as if both in i spirit and in flesh she were traversing a vast field of ice. Blinded by the glare, bruised by the hummocks, she felt some desperate compulsion to keep on, with every muscle strained in the effort; and, as if in a nightmare, she was always trying to get on and out, and she never could.

She rediscovered Roger in a climax of hideousness one night when he and his loves danced before her eyes in horrible carnival. Orgiastic, leering, beastly, and dear to j the least detail, the episodes were enacted to her by Roger and the woman with flaming hair, by Roger and other women now known to Nancy for what they were, by Roger and women only dimly guessed, by Roger and women whom her maddened spirit invented for him.

All night long they whirled before her. In the dull morning of a bitter winter day Nancy rose, more dead than alive, and staggered out to her living-room. She laid a fire among the ashes in her grate, and kindled it; wrapping her dressing-gown tightly about her, she huddled over the blaze.

It was like a fire in a picture; it danced before her eyes, but gave out no warmth. She piled wood on, and yet more wood; she sat so close to it that she smelled the scorch of her dressing-gown. But her teeth continued to chatter, and her hands shook as if with an ague. She lapsed into a half-consciousness that was only distantly like natural sleep, and rallied herself at intervals to pile on more wood. If she could only get warm, surely all her torture would leave her: if she could only get warm, and sleep.

In an interval clearer than the rest, she perceived that it was noon-day, and that although she sat almost upon a fire which threatened destruction to her old chimney, she was no warmer than she had been. She stumbled over to her telephone and called a doctor; she could not get back from the telephone to the fire.

The next thing that she knew, the doctor was lifting her, dressing-gown and all, into her own bed. She felt a prick in her arm, and knew, although she had never experienced the like before, that he was giving her a hypodermic; she was pleased by her own cleverness in making the discovery. Then she heard him at her telephone, and knew that he was sending for a nurse; and suddenly there was a great load off her spirit. As she drifted off toward their artificial Nirvana, Nancy knew that she was sick. She hadn’t been simply the prey of her own imagination; she was sick, and people acknowledged it. They had come to her aid, to make her well, or at least to make her forget. She was forgetting, she was forgetting even now.

The doctor went away finally; and soon after he left, there was a cow in the room. She didn’t know how it got there, for this was her own bedroom; but it was there, and it was trying to drink out of her little blue teapot, which shouldn’t have been here either. But she was desperately afraid of the cow, as she had not been of the melancholy orange and scarlet devil. She groped and grasped a hand; and for a long time she held it, and struggled to send the cow away. She could have opened her eyes now, but she would not, for fear of the cow.

Then she did open her eyes; it was daylight, and her glance rested on her own blue and white bedspread. It was the work of her great-great-grandmother, who had spun both the flax and the yarn; in Nancy’s childhood it had been kept as a sacred relic; but when she moved into these rooms where she wished everything to be so pretty, she had put it to its original use.

She was gratified now by the honest fabric and the simple design; and the surface was pleasantly rough beneath the fingers that moved slightly upon it. By that she knew they belonged to her own hand, though it was strangely thin and white. But when she tried to lift her hand, it was so heavy it would not obey her; so perhaps it was not her own hand after all.

She stirred her head a little, and a strange face came between her and the light. It was an interesting face, thin, eager, intense, but too large for the little white cap that surmounted it. A band across the high forehead would help it; if Nancy had had a pencil, she would have tried to draw it surrounded by a nun’s cowl.

The thin lips moved, and there came a pleasant voice, which was not strange like the face. “ Drink this, please,” it said. “ No, don’t try to lift your head. Through the tube — so.”

“Through that thing?” came a ghost of Nancy’s own voice. “I can’t.”

“Oh, yes, you can! You have been doing it right along,” the voice encouraged her.

Nancy drank a little, and then turned resolutely away. “ Horrible — slop,” she articulated.

The interesting face softened in a laugh. “ You’re getting better in a hurry.”

She must be, if such a nice person told her so. But Nancy hadn’t much desire to get better. It was pleasant to lie here with everything about her soft and warm and dim. If only she could have been quite sure that it was she who lay here — Yet even on that point she wasn’t anxious to have her doubts resolved. She would come back to herself soon enough.

She lay in the delightful borderland between sleep and waking; but she knew that the day was drawing on, and she knew when night came. Then she went sound asleep; and from that sleep she emerged to complete wakefulness.

The woman with the interesting face still tended her. “ Have you been here all along? ” asked Nancy under her ministrations.

“ All along.”

“ Have I been sick long?”

“ Some time.”

“Where did you sleep?”

“ On that cot.”

Nancy shifted her head, and took in the fact of a cot where no cot should be. “ And have I given you a rotten time?” she wished to know.

“ Not at all,” said the nurse politely.

Nancy wondered vaguely whether she had talked, and said things that she couldn’t recollect now; but she dismissed the matter as of no importance. “Please may I have my hair well brushed ? ” she asked. “ It feels tangled, and that bothers me.”

“ I haven’t been able to take care of your hair as it deserved.” The nurse’s capable hands began to unbraid it. “You have beautiful hair; I like to handle it.”

When it was smooth and sleek about her head, Nancy closed her eyes in contentment. She opened them a half-hour later to ask, “Has anyone inquired about me?”

Several people had, it appeared. The nurse produced a little heap of cards, and one or two scrawled pieces of paper. “ This one has ’phoned every morning, Miss Desmond,” she informed Nancy.

“ This one ” was Mrs. Peabody, the illustrator, a cheerful young person whom Nancy liked, though they were by no means intimate. “ That was very decent of her,” commented Nancy. “ Say I appreciate her interest, will you, the next time she calls? ”

It seemed to her that she had been talking a long time; she felt weary with the effort. She held on, however, a moment longer. “ Hold up the rest of the cards — where I can see them,” she whispered.

It was surprising how many people had concerned themselves about her, surprising and delightful, though none of the cards represented a closer intimacy than Mrs. Pea-body's. But then of course she had no intimates. Nancy closed her eyes wearily.

“ Several of these came with flowers. But I had to take all the flowers out of the room; they seemed to disturb you. There was one bouquet particularly that very well might I thought. But perhaps it was a riot of color, or something else that I don't understand.”

“What was it?”

“Red roses, and some flower I don't know. It was orange and scarlet, anyhow; I thought it was terrible. Miss West's card was with it.”

A faint chuckle came from Nancy's white lips.

Another day she inquired for letters, and suffered herself to be put off. Twenty-four hours later her demands became pressing; and a little heap of correspondence was produced. Nancy glanced through it, and sorted out three letters from Max. She pushed the rest toward the nurse. “ You may read those to me, if you will,” she said.

Max's letters she slipped unopened beneath her pillow; and she kept her fingers upon them as the nurse read the other letters. Her attention was incompletely on them: it was wonderful how many trivial things people found to write about, and how many words it took them. But that correspondence must have been piling up for a long time, she judged.

She opened Max's letters when the nurse was out of the room. They were meager enough; it did not take her long to read them. But in the last she saw that Max was beginning to be anxious because he had not heard from her. It was good of him to be anxious; and the feeling of anxiety was like a first faint throb of returning life. She smuggled the letters back to their place; when the nurse returned she asked, “How soon may I write a letter?”

“ I will write for you, if you like,” the nurse suggested.

“That won’t do? Then get better as fast as possible; it rests with you.”

A week later permission was given; and with incredible difficulty Nancy accomplished a brief scrawl, wherein the lines tumbled over the paper at their own sweet will. “ Max dear, I have been sick, but I am now better. I think of you, and rejoice that you are doing as I would have you. I shall see you again some day. Meanwhile I am always yours, Nancy.” She had to let the nurse manage the envelope.

Max answered by return of post, though thanks to the distance between them it was a week between the sending of her letter and the receipt of his. His letter was all about her, all concern for her illness, and exhortations to take care of herself: he seemed to be quite sure that she wouldn’t. Nancy smiled at his detailed inquiries about nurses and doctors; then she sighed at his unnecessary cautions. But she was proud that he wrote so.

She was better by this time, well enough to sit up m bed, and to take a faint interest in things about her. Of these the chief was the nurse, whose presence she no longer took for granted. She had demanded her name, and learned that she was Mrs. Constantine; and she had begun to piece together some particulars concerning this attendant. Mrs. Constantine was about Nancy’s own age, although she looked older. She had a husband, but no children. Her outlook on life was eager, interested, and curious; and she had developed a genuine attachment to Nancy, an attachment which pleased Nancy not the less because it rather surprised her.

In her weakness, indeed, Nancy did not suspect the strength of Mrs. Constantine’s interest in her; and that lady’s off-hand manner was designed to conceal her own sentiments. She had been drawn to Nancy from the first, seeing her lie like a sick child, mute and helpless. As the days had gone by she perceived more and more clearly that the thin face with the eyes which recognized nothing wag essentially most unchildlike; and the thin hands moving only in the purposelessness of delirium were emphatically the hands of a doer. In Nancy’s little dwelling, too, Mrs. Constantine read signs of what her life had been; and it was with more than professional interest that she looked for the end of Nancy’s prostration.

When it ended, however, there was no revelation. Nancy carried on a fitful correspondence with some man in the west, it seemed; but that fact was not much to build on. For the rest, she was very sweet and tractable: she not only obeyed orders, she accepted suggestions, and seemed even to be grateful for them. She shrank from activity, and even more from decision; but undoubtedly that was the result of her illness, and of her slow recovery. In short, she was a model patient; but that did not satisfy her nurse.

Her persistent feeling was that there was a mystery here, a human problem which not only filled the observer with imperfectly suppressed curiosity, but in some sort affected the case. She finally spoke to the doctor about it, following him into the living-room for a professional aside at the conclusion of one of his visits. He eyed her somewhat askance; he had not known Nancy before this illness, except on one occasion when he had treated her for grippe, but he knew Mrs. Constantine.

“ I have taken it for granted that she was sick,” he remarked, “ but if you tell me she is suffering from a broken heart — ”

She smiled at herself, but she pressed her point earnestly. “She was sick, but she isn’t now. She doesn’t seem to care about getting well, though; and she creates curious inhibitions for herself.”

“ Can’t you tempt her out of them?”

“ I’ve tried. The other day she was telling me that my cap wasn’t becoming; and I gave her a pencil and a piece of paper, and told her to draw me one that would be. She drew a cap at once, and began to draw me, too; she worked very quickly and eagerly for a few minutes. Then she made two or three slower strokes; and then she burst out crying and told me to take the thing away.”

“Weakness,” remarked the man of medicine.

“ I suppose so, but — ”

He drew on his gloves, and condescended to a partial acceptance of her theory. “ She is pretty,” he remarked. “Have you tried to stir her by an appeal to her vanity?”

“ She doesn’t seem to have any vanity. There isn’t anything I can appeal to,” sighed the nurse.

“Then suppose you let her alone. She is probably capable of working out her own cure. And don’t let her suspect how curious you are; for if she begins to resent your interest I shall have to take you off the case.”

As the weeks went by, Mrs. Constantine was moved to retire of her own accord. Nancy grew better slowly, being promoted from bed to a chair, and then, as spring came and the days grew milder, to careful constitutionals in her own street. Another person might have recuperated just as slowly from such a severe illness, without engendering such combustion in the bosom of Mrs. Constantine. Another person might have been just as arbitrary in her ideas of what she could do and what lay beyond her strength; and Mrs. Constantine would have laid it to the simple peevishness of a convalescent. But Nancy was not peevish; and when Mrs. Constantine was driven by conscience to speak of resigning, there were actual tears in Nancy’s eyes as she asked her to stay.

At first the nurse was touched by those tears; then she fell to wondering why, if Nancy clung to companionship, she so persistently avoided seeing callers. Mrs. Peabody came several times, and several others once; and Nancy seemed pleased at the attention; but her callers were not admitted to her. She retired to her own bedroom at the sound of the doorbell, and could neither be lured thence nor inveigled into letting any one in. In reply to her nurse’s questions she answered whimsically that if she saw them they would sooner or later speak of paint, and the smell of paint made her sick. Yet her most casual remark was a painter’s remark; and half the time it seemed to the shrewd eyes upon her that her fingers were itching for the brush.

“ I give it up,” said Mrs. Constantine to herself. She took refuge in her sense of being baffled; but it would not stay with her. After an interval of quiet, conjecture would again begin to rage. “ It seems as if she were always listening for something; and I can’t even make out whether she listens in expectation or in dread. If I thought she wanted to see that man out west, I’d write him myself to come. Yet I don’t think it’s that. Well, doubtless she will work it out some time; but I don’t see any signs of that. And I should like, I should more than like, to help her do so.” And the eager eyes would turn to Nancy with their curiosity softened by a yearning to help.

CHAPTER XXII

YOUNG RANDY

Nancy drew a quiet satisfaction from the thought of Max. It was fairly worth an illness to feel his concern, the kindliness of it, the impersonality. But what of that other, the finer temperament of which less was asked? Wouldn’t that other do anything for her? She asked for so little now, mere incidental kindness, a call or a note, or any demonstration of concern as to whether she was still in the world, and what she did in it.

Yet she was not sure whether she felt more desire or dread of such demonstration. Sometimes her imagination ran wild, picturing what Roger was doing. She fancied him come at last into his own, through the success of Mary’s portrait: he was taken up in the right quarter, his work had become the vogue, he had no time for old friends. Then she would repudiate this picture of Roger successful and hardened. Roger had often neglected her; but if he neglected her to the present extent, it could only be because he was sick or in trouble. A thousand incidents would swarm to her mind to support this hypothesis; and for a moment she would fully believe it.

Then came the killing reflection that she was once more putting Roger on a plane of his own, above all possible human failings. Hadn’t she learned anything from bitter experience? Was she anxious to recreate a god, only to see him once more deprived of his godhead? Did she actually even wish to see Roger? At any rate, she did not wish to learn of him from others, either to have her suspicions confirmed or to endure the casual mention of his name.

As a matter of fact she never did meet anyone who could tell her the true reason for Roger’s neglect at this time; and she learned it only years afterward. But her contact with the outside world was presently reestablished, and that in a manner she would never have expected.

On a fine spring afternoon Nancy went out for one of her tame parades in the company of her nurse. Over her neat braids — Mrs. Constantine still did her hair for her, and was unable to achieve Nancy’s characteristic knot — was drawn a knitted cap, old-blue in color; and she had donned a sweater to match. Nancy had bought the outfit in the fall with an idea of skating, but the first use she had put it to was for wear on these constitutionals.

To-day they prolonged their walk to the Square; and there Nancy sat down to rest, and sent Mrs. Constantine on an errand. She was glad to be rid of everlasting surveillance, even from a nurse whose friendly intentions she divined. Perhaps she was well enough to do without Mrs. Constantine; but if she sent her nurse away, she would simply be all alone. She who had once loved her own solitary company now found the idea of loneliness intolerable. Her present mode of life was impossible of continuance; but with her weakened resistance she could see her way to no other. The doctor had suggested change, travel, diversion; but she was curiously afraid of change, and everything within her seemed to deny the possibility of diversion.

But she enjoyed sitting here alone in the sun, watching the tender green of the tree-tops as they swayed in the light wind. Her spirit was fairly in the tree-tops with the wind, when she became aware of someone who had halted before her. It was not Mrs. Constantine; it was a man. Nancy was not afraid of a polite loafer; but she felt a spasm of dread that it might be someone she knew.

She turned deliberate eyes upon him, and recognized him, with a sensation of relief: no other presence on earth could have been quite so harmless. “ Randy! ” she exclaimed. “ Why, Randy! ”

The dapper young man disposed of his walking-stick, and seized both her hands in a stout grip. “ I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he declared. “ They hadn’t beheld you in so long that I thought they lied.”

“ Nor I mine,” she said. “ You’re a stranger, Randy.”

“No, you are the stranger,” he retorted. “Have you been out of town ? ”

“ I have been sick,” Nancy acknowledged.

“ I’m sorry to hear that; but I’m glad it hasn’t damaged your looks. You’re very thin; but upon my soul I think that you’re prettier than ever,” he declared, and seated himself beside her.

Nancy had never been bumingly interested in her own looks; and when they were at their best Randy had never complimented them. He had somewhat unwillingly respected her; she had tolerated him because he was agreeable and made things “ go.” But now she was ridiculously pleased at his evident intention of staying, she who had for months avoided seeing anybody; and she was even pleased at his compliment.

In her pleasure she smiled, and he smiled back at her. “You yourself look fresher than a May morning, Randy,” she said.

“Well, it is a May afternoon, isn’t it? And what have I to do except to preserve my youthful beauty and dash?” Randy wanted to know.

“ I can’t even do that,” said Nancy.

“If you couldn’t, why should you care to? You can paint,” he said. “It would exhaust anyone to paint so well.” She lighted with a mournful eagerness. Pleased at having found the right line, Randy went on. “You are entitled to a rest on your laurels. There was ‘ Kiteflying,’ for instance.”

“ ‘Kite-flying ’ was a long time ago,” she said.

“As if that could make any difference! I remember still the day I saw it, and kissed the hem of its garment. My first feeling was pure delight, and my next was a shrinking sense of my own inferiority.”

Modesty had never been Randy’s most striking characteristic ; and she knew that he threw in that touch for her edification. She smiled at it, and he returned her smile. But he leaned back, tapping the sole of his shoe with his stick, and fell into silence; and across his face came a flash of gloom that contrasted oddly enough with his usual cheerful flippancy.

There came back to Nancy remembrance of scattered things she had heard about him for the last two years — it was about two years since Randy had ceased to frequent her Sunday afternoons, shortly before the afternoons themselves were discontinued. In the interval Randy had drifted into the ranks of those on whose banners “ Bevolt ” is writ large. Such people, as Max Meredith had early noted, it was beyond Nancy to take seriously. To her nothing on earth was worth making a fuss about except art; and about art there was nothing to be gained by making a fuss.

Randy took nothing seriously, but he took Bevolt to be his mistress; and the revolters took Randy to their collective bosom. His glibness, his neat good looks (which had among the surrounding frowsiness an air of positive originality), his talent for making his listeners believe that he was impressed with their importance, and above all his fund of large loose easy-flowing enthusiasm, qualified him as a leader in this army of intellectual salvation. He still called himself a painter, but he painted progressively less and less. Wherever the emancipated and hand-to-mouth were in these days to be found, there too might be found Randy Payne, with his neat black hair and his pointed chin, leading the discussion, breaking the ice on new topics, warming up the old, with a skill and daring to which nothing gave pause, not even a change of side. People liked him, and easily made much of him; the very young were inclined to look on him as an exceptionally knowing fellow — and this circle was largely made up of the very young. So Randy passed, as season followed season and burning topic succeeded to topic that had burnt out, from futurist painting to birth control, from birth control to psychic analysis; and if there were times when he longed for a life closer packed and more directed, at the majority of times he knew himself for a drifter by nature, and felt that here and now he was drifting aa entertainingly as possible.

Nancy, however, was willing to forget the apostle of Bevolt in the old friend opportunely dropped down, especially as the old friend spoke so pleasingly of her painting. She therefore broke the silence to say, “ If you run about the world while I sit in a corner and paint, you will at least have news to tell me/’

He lighted, quite the old Randy at once. “ News, gossip, the true and the untrue, doings of the great world and the little,” he assured her. “ My only difficulty is in knowing where to begin.”

“ Begin anywhere. It is all news to me,” she said. “ Or if I must make a choice, begin with the old guard. Who is painting what, and why ? ”

“ A loud-mouthed lot are painting trash, heaven knows why. And a few quiet ones are sitting in the corners, doing the solid stuff that counts,” Randy began with unction. “ Now in my own gang—”

Usually he figured forth as the apostle of his own “ gang,” interpreting to it its own impulses, defending its own creations from its conscience. Now he took pleasure in flaying and anatomizing his “ gang,” in showing its impulses for drunken ego-mad delusions, and in grinding its creations to powder. Nancy listened, interested, amused, not wholly approving his change of front; but she listened, and an audience was all that Randy required.

He passed to the gossip of a wider circle of studios: it was his business to know everything about everybody. Nancy held her breath, feeling that he drew nearer to the mention of a certain name. She dreaded hearing it; yet she wouldn’t by interrupting throw away her chance of learning that all was well with Roger.

But Randy, quick to perceive change in his auditor, saw her tension and misinterpreted it. “I’ve tired you,” he | broke off to say.

“ No. No, indeed. But I’m gettihg chilly,” she apologized.

Randy jumped to his feet. “I’ll tell you,” he proposed. “We can go somewhere and have some tea, and get warmed up.”

Her look was eager, but she demurred conscientiously, “But, Randy, I was left here to wait until I was called for.”

“Come on anyhow; cheat the law,” insisted Randy.

Nancy looked about, but saw no sign of Mrs. Constantine. She perceived that she was actually hungry; and she was gratified by attention neither authoritative nor hired. She surveyed Randy, dapper in his spring turnout, eager, friendly, with his pointed chin and smooth longish hair. She made a last excuse, “But in this cap — ”

“ Oh, we’ll go somewhere in the Village. That cap is intensely becoming, and the Village asks no more.” Randy put his hand under her elbow, and assisted her to rise.

“ Come on — let’s run! ” he said.

He kept hold of her arm; and they sped across the Square, if not at a run, at any rate faster than Nancy had gone in months. Just before they emerged, a child which had strayed from its nurse fell on the walk ahead of them. Randy sprang forward and lifted it to its feet; Nancy bent to look for bruises, or at least for the source of those loud howls. When the two of them had succeeded in stopping the howls, by soothing words and a small sum of money, they grinned at each other over the child’s head. Somehow the incident made them feel more at their ease with each other.

They restored the child to its nurse, and continued on their way, reaching in a few minutes the basement room which was familiar enough to them both. Within its narrow confines were several other tea-parties, some of their members and habitute, others strangers seeing Bohemia. All the habitues hailed Randy as an intimate; some of them spoke politely to Nancy. Nancy was conscious of a certain curiosity in more than one glance, and divined the comment, “ That’s a new combination I ”

They were lucky enough to get a table in a corner; a person in a sailor blouse came for their order, just as in the old days. “ Tea, Nancy?” asked Randy.

“ Coffee, please.” She hadn’t tasted it in months.

“Muffins?”

“ No. Cake,” she decided.

He passed her his cigarette case; she helped herself, and inhaled the smoke as if it were incense. Randy put his elbows on the table, and watched her. That blue of old china was very becoming to her, he thought, even if it did bring out the shadows under her eyes. The smoke was another blue; she glanced at him through it, and grinned naughtily as she lighted a second cigarette. Growing warm, she took off her cap, and Randy perceived her sleek braids.

“ I say, I like your hair that way! ” he exclaimed.

“ This way ? ” She put up a hand to feel. “ Oh, these silly braids! ”

“It’s awfully becoming; makes you look like a little girl,” he explained.

“It must,” said Nancy.

“ A little girl sampling her first cigarette,” he insisted.

She enjoyed Randy’s silliness, as she enjoyed her food and her cigarette; but repletion of silliness was sooner reached than repletion of coffee or smoke. She poured herself a second cup; and having disposed of her cake, lighted another cigarette. “ Go on with what you were telling me,” she said. “What is Tom Peabody doing?”

“Bucking up,” said Randy. “He’s a wife-made man; but that isn’t the worst thing that a man can be.”

He went on to mention other names, and to tell her some news of each. After their coffee was disposed of they continued to sit there, and be rattled on and on, about this one and that one. Again Nancy grew restless. Wasn’t that one name ever coming? Was it possible that he unaccountably knew or impossibly guessed, and therefore spared her? No, that was preposterous. But her uneasiness finally nerved her to ask, “What about Roger Greene Third?”

“Roger Greene Third? Oh, he has swum out of onr ken,” said Randy easily.

“Has he got famous?”

“ Got famous, or gone broke, or run off with an inamorata— I’m sure I don’t know which; though if it were that last, people would be sure to have heard, wouldn’t they? The fact is that I don’t know a thing about him.

He isn’t at the school any longer, and I haven’t happened to see him about town.”

“He must have gone away,” Nancy concluded. She flecked off ash, and suggested, “He made rather a hit, didn’t he, with that one picture ? ”

“ His portrait of Mary Allen ? Indeed he did. I don’t think so much of it myself; Roger knows what should go into a picture, but he hasn’t much native force. It was well handled, though, and pushed into a popular success. I’ll bet old Roger was enraged at having his sacred work reproduced in half the magazines of this broad and partly enlightened land. He’s a stiff one.”

“ Who bought the original ? ” asked Nancy.

“ Her manager — what’s his name — ”

“ Her manager ? ”

“Yes. Incidentally, I believe, an old flame of hers. She has flamed here and flamed there for years; she’s a wonder,” said Randy.

“ She’s a subject.”

“ Old Roger did her fair justice, at that. But I still hold to my opinion that he’s more of a talker than a workman,” said Randy. “ Lord! how he used to rage at me in the old days at the Art School. My rotten painting and my frivolous character, you know — ”

“ You could make more of your painting than you do,” suggested Nancy.

“I suppose I could; but I should still be an also ran. You needn’t talk to me, Nancy. I might work my fingers to the bone, and put my eyes out and scatter my few wits; and still I should never be any higher than the decently mediocre.”

“ Can such things be graded ? ”

“ You mean that the smallest improvement is worth the greatest effort? That’s what old Roger used to preach to me. Upon my soul, Nancy, you were a diligent pupil; you must have done his heart good.”

“ He taught me everything I know,” said Nancy quietly. What those quiet words cost her, words that could once have been uttered so freely and so gladly!

“He taught you more than he himself knew, then. Well, peace to his ashes! ” said Randy flippantly.

“ Yes. Peace to his ashes,” echoed Nancy.

Randy looked with sudden distaste at the devastated table. “Perhaps you would like to go upstairs and see if there are any new cartoons,” he suggested.

“ I certainly should,” said Nancy, getting up and snatching her blue cap.

They went upstairs, and examined the decorations which festive young persons of artistic pursuits were wont to place upon the walls. There was a whole new crop since Nancy had made the round of the walls in company with Max Meredith. She commended two or three, made up a face at several others, and borrowed Randy’s pencil to add a drawing of her own in an inconspicuous corner. “ Date it,” suggested Randy. “ It will serve to commemorate your return to the world.”

Nancy scrawled some numbers, and stood back to look at the result. She had drawn a thin, eager woman's face, under a nurse's cap that was not too small for it.

He took her home then, and on her door-step went through a formal leave-taking, as if he were conscious of observation from behind the window-curtains. Nancy walked up-stairs, to confront a nurse both amused and anxious. An explanation was due; Nancy regretted the necessity, but came up to sense of requirements. “You didn't come and you didn't come; and finally I went off without you.”

“So I discovered. In other words, you were playing truant.”

“ I was, and it's very tiring. I think I’ll go to bed at once,” said Nancy.

She was tireder, indeed, than she had been for many a day; but she brushed out her own hair. She didn't want Mrs. Constantine to smell the smoke in it.

She woke the next morning with a headache, and stayed in bed until noon. Unaccustomed indulgence had combined with conscience to do her up. If she wasn't well enough to work, she wasn't well enough to go gadding about with Randy Payne. She had allowed Randy to be idiotic, anyhow, and in particular to speak his blatant mind about Roger Greene. Randy couldn't help his mind's bla-tancy; but Nancy had had special opportunities of understanding Roger, opportunities which should oblige her to defend him from the likes of Randy Payne.

Not that she had particularly understood Roger: things which every young simpleton in New York had known all along, had come to her only by a special revelation. But to-day she felt forgiving toward him. At least he wasn't cutting her particularly: nobody knew anything as to his whereabouts or pursuits. Unless to be sure Randy lied, thinking to let her down easily, thinking — But it didn't matter what Randy thought. Nobody minded Randy, in the first place; and Nancy herself saw him only once in a dog’s age.

In the afternoon she got up and was established near the fire. She had achieved a habit of being in the same room with Roger’s picture a whole afternoon without glancing at it; she did not glance at it now. Some day she would take it down; but as yet she preferred the careful aversion of her eyes to the thought of a horrible symbolic blank.

She was turning the leaves of a book, a leaf every quarter of an hour, when there came a ring at the bell. Mrs. Constantine went to answer. Polite inquiries penetrated to Nancy as she lounged; the voice was the voice of Randy, coming thoughtfully to inquire if he had done her up yesterday.

“You can see her a little while if you’d like to,” suggested Mrs. Constantine, and came ushering him upstairs.

Nancy sat up hastily, smoothing her hair with her hands. She was aware of the twinkle in the nurse’s eye as she ushered the caller in; and her cheeks grew warm. She felt the falseness of her position, but she assured herself that the matter wasn’t important. Randy wasn’t accustomed to spending his afternoons calling upon sick people, and had come only out of politeness.

He put a good face on the business, to be sure: came forward eagerly, sat down beside her, and began to chat. He put her at her ease; in a few minutes Nancy began to enjoy his visit. She had the nurse make tea for them — she was afraid to ask for coffee; and he stayed until six o’clock.

When he rose, however, he overshot the mark by asking if he couldn’t come again soon. He asked it sincerely enough too — perhaps he had made himself believe that he actually cared to come. Nancy assented; she had again enjoyed the sensation of being for some hours restored to life. But before she went to bed she reacted violently: had she got to the point where she must be grateful for the company of Randy Payne ?

Randy reappeared three days later, either through fidelity to his word or because he found some curious attraction in these quiet visits. He came again and yet again; as the fulness of spring passed, and summer loomed ahead, his visits grew to be an established thing, not to be skipped on either side without explanation. He made Nancy's world seem a little less empty. At first she wondered what he got out of their intercourse; but presently she divined that Randy could go on without any too prudent calculation of profit.

Mrs. Constantine's suspicions were not so easily lulled; but they only amused Nancy. Randy's attachment to her was of a less constant character than Mrs. Constantine's own, contemplation of which always left Nancy a little shame-faced. She had done nothing to merit the eager devotion of the other woman; she looked forward now to liberation from her interest and care. A dozen times, indeed, she was on the point of dismissing Mrs. Constantine. But she was not yet restored to anything that she could call health. Her knees still shook under her at the slightest exertion, the smell of paint still nauseated her; she had no impulse to work, and although she was bored by the life she was leading, her discontent did not assume an active enough form to cause her to break from it.

Max wrote advising change and travel. He wrote oftener lately, and with fuller frankness, which was quite as it should be. Nancy thanked him for his advice, and deferred taking it.

July brought breathless days and scorching nights. Nancy always slept badly now, but with the heat she slept worse; it seemed to the eye of the nurse that she was losing the little ground she had gained. In her weakened condition, indeed, she did not notice heat as heat; but she would lie hour after hour with half-closed eyes, not moving, scarcely breathing, only shaking her head impatiently in answer to questions. “ She can’t keep this up,” thought Mrs. Constantine.

One night she lay for hours fighting for breath. Just before dawn there came a little coolness: and suddenly Nancy had a vision of something she wanted. To see the west, as Max had sometimes embodied it for her, as she herself had tantalizingly tasted it on one long ago visit, to see it, live in it, be of it: to quit the cursed cramped horizons that were killing her, and have part in freedom and space. The mountains which meant so much to Max, lifting their gaunt tops to the bluest of blue skies, and beyond them the sunny land she had never yet penetrated — that was what she wanted.

The vision grew stronger with the strengthening light — if only it wouldn’t wane with the waning! She looked through the open door into the front room, where Mrs. Constantine had moved her cot, and traced the outline of her head upon the pillow; she looked at the window of her own room, with well-remembered outlines growing clear beyond it. She bade a mute farewell to the cramped prospect. Even after this last year she should be sorry to leave it, but perhaps she would have been happier if she could be sorrier.

When her nurse entered she found Nancy wide-eyed and smiling, with no trace of her usual morning lassitude. “Mrs. Constantine,” Nancy greeted her, “are you an accomplished packer ? ”

“ I am almost everything that I am called on to be,” said Mrs. Constantine, standing beside her bed. “What do you want packed ? ”

“Everything.” Nancy scrambled past her out of bed, thrust her feet into slippers, and walked appraisingly from that room to the other. “ Clothes, furniture, that truck upstairs — I want everything packed. I’m going away.”

“So — o, you’ve really made up your mind?” The nurse looked at her eagerly, and then asked with hesitation, “and I? Do you want me to go with you?” She would have gone, too; she made the offer without even being aware of Nancy’s destination. Nancy noted her generosity; but like her regret at leaving home, her gratitude for it seemed feeble in her own eyes. “You would if anybody did,” she said gently. “ But Fm going alone. You have done so much for me that I shan’t need a nurse any longer.”

Mrs. Constantine diverted her mind from the pangs of the approaching separation by connecting this sudden resolution with those letters from the west which were never opened in her presence. She was wrong in her conjectures, but not in their base. Nancy did not in her westward progress expect to see Max. But finer than the mere seeing him would be her going in his name to the beauty that he loved; and perception of that fineness did much to energize Nancy for her undertaking.

She communicated her decision to only two people beside the nurse. One of them was the doctor, who told her to start if she thought she could stand it; he seemed to have his doubts. The other, equally of course, was Randy Payne.

Randy received the news in unwonted seriousness, and after it was delivered looked about the room as if he too were bidding farewell to something. But it was with his usual smile that he asked, “Cured, are you?”

“ Cured, or on the way to cure.”

“ Or spunky, perhaps?”

“ I think that is really the case.”

“ You are going to show people? Good! I am one of the first to be shown, am I not? And I can assist in the showing, too: nailing up boxes, or getting Pullman reservations, or any other typically masculine task.”

She looked at him, and he met her eye gaily. “ Do you know, Randy, I think you might be useful if you really cared to be?”

“ Then try me and find out. This is the chance of a life-time,” said Randy. He stood up and took off his coat.

She was prepared to see his enthusiasm wane; she pictured his assistance as principally his being waited on. , But Randy really worked; and he returned the next day and the next, with no abatement of energy. In her interest he defied heat and denied callouses; without him she could hardly have got away.

He not only packed belongings and nailed up boxes; but his interest and his questions crystallized her plans. She had had no definite program at first, only that curious sense of a new horizon waiting, of a dimly perceived beauty and freedom opening before her. She spent her days in a hurry and fever, with a sort of bright haze before her eyes; she was scarcely conscious of Mrs. Constantine, reluctantly counting the days that remained to her; she accepted easily the services of a toiling perspiring Randy, oddly evolved from the indolent creature who had haunted her hearth so long. But he led her to declare her destination and set her date; thinking only of getting away somehow, out to the breadth and the newness and the peace, Nancy found herself committed to a workable program of preparation.

With her she took nothing but her clothes. Furniture that had come to her from the dimly remembered home of her childhood, belongings accumulated little by little and endeared by association, well-loved books, even her guitar, she stored; and with them went canvas, brushes, and paints. Some small sketches and pictures she sent to a dealer; many she destroyed. She must go unencumbered on this quest of hers. She was tired of all those things anyhow; she had seen them too often lately.

She did not know exactly what became of Roger’s picture, his once marvelous gift to her. She saw Randy take it down one afternoon while the demolition was going on; and she went out of the room, and stayed until she was sure that on her return it would be represented only by a darker space on a blank wall. She didn’t care to know what became of it; if she hadn’t been certain that he would think the presentation odd, she would have given it to Randy for his pains.

The day came when she and Randy stood alone in a denuded house. Mrs. Constantine had left that morning, after a farewell made carefully casual; Nancy and Randy went out to lunch, and came back to wait the arrival of the expressman. She sat down on a packing-crate; Randy walked about whistling, his footfalls heavy on the bare floors.

“ Where,” he demanded presently, “ where do you want your ticket to read? And what about stop-overs?”

She paused in the middle of a look about the room, not in farewell, for her farewells had been said, but to be sure that nothing was forgotten. “ Are you going to get it for me?” she asked.

“ Yes. It will save you the trouble of going for it”

“ Can’t you have it say ‘ Westward ho! ’ or something like that, Randy? Something simple and inclusive? If you can’t, get it only as far as Chicago.”

“ But aren’t you going to the Canadian Boddes as directly as may be?”

“ Yes. I haven’t changed my mind. But I shall stay three or four days in Chicago, and I can find out there what my objective point is to be.”

“I should advise the other way; but just as you like,” said Randy. “ Do you want a state-room ? ”

“ I do not. I’m neither a millionaire nor an invalid,” said Nancy decisively.

The expressman came, and removed the last vestige of her from her desolated home; she and Randy turned over the keys. Then he took her to a hotel, and went off to check her baggage. Nancy 6lept on the verge of freedom.

The next day Randy put her aboard the train. He came for her in a taxicab, with a box of flowers and a wonderful basket of fruit. He was dressed in jaunty summer trim, and so to be sure was Nancy. Under the brim of her new hat her hair showed in its old familiar style, and her face was radiant with a childlike wonder. It seemed to her that she was going out into the world for the first time; and a new-made world awaited her.

She looked out upon a world that was surely making holiday; and her wide bright eyes took note of everything in it, except her companion. He looked at her often enough to make up; his own face was a little drawn, as if he hadn’t slept. But he was faithful to the duties of the charge he had assumed; he escorted Nancy to her train, and helped the porter to install her. “I still wish that you had taken a state-room,” he said.

“ Oh, I want to be out here with everybody!” she pleaded. She stood on tiptoe, and gazed up and down the car. Finding him in the course of her survey, she seemed for the first time to become fully aware of him. “ Sit down, and ride as far as Albany,” she suggested. Randy shook his head. “ I must be getting back.”

“I suppose you must; now that you are rid of me — ”

“I shall miss you,” said Randy. His manner was a little stiff; and stiffness was unlike Randy.

“You have been very good to me; I don’t know how to thank you,” said Nancy. For the first time there was a hint of wariness in her manner.

“Let me know when you return,” said Randy. “But don’t come back until you’re quite, quite ready to come.” He pressed her hand, lifted his hat, and turned away, but not soon enough to hide his tell-tale face. Nancy watched his retreat down the aisle, and then sank back and closed her eyes. So Randy was affected that way. Well, being Randy, it wasn’t surprising. His keeping it to himself was very decdnt, though. Perhaps he did it chiefly in order to give a different flavor to this episode; or perhaps he did it from native tact, knowing that she couldn’t be bothered to reciprocate just now. “Let me know when you return,” he had said, meaning that they could open a fresh chapter of their episode then. But he had been kind to her, very, very kind; it was ungrateful of her to be captious. And in thinking how kind he had been she gradually lost her first disgust that such a thing must come in even here. That he in all the world should have been chosen to be kind to her when she needed kindness most — he, Kandy Payne!

The train started; and she opened her eyes and turned her head to look out of the window. Now that the excitement of getting away was subsiding a little, she felt tired and unwilling to move. But it was not necessary for her to move. She had only to sit passively here, and freedom opened out before her.

She ceased to think of Randy, or of anything in particular. She felt only the rhythm of the train, saw only the sun on the Palisades and the river. Light and motion seemed to draw her on, in peace and rich promise. She was no longer a focus of sensation, but part of the life that encompasses.

So she went by easy stages westward, unhampered by impedimenta physical or spiritual, by purposes, memories or after-thoughts. In the mountains her golden daze yielded at moments to a high excitement; but the excitement soon passed, and the daze returned. A spirit free of the world, an artist enfranchised from art, a woman with no mark or sensation of being a woman — such was Nancy Desmond on her pilgrimage away from herself.

But ever as she went she was little by little plucking from her, and giving to the wind to blow away, the vestiges of Roger Greene. Sometimes it seemed to be only dusty cobwebs that she thus tore away; sometimes it was the very stuff of her heart itself. But always, night and day, in the trough of the waves or on the crest, the plucking went on. For at the last she must stand up free and whole, if she could; and if not, she must lie down clean and naked.

CHAPTER XXIII

OLD ROGER

The true explanation of Rogers long neglect may have eluded Nancy because it was so simple: it was so simple, and it had nothing to do with Nancy Desmond. He had been sent for because his mother was critically ill, and had remained to watch her die.

Dying was a lengthy process in the hands of Mrs. Greene, and was accompanied by a parting series of exactions. Week after week Roger lingered in the winter-bound village, prey to every sort of exasperation and anxiety, always hoping that another week would set him free, and in duty bound to be ashamed of that very hope. His own concerns were a long way off. He had received orders for two portraits from admirers of his rendition of Mary; they perforce hung fire. Mary herself, now on tour in the play which had been carpentered into a halfsuccess, wrote to him less frequently than of old. Sometimes her letters had the old ring; more often they protested how much she cared for him, and how greatly she missed him. From their extravagance Roger augured the worst, though he smiled sometimes to see how when she lost her own clear vein she wrote in the too-effective style of the type of play she affected.

He was a man, it seemed, whom everything deserted: to whom promises were made and hopes held out, only to tantalize him. He thought sometimes of Nancy, and wished that he might see her: Nancy the anchored, conditioned both by temperament and by circumstance not only for achievement and success, but for inner harmony as well. There had of late been signs of trouble about Nancy, to be sure; but she would weather trouble. She could be in the end nothing but the fine woman and the fine artist she was meant to be. He would like to see her, though he had no heart to write to her; meanwhile it was a solace to think of her, and to picture to himself the life she must be leading. And having had the thought of her for refreshment upon some lonely walk, Roger would reenter his mother’s house, to find it filled by a querulous voice and an antiseptic smell and the stiff presence of a hired nurse, just as when he had left it.

So spring came; and Mary’s letters had to travel from the Pacific Coast, and were already old when they reached him. Increasingly delinquent in answering them, increasingly isolated from all his old interests, Roger watched the grim fight with death in the wasted frame that had given him life. He had never loved his mother, though he had always done his duty by her; but in these days he came to a sense of close kinship with her. Here she was painfully struggling to keep a life that had never known charm or beauty or brightness; and in the same prison, only with a different slant of light on the walls, Roger was fretting his own life away.

It was summer when Mrs. Greene finally died. Roger’s sister and her husband came to the funeral, and she stayed to help Roger wind up affairs, divided between an inclination to fawn upon him as a successful man and her sharp desire to get as much of the property as she could. Life hadn’t been easy for her: her husband was an incapable soul, given to finding fault with everything in the universe except his incapable self; and she had, as Roger grimly reflected, children enough for two families. He allowed her to get away with rather more than her share of the property: she needed it so desperately, for one thing, and her own guilty conscience would prevent her in the future from supplying her mother’s place by making direct demands upon Roger.

They were fortunate enough to sell the old house at once; and between them they disposed of the movables, Roger saw his sister off for home; the next day he started back to his own haunts, free at last of any farther tie with the village.

At the end of July, then, he tried to get once more into the active current of the life which had been held for months so strangely at a standstill. It was queer to find himself bereft of that familiar burden of responsibility, which had never before been absent from some comer of his imperfectly Pagan mind. It was queer to find himself with money in his pocket and the future his own. But the most immediate queemess was to find himself in town in midsummer, with Mary Allen hundreds of miles away.

He had not seen her for half a year. Her tour through the west had lasted into June; when it closed, she went to her cottage in the Adirondacks. From there her letters had continued to come. Now that she was released from the associations of her late tours, it is perhaps not surprising that she no longer tried to be full or fervent; and she may have felt a certain chilliness in his own replies. She failed to miss him in the Adirondacks, not only because he had never been there with her, but because she had never carried the thought of him there when the thought of him was at its strongest. She was out of sympathy with his situation that spring: she had always considered his devotion to his mother an anomaly. Knowing that he did not love the old lady, Mary wondered why he did not simply ignore her.

When Mrs. Greene died, Mary wrote at once on receipt of the news. She spared him condolences, and spoke only of his plans. She wished him to come to her cottage for rest and change. She had other people there; but if they hadn’t gone by the time he arrived, she would turn them out; he could have the run of the place, and do pretty much as he pleased. The scenery was as wonderful as ever, and the quiet just what he needed. But if he couldn’t or wouldn’t come, she would be in New York at the beginning of August.

Until he came to that last sentence, Roger was minded to go to her: it still seemed the natural thing to do. But her suggestion of an alternative angered him: she was quite prepared, it seemed, for a refusal. It would be too bad to have her preparation wasted. He answered dryly that practical matters would keep him where he was for some time longer; after that, he had things to see to in town. He wouldn’t ask her to let her own plans depend on anything so shifting as his arrangements.

An hour after bis letter had gone, he tried to remember whether his phraseology had left him any possibility of a dignified volte-face. He felt a sudden swift hunger for the face among all faces, and the voice that had not fallen on his fleshly ears through all these dreary months. He had swift visions of Mary and the mountains: of Mary as a mountain sprite, and of the mountains as an echo of Mary. He was tempted to take the next train, and arrive before his letter.

The restraining presence of his sister prevented that extravagance; he was compelled to wait for Mary’s answer, which was both prompt and affectionate. She told him how eager she was to see him, how she would look forward to their meeting. “ I should like to have you here for a few weeks,” was her conclusion, “but it’s in town that I couldn’t bear not to have you.” Beading those words, Roger was ashamed of his stand upon his own dignity; but to be sure she might mean all that she said, or she might not.

He missed her atrociously, even in his last days in the home village; back in town he missed her more. Yet even on this side there was something sweet in belonging, were it ever so temporarily, to himself; and perhaps he needed this interval for the sake of perspective.

He could not complain of being tired of Mary. But he was growing tired of love, with its long duet and silly harmonics on the eternal theme. Love dies, both his experience and his philosophy assured him. To be sure the dying of love may come about in so many different ways: it may die in giving birth to new things, and so achieve a vicarious immortality; it may die early, of inanition; having run a long course, it may die of weariness; or it may be slain in sheer boredom by the lovers who have wearied of it. So far was Roger from being anxious to slay his, that all his philosophy was required to make him see that like the rest this must one day die; yet he felt a craven gladness because he had not to face it just now.

In the summer quiet of the town he went about his ovna concerns. In the fall some of his hitherto unregarded pictures were to be exhibited; at a date which he could now set, he was to begin one of the portraits that had been ordered the winter before. He began also to look about for more comfortable quarters: he had, indeed, plenty of details to busy himself with.

Studio-hunting was a luxury he prolonged: he had so long been forced to be satisfied with what he could get that it was a rare delight for him to pick and choose. He set his standard ridiculously high, including, for instance, a porcelain bath-tub among his desiderata; it was only when he began to be weary of the new game that he came down to enameled iron, closed a bargain, and moved in.

His new studio was well uptown, far enough from his own haunts; he chose not to be distracted, for here at last he had his long dreamed of opportunity of working his head off. He established himself, and was promptly surrounded by his familiar disorder. Free as he had ever dreamed of being, beginning to succeed as he had almost given up hope of succeeding, Roger might well imagine that he had come at length to the point where his days should pass zestfully and without friction.

But he was restless rather than industrious; he found difficulty in settling to anything. He expected Mary’s return almost any day; but Mary would hardly solve his present difficulties, though she would doubtless relieve him of a creeping feeling of loneliness. Yet there remained one place where he could always go for companionship and serenity; there was one person who had always taken what he had to give and given what he asked.

He had treated Nancy rather shabbily of late: he ought, for one thing, to have gone to her as soon as he returned to town. But Mary had stood shadowily between him and Nancy ever since the time when in Nancy's presence he had first felt ashamed of Mary. But his shame was ! ridiculous; and his regard for Nancy was not only constant, but sure now of a clearer field than it had ever known before; She was mature and he was successful: the future was more firmly theirs than the past had been. But how had he managed to stay away so long from his old disciple and future companion? How could even the first-fruits of his success have been dear to him, when they hadn't been spread before those clear but kindly eyes?

Now as always, Roger had delayed going to her; now as always, when he got the impulse to go, he couldn't act upon it fast enough. It was very early in the afternoon, and at this hour Nancy would be still immersed in work; but Roger rushed forth at once, and took a bus down to the familiar Square, where he hadn't set foot in months. The bus made a convenient link between him and Nancy, miles apart as they were; if he chose to live remote from the people whose talk kills a man's time, at least he could always take a direct road down to Nancy. He smiled when he thought of the way she could live perpetually near the talkers, yet manage not to listen unless it suited her.

It was more than he could. But although he had railed at them in her presence, he privately respected those strong simplifications of hers; and sometimes he saw in them one of the manifestations of a spirit to which, in spite of his own greater sensitiveness and breadth of vision, he might some day have difficulty in coming up.

He started down Nancy’s street at his usual rapid stride, which quickened almost to a run when he reached the block in which she lived. He dashed up the well-worn steps and rang the bell without pausing to look at the house; then, according to custom, he tried the outer door. It was locked. He rang again; then while he waited he stepped back a little, and glanced at her windows. The curtains were invisible, the shades all down.

She must be out of town, then, if only for the day; of course at this season she might very well be off for some weeks. Delay was distressing to Roger’s eagerness; he might stay away from Nancy for months, but when he sought her he could be satisfied with nothing less than seeing her instantly. However, he hoped that she hadn’t gone far; he would write a note, and leave it in her letterbox. He thrust his hand into his pocket in search of paper; just at that moment his eye fell upon the spot above Nancy’s bell. Her card was gone.

Roger went back to the sidewalk, and looked up at the windows: in one of them was a “For Rent” card. His bird had flown, he hadn’t the ghost of an idea whither.

He was more than disappointed by this ill-luck; he was oddly upset. Of course, in civilized society it is always possible to trace people; but that he should have to trace Nancy Desmond — And it was purely his own fault.

Roger lowered his eyes to the apartment under Nancy’s, and became aware of music issuing therefrom. Somebody was practicing the piano part of a concerto, a modern thing full of studied dissonance. It added to his sense of injury that any one should play such a thing here and now; half in rage and half for purposes of inquiry, Roger rang the bell below Nancy’s.

The music ceased, and the door was opened by a pretty if not very tidy woman, whose eyes met his with a sort of austere challenge. She was not the downstairs neighbor whom Roger had seen occasionally; there must have been several changes in that neighborhood since his last visit “ Good-afternoon,” said Roger.

“ Good-afternoon,” echoed the woman, with a faint note of interrogation.

“Has Miss Desmond moved?” asked Roger. “The young lady upstairs, I mean.”

“ Just before I moved in, I think,” the woman informed him.

“ Then you don’t know where she has gone?”

“ No,” she said. “ I couldn’t say.”

She might have ended the conversation there; but instead she looked intently at Roger, as he stood crushing his soft hat in one hand, eager, disappointed, wistful. Then she threw out the further information, “ I met her the day I came here to look; she was in the midst of her packing then.”

“That wasn’t long ago?” Roger asked.

“ Not more than two or three weeks.”

It was maddening to miss her by so much; but perhaps he might yet see her to-night. ” She was moving somewhere else in town?” he suggested.

“No, I think not. Indeed, I am sure she didn’t, for the mail man has asked me about her; she didn’t leave any address with him. I believe she was going away for her health.”

Something stabbed Roger. “She wasn’t well?”

“ I think not. She had a nurse living with her; I remember seeing the uniform.”

She had given him all the information she possessed. Roger thanked her, apologized for disturbing her, remarked that people should keep better track of their friends. He smiled, and was smiled upon; he retreated in good order. But the bright afternoon was blotted out for him.

Nancy sick — Nancy, whose every habit and look had . always spoken of health! She wasn’t exempt from human chance; but he was galled by the thought of Nancy sick, and tended by a hireling, and forced by her illness to leave the pleasant habitation she had made for herself. He wished he had known of her illness: he would have liked to take her away from the things that preyed upon her, away somewhere where she could have been quiet, somewhere up in the mountains, say, with the wide sweep of country below, and nothing but the peaks and the skies above. The mountains would be an appropriate setting for her, too: she had nothing to fear from solitude and bigness. He could even imagine her living perpetually in 6uch surroundings, solitary, withdrawn, self-sufficient, neither feeling nor desiring love — oh, she was very self-sufficient! But before the dream ended he saw himself coming to her; and although he went back to the beginning and tried to be more consistent, he saw only the same thing repeated. ^That didn’t mean the coming of love: but was it the coming of man to woman? He couldn’t be sure; it was his inability to exclude his own ego, more likely.

Roger avoided a cable that had been stretched across the sidewalk to a warehouse; the picture passed from his mind. He had recollected that had he chosen he might have been in the mountains even now, and his companion would not have been Nancy.

Nothing, however, forbade his finding Nancy if he could, and taking a decent interest in her welfare. His excuse for neglecting her was removed; and even in its day he had stretched it. In his dealings with Nancy he had always taken a lot for granted, had received bountifully in response to the little he had been able to give — yes, and had given chiefly because it was a pleasure for him to do so. He wanted to find her now not because of any good, real or fancied, that he might do her, but in order to lay before her both the troubles he had been through and his present position: her cool understanding would be worth more to him than another woman’s sympathy.

Whatever his reason for wanting to find her — and the shock of learning of her illness had carried Roger farther toward remorse than was often possible in the mixed tissue of his emotions — whatever his reason for so desiring, Roger’s desire to find Nancy was most acute. She couldn’t simply disappear, even if the postal authorities had lost knowledge of her whereabouts. There must be some one who would know — some one — Roger ran over the list of their common acquaintance.

On the top of the bus, wind and motion cooled him; and Roger remembered who would know where she was, if any one did. The man who sold her pictures, of course, the individual to whom she was bound by the most practical ties. Roger was slightly acquainted with Nancy’s dealer, whom he despised not only on principle but personally: his name was Morgan, and he was a Jew who aspired to Gentility. Roger thought him worse on all accounts than Ben King, who enshrined a similar shrewdness; King at least knew that he was common, and never erred on the side of effusiveness.

Roger delayed going to him until he thought that business would be almost over; then, true to his expectation, he found Mr. Morgan at liberty, and disposed to be sociable. He took Roger around his gallery, with comments the shrewdness of which Roger could not impugn; then he led him into his office and proffered cigars. He had not always been so condescending; but to-day he had some time on his hands, and Roger was now a rising man.

Roger, smoking his cigar, looked at the unctuous little man, and wondered if he were rising only for some shade of consideration from such men as this. But it was not in this connection that he had come.

Now that he was here, he might as well accomplish the object of his visit. He could see Morgan waiting for him to lead up to mention of his own work; it was with glee as well as curiosity that he mentioned Nancy’s instead.

The dealer’s face lighted at mention of her name, perhaps he had real enthusiasm for her. “ Does she still do business with you ? ” Roger asked shortly.

“ With no one else!”

“Then perhaps—” Roger was beginning; the dealer cut him short by rising and walking across the office. From a tall cabinet he produced a sheaf of drawings, which he brought back and laid before Roger.

“You have her here,” he said, “the real Anne Douglas Desmond. The same thing comes out here that comes out in ‘ The Dryad’ and ‘ Kite-Flying’ but not in a big picture that people will stare at. You know, though: look.” His oracular manner inspired in Roger an intense desire to refuse to look: Nancy brought to him, indeed, through this beast! But he was ashamed of his own childishness; and reflecting that the beast had after all very little to do with it, he opened the wrapper and began to turn over the drawings.

It was not like seeing her, for it was seeing only the best of her; and Roger hungered that afternoon for her dear human quality, her little idiosyncrasies, her relation to himself. But gradually his enthusiasm kindled. The drawings before him were of various sorts: little woodland sketches, all sunshine and suggestion; studies of the nude; and some hints so fragmentary as to be scarcely sketches, a back, a torso, a head and arm, set down apparently almost at random, but allusive, alluring.

Roger examined them all in silence; returning to some of the best, he gave his comment. “ These are wonderful. This is just the sort of thing I had always supposed she couldn’t do. She used to be a pupil of mine, you know.” “ You can’t predict even now what she will do. She is young; she hasn’t yet reached her best. But I must beg your pardon, Mr. Greene, for continuing to think that she was always rather her own pupil than any one else’s.” Roger smiled; if he didn’t exactly love the snub, at least he respected Morgan for bestowing it upon him. Morgan returned the smile, and became confidential.

“ Much worse work sells better than these,” he remarked. “ But I intend to make an exhibit of these some time when things are slack; and then we shall do better”

“ What is she doing for you now?” asked Roger.

“ She has gone away, out of town.”

“Could you give me her address? I had thought of writing to her.”

“ As a matter of fact, I don’t believe we have it She said she would see me when she returned; but her plans were somewhat indefinite.”

Roger struggled with his disappointment, struggled too with an unworthy notion that Mr. Morgan knew something, and was keeping it back. “Well, she will bring you something good, wherever she has,gone,” he suggested. He leaned over the table, and lovingly traced the curve of a back in a drawing that now topped the pile.

“ I sometimes wonder — ” said Morgan slowly.

“ Yes ? ” Roger looked up, surprising on his face a look he had never seen there — though to be sure you never could be sure that the mystic strain was quite dead in any Jew. “ Yes ? ” he said again, now acutely interested.

“ I sometimes wonder what lies behind work like hers. Modern philosophers would have us believe it’s a queer kink in the brain, or perhaps an impulse in the arm — I don’t know. I rather cling myself to the notion of a soul, and I can’t quite believe that art is a by-product of evolution. Of course the art justifies itself: what lies here, for instance, needs no explanation. But it’s the process of emanation that I don’t understand, especially in a case like Miss Desmond’s. She comes walking in here, pretty and prim; says ‘ Yes, Mr. Morgan,’ and ‘ No, Mr. Morgan,’ and * How much? ’; and walks out. And I can’t for the life of me connect her with her work. That’s the bewildering pari”

“She has no expository faculty,” said Roger politely. He felt enormously superior: he saw so clearly how Nancy’s work grew from, though it might transcend, Nancy’s usual self. Yet he watched with a new-found interest and respect Morgan's pudgy hand begin to turn over the drawings, resting now and then at one he found noteworthy.

He finished his inspection in silence, and began to gather up the drawings. One of them fluttered to the floor, and Roger picked it up to restore it. His own glance fell on it as he did so; and he drew in his breath sharply. “I don't remember seeing this as I went over them,” he said.

Morgan glanced at the drawing: it showed a view of a hill-side, with a curious darkening half-way up, intended perhaps for the mouth of a cave. “Oh, you wouldn't notice that! It isn't very good,” he said.

“Yet I think I recognize this place.” Roger spoke dully, almost as if the words were forced from him. Becoming conscious of Morgan's curious look, he handed over the drawing hastily. “Thank you for showing me all these,’ he said. “It has been a real treat.” But his voice did not sound natural in his own ears.

“It has been a pleasure to me to show them,” said Morgan. “ I'm sorry I can't give you information about the young lady's whereabouts — ”

“ Oh, it doesn't matter! I probably shouldn't write to her anyhow.” Roger looked about for his hat.

“If you have something of your own that you care to let me see —” began Morgan in his professional tone.

Roger didn't mind even the professional tone: all he wanted was to get away. He had the idea, indeed, that he promised something or other, in order to escape more quickly; but all he knew for certain was that he presently found himself out in the fresh air, and that he felt most horribly sick and strange.

If he could only find Nanqr and make her see — or even find her and own himself wretchedly in the wrong — or find her and say nothing, but let things right themselves. He had to find her now, before it was too late; yet even as the thought spurred him on he realized that he couldn’t find her, and he saw that it was already too late. It had been too late any time these three years; it had always been too late. Too late from the very beginning — but if he could tell her even that!

He walked about for a long time, as twilight deepened into darkness and the lights came on. He had nowhere to go. He recalled vividly the many times he had gone down to Nancy’s little house at the close of day; with equal vividness he saw it as it must be now, abandoned to solitude and darkness, the shades drawn, the hearth cold, his picture gone from the place of honor where she had so long faithfully kept it. He hoped she hated him, for it would help to equalize things between them.

But she wouldn’t hate him. She had outgrown him, and gone away. Roger was too miserable even to resent being outgrown. He went groping in the darkness, and he couldn’t find her.

CHAPTER XXIV

FROM DAWN TO DUSK

On her first morning back in her town bedroom, Mary Allen opened her eyes with a feeling that she had been employed for a long period in fighting the return of consciousness. It was a disgusting feeling, which left a peculiar staleness in its wake; yet even now consciousness was distinctly unwelcome. The uncompromising light of morning has always a tendency to make the poppied reaches of the night look rather flat and insufficiently poppied. Mary had, however, a practiced eye to detect poppies and ignore interstices; her sense of staleness was not altogether due to the fact that it was morning.

It might be due in part to the lingering smell of Roger’s cigar smoke in her burnished hair; she welcomed Ther&se’s ministrations with her brushes. A thought, however, cannot always be erased as easily as an odor; and the thought that cannot is unsuitable to some relations in life. Under the soothing strokes of the brush, Mary continued to think about Roger Greene, not merely recalling the sight and sound of him, but deliberately considering the man and his relation to her; and she was displeased to find herself thinking where it had once been sufficient to feel. Eye to eye, she and Roger still kindled; but first they looked and considered. The tide still bore them along; but they had got to the point now where they could strike out for themselves. To find themselves left high and dry would have been preferable in one way, as saving calculation; Mary hated to calculate.

She could postpone reflection, to be sure, if she adopted the simplest course open to her. With her physique and Roger’s nerves, and her infernal wisdom to fiddle for them, she could keep him dancing for a long while yet, for as long perhaps as she chose. But she had never yet consciously “kept” a lover; did she wish to begin by keeping this one?

It would be doing him no great injustice if she did; yet the whole coil sickened her. In her bad quarters of an hour, she had imagined every ending to her affairs with Roger, except her tiring of him. She had tired of the others in their turn; but she had never loved another as she had loved Roger. She loved him now, yet her love was no longer the mighty thing it had been. And when love should die, was she going to keep Roger dangling simply to please her vanity ?

Roger’s growing indifference, patent enough at their meeting after the summer’s separation, had been a challenge; in the presence of a challenge, one didn’t stop to think. Challenged again, she would not retreat; but was she going to wait for a challenge? She smiled at her old futile imaginings, recalling her picture of Roger led away from her by the call of young blood to young blood, and herself left stranded, done with, not wanted. Unhappy Dido! She had sung herself a pathetic song, made up a lovely role of patient sufferer; and in a way she was rather sorry that she would not be called on to play it. It was not only a beautiful rdle; it would have freed her from any necessity for making up her mind.

Its failure left her under just that necessity, and left her too with an ethical perception that she would have liked to do without. For Roger was a darling; but he was a Greene at bottom, little as he liked to think it. She had seen the Greene in him last night, brought out by his recent preoccupations as well as by the stage of his affair with Nancy. He was only half — what was the word he was so fond of using ? — only half Pagan. He had done well to trample the Greene underfoot for a space; but if he fed too long among the lilies —

Mary sat up in bed, stretching her arms above her head. She would breakfast in her sitting-room, she told Thèrése, as soon as she had had her bath. The sight of her own limbs emerging with their marble contours still a little pink with sleep, the feeling of her hair heavy and warm about her shoulders, gave her a quick thrill of pleasure. She jumped into her bath, turned in more cold water, and splashed royally. The shadow of responsibility slipped from her as if she were washing it away. It was queer indeed if Roger Greene couldn’t take care of himself: he wouldn’t thank her for worrying about him!

A free morning lay before her. She had told no one but Roger of her arrival in town, and Roger had left without making any appointment with her. She could employ a free morning in town well enough, if only in savoring its unusualness. After breakfast Mary slipped hurriedly into such clothes as she had worn all summer, with a pair of the low-heeled shoes which she loved, but never wore when she expected to see Roger, who noticed pretty feet. “ I am going for a walk, Thèrése,” she said. “ A small hat, please, and that rough coat with the big pockets.”

She sat a moment before her triple mirror; her fingers wandered uncertainly toward a little drawer close at hand. Until her acquaintance with Roger ripened into intimacy, she had never used rouge except for the stage. Now was her chance to break off the habit; now it mattered no more than it had two years ago if she looked a little worn of a morning. But in those two years she had got accustomed to never looking worn.

At first she had adopted the mask of youth as a necessity of the situation. But she had come to value it for its own sake; if Fate had made her a painted woman, at least she could play the game with the best of them. Mary opened the drawer, and took out her little woolen pad. She applied a light dusting of rouge, shading it off carefully toward her temples, and not forgetting her eyelids; she sat back to test the result, and retouched a little. As she closed the drawer she smiled. It would be droll if Roger’s most enduring gift to her were the habit of delicate disguise.

She left the house on foot. It was a glorious autumn morning, fatal to inertia and regrets. Mary plunged her hands deep into the pockets of her rough coat, and turned toward the Park. She entered it eagerly: it was a restricted space compared to the vastness in which she had lately been enjoying herself, but it was the Park. She had not walked there year after year without developing a vast appreciation of its peculiar charm.

She sought one of her favorite less frequented paths; with her head grandly in the air she sauntered down it, and then turned and sauntered back. She was conscious only of the sunlight and the wind, and herself moving in the midst of them. Her mighty invincibility wrapped her round: she was strong, free, perfect.

For a time she existed blissfully in vacuo. Then she began to think of the play which she was to begin work on soon. She had read it during the summer, and was conscious of its possibilities; she felt an itching eagerness to begin. When once she had begun work upon it, she would not change places with any one: she loved every stroke upon a play, from the first indifferent rehearsal in dusty space to that moment of high excitement and panicky dread when it was placed before the public.

She seemed now to feel that moment of splendid high tension; before her came the crowd of upturned faces, less dimly perceived across the footlights than felt — the crowd, which was as much the stuff she worked in as the play itself, — the crowd, which chastened and rewarded — the crowd, which had made her what she was. It followed her even into the morning’s sunny stillness, the crowd which was hers, and she its: for she wasn’t at bottom Roger Greene’s, or even her own. In love or out, from that hazy point long ago where it had caught her up, to that dimly perceived shudderful point when it should cease to care, die was the public’s child — the dear, heartless, thoughtless public, quick to reward such as Mary Allen, quick to forget them when they no longer gave what it demanded.

The public’s child, and therefore certain to be some day a child disowned. That would be worse than the death of love, which may conceivably bring compensation; worse even than the death of the body, which is at least extinction. To die to the public, and then go on living as a shade: to have none but a private life! She had known retired actors, had treated them with the off-hand kindness with which another generation would soon be treating her. A “private life,” indeed! What had her private life ever been but the back of the scenery, a back endurable because in fancy she was always getting around it? And what was to become of her when she could no longer get around?

Mary’s pace had slackened, and she moved as if her limbs were heavy. She presently sat down on a bench, staring not at the withering hedge that was before her eyes, but at her grim vision of days to come. She saw herself as old, and no longer able to outface the fact, old, distanced by younger competitors, forgotten. Old, old, outdone — the dismal refrain rang in her ears. And nearer at hand, and fairly worse in prospect, were the days that must precede that final acknowledgment and retiring into the shade, the days of having to keep on and keep up — to keep up, she to whom things had always come so easily and so naturally!

This was extinction made conscious. It was not Mary’s practice to burden herself by rebelling against the inevitable ; she faced it to-day, not because she felt any waning in her powers, but because she had come to the point where she must make up her mind whether or not it was worth her while to keep her lover.

The fact that she even thought of keeping him was fatally significant: as well have married to begin with, as to insist on forging permanent bonds which should hold love prisoner. To take love as it came to her, to — she had merrily quoted the lines to Roger more than once — to —“ kiss while kissing pleases,

And part when kisses pall,” had been not only the bent of her nature but the proud habit of her life. But to turn love into an obligation, to claim kisses when kisses actually had palled, simply because it was impossible to think of going forever unkissed — there was humiliation even in facing such a prospect, and feeling its sickening grimness steal over her.

If Roger hadn’t been Roger, she could have faced the prospect gallantly enough, and perhaps laughed it away. But she hadn’t loved any man, even the first of her lovers, quite as she loved Roger Greene. In his strength and his weakness, his high aspirations, his pitiful defeats, his youth, his weariness, Roger had been hers. Other men’s hands had been stronger in their touch, other men’s eyes more constant in their adoration; but no other man had ever succeeded in finding the chink in her armor, which Roger had found, indeed, before he ever became conscious of wishing to find it.

But the very fact that he was different showed Mary that the old rules need no longer hold, if she chose not to have them. Why not keep him, if she could; why not at least meet defeat fairly, and lose him only if she must ? Why not marry him now ? This change which had already altered their relation, yet had not disrupted it, was nothing but a natural desire for stability and compromise, for evenness and permanence. Why not simply turn the stream into another path?

Even Roger, though younger than Mary, was not so young as he used to be. Greedily she recalled signs of age in Roger: scattering gray hairs — and she had not one; weariness where she was still unwearied, disillusion while she was still eager. Roger would marry her at a word, even now: perhaps more readily now than ever, as his dawning success would make it seem less condescension on her part. The public would chuckle over the picturesqueness of her choice, and lick its chops at the romance.

Why not marry him? Everybody did marry; and she was too wise to make her marriage an affair of shackles. She recalled that it had once been said of her, “ She could give to marriage itself the flavor of a whole series of delicate improprieties.” At the time of their utterance the words had seemed simply an ingenious compliment; now she went back to them with eagerness. Of course, she wouldn’t try to live up to them literally; but they were a prophetic earnest of what she might do in this particular situation. It would be interesting to try; and it would be sweet to call herself Roger’s wife — she who had never thought to be wife to any man. It would be sweet to come back to Roger, and to have Roger always coming back to her. If they were husband and wife, the world would lie at their feet for a few years; and afterward — we11, the afterward might not be long, and for his second wife Roger could take a younger woman.

He might, if he chose, take her while Mary was still living; she could face even that possibility. Half of him would be better than nothing. But somehow she felt that she hadn’t that to fear: not only was desertion of Mary in itself unthinkable, but she seemed to see that Roger married would be Roger tamed. A definite obligation would be laid upon him; and Roger was sensitive to his obligations. He had faithfully served his mother, whom he hadn’t loved; what reason was there to suppose that he wouldn’t be faithful to Mary, whom he did ?

But to think of putting herself in the same class, even in a single respect, as Roger’s mother! To be a duty to him, she who had been a release from duty — to bring him obligations instead of roses — to be an aging wife where she had been an ageless mistress — and herself to live perpetually on a warmed-over passion!

The grotesquerie of it came vividly before her, moving Mary to a smile. She lifted her head, and her gray eyes cleared. She had been forgetting who and what she was, what was due herself as well as Roger. What if her freedom had grown a little bleak, and her roses threatened to droop? At least she could be gay in her decline, graceful — she smiled again — in her ruin. If her lover should in the course of things pass from her to a young wife whom he could lecture, and a baby for the young wife to adore when she had grown a little tired of Roger — if this should happen,- let Roger at least carry with him the memory of his perfect mistress. That indeed he must carry with him; she defied him to forget her.

Mary rose from the bench, and turned toward home; she walked once more with the stride that showed the true goddess. In her own mind she might now and again be a sentimental idiot; everybody was a sentimental idiot at bottom, no doubt. But to the world she would still be what she always had been; and thenceforth, in this respect at least, she ranked Roger with the world.

Emerging from the secluded path, she felt a sudden acute desire for crowds and noise: for noise that would deafen her to inner voices, and for crowds that would turn to look at her as she passed. There would be a crowd on Broadway now, she thought: a crowd that knew enough to appreciate her, and did not know too much. Very well, then, to Broadway she would go. She was not in proper trim, but she could change in ten minutes. She quickened her homeward pace.

Thèrése, receiving her wraps, mentioned a telephone message from a sister actress. It might be very opportune. Mary called her number at once, and announced herself. “ How did you know I was in town ? ” she demanded.

“ I called on the chance that you were,” a gay voice told her. “ No, that isn’t exactly true. I saw you last night.

You didn’t see me; you were occupied. But how long did you think that you could remain in town incog. ? ”

“ Not very long, it seems,” said Mary.

She held her friend in chatter for some time, although prolonged conversation over the telephone was not by any means her custom, and wound up with, “ Shan’t I see you soon?”

“ I was coming to that,” said the voice at her ear. “ Do you happen by any chance to have this afternoon free ? ”

“I happen to have. Did you want me for anything?” said Mary.

It appeared that there was to be a tea that afternoon. “ A lot of idle people, some of them rich and some not so rich, want to drink tea with real actors. You know the sort of affair. This one is supposed to benefit the drama, but of course that’s all rot. It’s rather fun to see them, though; and they will think they’re in heaven if they get a chance to see you. So if you have nothing better to do, come and make a lot of people happy.”

Mary hesitated. It had always been her policy as well as her inclination to avoid large promiscuous gatherings. But she had always regarded them as a distraction and a weariness; to-day she desired distraction, and would risk weariness. “ I’ll come,” she said. “ I shall be happy to. I can call for you, if you like. At what hour shall you be ready?”

She rested a few minutes in her chair, lunched, and then dressed leisurely. She chose a sweeping black and white gown, and fastened a red rose at her belt, where it would liven her dress without conflicting too violently with her hair. Then by an inspiration she wired a second rose on the back of her left hand, which it covered. Two days later there were a hundred roses so worn in New York.

She stood in the center of her dressing-room, and surveyed herself over her shoulder; Thèrése adjusted the triple mirror for her, and then knelt to arrange a fold of her drapery. The reflection was regal; Mary couldn’t help smiling. She sighed the next moment, recalling the years of her simplicity. But if her showing forth so was actually an evidence of her necessity for combating old age, at least she fought with polished weapons.

Thèrése, still kneeling, looked up with a certain satisfaction in her mien. Mary smiled down at her. Therese was not given to enthusiasm; she was so efficient that she did not need to admire. Yet she lived in the reflection of Mary’s glory, and would not have known how to live without it. To an eye that could penetrate, even Thèrése was a means of consolation.

“ Get me a messenger, Thèrése,” said Mary. “I want to write a note; I had almost forgotten. Or no, I can have Ed leave it after he has taken me.” She sat down at her desk.

Her note was directed to her manager. “Dear Ben,” it ran, “ I have for once returned to town before you had a chance to remind me, and then to re-remind me, that I was due. I am amending, am I not ?

“If you have nothing better to do, suppose you come and take me to dinner to-night, either a deux, in which case we can talk business, or in a party, when we shall strive to be suitably gay.”

She signed her initials, and then wrote underneath, “Please make it a party. We can talk business to-morrow.”

That afternoon hers was a royal progress. The affair was large, and there were other celebrities besides herself present. But Mary was pleasantly conscious, as she moved from room to room, that all eyes were following her, even as she would have them. She dispensed smiles and words; she charmed consciously, but she was grateful to the people, were they never so jejune, who allowed themselves to be charmed by her. She stayed more than two hours, although the friend who brought her had scarcely expected her to brave out one. She had never been so gracious before.

She arrived home to find a note from Ben King. The unexpected offer of a whole evening alone with her had alarmed but had also fascinated him; he was angry when he read her postscript. But it behooved him to swallow his anger. He had hastily collected the promise of a party, and wrote to assure her that he wouldn’t think of talking business with her on her first evening in town.

“I’m dining out, Thèrése,” said Mary, when she had scanned the note. “Look me out the prettiest thing I own. I need some new clothes, don’t I? What I wore last night will do, I suppose. I’ll rest now, as I am going to be up late.”

Therese, beginning to unhook her, said, “Mr. Greene called on the ’phone while you were out, Miss Allen.”

“Did he? I couldn’t see him anyhow.” Mary was busy unfastening the flower from her left hand. “ Indeed, I don’t know when I can see him, Thèrése; these are going to be busy days. If he calls again, you may tell him I am not in.”

She laid the rose down, and looking at it drew a full breath. After all, that hadn’t been hard to say: too busy for Roger, when she was going out to dinner with Ben King!

Lying down in her quiet room with drawn shades, she was the picture of a tired woman resting, every line of her body relaxed, and her face quiet and peaceful in its frame of loose smooth hair. For a moment she felt that it was to be so: she would simply rest, and then rise and go about her business. What difference did it make if Roger called fruitlessly, and she dined to-night opposite another man?

No difference, she said, and for just a moment believed her saying: but she could not face it out. A sudden tremor went over her from head to feet; with nervous hands she drew the loose hair about her lace. Oh, for the blessed days that were gone, for the free touch of Bogeys lips, or the weight of his head on her arm! Or even for forgetfulness— but no, she would forget too soon. To-night after her gay party she might for all her weariness be unable to sleep. But to-morrow night she would be very tired, and then she would sleep a little; and presently she would sleep almost as well as ever. Not quite so well, to be sure; never quite so well again. But after all one forgot; one hastened to forget. She would hasten as others did; she was beginning this very day.

But for an hour, only at first and here where no one saw, she drew her hair about her, because he had loved it so; she felt with her own lips the arms that had been his delight; she remembered the ecstasy that could never come again. Soon enough she would have ceased even to remember.

CHAPTER XXV

ANOTHER TWO

As quickly and easily as if she had never known any other mode of life, or had found the right mode but now, Nancy Desmond became used to a wandering and unattached existence. She learned how to make all her arrangements with as little trouble as possible, and how to let details suffice for interest in life. She had reduced her personal belongings until they could all be contained in a suit-case; her personal interests would have gone into something much smaller. To leave a place when she had wearied of it, to go by the best train to the next point of note, and find a good place to stay; to eat three meals a day, and to see all the sights, both usual and recondite; to read a little, walk a little; to make a few chance acquaintances; and then to pack and go on — this was her life.

Physically she benefited by it. Her hand grew steady, her eyes bright; her skin was a little tanned, and the tan was becoming. She stayed among the Canadian Rockies until September; then she worked her way down the coast, following retreating summer. With the new year she settled, or at least alighted, in a sleepy little seaside town with a Spanish name.

It was not more picturesque than many another town that she had seen; her chief reason for going there was that it was a convenient journey from a painters’ colony on which she had stumbled by accident, and from which she fled as if it were plague-stricken. The sight of other people busy at her old employment was more than she could endure. She felt that she showed herself a coward; but cowardice was now her policy.

In this pretty town the suit-case remained unpacked for many months. She had chanced on an excellent small hotel; and the beach here was perfect. She had grown a little tired of roving; she was glad to feel her days slip into a well-regulated round, though it was only a round of time-killing. She was as idle as possible, quite aimless, not at all unhappy. She felt that she could live here and thus for twenty years, and at their end pass tranquilly out to the sea and the broad sky.

Then came spring, the bringer of unrest. But either because spring is not such a miracle in warm latitudes, or through some defect in herself, Nancy felt no responsive thrill. Once or twice she caught herself wishing that she were in Paris, where she had once spent a spring in her student days: the recollection of it came back to her now as quite the happiest season of her life. But she herself had been perpetually unquiet then, had seethed and simmered beneath her quiet manner and the blond exterior that conveyed such an impression of calmness. Was she simply regretting the unchecked flight of youth ? Or was it possible that the old unrest would ever return, the old delicious disturbance, the urge that must find outlet, the instinct that sought life instead of peace?

For she was very peaceful now, simply drinking in the sunshine. She could have asked nothing better, if she had not remembered that once she was capable of giving it forth again in beauty and fragrance.

One morning she went down to the beach directly after breakfast, her parasol in one hand, her pine pillow in the other, to lie on the sand in a little nook where the rocks gave some shelter. In this particular spot she often lay for hours of a morning, sometimes dozing, but usually in a waking lassitude fed by the life that seeped through to her. She would watch the clouds and listen to the waves, feel the pleasant sunshine upon her body hour by hour; and at length she would rise and go away, no whit different from the woman who had lain down there, except perhaps that she was beginning to be hungry for her lunch.

This particular morning was like yesterday and many yesterdays, except for differences in the clouds; the sky was as blue, the sea as unresting, the sand as cushiony beneath her, the sunshine as grateful to her extended limbs. Yet even as she stretched herself out and adjusted her parasol, Nancy was aware of a difference somewhere. Somewhere: where conceivably but in her? The mighty hand of change was once more upon her, and life had reached out to draw her to itself.

She lay quietly on her back, with one arm crooked beneath her head. She would no more help the process than she would resist it. But she was not required to help it; she had only to be quiet and let it take its will of her. For in the great calm of the open and the sunlight, in the stillness which the breaking waves seemed to intensify rather than to interrupt, she felt herself once more become a vortex of seething life; or rather, perhaps, she found and embraced the living self which had become quiescent in her so long.

At first indeed she hardly dared to move, for fear this inpouring should be only an illusion; but presently she could no longer rest under it. She rose and began to move along the beach, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the tide in her mounted higher. Presently she turned to scramble up some steep rocks; on the top she sat down, breathless but unspent. There, with the sun pouring upon her unprotected head, she sat motionless and looked out to sea. Her excitement had reached a crisis; but she was once more in control.

Late in the afternoon she returned to her room, having missed her luncheon and forfeited her afternoon nap. She ate her dinner with appetite, but without any idea of what she ate; she answered mechanically the polite remarks of acquaintances — people always liked to talk to Nancy. Then she went to her room and lay down in the dark, but not to sleep. Never during all that night was her pillow visited by the heavy sleep of convalescence; and at the first hint of light she slipped from her bed and stood at her open window. The wind of dawn was on her cheeks, the light of dawn in her soul: day was breaking for her, at last.

A picture was coming to her. What other shape could the cosmic force assume when it impinged upon Nancy Desmond? In a state of excitement at once delicious and painful, she waited another day, two days. She must be sure.

But instead of passing, her excitement steadied into resolve; in the mind long fallow was springing an overwhelming impulse, a blind whirling something which strove to get itself embodied. She walked with the thing before her eyes, slept with it hovering over her, felt it in her every nerve. And after their long rest her nerves responded much more rapidly than usual. In three days this itching down her arm would no longer be denied. The dream-like state which had endured so many months was gone, definitely and finally.

It is perhaps significant that she had no desire to paint what she had seen in the past year. The mountains, the sea and the sunshine had all penetrated her, but she had to transform them before she could give them out again. And when she had reached the stage of transforming she could easily part from them.

She decided to go back to New York, where she could have every facility for work; she believed that she knew just where to find a suitable model. During all her absence she had communicated with New York only twice, and then on money matters; she had thought little about her old milieu — it seemed too remote for thought. Now she had no particular feeling about returning: she did not shrink from the prospect, yet it was not in the least like going home. All she desired was to find the best place to paint, and then paint her head off.

Full of her errand, and ruthless for its execution, she plumped her scanty belongings into her suit-case, and set off to get her ticket and her reservation. She had no thought now of good trains or of bad; her concern was simply the first train.

In the open street she hesitated, all her brisk confidence and sheltering unconcern brought to a stand-still. The way was not clear to her picture; before it could be clear, she Sad something still to do. She did not rejoice to do it; but she owed an acknowledgment.

She walked on presently, and bought her ticket. “I should like a stop-over in Denver,” she told the agent. Then passing to the telegraph office she wrote her first letter in months, a letter to be clicked across the mountains that night, and delivered in cold type at a man’s strait office.

“ Can you meet me in Denver Thursday ? ” she wrote. “I am stopping over there for a few days on my way east, and should like to see you. I shall arrive — ” She consulted her time-table, and added the hour.

“ This will surely go to-night ? ” she asked.

* Surely,” said the agent, smiling at what he mistook for eagerness. She was anxious rather than eager. For if her message failed to reach its destination, she would both keep her cake and eat it. Nancy signed her initials, and then wrote at the top the direction which she had hitherto omitted. When the name “Max Meredith” stared up at her in her own writing, she shoved the paper hastily across the counter.

A night and a day and yet another night, and she left the train in Denver. Nancy had made herself as smart as possible; and now that it was so near, she approached the interview without misgiving. They had earned a day together; their part was simply to enjoy it to the full.

Her eyes singled him out at once in the crowd outside the gate. She felt something of the old acceleration of her heart, the old catch in her throat; but she felt also a new and curious shyness, as if he had grown half strange to her. But to be sure it was queer, her coming to him like this; with him actually before her, Nancy reflected on what must have been her state of mind if he hadn't come, for any reason whatsoever.

She was through the gate now, a porter with her bag following at her heels. Max advanced a few steps to meet her. Stress of emotion did not keep Nancy from noting how well set up he was, and how well turned out: she had never seen him look quite so “nice.” But then she had never seen him before on his own ground, and against the backing of his own people.

Max lifted his hat, and put out his free hand for hers; he said, “Well, Nancy?” in a voice which was a little unsteady.

Nancy gave his hand a little quick pressure, and withdrew her own. Then she looked down and down, until , her face was hidden beneath the brim of her hat.

“What shall we do with your bag?” she heard him ask. “Shall you be here long enough to need it?”

“No. Check it, please. And I think there is something to be done about my ticket.”

Max possessed himself of her ticket, and transacted her business for her. Then he led her to a waiting taxicab. “We are going somewhere where we can be quiet,” he said.

They drove uptown. He had reserved a table for luncheon in a corner of a huge hotel dining-room, a corner behind the palms. He had thought of everything: beside her plate lay a nosegay of Scotch marigolds and cornflowers, symbolic to him, perhaps, of her hair and eyes. It harmonized with what Nancy chanced to be wearing; as she pinned it to her blouse, she resolved that she would make this a day for Max to remember.

Everything, indeed, was quite as it should have been.

At first they were both a little reserved, a little doubtful about the tone they were to take, hesitant, perhaps, because they had to make the brief hours count for so much. But they began soon enough to talk their old trivialities, and to find in them the old curious significance.

He told her how he had received her telegram, and had postponed an important engagement to rush off in answer; he had been in Denver all the night before.

“I am sorry,” said Nancy, “that I interrupted anything important.” He smiled at her old respect for work, and inquired about hers. She told him that she was going back to it after a long rest; she spoke shortly, not to seem too eager.

She was quite well, then ? Oh, quite! Couldn’t he see that for himself ? She had never been better in her life. She enjoyed even riding on the train now. And then she went on to tell him little unimportant happenings of her journey. He told her of his plans and his occupations. There was some inequality here, but it was inevitable; of some things she had never been able to talk to Max, and now she seemed less able than ever. But perhaps it did not matter much what she said; half the time he listened as if he were hearing rather the voice itself than what it said; and when her sentences ended in mid-air, they seemed not to produce in him any feeling of incompleteness.

It would have been cruel of her not to give him this much. For the man was actually absurdly happy, here in this pitiful little interregnum, happier far than when he knew the first ecstasy of love, and recognized in her the beauty of life. For he had not only earned his present happiness, and felt free to enjoy it with a clear conscience; he was lifted beyond doubts and questionings into the presence of a miracle. His love for her had lasted. Half the world would soon lie between them again, half the world and all of life. Yet as he trod his appointed pathway, nothing could dim his resplendent fact. If he never met Nancy again until they were old man and old woman, he would scarcely need to look into her eyes to know that it lasted still.

When they had finished their luncheon, and a second round oi coffee, a little silence fell. The sunshine had ripened to the blaze of early afternoon: they had several hours ahead of them, but it was not amiss to pause and glory in them now, for soon enough the hours would be spent. He left it to her, indeed, to end that moment of realization of their riches. But when she unpinned her bouquet from her blouse, in order to pin it later on her coat, Max resumed command of the expedition. “We can drive around a little while now,” he suggested.

Nancy prudently proposed that they should walk; but it appeared that the taxicab had been waiting during their leisurely meal. Nancy was scandalized at his extravagance, yet not displeased that this seemed to him an occasion for extravagance. Max was perfect to-day. She heard with interest his careful instructions to the driver; he had planned to make the most of her every moment with him.

Under a sky brilliantly blue, the city lay in its imposing red-brick solidity. Nancy tried to play the role of interested sight-seer; but her attention would keep straying from what Max was trying to tell her. A face on the pavement would catch her eye: Colorado women were astonishingly well worth looking at, in spite of the prevalent dryness of their skins. A face that had significance for Nancy always set her to thinking how that significance could be brought about. During these late months faces had been blanks; but now one after another caught her eye and set her off on considerations of medium and placing and shading. She would bring herself back to what her companion was saying, only to wander off again.

“How,” she asked him suddenly, “is Virginia? And how is Jo?”

He deferred Virginia; he could always talk about Virginia. He set himself resolutely to the task of expressing the fact about Jo. “ Jo is fairly well,” he brought out, “and I think reasonably contented. She has tried very hard lately to be a good wife, and has, humanly speaking, succeeded very well. Away from her own family she would succeed better; but now that we have rather more money than we used to have, even the summers are quieter. Jo lives up to her light; not everybody can say as much.”

Jo did not live an enviable life, it seemed to Nancy: for her it was all picking up the pieces. She recalled, as something incredibly distant but still seizable by memory, their girlhood dreams together, when she had already begun to open her mind for achievement, though the way of it was not yet plain to her, but Jo was always for love, believing in it as a doctrine and a revelation, waiting for the consecration of it to fall upon her. She had married Max, Nancy believed, more in desire of that consecration than because she loved the man himself; yet even supposing that, the failure of an undertaking in which she had embarked so much must have been bitter to her. In contrast Nancy saw her own life as something round and firm, built up from the ground bit by bit: flawed here and there, and never perhaps to be completely crowned, but solid, sure, satisfactory. The nightmare of the long months slipped from her; the future was hers to seize; or rather it was ready to seize her, and she willing to let herself be taken.

She had forgotten about Max. With a start she was recalled to his presence. “ Virginia,” Max was saying, “ Virginia, poor little kid — ”

She would willingly hear him on that subject. Yes, there was Virginia, the continuation of Jo’s stunted existence, the link that bound Max forever to her. When she thought of Virginia, Nancy did not feel quite so rich. She wanted not to feel so rich; and, sure that it would show him to advantage, she listened eagerly to Max’s talk of his child.

He showed, indeed, not only natural affection for his child, but an active interest in her personality and a passionate desire for her welfare. She couldn’t have an easy lot in life: she was too much Max’s daughter for that. But whatever could be done for her from outside should be done, and more must come to her somehow. Max had largely given up wanting things for himself, but that made him all the more jealously desire things for Virginia; had he not himself established an account against Fate, to be paid to the credit of Virginia?

His attitude made itself clear enough to Nancy, though he stumbled in uttering it. This was exactly what she wanted for Max; he had fallen into the line of duty, and embraced it with passion. She listened to him with rising pride: she had not supposed he had it in him to be quite so strong and true. Yet all the time she felt a vague pity for one who had by his own confession fallen into the second rank; and her too clear perceptions told her that he hadn’t escaped the penalty of exchanging vision for working compromise.

That was what she wanted not to see. There was a certain meanness in coming to this interview half-heartedly, as she had done; but after all she was used to the sharp centering of her interests outside the sphere of human relationships, and if in this company she felt like apologizing for her coldness, away from this company she could forget that she had ever been cold. But she should never forget Max as she saw him to-day: so much finer and simpler than she had supposed him, but already sunk prematurely into middle life, a solid citizen and an average family man, quiet, preoccupied, a little heavy both in figure and in speech. It was only what she might have expected, only the commonest human phenomenon of dying by inches. But there came to her sharply a contrasting remembrance; and it wrung her until she could have cried aloud. For whatever his errors were, and however they affected other people, Roger Greene would not only keep his soul alive, but develop it as it must develop. And here Max was slowly killing his, was learning for stabil tty’s sake not to see too much, not to attack more than he could nicely manage, to admit only a part of what impinged upon him. And he was doing it at her bidding.

The most that she could give would not be too much to atone to him; yet no atonement was possible. He hadn’t anything fine and free to offer her, and he wouldn’t offer her anything that wasn’t fine and free. He still believed her worthy; he loved her bidding, not only because it was hers, but because he believed it to be prompted by all fineness. But Nancy knew now, and in her shame felt that she had known it all along, that her bidding had been prompted by the fact that she couldn’t go out of her chosen way, even for him. If she had seen from the beginning just what this would do for him, it must still have been the same; and from this moment’s harrowing vision she would go back to her own way, stronger than ever in it, and leaving Max to the grinding hour by hour and minute by minute solution of a problem that was nothing after all, and could by his greatest or his most minute exertion be made nothing, but making the best of a bad bargain.

“ Oh, Max! I was right! I was right!”

Her cry startled him; he had been reveling in the immunity he had so toilsomely gained, the immunity which made it possible for him to sit with her as he was sitting now, and talk quietly about his everyday concerns. He could not go back to consideration of right and wrong; the course he had taken must be right, for him.

He moved closer to her, and took both her hands in his own as he said, “Of course you were right, little Nancy. Don’t ever let anything persuade you that you weren’t right, righter than anything else, righter than right itself, Nancy.”

There it was: she was his creed. Her own insufficiency could not spoil it; for his belief was not her doing after all, but simply the best part of him. If she had had strength in the beginning, even the sort of strength Roger had, she might have made things come out better for him, might have given him at least his rare moments. Yet to change Max would be to change everything.

He had dropped her hands, and leaned back in his comer. She looked about her. They had left the city behind them, and were climbing a road toward the line of the distant mountains. How perfect that line was; and the sun sank behind it every day, for the sublimely favored Space and silence were all about her; the chauffeur's rigid back ranked as nothing but a part of the machine. The space soothed her a little; from it she came back to him.

It seemed to her now as if she actually saw him whole for the first time. His blue eyes had strayed ahead, as hers had; his brown face was intent, half averted. She noted curiously that up above the beard line his cheek was as soft as a baby's. Suddenly the hints of himself, which he had given her at intervals and with such straining against his own inarticulateness, rushed into coalescence. He stood before her, not by right of intention or renunciation or circumstance, but simply as he was. And as he was, he sufficed.

She feared .to speak, lest her discovery should somehow be lost to her. Max had said all he had to say. They i rode on in silence, rode toward the glory of the mountains with the sun setting behind them. Only when it suddenly dropped from their view, Nancy recalled herself, j and looked at her watch; it seemed as if that silence had lasted an endless time.

Max gave the driver the word to turn back; and in the I gathering twilight their faces were once more set toward the world of men. Achingly Nancy reflected that she was going back toward her own busy life, that soon enough to-day would lie shadow-like behind her, all but forgotten. For him, to-day's austere communion had been all but perfect; she could not forget it too quickly.

They reached the outskirts of the city; Max turned to her and spoke. “ Yon have given me the happiest day of my life, I think. Yon have been happy, too?”

“ More than happy.”

“And yon will come again?”

“ Again, I think — bnt it will never be quite the same.” Even so much seemed to choke her.

“It will never be different,” he said quietly. “No matter what happens — and in the case of a young and beautiful woman I know what is likeliest to happen — it will never be different.”

He had reached a height of which Nancy believed herself to be incapable; man-like and Max-like, he dropped from it as she would never have dropped. For after a moment's silence, during which she strove to lift her eyes and meet his, Max called a direction to the driver, and threw open the door as the taxicab slowed down.

“ I can't take you to the station; I can't watch you go,” he said hurriedly. “ I don't want to know that you have gone, until I can begin to think that you are coming back”

Her lips formed the words, “I don't mind”; she was never sure that she uttered them. A moment later she was alone; the chauffeur, thrusting Max's bill into his pocket, started his car once more.

In the Pullman Nancy bethought herself of her flowers; she would put them in water and let them bear her company as long as they could. Glancing down, she was aware that they were no longer where she had pinned them. Search of her section failed to reveal them; and the pin, hanging by its head from her coat, told its own story. She had dropped them in the taxicab and had not even missed them, his little gift with its crude, pathetic symbolism, blue cornflowers for her eyes, and Scotch marigolds for her hair.

CHAPTER XXVI

“LOOK HERE UPON THIS PICTURE, AND ON THIS”

A week after her return to New York, Nancy Desmond sat in Mr. Morgan’s office, faced by a statement of her account and a check. She expressed neither surprise nor pleasure at the sum, although Morgan modestly thought he had done very well by her; for she knew, of course, that she hadn’t done badly by him. The real business of her visit was to reclaim the sketches she had let him take; among them there might be hints for what she had now to do.

Morgan, producing the sketches, called her attention to the number of them that were missing. “ Chiefly my landscapes, the least meritorious thing I do,” she responded. “I am glad they left the figures and the hints of figures. Will you have these tied up for me ? ”

“You want them all?”

“ I think so. I can’t tell what I may find useful.”

“What are you going to give me in exchange? What did you bring back from the west with you?”

“Not a thing,” said Nancy cheerfully. “I am going to set to work now, though; you will see the product soon enough.”

“ Could you give me an idea — ? ” he suggested.

“No, I couldn’t. I never can. Anyhow — ” a flicker of a smile came over her face — “I shouldn’t like to bias your judgment.”

She was the dryest person he ever dealt with: there passed through Morgan’s mind a vagrant idea that he should hate to be that young woman’s husband. But he looked rather regretfully at the parcel his young man was making up; he liked those sketches almost well enough to buy some of them himself. In her own level-headed way Nancy evidently found him satisfactory enough, for she continued to do business with him; but Morgan would have liked to know what lay beneath the shell of her self-possession.

He was on the point of telling her how her old teacher had come in one day and talked about her work; but Nancy checked him by rising. She folded his check and put it in the palm of her glove; then she lifted the packet of drawings. “ Can you carry that?” asked Morgan. “ Don’t you want me to send it over for you ? ”

She shook her head. “Well, all luck to the new picture,” he said. “ Make it as good as ‘ Kite-flying.’ ”

“ Do you mean that I am a one-picture person ? ” she asked quickly.

“ I mean that you have established a criterion,” he answered.

She bade him good-day, and passed out. Morgan was left to the reflection that after all no one with whom he did business made him as little trouble as she. If only she hadn’t had that way of arousing interest and then refusing to satisfy it!

Nancy, departing with her check and her recovered drawings, would on the other hand have characterized the interview as perfectly satisfactory, if she had paused to characterize it at all. But she had no time to think it over; it wound up her present concern with the non-paint-able world. She went back to the flat she had rented, well uptown this time. There she found waiting for her a maid-of-all-work and her recently installed goods, including the very canvas on which she had a year ago failed to get a picture at Roger Greene’s bidding.

It had no malign association for her now; nothing had much of any association. All her old scores had been wiped clean, but even their cleanness was no matter for self-congratulation. She had a picture to set down, and a place whereon to set it; everything else was swallowed up in that.

For weeks Nancy lived in the absorption and intensify that were the fullness of life to her; seven days in the week, from dawn to dusk, she labored at her picture. She ate and slept; she superintended her servant with automatic competence. Sometimes she sat for a few hours in dusk broken by the firelight, and played her guitar; but even at such times she had no feeling of coming to the surface.

After her work had reached the point where she could dispense with the services of a model, she scarcely spoke for days at a time. Speech would come afterward; she would even feel the need of it, and a craving for human companionship. But now she was above earthly needs, in the practising artist’s seventh heaven, where work flows hotly and without impediment, and the artist’s personality seems a mere vehicle for work, and yet more completely and significantly itself than at any other time.

One day when she had painted from dawn on, in utter absorption, along in the afternoon she suddenly came to the surface. She put down her utensils and backed away from the easel, rubbing the numb hand that had held her palette. A minute she stood so, and then another minute, while everything whirled about her.

Then her vertigo ceased. She lifted both hands to push away the hair from her forehead; and as she did so, the picture flashed upon her in its entirety. There would be a few days more to spend upon details; but already the thing was “ done ” in the sense in which she had always used the word. And she viewed it as complete: it was now not something growing under her hand, and of concern because she was doing it, but a production of which she was the first critic.

The picture represented a naked and lovely woman, full-length in profile, seen shadowily through what seemed at first glance a steaming mist, but showed a phantasmagoria of faces and forms, elfin, beastly, monstrous, leering. These faces and forms the woman was thrusting away from her, beating down with her bare hands; and still they surrounded, crept upon, enveloped her, hideous and menacing. Fears, follies, temptations, impinging upon her naked flesh, rising to her head and heart, ever beaten off by those tremulous determined hands, only to swarm anew: it was woman assailed by the world, or perhaps it was the human soul, if you liked; but at any rate something strange and lovely, dimly perceived and haunting, fighting down phantoms that would not be conquered, but could not be suffered to conquer.

In a triumph that was akin to despair by its very poignancy, Nancy looked at the picture: at last she had got what she wanted. She loved it so that she could have destroyed it upon the spot, to have it hers and hers only; she almost hated it, it was so perfect. And she was alone, because it had gone out of her, alone in the cold north light with this goblin of her own creating.

Not stopping to put away her brushes, she ran from the room and locked the door. Down the passage she could hear the cheerful everyday sound of her servant about her tasks; Nancy sought her in her shining little kitchen. “ Give me something to eat now, Amelia,” she said. “ I can’t wait for dinner; let me have something.”

Amelia knew the value of her easy position; moreover, she was not a person to be readily upset. She placed a hasty meal before her mistress; and Nancy ate and drank enormously. She perceived that she had a treasure in Amelia; she had selected her because she needed someone, but she had been lucky. She was always lucky, the world was her oyster, and she had at last applied the opener. She was very lucky; but then Amelia was lucky too; for if the lunch she spread was very good, she had a mistress who appreciated it both in action and in speech.

Nancy talked, indeed, as she ate, with unusual speed and at unparalleled length, until all at once her words began to drift off into incoherence, and she sat mouthing like a sleep-walker. “ I am going to lie down now, I think/’ she summoned concentration to say. “You needn’t call me.”

She slipped off her bedaubed apron and her shoes; with her hair half-down, she threw herself on her bed, in the new bedroom that was still strange to her. Without moving from her first position, she fell heavily asleep.

It was dark when Bhe woke. She covered herself warmly, lay down again, and slept on; when she woke again it was morning. She lay for an instant after full consciousness had returned, filled with the inner triumph which is the reward of artistic creation, to be exchanged after a moth’s life for the disillusion and disgust which is its penalty. Then she recalled her singular exultation of the day before: it had been a veritable debauch, and her condition now was characteristic of the aftermath of debauch.

She could eat no breakfast; but she had a hot bath and drank some coffee. “ I shall have to be a little more moderate,” she thought. “Sundays and all won’t do, I see: this isn’t heaven. I shall have to go back to my old schedule, or even less. It isn’t as if I had my working habits still to settle, though to be sure I have most of my business still to learn. But now that I have made a beginning — How tired I am! How tired I am — and there is still so much to do.”

She donned a clean apron, and doggedly entered her studio. With wrinkled brows she contemplated what had given her such joy the day before; then with weary patience she began to work at the finishing touches. “ I must be careful not to spoil it,” she thought. “ I wonder if Morgan will like it. He’s a monster, but he seems to understand. I suppose no one else will like this, however; I like it too much myself.”

As a matter of fact, she never learned whether Morgan liked that picture or not. He helped her to name it, exhibited and eventually sold it; but he had taken refuge in his dignity. Nancy was amused at his baffling her: she hadn’t supposed he had it in him. And it didn’t prevent his doing his full duty by the picture, which awakened its share of comment and even of controversy.

Nancy had never got over her old bewilderment that people should think it worth while to talk so much about a picture when the picture was there. But that part of the business was not her concern; and she had by that time other things to think about. There were plenty of readjustments to make; and in making them she resolved to profit by her misadventures. She would never go back to living in a tub. She no longer had to fear distraction; at her present age and state of progress, she did well to welcome it. It kept her from working too hard — self-restraint was required for that, now that the old core of her life was once more splendidly in place. But she had learned to like people better for their own sake; or if she didn’t like them better, at least she had grown fonder of watching them, and had learned to appreciate their liking her.,

Morgan telephoned her one morning to say that the picture had been sold. The news was not a surprise, but she heard it with a certain reluctance. She had grown to think more of sales than she used; by such substantial criteria, as well as by inward satisfaction, did one judge one’s progress as life advanced and young idealism faded. But she had a special feeling for this picture; and she told him she would come down that same day to bid it farewell.

She was already ashamed of her sentimentalism when she arrived; and half to preserve her integrity in his eyes, she went directly to where her work hung, neglecting to report herself to the dealer. It came about, therefore, that she stood in a sort of anonymity before the product of her spirit and her hands. She would be embarrassed if anyone surprised her there; but she had few acquaintances, and in her correct and quiet winter clothes, she looked sufficiently unlike the popular idea of an artist.

She had only begun her inspection, however, when it was brought to a pause in a remarkable manner. Stepping back to get the picture at a better distance, Nancy almost collided with a tall woman who had also stopped to look at it. Both of them drew back with a murmur of apology; simultaneously they recognized each other. The tall woman put out her hand, her face lighting with a smile. “Miss Desmond!” she cried. “How charming to meet you here! ”

Nancy, taken in all respects at a disadvantage, was chiefly conscious of a wish that she were six inches taller; perhaps if she hadn’t had to look up, she wouldn’t have felt that the moral odds were so completely against her. She surrendered her hand, however; and although she could feel the blood rising in her cheeks, she heard herself say quietly, “ This is a natural place for any one to find me, Miss Allen. I do a good deal of business with Mr. Morgan.”

“ Then it is only strange that we haven’t met here before,” said Miss Allen, her eyes going back to the picture. “I come here often myself. Mr. Morgan handles the loveliest things in New York, I think.”

“You are a connoisseur?” suggested Nancy.

“ I shouldn’t go so far as to say that,” returned Miss Allen easily.

No doubt, however, her education in these matters was proceeding under capable direction; Nancy had reason to know just how capable that direction was. But although she recalled meetings of her own with Mary Allen while that education was in progress, and carefully forgot the last meeting of all, of which to be sure the other woman had been quite unconscious, Nancy felt singularly little bitterness at the thought. It was all a very long time ago.

Mary Allen studied the painting, and Nancy studied Mary Allen. “That is a very wonderful picture,” said the older woman presently.

“ Thank you,” said Nancy.

“Very wonderful,” repeated Miss Allen. “I am sorry it has been sold.”

“ Yes, it has been sold,” said Nancy, not without a little thrill of satisfaction.

But she found it impossible to return to her own inspection of the picture. Not only was her mood broken; she was drawn into an admiring study of the human creature at her side. Her eye gloated on that perfect profile under the line of the magnificent hair, on those long limbs under their cunning draperies of velvet and fur. This woman, at once lawless and lovely, bore in her body the beauty that such people as Nancy sought curiously. She was dressed with more studious effectiveness than of yore; and there was a faint pink in her cheeks, a delicate darkening of the eyebrows, that gave itself away to an eye practiced in pigmentary matters. But if anything the touch of artifice accentuated the glory; for when a woman got to that stage, if she weren’t Mary Allen to begin with, she was nothing but a painted old fright. Thus reasoned Nancy, with the magnanimity of one whose youth might in a sense be dead, but who still kept her complexion.

Mary turned her head, the muscles rippling beautifully under the clear skin of her neck, and showed to Nancy’s view the curious irregularity of her full face, with the eyes and mouth that went up at the comers. She smiled again, almost wistfully this time, and said in that voice which made her simplest statements caress the ear, “I have a little thing of yours that I’m fond of; I bought it here. It is a landscape.”

“ I’m not very fond of my own landscapes,” said Nancy.

“ Perhaps they aren’t your most representative efforts; but I have found them very interesting.”

Nancy had been aware all along of Mary Allen’s graciousness, but recognized in it the habit of a life-time. She was not prepared, therefore, for what came next. “ Are you,” asked Miss Allen, glancing again at the painting, “are you in a hurry just now?”

“No,” said Nancy, not guessing her drift, but adhering as usual to literal fact.

“ Then can’t you come with me to see your little picture, and perhaps tell me something about it?”

A good picture, ran Nancy’s doctrine, requires not even a title, far less an explanation: she had been known to allow her own to figure in catalogues simply as “Landscape,” or “Figure,” or “Figure Dancing.” “There is probably nothing to be told,” Nancy began, and stopped. It would be cowardice to refuse. “ There is nothing to be told,” she went on, “ but I shall be happy to see the picture, and tell you the nothing.”

“You will? Now?” There was actual eagerness in the other woman’s manner. It was nothing but caprice, of course; yet there was something compelling in her very caprices.

“ Now if ever,” said Nancy smiling. “ I shall have to see Mr. Morgan for a moment; he expects me. But if you can wait — ”

They left the gallery together a quarter of an hour later; even then Mary Allen looked back at the picture that had haunted so many of Nancy’s nights and dominated her days. They established themselves in an obviously new limousine, of which the pale-gray elegance was a fitting background for Mary. There was a single flower in a little vase, and a tiny case of books bound to match the upholstery, and divers elegant little appointments of which Nancy did not even know the nature. It must be sustaining to live in such an atmosphere, if you were inclined that way; to Nancy it seemed just a little oppressive.

They were driven in a direction different from what Nancy had expected. Miss Allen answered her unspoken question. “I have given up my house; it really wasn’t worth while, for the few months that I am in town. My smnrner place is my real home; I keep all my pictures there, except the few that are newest, and one or two that I like to have with me.”

“It seems too bad; it was such a beautiful house,” said Nancy quietly.

“Yes, it was,” answered Miss Allen eagerly; and then she added in a different tone, “ But I got tired of it.”

Her private sitting-room at a hotel was indeed homelike enough, having been transfigured throughout by the tastes of its occupant. Nancy perceived its charm at a glance, even before her eyes had time to wander in search of her own drawing. When they found it she said nothing, because her hostess had not introduced the subject; but she could not have said anything adequate.

It stood, appropriately framed, on a little table against the wall, just where the light was best for it; under it was spread a piece of embroidered stuff, on which stood a crystal vase of flowers, and both flowers and embroidery echoed tones in the picture itself. In that one moment of gratification Nancy forgave the other woman all transgressions committed or possible; there could be no sin in a soul which so perfectly enshrined another person's work.

Mary gave her own wraps to her dark-eyed saturnine maid — Nancy refused to be relieved of hers — ordered tea, and waved her guest to a couch piled with cushions. Nancy, however, chose a little straight-backed chair which allowed her feet to touch the floor; so Mary established herself in a corner of the divan, sitting both comfortably and effectively, with one arm, clad in a transparent black sleeve, thrown over a piece of vivid embroidery, and her head resting against a background of clear deep green. “ You have been away from New York, Miss Desmond?” she asked casually. It was exactly like the first act of a play, Nancy thought. What a life, that could never manage to transcend the proscenium arch!

Her own reply was in quite another tone: one advantage of pictures is that they stay within their frames. Miss Allen listened, however, as if she were interested. When. Nancy had finished — and she talked longer than was her custom — the other woman nodded and sighed. “ You lucky ones travel for change. When we poor mimes get a chance to cease traveling, we are glad enough of the rest But it is difficult to rest, if one is bom as we are.” They had at least that much truth in common. “ It is very difficult,” said Nancy eagerly. “ And one is likely to find out afterward that when she thought she was resting, all she managed to do was to store up new impressions.”

“ But that is what makes resting tolerable,” said Miss Allen. “ This little picture of mine — it is over there, you see — was done before you went away, then?”

“Yes.” Permission being thus given, Nancy looked at the picture; she even got up and approached it. “I can't seem to remember much about it, though I recognize my own work. It must have been done some time ago.”

“It shows an actual scene?”

“I suppose it does; all those little landscapes of mine do. It must be somewhere within reaching distance of New York, too. Oh, now I remember! It's quite a long tramp inland. That dark spot half-way up is the mouth of a cave. I climbed up and explored it, and made another sketch from there. That was a better picture than this, I think. But the important thing in this picture isn't the suggestion of a cave, which mightn't for what you can see here be a cave at all: it's this tree. This holds the entire composition together, you see, and points it up.”

“ Then there is no story ? ” asked Miss Allen.

“Half a day's work in the open air, and the pursuit of some minor technical effects; I'm afraid that’s all. The picture isn't worth the setting you have given it, though of course I'm gratified to see my work so set off.” Miss Allen's eyes lingered on the picture as if she were reluctant to look away. “ I somehow took a fancy to it,” she said softly.

“ Yonr taking the fancy is the story,” replied her guest.

Miss Allen turned her head, startled. Reading in Nancy’s look that it was only a pretty speech, she accepted the remark gracefully, but with just a shade of embarrassment in her manner. She could have accepted a pretty speech from the Sphinx — she had had practice enough; but perhaps a pretty speech from the Sphinx would have been only slightly more startling than one from Nancy Desmond.

The tea arrived at that moment, in Miss Allen’s own service; it was poured by the deft tight-lipped maid. Mary moved just sufficiently to take her cup, which she held as Nancy had seen her hold a tea-cup on the stage. She made only a stage meal. Nancy drank her tea, and ate two slices of buttered toast and a little cake. If she were not exactly enjoying the interview, at least she was interested by her new light on Mary Allen. One of the changes which the last few years had brought Nancy was shown in her now finding a certain stimulation in her underlying knowledge of facts which would once have rendered the situation intolerable to her. But by now the factB lay very far away.

When she surrendered her tea-cup Nancy sat for a few minutes longer, and they talked of unimportant things. Mary did most of the talking, and Mary had no need to say anything memorable. Her voice gave distinction to her commonest utterance; her smile was the smile that audiences called her back to see, and felt themselves drawn across the footlights by it, and made personal friends of hers upon the spot. But as she lounged there gracefully, and spoke and smiled, Nancy could see that Mary Allen was tired, and was trying not to seem tired. It struck her as pathetic that the attempt should be made for her benefit: the effort would have been better spared. But Mary Allen was growing old in a situation that compelled her to fight age; and in such a fight, Nancy supposed, it would not do to yield even an unimportant skirmish.

Presently Nancy rose to take her leave. “ Must you go?” asked Mary Allen. “It is still early”

“ I have stayed a long time,” said Nancy smiling.

“ Then don’t let this be your only visit,” urged Mary Allen.

It would be, of course; what surprised Nancy was that she had stayed so long, and had been not only interested but comfortable, watching at her ease the manifestations of a nature so alien to her own. Just as she stooped to gather her gloves and muff, however, she had a sudden sensation that the watching had not been all on one side; but she took refuge in her security that there was nothing for Mary to find out.

Nancy’s polite farewell was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. The hovering Th6rdse answered, and having called Mary to the instrument, retired discreetly. Mary excused herself to Nancy, and answered eagerly. Nancy, thrusting her hands into her jacket pockets, waited until Mary should be at liberty to receive her good-by; her eyes, politely averted from her hostess, turned to her own picture.

But she could not help hearing; and she heard the wonderful voice sink to its tenderest tone. “Yes, you may come up. Yes, do.” That was all that Mary said; but turning from the telephone she faced her guest with a trace of the look that can be roused in a woman by the voice of one man only.

Nancy stood as if rooted to the spot, her arms still crooked defiantly. Everything which she had supposed safely dead and decently interred rose with the old hideous vitality. To meet him here, like this — here, when she hadn’t see him since that dreadful day; to see him now, and see him with her, familiarly with her!

The one possible course of conduct was to stay a little longer, and to show them that she didn’t care. She noted the rapid glance that Mary gave herself in the mirror: the older woman’s face was a little flushed with pleasure, and had lost its weary look. He could recreate her, then, could undo by a dozen words over the wire all that the taxing years had done. Doubtless he found it worth the doing; and certainly it was none of Nancy’s affair.

There came a rapid knock at the door; Mary went to open it. It swung on noiseless hinges for what seemed to Nancy an endless time; then there stood revealed in the opening a perfect stranger.

A tall, dark young man, as idiosyncratically elegant as Mary herself, with a manner of chronic boredom that couldn’t conceal the force which was in him; an interesting enough young man, and one well accustomed to carrying things before him. He was not, however, quite prepared for his reception now. He had expected to find Mary alone; and here with her was a handsome young person, who stared at him as if he had been a ghost.

Mary performed the ceremony of introduction; and the young man, advancing, thought to set the stranger at her ease. He was not prepared, however, for her laughing when she met him, an impudent and nettling little laugh delivered squarely in his face. He believed it to be unforeseen on her part, however, and due to some strange embarrassment; for having laughed she turned white as a sheet, and then flushed deep pink. From her conduct he might have judged either that she was unbalanced or that she had fallen in love with him on the spot.

“And now you must stay, Miss Desmond,” she heard Mary say. “ I know you two will have a famous talk; I believe there are a thousand points on which you are just ready to differ.”

He added his plea to his friend’s, though a triangular conversation was not what he had come for. The extraordinary young woman, however, shook her head decidedly.

Having recovered from her curious emotion, she performed her adieux properly enough, as properly indeed as a well brought up school-girl. The young man held the door open for her, and she passed out into the hall, a very school-girl in her own estimation. For hadn’t she been naive enough to take for granted that it would still be Roger Greene to whom Mary responded — and hadn’t she descended from a height of fury to the conviction that she would still have had a great deal to learn from a very curious book had she either means or inclination for going on with her study!

Mary’s visitor closed the door. “ Did I interrupt a conversation of any importance ? ” he asked.

“ No. She was leaving anyhow. She came up simply to tell me something about that picture, of which she is the painter.”

“ Oh, a painter! ” Apparently to the young man’s mind that explained a good deal of eccentricity; he was an actor himself.

“ Yes. Isn’t she pretty ? ”

“Is she?”

“ Oh, delightfully! ” Mary seemed to make the statement in all good faith, with a charming lift of her eyebrows and glance at him. The young man, who was heartily infatuated with her, made the only suitable reply; and so Nancy passed out of the conversation.

If she had passed out of Mary’s thoughts so easily, (as indeed Nancy herself would have expected to pass) other chapters in other lives would never have been written. But Mary’s thoughts sometimes went in directions that the thought-about could scarcely have credited; and they moved with a certain magnanimity of a curiously characteristic sort.

She enjoyed her play-hour with young Charles Connelley to the full; not the least of her pleasures was giving Charles his choice between dining and supping with her — she knew so well that in his present state both dinner and supper would have been little enough for him. He chose dinner because he couldn’t bear to defer a pleasure.

They lingered longer than they should have; and Mary reached the theater late, to be met by Mr. King’s sarcastic offer to engage the services of another leading man, if that were necessary in order to insure her presence. She laughed as if the hit had been witty; indeed poor old Ben’s snortings made her feel a girl again.

But she had to hurry her dressing, and got a poor start at the evening; and although her usual access of energy came to her in her acting, the conclusion of the play left her spent. She began to wish then that she had not been so capricious; but perhaps it was as well. She was too tired to face Charles just now: he was young himself, and inclined to be merciless.

A good sleep would suit her needs better than Charles. But for all her weariness she found herself unable to sleep. She had a warm bath and a warm drink; she read a little in a book that was easy to hold and dull as to contents; she laid it down, and sought to compose herself. But she could not stop thinking; and finally she decided that the easiest course was to give her thoughts free play.

She rose and slipped on her dressing-gown; then she went into her sitting-room, and turned on the lights. It was better here; she walked back and forth for some minutes, until the worst of her uneasiness had worn off; then she sat down before Nancy’s picture. And it was not of the picture nor its associations for her that she thought; it was, as it had been for the past hour, of Nancy.

She had seen everything in the little scene of that afternoon; she had seen as much all along as Nancy at the end suspected. She thought of all that she had seen and all that she surmised. She thought of Nancy’s power, which she recognized, and of her youth, which she envied; but chiefly she thought of Nancy’s loneliness. Perhaps that would have surprised Nancy; perhaps she didn’t know that she was lonely. People didn’t, when they were young and self-confident, and very busy. When at length Nancy did know it for herself, she might be too late. Then she would have her choice either of drifting about as Mary herself had drifted, or of sitting down to be alone in hardness of heart — which was more like Nancy.

One never knew anything, to be sure, until it was too late to profit by the knowledge. One never had anything, until the day for using it had gone by. Nancy was hardening already; Mary couldn’t imagine her as still feeling for Roger that old obvious adoration. But they might have something in common still ahead of them, if they were wise enough to see it: if they were wise enough to see it, as they undoubtedly vere not^

Mary had seen very little of Roger lately. They met once or twice at big public gatherings; and once they found themselves set down at dinner side by side, and after their first embarrassment rather enjoyed the occasion. But Roger had been definitely superseded for her; and she thought it good of herself to take any interest in the manner in which she was superseded for him. She could fold down his page with a wistfulness that nothing spoiled, but she would hate to think of Roger’s doing anything dreadful. Not even an imperfectly reconciled Roger could think Charles Connelly dreadful; Charles was only trifling.

Mary remained for a long time with her chin in her hand, staring at the little picture that she w€s keeping so religiously. Occasion to put it religiously away would be easier on her if it sprang from her own doing; Mary had not yet got out of her attitude of captain of the expedition. At length she rose from her vigil, tossed back her hair, and went to her desk. She covered a page quickly with her carefully irregular writing; then she read over what she had written.

“Dear Tertius,” it said, “Little Desmond is back in town, hard at work, of course, and prettier than ever. She was up here for a little while this afternoon, talking about a picture. Have you seen her yet? If not, go to see her. And Tertius, don’t be a fool.”

She smiled as she signed and sealed this. Roger would regard it as an echo from the kind of play she had played so long, as a deed of false and stagy magnanimity. He would also, or she did not know her man and men in general, see Charles in every line, and reflect that it was kind of Mary to wish to establish him when she had already done the like for herself. It would be all the better, indeed, if Roger believed himself, so far as Mary was concerned, only one of a series; at least, it would never do for him to suspect how in Mary’s mind he still stood out from the series. Her affairs had increased in intensity since Roger’s time, from mere self-defense. That was unjust to Charles, of course, and to others; but such injustice did not disturb Mary. In this world you had to act on both the defensive and the offensive; you couldn’t hold yourself apart from its give and take.

But you could, if you were big enough to risk making a fool of yourself, indulge yourself a little sometimes. Of course, her magnanimity might be superfluous as well as ridiculous. In the rumors that drifted to her Roger had been reported as prospering, as poor, as working hard, as taking to drink: rumor had represented him as in almost every state and act except attaching himself to a woman. But the omission might be due only to a deficiency in Mary’s sources of information, or to another magnanimity of which she was the object.

But she was willing to chance that too; she might be doing him a genuine kindness, and at the worst he could only smile at her absurdity. Let him smile, if he liked; she had never wished to give him anything but smiles. There was something at her heart, and always would be till all smiles ceased together; but it was something he couldn’t suspect, unless perchance something akin to it lay at his own. Even if that were so, his way still lay toward little Desmond; but if she could fully have believed it, Mary could have gone on more contentedly toward the setting sun.

She stood with her note in her hand, looking pensively down at it; the drooping ends of her hair kissed it, as it lay in her hollowed hand. Let all the perfume of her penetrate it, Roger would not recognize that when he got it; yet as she stood there, lone and lovely in the encircling shadows, Mary knew that as passing from her to him, even in its bareness it was a word too much.

She laid it hastily on a little table near the door, and went out of the room without a backward glance. It would be mailed in the morning long before she woke. That was as well, too; for when she woke these days she was incapable even of a false magnanimity.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE RECKONING

It was the middle of the afternoon when Roger took Mary’s letter out of the mail-box, and carried it upstairs to read. His hand trembled as he opened it. He had never got over believing that some day Mary would whistle him back. He wouldn’t go, of course; but her act would appease him, if only by showing him that he had got over caring.

He was not appeased when he read this note. He flung it down angrily, and stood staring at the mark of his own painty thumb on the envelope. Then he picked it up to reread, and was angrier still. Instead of reconstructing Mary’s state of mind in writing, as she had expected, he saw in the message simply an affront. Mary was tired of him, and had gone on: that was very well, though he sometimes meanly regretted not having made it clearer that he was tired of her too. Still, they were even enough; but Mary didn’t seem to realize that, or she wouldn’t have high-handedly selected a pigeon-hole and invited him to climb in and spend the rest of his life comfortably there.

He was doing very well; and he would thank her to let him do well in his own way, and not go sending him absurd letters about other women. He was doing so well, indeed, thanks largely to the fact that he had in these days very little to do with women. Perhaps his taste had been educated to the point where he was no longer easy to satisfy; but principally he was enjoying his freedom. He didn’t regret the specific responsibilities that had slipped from him, either cloak-holding or tithe-paying. He was free; if he wasn’t also completely happy, that was probably his own fault. He wasn’t made for continuous happiness.

But Mary’s note had impinged upon a raw spot, of which he would have liked to forget the existence. The alternative that Mary’s mind had proposed for Nancy, the more introspective Roger was uneasily aware of in his own case. For when a man’s work has reached the point, if not of unqualified success, at least of complete possession and sure attack, and when he sees as he brushes his hair of a morning that it is beginning to be sprinkled with gray, and can’t be altogether certain that the gray is premature— then he is faced with the alternative of either going on as he is, unsatisfactory though the way may be, or of looking definitely for another scheme of life. Roger had elected to go on as he was; but he was conscious that it was the Puritan in him which drove him to such election. Youth may last indefinitely for such as he; but if it does, thought Roger, it must last of its own accord. He wouldn’t make himself ridiculous by hanging to the skirts of a fleeting youth.

He thrust Mary’s note into a drawer; but its contents had made their way into his mind, and her phraseology rankled. There was her calling him “ Tertius,” for one thing, as if she could revert easily to the days that didn’t matter; and there was her adjuration to him not to be a fool. He didn’t object to having it insinuated that he could be a fool, or even that he was likely to be; he resented the intimacy of her telling him not to be, and telling him how not to be, the while she also bade him be on his way, and called him “Tertius” as if he were eighteen.

Of course, she had spoiled the day’s work for him. But that was now no such great matter, as he had every day the privilege of working himself to fiddle-strings. He seized the opportunity of going out into the open air. He had no definite destination in view, but he dressed himself carefully, in case he should choose to go among lions or among ladies.

An hour’s rapid walking was sanative; and he was further restored by a visit to his dealer’s: he had not yet wearied of the aroma of his limited but indubitable success. He was much restored by perceiving afresh that he was now on the inside: so much restored, indeed, that he had thoughts of paying Mary a visit, and showing her something — anything — in sum, how little he cared for her or for what she took it into her head to do.

He was restrained not only by perceiving that the dignified course was not to notice her freaks of temper, but also by an underlying conviction that if he did go to her, the actual upshot of the matter would be not that he showed anything at all, but that he would be shown whatever she pleased. So after some farther walking about he went into Morgan’s, not with any very definite purpose, but in order to see what he could see.

He not only saw, but heard. Mr. Morgan, beholding him, led him in the first place to his old pupil’s new picture, and then showered him with news of that pupil herself. Finally he copied off her address, and thrust it into Roger’s hand. Roger looked at it with vexed amusement; all the gods were getting out of all the machines, it appeared, in order to point out the way to Anne Desmond.

But he turned back to her picture; and that settled the matter for him. Having relieved himself of Mr. Morgan, he studied the painting for a long time; and when he emerged at length into the sunlight, he was a man with a spell upon him. He had always known that Nancy could paint, and that as she went on she was painting better and better; but that did not prevent him from being awed by the beauty and strangeness of this singular new work of hers. The force of her conception, the loveliness of that central figure, shrinking but undaunted, the fascination of the mist resolving itself into demoniac figures, and the demoniac figures beaten back into mist — Roger carried them with him as he walked, and again and again they seemed to lift him on a mighty surge.

It wasn’t necessary for him to see Nancy now: he carried the best of Nancy with him. But as the surges subsided a little, there occurred to him one or two points he would like to discuss with her. This picture had final rightness, supreme authority; but it wouldn’t do for her to go in for mysticism. In her future work — But her future work was no concern of his. What he had to give Nancy was given long since. Hers was the only relation in his life which had ever eventuated just as he would have had it. Why not let the episode remain closed, and so for ever satisfactory?

That would be the prudent course; but Roger was not prone to prudent courses, and his life held too many closed episodes already. Moreover, when he wanted to talk about a picture he had to talk, or die. So he did exactly what Mary bade him do, though not of course by reason of her bidding. He consulted Mr. Morgan’s memorandum ; approaching by a round-about way, but nevertheless approaching, he presented himself late in the afternoon at Nancy’s door.

As he waited for the answer to his ring, his complex of feeling had resolved itself into simple fear that she might not be at home: when eagerness rose within him, it could brook no check.

He acquired a grievance, however, the moment the door was opened to him; for it was opened by a servant. She was not indeed a beautifully sophisticated bit of the setting like Mary’s Thèrése; she was simply a neat creature, who was politely non-committal as to Nancy’s being at home, but showed him into the living-room to wait. In the old days Nancy hadn’t kept a servant; in the old days, Nancy had had another sitting-room: matter enough for grievances this.

This room was larger than the old one; and although many of the old furnishings were recognizable, the whole air of the place was different. It was less cloistral but also less intimate: more mature, and more studied. And although there were four pictures on the walls, and all of them excellent, his own was not among them. Roger lounged near the fireplace, which was empty, and surveyed the room; then he fell to examining a little bronze on the shelf. He would have supposed himself alert for her coming; yet the first he knew of her presence was when he turned and saw her standing beside him.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Roger was oddly disturbed in meeting her glance, but his disturbance did not prevent his observing her closely. There was plenty for him to note. This was indeed Nancy; yet at first glance he saw, not her essential identity, but the many changes two years had made in her. She had altered as he might have predicted from the room: she was older, more stable, more concentrated and yet more at her ease. Her hair, which he remembered as worn consistently in a knot at the back, was now braided and wound about her head like a close-fitting golden cap. Her gown was very simple, and very modish; the lines about her fine throat were peculiarly becoming. She had never looked better, either in health or handsomeness; but the effect she made on him was of remoteness, and of something hard. He waited for her to speak first, which had not been at all his intention.

“ Amelia stumbled over the name; I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said presently. Thank heaven people’s voices didn’t change; Roger felt better at once.

“ It is I. I am a stranger, am I not ? ” he began eagerly. “ I only just learned that you were back in town. I had called at your empty house after you went away, and since then I haven’t had any word — ”

“No,” she said. “Won’t you sit down? You used to find that chair comfortable.”

“ You can spare me a few minutes ? You aren’t busy ? ”

“ No. I have finished work for the day; and I have no engagement until half-past six. I am very glad you have come.”

She spoke gently, but he was not mistaken about the change in her. She was horribly quiet. She had always been quiet, to be sure, but not like this. Native economy of effort had led her to concentration and kept her from wasting herself by bubbling; but now she gave him an impression of a nature driven back upon itself. The impression was absurd, but it made him uncomfortable. Yet it added a curious fascination to her, a needed element of shade.

“ You have a neat little diggings here, Nancy,” he said. “ Bather far from your old house, isn’t it?”

“Pm very comfortable here,” said Nancy. “IPs a good place to work, and I have room for a maid.”

“I was duly impressed by the maid,” Roger assured her. “Things are easier, then, all around?”

“ Easier all around.”

“I have moved, too,” he went on. “My flat is not palatial, but I assure you it gives me quite the feeling of a householder.”

“And you like the feeling? I should hardly have expected that, Roger,” she said.

It was the first time, he noted, that she had used his name. He was on the right track now; and he went on to speak of his own concerns. She listened with rising interest, even leaning a little forward in her chair, and putting questions to him. Something in her look at that moment led Roger to say quickly, “ It isn’t so easy for us to talk as it used to be.”

“We haven’t seen each other for a long time; perhaps our connections aren’t re-established,” she said.

He shook his head. “ It hasn’t been the simple lapse of time; lapse of time isn’t important. But so much water has flowed under the bridge.”

“A great deal under your particular bridge, perhaps,” she suggested.

“ Come and see,” he demanded, getting to his feet.

She looked up at him in some uncertainty. Roger took her hand and led her to the windows, where the light was still good. There he seated himself, to bring his head below the level of her observation. “ Count my gray hairs,” he demanded. “ Count them. Seeing is believing.”

She looked, if she did not count them. “I have gray hairs myself,” she said. “ Gray hair will be very becoming to you, Roger.”

He looked up at her, to surprise the glance that went with her softened tone; but she had turned her head, and was looking out of the window. It was no wonder that her presence seemed strange to him: he had found finish where he left only possibilities. But he was not mistaken in seeing in her more than the calm of development and self-command. She was capable of standing as completely alone as any creature he had ever seen; yet Roger felt that she now stood alone, not because she chose to, but because she must. Two years ago he had not felt that way about her: but much water had flowed under the bridge, altogether too much water.

“ There is an admirable prospect from this window,” she said presently. “Admirable in a peculiarly citified way.”

“Don’t you ever miss the Square?” he asked. “Or do you still go down there ? ”

“ I have been down there, now and again. No, I can’t say that I miss it,” she answered.

“ Do any of the old crowd come up to you ? ” he asked.

“I see a good deal of the Peabodys,” replied Nancy. “ They live around the comer. I am going to dine with them to-night, in fact.”

“She is a wholesome woman,” said Roger. “Hardly in your class when it comes to production, but a woman whom I dare say you can enjoy.”

“Indeed I can,” said Nancy. “The four of us have some good times together.”

“The four of you?”

“The Peabodys and I and Randy Payne.”

“Randy Payne?” Roger could hardly believe his ears.

“ Yes. I have learned to like Randy.”

“He is good company,” said Roger. Circumstances forced him to be polite; but he was dismayed by the mention of that young twiddler. Nancy was lonely, whether she knew it or not; she had learned to like Randy Payne, and she had steadily before her eyes the example of what a wife like Mrs. Peabody could do for a man naturally much her inferior. She might end by marrying Randy Payne; for all that Roger knew, she might even then have recognized her own intention.

It wouldn’t be a dreadful fate; but where would it leave Roger? It might never be possible for him to resume his inward empire with Nancy; but already there began to shape in his imagination solid benefits that he and Nancy might get from each other. He would have to win his; but Roger wouldn’t think the less of them on that account.

“I say, Nancy,” he began, “you want to be careful, you know—”

“ Careful ? ”

“ I mean, I want you to. You will be marrying one of these fine days — ”

“ I don’t think I shall,” said Nancy promptly, but not as if she were annoyed at his mentioning the subject.

“Yes, you will. Have you ever looked in the glass? If not, look some time, and let me know if you can find permanent spinster written anywhere about you.”

She laughed. “Everybody does marry, I know,” she said. “But I never think about it, Roger. Still, you aren’t married yourself — are you ? ”

“What do you mean by that juxtaposition?” asked Roger quickly.

She was startled. For a moment her lip quivered; then a flush ran over her face. She looked out of the window again; and Roger went on. He hadn’t intended anything like this when he came; but he knew that there are some positions which can be carried only by storm. If he gave himself time, he would recognize the shabbiness and the futility of his own offer; if he gave Nancy time, she would see that she was well off as she was — to that extent at least the permanent spinster had made inroads upon her. Instinct and policy both urged him on.

“Nancy,” he said, “I know that I am not much. In fact I know better than you can just how little I am. But that little is yours for the taking. It always might have been yours; but I think the time for taking has come. I shan’t try to tell you what you have always been to me; but you know at least that I appreciate your work as consistently as any one can, and that I have a grounded respect for you. I have almost as much respect for you,” said Roger keenly, “ as I have for myself, and with better reason.”

She smiled at that last flash, as he had intended that she should: it was so very characteristic of Roger. But she did not look at him as she answered, “ I believe that, Roger. But it doesn’t seem to me like any very powerful reason for my changing the whole course of my life.”

“But that’s just it,” he said eagerly. “To marry me — see how easily I can say that, Nancy — to marry me needn’t change the whole course of your life. It would only complete it. And Nancy,” he said with a sudden catch in his voice, “it would be very sweet for me.”

The strong hand that rested on the window frame trembled a little; but her voice was steady enough as she answered- dryly, “ Indeed, I don’t doubt that. It would be pleasant for you to have me to come back to. But the position of permanent refuge doesn’t appeal to me.”

Blasphemy from an archbishop would scarcely have been more startling than that thrnst; yet what had happened was simply that she had taken the strongest possible ground against him. “I don’t speak of the past, any more than I ask questions about it,” said Roger sharply. “I am at present heart-whole and free from any entanglement; and if I marry, I shall do so without reserve or afterthought.”

She answered gently and rather wearily. “That is doubtless true. But I am an ineradicable Puritan, Roger — you remember our old distinction? — an ineradicable Puritan, and therefore no match for you.”

He had actually begun to reply, when a thought seemed to strike her; she flushed and added hastily, “At least, I am a Puritan by spells, and in those spells I am I think most truly my natural self. In leading me out of my Puritanism, life has done me no kindness.”

“You are a Puritan in art, I believe,” said Roger, on familiar firm ground now. “This new picture of yours might fairly be called ‘ The Puritan Genius.’ But don’t harden yourself in that course, Nancy. The young Milton was all very well; but remember that Milton lived to write ‘ Paradise Lost.’ ”

“I shall heed the warning,” she said. “I’m not so young as I once was; but things that my intellect accepts, and even admires, still distress my spirit. Roger — I saw Mary Allen yesterday.”

He knew that, of course; what might she make of it? If Mary kept him and Nancy apart, there would be irony in the contrast between that fact and Mary’s elected rdle of reconciler; but it was not an irony that would amuse Roger. “Yes?” he said. “You saw Mary Allen?”

“She’s wonderful. She is the perfect Pagan. But I couldn’t be like that if I tried.”

“ It isn’t necessary for you to try. But I am glad you saw her, and recognized what she is,” said Roger quietly. “ I know pretty well what you mean, and perhaps I also know how far off you are. Mary Allen and I were once very good friends. There is every excuse for Mary Allen.”

At least, he didn’t try to palliate his offense. Nancy looked around at him. “You were in love with her?”

“I was daft over her. I would have married her, if she hadn’t been wise enough to see the disaster of such a marriage.”

She looked out again at the darkening street. “ There were others before her.”

“ There were. Not so many as you think, perhaps, and not after all very important; most of those affairs were of no more vitality or persistence than a summer cloud. But the question isn’t of those tenuous others.”

It wasn’t indeed: the mere mention of them seemed to have wiped out the score. She fairly wondered at the oppression which had so long lain upon her: an hour ago it still lay there, though she had trained herself to disregard it; and now it was gone. She did not speak or look around, but Roger understood. He understood too that what she was ready to give him, what was even now his for the taking, was something like their old relation.

But good as that had been, better perhaps than anything they would find again, it wasn’t what Roger wanted now. And if he gave her time to reflect, if he considerately and decently withdrew, and left her to keep her dinner engagement at half-past six, she could come to no conclusion except that she liked to dine with Randy Payne and the Peabodys, and her arrangements were not susceptible of much improvement, and she was very well off as she was. Let Roger come back: she wasn’t so rich in friends that she could turn one away. But she could be as wise in her own situation as Mary Allen in hers: she too could decline a marriage that meant, not disaster perhaps, but at any rate no great improvement on her present state.

He did not decently withdraw. “ The question,” he repeated, “the question, Nancy, is of you and me as we stand to-day. We can’t go back to the past. Such as it was, we lived it. But we have gone on. As we stand to-day, don’t you think you had better take me ? ”

At least, she couldn’t wipe him clean out of her life, in spite of her grave desire to do so. But it was cruel that he wouldn’t at least climb back into his old niche, even if he had somewhat contracted, and could no longer fill it. Perhaps he was right, though; you couldn’t go back to the past, and if you tried you only laid yourself open to mockery. As for marriage between her and Roger, which would once have struck her as unthinkable but beatific, it was no longer a heaven-sent boon, but perhaps it was the sensible course. It opened before her as an obligation and an opportunity. Roger would keep her from feeling dry and withdrawn; Roger’s attitude toward her work was perfect — so perfect as to suggest to the mere woman in Nancy that it was her work he wanted to marry. She didn’t love him, but he didn’t ask her love. He couldn’t indeed, give her the full flame and pulse of love, any more than he could give her back the sunrise glory of her adoration.

But although the idol had manifested his clay feet, perhaps she had the integral man still to learn. Only she had no zest for the learning. She wished he would go away; yet what was actually potent with her was his mere presence in the room, the fact of him, even in his shrunken state, where there had so long been only a distorted dream.

He knew better than to go away. He hadn’t come here to woo her; but he saw that this late in the day he must either woo or lose. And he wasn’t going to lose her again. She was peculiarly his, let be what had been, and let come what might. He would give her a minute, two minutes, five; but he wouldn’t give her until to-morrow. Once more Roger trusted to his instinct; and instincts were ever his surest guide. But he was silent as he waited; no word could help her in her decision, even if it were as happily inspired as those words of his that she used to hang on.

Dusk had fallen in the room, closing them in together. She still stood beside him, as if it wouldn’t be worth while to sit down for their brief passage. Suddenly Roger put out his arm and drew her toward him. He felt her start; then she was for a moment quite still. He leaned his head against her waist, and closed his eyes. And then she lifted one hand, and began to stroke his hair.

He was hers, hers peculiarly and inescapably. The knowledge was bitter-sweet to her, but there was no putting it away. The strangeness of him so near, and of others so far removed — the bitterness of things dead and done with — the trumpet-call of things still to come and requiring her to do them — hopes, regrets, fears, plans and dreams — all flashed lightning-like before her mind, and then ran into a soft blur. From them all emerged Roger; Roger so near, and needing her, Roger for all his faults so purely Roger, and so essentially hers. This wasn’t the outcome she had planned — or he either, to be sure. But as the darkness drew closer and closer in, she continued softly to stroke the hair which was beginning to be sprinkled with gray.