Author: Robert W. Chambers
Date: 1894-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Horror; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Romance
Description: The shadows lengthen …… In Carcosa. **** Ranging from horror and the macabre to eerie eldritch fantasy to comic expeditions into the unbelievable, expertly woven with threads of poetically beautiful description, the supernatural writings of Robert W. Chambers will pique your imagination. **** This omnibus presents all eight books of Chambers’ weird fiction.
Publisher: MobileRead
Rights: Text is the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STRANGE VISIONS

The King in Yellow
The Maker of Moons
The Mystery of Choice
The Tree of Heaven
Police!!!
In Search of the Unknown
The Tracer of Lost Persons
The Slayer of Souls
… Appendix
… Index of Titles
… About This eBook

THE KING IN YELLOW

(1895)

DEDICATED TO MY BROTHER

CONTENTS:

The Repairer of Reputations
The Mask
In The Court of the Dragon
The Yellow Sign
The Demoiselle d’Ys
** The Prophets’ Paradise
The Street of the Four Winds
** The Street of the First Shell
** The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
** Rue Barrée

** = general fiction

MAIN ToC     INDEX

THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,

Where flap the tatters of the King,

Must die unheard in

Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed

Shall dry and die in

Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda’s song in The King in Yellow,
Act 1. Scene 2.

THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS

Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre… voilà toute la differénce.

[Let us not laugh at the insane; their madness lasts longer than our own… that’s the entire difference.]

I

Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff and Labor questions were settled. The war with Germany, incident on that country’s seizure of the Samoan Islands, had left no visible scars upon the republic, and the temporary occupation of Norfolk by the invading army had been forgotten in the joy over repeated naval victories and the subsequent ridiculous plight of General Von Gartenlaube’s forces in the State of New Jersey. The Cuban and Hawaiian investments had paid one hundred per cent, and the territory of Samoa was well worth its cost as a coaling station. The country was in a superb state of defense. Every coast city had been well supplied with land fortifications; the army under the parental eye of the General Staff, organized according to the Prussian system, had been increased to 300,000 men, with a territorial reserve of a million; and six magnificent squadrons of cruisers and battle-ships patrolled the six stations of the navigable seas, leaving a steam reserve amply fitted to control home waters. The gentlemen from the West had at last been constrained to acknowledge that a college for the training of diplomats was as necessary as law schools are for the training of barristers; consequently we were no longer represented abroad by incompetent patriots. The nation was prosperous. Chicago, for a moment paralyzed after a second great fire, had risen from its ruins, white and imperial, and more beautiful than the white city which had been built for its plaything in 1893. Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in New York, a sudden craving for decency had swept away a great portion of the existing horrors. Streets had been widened, properly paved and lighted, trees had been planted, squares laid out, elevated structures demolished and underground roads built to replace them. The new government buildings and barracks were fine bits of architecture, and the long system of stone quays which completely surrounded the island had been turned into parks which proved a god-send to the population. The subsidizing of the state theatre and state opera brought its own reward. The United States National Academy of Design was much like European institutions of the same kind. Nobody envied the Secretary of Fine Arts, either his cabinet position or his portfolio. The Secretary of Forrestry and Game Preservation had a much easier time, thanks to the new system of National Mounted Police. We had profited well by the latest treaties with France and England; the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive all contributed to national calm and prosperity. When the Government solved the Indian problem and squadrons of Indian cavalry scouts in native costume were substituted for the pitiable organizations tacked on to the tail of skeletonized regiments by a former Secretary of War, the nation drew a long sigh of relief. When, after the colossal Congress of Religions, bigotry and intolerance were laid in their graves and kindness and charity began to draw warring sects together, many thought the millennium had arrived, at least in the new world which after all is a world by itself.

But self-preservation is the first law, and the United States had to look on in helpless sorrow as Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium writhed in the throes of Anarchy, while Russia, watching from the Caucasus, stooped and bound them one by one.

In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.

I had walked down that day from Dr. Archer’s house on Madison Avenue, where I had been as a mere formality. Ever since that fall from my horse, four years before, I had been troubled at times with pains in the back of my head and neck, but now for months they had been absent, and the doctor sent me away that day saying there was nothing more to be cured in me. It was hardly worth his fee to be told that; I knew it myself. Still, I did not grudge him the money. What I minded was the mistake which he made at first. When they picked me up from the pavement where I lay unconscious, and somebody had mercifully sent a bullet through my horse’s head, I was carried to Doctor Archer, and he, pronouncing my brain affected, placed me in his private asylum where I was obliged to endure treatment for insanity. At last he decided that I was well, and I, knowing that my mind had always been as sound as his, if not sounder, “paid my tuition” as he jokingly called it, and left. I told him, smiling, that I would get even with him for his mistake, and he laughed heartily, and asked me to call once in a while. I did so, hoping for a chance to even up accounts, but he gave me none, and I told him I would wait.

The fall from my horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all—oh, above all else—ambitious. There was only one thing which troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet it troubled me.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali; and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue. The block which had formerly consisted of a lot of shabby old buildings, used as cafés and restaurants for foreigners, had been acquired by the Government in the winter of 1898. The French and Italian cafés and restaurants were torn down; the whole block was enclosed by a gilded iron railing, and converted into a lovely garden with lawns, flowers and fountains. In the centre of the garden stood a small, white building, severely classical in architecture, and surrounded by thickets of flowers. Six Ionic columns supported the roof, and the single door was of bronze. A splendid marble group of The Fates stood before the door, the work of a young American sculptor, Boris Yvain, who had died in Paris when only twenty-three years old.

The inauguration ceremonies were in progress as I crossed University Place and entered the square. I threaded my way through the silent throng of spectators, but was stopped at Fourth Street by a cordon of police. A regiment of United States lancers were drawn up in a hollow square round the Lethal Chamber. On a raised tribune facing Washington Park stood the Governor of New York, and behind him were grouped the Mayor of Greater New York and Brooklyn, the Inspector-General of Police, the Commandant of the state troops, Colonel Livingston, military aid to the President of the United States, General Blount, commanding at Governor’s Island, Major-General Hamilton, commanding the garrison of New York and Brooklyn, Admiral Buffby of the fleet in the North River, Surgeon General Lanceford, the staff of the National Free Hospital, Senators Wyse and Franklin of New York, and the Commissioner of Public Works. The tribune was surrounded by a squadron of hussars of the National Guard.

The Governor was finishing his reply to the short speech of the Surgeon-General. I heard him say: “The laws prohibiting suicide and providing punishment for any attempt at self-destruction have been repealed. The government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair. It is believed that the community will be benefited by the removal of such people from their midst. Since the passage of this law, the number of suicides in the United States has not increased. Now the Government has determined to establish a Lethal Chamber in every city, town and village in the country, it remains to be seen whether or not that class of human creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided.” He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. “There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek it there.” Then quickly turning to the military aid of the President’s household, he said, “I declare the Lethal Chamber open,” and again facing the vast crowd he cried in a clear voice: “Citizens of New York and of the United States of America, through me the Government declares the Lethal Chamber to be open.”

The solemn hush was broken by a sharp cry of command, the squadron of hussars filed after the Governor’s carriage, the lancers wheeled and formed along Fifth Avenue to wait for the commandant of the garrison, and the mounted police followed them. I left the crowd to gape and stare at the white marble Death Chamber, and, crossing South Fifth Avenue, walked along the western side of that thoroughfare to Bleecker Street. Then I turned to the right and stopped before a dingy shop which bore the sign,

HAWBERK, ARMORER.

I glanced in at the doorway and saw Hawberk busy in his little shop at the end of the hall. He looked up, and catching sight of me cried in his deep, hearty voice, “Come in, Mr. Castaigne!” Constance, his daughter, rose to meet me as I crossed the threshold, and held out her pretty hand, but I saw the blush of disappointment on her cheeks, and knew that it was another Castaigne she had expected, my Cousin Louis. I smiled at her confusion and complimented her on the banner which she was embroidering from a colored plate. Old Hawberk sat riveting the worn greaves of some ancient suit of armor, and the ting! ting! ting! of his little hammer sounded pleasantly in the quaint shop. Presently he dropped his hammer, and fussed about for a moment with a tiny wrench. The soft clash of the mail sent a thrill of pleasure through me. I loved to hear the music of steel brushing against steel, the mellow shock of the mallet on thigh pieces, and the jingle of chain armor. That was the only reason I went to see Hawberk. He had never interested me personally, nor did Constance, except for the fact of her being in love with Louis. This did occupy my attention, and sometimes even kept me awake at night. But I knew in my heart that all would come right, and that I should arrange their future as I expected to arrange that of my kind doctor, John Archer. However, I should never have troubled myself about visiting them just then, had it not been, as I say, that the music of the tinkling hammer had for me this strong fascination. I would sit for hours, listening and listening, and when a stray sunbeam struck the inlaid steel, the sensation it gave me was almost too keen to endure. My eyes would become fixed, dilating with a pleasure that stretched every nerve almost to breaking, until some movement of the old armorer cut off the ray of sunlight, then, still thrilling secretly, I leaned back and listened again to the sound of the polishing rag, swish! swish! rubbing rust from the rivets.

Constance worked with the embroidery over her knees, now and then pausing to examine more closely the pattern in the colored plate from the Metropolitan Museum.

“Who is this for?” I asked.

Hawberk explained, that in addition to the treasures of armor in the Metropolitan Museum of which he had been appointed armorer, he also had charge of several collections belonging to rich amateurs. This was the missing greave of a famous suit which a client of his had traced to a little shop in Paris on the Quai d’Orsay. He, Hawberk, had negotiated for and secured the greave, and now the suit was complete. He laid down his hammer and read me the history of the suit, traced since 1450 from owner to owner until it was acquired by Thomas Stainbridge. When his superb collection was sold, this client of Hawberk’s bought the suit, and since then the search for the missing greave had been pushed until it was, almost by accident, located in Paris.

“Did you continue the search so persistently without any certainty of the greave being still in existence?” I demanded.

“Of course,” he replied coolly.

Then for the first time I took a personal interest in Hawberk.

“It was worth something to you,” I ventured.

“No,” he replied, laughing, “my pleasure in finding it was my reward.”

“Have you no ambition to be rich?” I asked smiling.

“My one ambition is to be the best armorer in the world,” he answered gravely.

Constance asked me if I had seen the ceremonies at the Lethal Chamber. She herself had noticed cavalry passing up Broadway that morning, and had wished to see the inauguration, but her father wanted the banner finished, and she had stayed at his request.

“Did you see your cousin, Mr. Castaigne, there?” she asked, with the slightest tremor of her soft eyelashes.

“No,” I replied carelessly. “Louis’ regiment is manoeuvring out in Westchester County.” I rose and picked up my hat and cane.

“Are you going upstairs to see the lunatic again?” laughed old Hawberk. If Hawberk knew how I loathe that word “lunatic,” he would never use it in my presence. It rouses certain feelings within me which I do not care to explain. However, I answered him quietly: “I think I shall drop in and see Mr. Wilde for a moment or two.”

“Poor fellow,” said Constance, with a shake of her head, “it must be hard to live alone year after year, poor, crippled and almost demented. It is very good of you, Mr. Castaigne, to visit him as often as you do.”

“I think he is vicious,” observed Hawberk, beginning again with his hammer. I listened to the golden tinkle on the greave plates; when he had finished I replied:

“No, he is not vicious, nor is he in the least demented. His mind is a wonder chamber, from which he can extract treasures that you and I would give years of our life to acquire.”

Hawberk laughed.

I continued a little impatiently: “He knows history as no one else could know it. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his search, and his memory is so absolute, so precise in details, that were it known in New York that such a man existed, the people could not honor him enough.”

“Nonsense,” muttered Hawberk, searching on the floor for a fallen rivet.

“Is it nonsense,” I asked, managing to suppress what I felt, “is it nonsense when he says that the tassets and cuissards of the enamelled suit of armor commonly known as the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned’ can be found among a mass of rusty theatrical properties, broken stoves and ragpicker’s refuse in a garret in Pell Street?”

Hawberk’s hammer fell to the ground, but he picked it up and asked, with a great deal of calm, how I knew that the tassets and left cuissard were missing from the “Prince’s Emblazoned.”

“I did not know until Mr. Wilde mentioned it to me the other day. He said they were in the garret of 998 Pell Street.”

“Nonsense,” he cried, but I noticed his hand trembling under his leathern apron.

“Is this nonsense too?” I asked pleasantly, “is it nonsense when Mr. Wilde continually speaks of you as the Marquis of Avonshire and of Miss Constance—”

I did not finish, for Constance had started to her feet with terror written on every feature. Hawberk looked at me and slowly smoothed his leathern apron. “That is impossible,” he observed, “Mr. Wilde may know a great many things—”

“About armor, for instance, and the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned,’” I interposed, smiling.

“Yes,” he continued, slowly, “about armor also—may be—but he is wrong in regard to the Marquis of Avonshire, who, as you know, killed his wife’s traducer years ago, and went to Australia where he did not long survive his wife.”

“Mr. Wilde is wrong,” murmured Constance. Her lips were blanched but her voice was sweet and calm.

“Let us agree, if you please, that in this one circumstance Mr. Wilde is wrong,” I said.

II

I climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs, which I had so often climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor. Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.

When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it, he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little light-colored eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax and painted a shell pink, but the rest of his face was yellow. He might better have reveled in the luxury of some artificial fingers for his left hand, which was absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no inconvenience, and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small, scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete’s. Still, the most remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvelous intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane but I knew him to be as sane as I was.

I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature, nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He was eccentric.

Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my face, picked up a dog’s-eared ledger and opened it.

“Henry B. Matthews,” he read, “book-keeper with Whysot Whysot and Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3d. Reputation damaged on the race-track. Known as a welcher. Reputation to be repaired by August 1st. Retainer Five Dollars.” He turned the page and ran his fingerless knuckles down the closely-written columns.

“P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey. Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible. Retainer $100.”

He coughed and added, “Called, April 6th.”

“Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,” I inquired.

“Listen,” he coughed again.

“Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City, Called April 7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st. Retainer $500.

“Note.—C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. Avalanche ordered home from South Sea Squadron October 1st.”

“Well,” I said, “the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is lucrative.”

His colorless eyes sought mine. “I only wanted to demonstrate that I was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases it would cost me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples; others are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others, hold undisputed sway among the ‘Fancy and the Talent.’ I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough, they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of their fellow-citizens, I have in my pay.”

“They may turn on you,” I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears, and adjusted the wax substitutes. “I think not,” he murmured thoughtfully, “I seldom have to apply the whip, and then only once. Besides they like their wages.”

“How do you apply the whip?” I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair of green sparks.

“I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,” he said in a soft voice.

A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable expression.

“Who is it?” he inquired.

“Mr. Steylette,” was the answer.

“Come to-morrow,” replied Mr. Wilde.

“Impossible,” began the other, but was silenced by a sort of bark from Mr. Wilde.

“Come to-morrow,” he repeated.

We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the stairway.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Arnold Steylette, Owner and Editor in Chief of the great New York daily.”

He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand adding: “I pay him very badly, but he thinks it a good bargain.”

“Arnold Steylette!” I repeated, amazed.

“Yes,” said Mr. Wilde with a self-satisfied cough.

The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at him and snarled. He climbed down from the chair and squatting on the floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased snarling and presently began a loud purring which seemed to increase in timbre as he stroked her.

“Where are the notes?” I asked. He pointed to the table, and for the hundredth time I picked up the bundle of manuscript entitled

THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY
OF AMERICA.

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own handling, and although I knew all by heart, from the beginning, “When from Carcosa, the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran,” to “Castaigne, Louis de Calvados, born December 19th, 1877,” I read it with an eager rapt attention, pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and dwelling especially on “Hildred de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne, first in succession,” etc., etc.

When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed.

“Speaking of your legitimate ambition,” he said, “how do Constance and Louis get along?”

“She loves him,” I replied simply.

The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung her off and climbed on to the chair opposite me.

“And Doctor Archer! But that’s a matter you can settle any time you wish,” he added.

“Yes,” I replied, “Doctor Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin Louis.”

“It is time,” he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the table and ran over the leaves rapidly.

“We are now in communication with ten thousand men,” he muttered. “We can count on one hundred thousand within the first twenty-eight hours, and in forty-eight hours the state will rise en masse. The country follows the state, and the portion that will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.”

The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, “A new broom sweeps clean.”

“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts,” said Mr. Wilde.

“You are speaking of the King in Yellow,” I groaned with a shudder.

“He is a king whom Emperors have served.”

“I am content to serve him,” I replied.

Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. “Perhaps Constance does not love him,” he suggested.

I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the street below drowned my voice. The twentieth dragoon regiment, formerly in garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the manoeuvres in Westchester County, to its new barracks on East Washington Square. It was my cousin’s regiment. They were a fine lot of fellows, in their pale-blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbys and white riding breeches with the double yellow stripe, into which their limbs seemed molded. Every other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which fluttered yellow and white pennons. The band passed, playing the regimental march, then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons fluttered from their lance points. The troopers, who rode with the beautiful English seat, looked brown as berries from their bloodless campaign among the farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres against the stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful to me. I saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an officer as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the window, saw him too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked straight at Hawberk’s shop as he passed, and I could see the flush on his brown cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the window. When the last troopers had clattered by, and the last pennons vanished into South 5th Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away from the door.

“Yes,” he said, “it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.”

He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set my foot on something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a murderous blow at the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against the balustrade, and the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde’s room.

Passing Hawberk’s door again I saw him still at work on the armor, but I did not stop, and stepping out into Bleecker Street, I followed it to Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and crossing Washington Park went straight to my rooms in the Benedick. Here I lunched comfortably, read the Herald and the Meteor, and finally went to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the time combination. The three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments must be like moments passed in Paradise. I know what I am to find at the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of waiting and at last touching again the diadem, only seems to increase as the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a King among kings, an Emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm in the safe rang harshly, and then tenderly, proudly, I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I walked slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square, and leaned on the window-sill. The afternoon sun poured into my windows, and a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park, now covered with buds and tender foliage. A flock of pigeons circled about the tower of the Memorial Church; sometimes alighting on the purple tiled roof, sometimes wheeling downward to the lotos fountain in front of the marble arch. The gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the fountain, and the freshly-turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and watering carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced the monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby carriages with a reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants, which could probably be explained by the presence of half a dozen trim dragoon troopers languidly lolling on the benches. Through the trees, the Washington Memorial Arch glistened like silver in the sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern extremity of the square the gray stone barracks of the dragoons, and the white granite artillery stables were alive with color and motion.

I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched the fountains ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook, and the basins were covered with the dusty-feathered little things. Two or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab colored pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the Fates, that it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.

As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group of curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young man had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the gravel path which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber. He paused a moment before the Fates, and as he raised his head to those three mysterious faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a moment and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hand to his face, and then with an undefinable gesture sprang up the marble steps, the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers slouched away, and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the arms of Fate.

I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before dinner. As I crossed the central driveway a group of officers passed, and one of them called out, “Hello, Hildred,” and came back to shake hands with me. It was my Cousin Louis, who stood smiling and tapping his spurred heels with his riding-whip.

“Just back from Westchester,” he said; “been doing the bucolic; milk and curds, you know, dairy-maids in sunbonnets, who say ‘haeow’ and ‘I don’t think’ when you tell them they are pretty. I’m nearly dead for a square meal at Delmonico’s. What’s the news?”

“There is none,” I replied pleasantly. “I saw your regiment coming in this morning.”

“Did you? I didn’t see you. Where were you?”

“In Mr. Wilde’s window.”

“Oh, hell!” he began impatiently, “that man is stark mad! I don’t understand why you—”

He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my pardon.

“Really, old chap,” he said, “I don’t mean to run down a man you like, but for the life of me I can’t see what the deuce you find in common with Mr. Wilde. He’s not well-bred, to put it generously; he’s hideously deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know yourself he’s been in an asylum—”

“So have I,” I interrupted calmly.

Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and slapped me heartily on the shoulder.

“You were completely cured,” he began, but I stopped him again.

“I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been insane.”

“Of course that—that’s what I meant,” he laughed.

I disliked his laugh because I knew it was forced, but I nodded gaily and asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his brother officers who had now almost reached Broadway.

“We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but to tell you the truth I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come along, I’ll make you my excuse.”

We found old Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit, standing at the door of his shop and sniffing the air.

“I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,” he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. “We thought of walking on the park terrace along the North River.”

At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by turns as Louis bent over her small gloved fingers. I tried to excuse myself, alleging an engagement up-town, but Louis and Constance would not listen, and I saw I was expected to remain and engage old Hawberk’s attention. After all it would be just as well if I kept my eye on Louis, I thought, and when they hailed a Spring Street horse-car, I got in after them and took my seat beside the armorer.

The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the wharves along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished in the autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular promenades in the metropolis. They extended from the battery to 190th Street, overlooking the noble river and affording a fine view of the Jersey shore and the Highlands opposite. Cafés and restaurants were scattered here and there among the trees, and twice a week military bands from the garrison played in the kiosques on the parapets.

We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the equestrian statue of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her sunshade to shield her eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring conversation which was impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning on his ivory-headed cane, lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to which I politely refused, and smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low above the Staten Island woods, and the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of the shipping in the harbor.

Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming with people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue and white freight cars, stately sound steamers, déclassé tramp steamers, coasters, dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay impudent little tugs puffing and whistling officiously;—these were the crafts which churned the sunlight waters as far as the eye could reach. In calm contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer a silent fleet of white war-ships lay motionless in midstream.

Constance’s merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.

“What are you staring at?” she inquired.

“Nothing—the fleet,” I smiled.

Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its relative position to the old Red Fort on Governor’s Island.

“That little cigar-shaped thing is a torpedo boat,” he explained; “there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox and the Octopus. The gun-boats just above are the Princeton, the Champlain, the Still Water and the Erie. Next to them lie the cruisers Faragut and Los Angeles, and above them the battleships California and Dakota, and the Washington which is the flag-ship. Those two squatty-looking chunks of metal which are anchored there off Castle William are the double-turreted monitors Terrible and Magnificent; behind them lies the ram, Osceola.”

Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes. “What loads of things you know, for a soldier,” she said, and we all joined in the laugh which followed.

Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to Constance, and they strolled away along the river wall. Hawberk watched them for a moment and then turned to me.

“Mr. Wilde was right,” he said. “I have found the missing tassets and left cuissard of the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned,’ in a vile old junk garret in Pell Street.”

“998?” I inquired, with a smile.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,” I observed.

“I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,” continued Hawberk. “And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled to the fame of it.”

“He won’t thank you for that,” I answered sharply; “please say nothing about it.”

“Do you know what it is worth?” said Hawberk.

“No, fifty dollars, perhaps.”

“It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned’ will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.”

“He doesn’t want it! He refuses it!” I answered angrily. “What do you know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn’t need the money. He is rich—or will be—richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money then—what will we care, he and I, when—when—”

“When what?” demanded Hawberk, astonished.

“You will see,” I replied, on my guard again.

He looked at me narrowly, much as Doctor Archer used to, and I knew he thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he did not use the word lunatic just then.

“No,” I replied to his unspoken thought, “I am not mentally weak; my mind is as healthy as Mr. Wilde’s. I do not care to explain just yet what I have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold, silver and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity of a continent—yes, a hemisphere!”

“Oh,” said Hawberk.

“And eventually,” I continued more quietly, “it will secure the happiness of the whole world.”

“And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr. Wilde’s?”

“Exactly,” I smiled. But I could have throttled him for taking that tone.

He looked at me in silence for a while and then said very gently, “Why don’t you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing. Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.”

“I don’t care for fishing any more,” I answered, without a shade of annoyance in my voice.

“You used to be fond of everything,” he continued; “athletics, yachting, shooting, riding—”

“I have never cared to ride since my fall,” I said quietly.

“Ah, yes, your fall,” he repeated, looking away from me.

I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I brought the conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again in a manner highly offensive to me.

“Mr. Wilde,” he repeated, “do you know what he did this afternoon? He came downstairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it read:

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
3D BELL.

Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?”

“I do,” I replied, suppressing the rage within.

“Oh,” he said again.

Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite. The flag came running down from the flag-pole, the bugles sounded on the white decks of the war-ships, and the first electric light sparkled out from the Jersey shore.

As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur something to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered “My darling,” in reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk through the square I heard a murmur of “sweetheart,” and “my own Constance,” and I knew the time had nearly arrived when I should speak of important matters with my Cousin Louis.

III

One morning early in May I stood before the steel safe in my bedroom, trying on the golden jewelled crown. The diamonds flashed fire as I turned to the mirror, and the heavy beaten gold burned like a halo about my head. I remembered Camilla’s agonized scream and the awful words echoing through the dim streets of Carcosa. They were the last lines in the first act, and I dared not think of what followed—dared not, even in the spring sunshine, there in my own room, surrounded with familiar objects, reassured by the bustle from the street and the voices of the servants in the hallway outside. For those poisoned words had dropped slowly into my heart, as death-sweat drops upon a bed-sheet and is absorbed. Trembling, I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead, but I thought of Hastur and of my own rightful ambition, and I remembered Mr. Wilde as I had last left him, his face all torn and bloody from the claws of that devil’s creature, and what he said—ah, what he said! The alarm bell in the safe began to whirr harshly, and I knew my time was up; but I would not heed it, and replacing the flashing circlet upon my head I turned defiantly to the mirror. I stood for a long time absorbed in the changing expression of my own eyes. The mirror reflected a face which was like my own, but whiter, and so thin that I hardly recognized it. And all the time I kept repeating between my clenched teeth, “The day has come! the day has come!” while the alarm in the safe whirred and clamored, and the diamonds sparkled and flamed above my brow. I heard a door open but did not heed it. It was only when I saw two faces in the mirror;—it was only when another face rose over my shoulder, and two other eyes met mine. I wheeled like a flash and seized a long knife from my dressing-table, and my cousin sprang back very pale, crying: “Hildred! for God’s sake!” then as my hand fell, he said: “It is I, Louis, don’t you know me?” I stood silent. I could not have spoken for my life. He walked up to me and took the knife from my hand.

“What is all this?” he inquired, in a gentle voice. “Are you ill?”

“No,” I replied. But I doubt if he heard me.

“Come, come, old fellow,” he cried, “take off that brass crown and toddle into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What’s all this theatrical tinsel anyway?”

I was glad he thought the crown was made of brass and paste, yet I didn’t like him any the better for thinking so. I let him take it from my hand, knowing it was best to humor him. He tossed the splendid diadem in the air, and catching it, turned to me smiling.

“It’s dear at fifty cents,” he said. “What’s it for?”

I did not answer, but took the circlet from his hands, and placing it in the safe shut the massive steel door. The alarm ceased its infernal din at once. He watched me curiously, but did not seem to notice the sudden ceasing of the alarm. He did, however, speak of the safe as a biscuit box. Fearing lest he might examine the combination I led the way into my study. Louis threw himself on the sofa and flicked at flies with his eternal riding-whip. He wore his fatigue uniform with the braided jacket and jaunty cap, and I noticed that his riding-boots were all splashed with red mud.

“Where have you been,” I inquired.

“Jumping mud creeks in Jersey,” he said. “I haven’t had time to change yet; I was rather in a hurry to see you. Haven’t you got a glass of something? I’m dead tired; been in the saddle twenty-four hours.”

I gave him some brandy from my medicinal store, which he drank with a grimace.

“Damned bad stuff,” he observed. “I’ll give you an address where they sell brandy that is brandy.”

“It’s good enough for my needs,” I said indifferently. “I use it to rub my chest with.” He stared and flicked at another fly.

“See here, old fellow,” he began, “I’ve got something to suggest to you. It’s four years now that you’ve shut yourself up here like an owl, never going anywhere, never taking any healthy exercise, never doing a damn thing but poring over those books up there on the mantelpiece.”

He glanced along the row of shelves. “Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon!” he read. “For heaven’s sake, have you nothing but Napoleons there?”

“I wish they were bound in gold,” I said. “But wait, yes, there is another book, The King in Yellow.” I looked him steadily in the eye.

“Have you never read it?” I asked.

“I? No, thank God! I don’t want to be driven crazy.”

I saw he regretted his speech as soon as he had uttered it. There is only one word which I loathe more than I do lunatic and that word is crazy. But I controlled myself and asked him why he thought The King in Yellow dangerous.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, hastily. “I only remember the excitement it created and the denunciations from pulpit and press. I believe the author shot himself after bringing forth this monstrosity, didn’t he?”

“I understand he is still alive,” I answered.

“That’s probably true,” he muttered; “bullets couldn’t kill a fiend like that.”

“It is a book of great truths,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “of ‘truths’ which send men frantic and blast their lives. I don’t care if the thing is, as they say, the very supreme essence of art. It’s a crime to have written it, and I for one shall never open its pages.”

“Is that what you have come to tell me?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “I came to tell you that I am going to be married.”

I believe for a moment my heart ceased to beat, but I kept my eyes on his face.

“Yes,” he continued, smiling happily, “married to the sweetest girl on earth.”

“Constance Hawberk,” I said mechanically.

“How did you know?” he cried, astonished. “I didn’t know it myself until that evening last April, when we strolled down to the embankment before dinner.”

“When is it to be?” I asked.

“It was to have been next September, but an hour ago a despatch came ordering our regiment to the Presidio, San Francisco. We leave at noon to-morrow. To-morrow,” he repeated. “Just think, Hildred, to-morrow I shall be the happiest fellow that ever drew breath in this jolly world, for Constance will go with me.”

I offered him my hand in congratulation, and he seized and shook it like the good-natured fool he was—or pretended to be.

“I am going to get my squadron as a wedding present,” he rattled on. “Captain and Mrs. Louis Castaigne—eh, Hildred?”

Then he told me where it was to be and who were to be there, and made me promise to come and be best man. I set my teeth and listened to his boyish chatter without showing what I felt, but—

I was getting to the limit of my endurance, and when he jumped up, and, switching his spurs till they jingled, said he must go, I did not detain him.

“There’s one thing I want to ask of you,” I said quietly.

“Out with it, it’s promised,” he laughed.

“I want you to meet me for a quarter of an hour’s talk to-night.”

“Of course, if you wish,” he said, somewhat puzzled. “Where?”

“Anywhere, in the park there.”

“What time, Hildred?”

“Midnight.”

“What in the name of—” he began, but checked himself and laughingly assented. I watched him go down the stairs and hurry away, his sabre banging at every stride. He turned into Bleecker Street, and I knew he was going to see Constance. I gave him ten minutes to disappear and then followed in his footsteps, taking with me the jewelled crown and the silken robe embroidered with the Yellow Sign. When I turned into Bleecker Street, and entered the doorway which bore the sign,

MR. WILDE,
REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS.
3D BELL.

I saw old Hawberk moving about in his shop, and imagined I heard Constance’s voice in the parlor; but I avoided them both and hurried up the trembling stairways to Mr. Wilde’s apartment. I knocked, and entered without ceremony. Mr. Wilde lay groaning on the floor, his face covered with blood, his clothes torn to shreds. Drops of blood were scattered about over the carpet, which had also been ripped and frayed in the evidently recent struggle.

“It’s that cursed cat,” he said, ceasing his groans, and turning his colorless eyes to me; “she attacked me while I was asleep. I believe she will kill me yet.”

This was too much, so I went into the kitchen and seizing a hatchet from the pantry, started to find the infernal beast and settle her then and there. My search was fruitless, and after a while I gave it up and came back to find Mr. Wilde squatting on his high chair by the table. He had washed his face and changed his clothes. The great furrows which the cat’s claws had ploughed up in his face he had filled with collodion, and a rag hid the wound in his throat. I told him I should kill the cat when I came across her, but he only shook his head and turned to the open ledger before him. He read name after name of the people who had come to him in regard to their reputation, and the sums he had amassed were startling.

“I put on the screws now and then,” he explained.

“One day or other some of these people will assassinate you,” I insisted.

“Do you think so?” he said, rubbing his mutilated ears.

It was useless to argue with him, so I took down the manuscript entitled Imperial Dynasty of America, for the last time I should ever take it down in Mr. Wilde’s study. I read it through, thrilling and trembling with pleasure. When I had finished Mr. Wilde took the manuscript and, turning to the dark passage which leads from his study to his bed-chamber, called out in a loud voice, “Vance.” Then for the first time, I noticed a man crouching there in the shadow. How I had overlooked him during my search for the cat, I cannot imagine.

“Vance, come in,” cried Mr. Wilde.

The figure rose and crept toward us, and I shall never forget the face that he raised to mine, as the light from the window illuminated it.

“Vance, this is Mr. Castaigne,” said Mr. Wilde. Before he had finished speaking, the man threw himself on the ground before the table, crying and gasping, “Oh, God! Oh, my God! Help me. Forgive me— Oh, Mr. Castaigne, keep that man away. You cannot, you cannot mean it! You are different—save me! I am broken down—I was in a madhouse and now—when all was coming right—when I had forgotten the King—the King in Yellow and—but I shall go mad again—I shall go mad—”

His voice died into a choking rattle, for Mr. Wilde had leapt on him and his right hand encircled the man’s throat. When Vance fell in a heap on the floor, Mr. Wilde clambered nimbly into his chair again, and rubbing his mangled ears with the stump of his hand, turned to me and asked me for the ledger. I reached it down from the shelf and he opened it. After a moment’s searching among the beautifully written pages, he coughed complacently, and pointed to the name Vance.

“Vance,” he read aloud, “Osgood Oswald Vance.” At the sound of his name, the man on the floor raised his head and turned a convulsed face to Mr. Wilde. His eyes were injected with blood, his lips tumefied. “Called April 28th,” continued Mr. Wilde. “Occupation, cashier in the Seaforth National Bank; has served a term of forgery at Sing Sing, from whence he was transferred to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane. Pardoned by the Governor of New York, and discharged from the Asylum, January 19, 1918. Reputation damaged at Sheepshead Bay. Rumors that he lives beyond his income. Reputation to be repaired at once. Retainer $1,500.

“Note.—Has embezzled sums amounting to $30,000 since March 20th 1919, excellent family, and secured present position through uncle’s influence. Father, President of Seaforth Bank.”

I looked at the man on the floor.

“Get up, Vance,” said Mr. Wilde in a gentle voice. Vance rose as if hypnotized. “He will do as we suggest now,” observed Mr. Wilde, and opening the manuscript, he read the entire history of the Imperial Dynasty of America. Then in a kind and soothing murmur he ran over the important points with Vance, who stood like one stunned. His eyes were so blank and vacant that I imagined he had become half-witted, and remarked it to Mr. Wilde who replied that it was of no consequence anyway. Very patiently we pointed out to Vance what his share in the affair would be, and he seemed to understand after a while. Mr. Wilde explained the manuscript, using several volumes on Heraldry, to substantiate the result of his researches. He mentioned the establishment of the Dynasty in Carcosa, the lakes which connected Hastur, Aldebaran and the mystery of the Hyades. He spoke of Cassilda and Camilla, and sounded the cloudy depths of Demhe, and the Lake of Hali. “The scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever,” he muttered, but I do not believe Vance heard him. Then by degrees he led Vance along the ramifications of the Imperial family, to Uoht and Thale, from Naotalba and Phantom of Truth, to Aldones, and then tossing aside his manuscript and notes, he began the wonderful story of the Last King. Fascinated and thrilled I watched him. He threw up his head, his long arms were stretched out in a magnificent gesture of pride and power, and his eyes blazed deep in their sockets like two emeralds. Vance listened stupefied. As for me, when at last Mr. Wilde had finished, and pointing to me, cried, “The cousin of the King!” my head swam with excitement.

Controlling myself with a superhuman effort, I explained to Vance why I alone was worthy of the crown and why my cousin must be exiled or die. I made him understand that my cousin must never marry, even after renouncing all his claims, and how that least of all he should marry the daughter of the Marquis of Avonshire and bring England into the question. I showed him a list of thousands of names which Mr. Wilde had drawn up; every man whose name was there had received the Yellow Sign which no living human being dared disregard. The city, the state, the whole land, were ready to rise and tremble before the Pallid Mask.

The time had come, the people should know the son of Hastur, and the whole world bow to the black stars which hang in the sky over Carcosa.

Vance leaned on the table, his head buried in his hands. Mr. Wilde drew a rough sketch on the margin of yesterday’s Herald with a bit of lead pencil. It was a plan of Hawberk’s rooms. Then he wrote out the order and affixed the seal, and shaking like a palsied man I signed my first writ of execution with my name Hildred-Rex.

Mr. Wilde clambered to the floor and unlocking the cabinet, took a long square box from the first shelf. This he brought to the table and opened. A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk’s apartment. Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an outcast of the slums.

I sat for a while watching the daylight fade behind the square tower of the Judson Memorial Church, and finally, gathering up the manuscript and notes, took my hat and started for the door.

Mr. Wilde watched me in silence. When I had stepped into the hall I looked back. Mr. Wilde’s small eyes were still fixed on me. Behind him, the shadows gathered in the fading light. Then I closed the door behind me and went out into the darkening streets.

I had eaten nothing since breakfast, but I was not hungry. A wretched half-starved creature, who stood looking across the street at the Lethal Chamber, noticed me and came up to tell me a tale of misery. I gave him money, I don’t know why, and he went away without thanking me. An hour later another outcast approached and whined his story. I had a blank bit of paper in my pocket, on which was traced the Yellow Sign and I handed it to him. He looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then with an uncertain glance at me, folded it with what seemed to me exaggerated care and placed it in his bosom.

The electric lights were sparkling among the trees, and the new moon shone in the sky above the Lethal Chamber. It was tiresome waiting in the square; I wandered from the Marble Arch to the artillery stables, and back again to the lotos fountain. The flowers and grass exhaled a fragrance which troubled me. The jet of the fountain played in the moonlight, and the musical splash of falling drops reminded me of the tinkle of chained mail in Hawberk’s shop. But it was not so fascinating, and the dull sparkle of the moonlight on the water brought no such sensations of exquisite pleasure, as when the sunshine played over the polished steel of a corselet on Hawberk’s knee. I watched the bats darting and turning above the water plants in the fountain basin, but their rapid, jerky flight set my nerves on edge, and I went away again to walk aimlessly to and fro among the trees.

The artillery stables were dark, but in the cavalry barracks the officer’s windows were brilliantly lighted, and the sallyport was constantly filled with troopers in fatigue, carrying straw and harness and baskets filled with tin dishes.

Twice the mounted sentry at the gates was changed while I wandered up and down the asphalt walk. I looked at my watch. It was nearly time. The lights in the barracks went out one by one, the barred gate was closed, and every minute or two an officer passed in through the side wicket, leaving a rattle of accoutrements and a jingle of spurs on the night air. The square had become very silent. The last homeless loiterer had been driven away by the gray-coated park policeman, the car tracks along Wooster Street were deserted, and the only sound which broke the stillness was the stamping of the sentry’s horse and the ring of his sabre against the saddle pommel. In the barracks, the officer’s quarters were still lighted, and military servants passed and repassed before the bay windows. Twelve o’clock sounded from the new spire of St. Francis Xavier, and at the last stroke of the sad-toned bell a figure passed through the wicket beside the portcullis, returned the salute of the sentry, and crossing the street entered the square and advanced toward the Benedick apartment house.

“Louis,” I called.

The man pivoted on his spurred heels and came straight toward me.

“Is that you, Hildred?”

“Yes, you are on time.”

I took his offered hand, and we strolled toward the Lethal Chamber.

He rattled on about his wedding and the graces of Constance, and their future prospects, calling my attention to his captain’s shoulder-straps, and the triple gold arabesque on his sleeve and fatigue cap. I believe I listened as much to the music of his spurs and sabre as I did to his boyish babble, and at last we stood under the elms on the Fourth Street corner of the square opposite the Lethal Chamber. Then he laughed and asked me what I wanted with him. I motioned him to a seat on a bench under the electric light, and sat down beside him. He looked at me curiously, with that same searching glance which I hate and fear so in doctors. I felt the insult of his look, but he did not know it, and I carefully concealed my feelings.

“Well, old chap,” he enquired, “what can I do for you?”

I drew from my pocket the manuscript and notes of the Imperial Dynasty of America, and looking him in the eye said:

“I will tell you. On your word as a soldier, promise me to read this manuscript from beginning to end, without asking me a question. Promise me to read these notes in the same way, and promise me to listen to what I have to tell later.”

“I promise, if you wish it,” he said pleasantly, “Give me the paper, Hildred.”

He began to read, raising his eyebrows with a puzzled whimsical air, which made me tremble with suppressed anger. As he advanced, his eyebrows contracted, and his lips seemed to form the word, “rubbish.”

Then he looked slightly bored, but apparently for my sake read, with an attempt at interest, which presently ceased to be an effort. He started when in the closely-written pages he came to his own name, and when he came to mine he lowered the paper, and looked sharply at me for a moment. But he kept his word, and resumed his reading, and I let the half-formed question die on his lips unanswered. When he came to the end and read the signature of Mr. Wilde, he folded the paper carefully and returned it to me. I handed him the notes, and he settled back, pushing his fatigue cap up to his forehead, with a boyish gesture, which I remembered so well in school. I watched his face as he read, and when he finished I took the notes with the manuscript, and placed them in my pocket. Then I unfolded a scroll marked with the Yellow Sign. He saw the sign, but he did not seem to recognize it, and I called his attention to it somewhat sharply.

“Well,” he said, “I see it. What is it?”

“It is the Yellow Sign,” I said angrily.

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” said Louis, in that flattering voice, which Doctor Archer used to employ with me, and would probably have employed again, had I not settled his affair for him.

I kept my rage down and answered as steadily as possible, “Listen, you have engaged your word?”

“I am listening, old chap,” he replied soothingly.

I began to speak very calmly.

“Dr. Archer, having by some means become possessed of the secret of the Imperial Succession, attempted to deprive me of my right, alleging that because of a fall from my horse four years ago, I had become mentally deficient. He presumed to place me under restraint in his own house in hopes of either driving me insane or poisoning me. I have not forgotten it. I visited him last night and the interview was final.”

Louis turned quite pale, but did not move. I resumed triumphantly, “There are yet three people to be interviewed in the interests of Mr. Wilde and myself. They are my cousin Louis, Mr. Hawberk, and his daughter Constance.”

Louis sprang to his feet and I arose also, and flung the paper marked with the Yellow Sign to the ground.

“Oh, I don’t need that to tell you what I have to say,” I cried, with a laugh of triumph. “You must renounce the crown to me, do you hear, to me.”

Louis looked at me with a startled air, but recovering himself said kindly, “Of course I renounce the—what is it I must renounce?”

“The crown,” I said angrily.

“Of course,” he answered, “I renounce it. Come, old chap, I’ll walk back to your rooms with you.”

“Don’t try any of your doctor’s tricks on me,” I cried, trembling with fury. “Don’t act as if you think I am insane.”

“What nonsense,” he replied. “Come, it’s getting late, Hildred.”

“No,” I shouted, “you must listen. You cannot marry, I forbid it. Do you hear? I forbid it. You shall renounce the crown, and in reward I grant you exile, but if you refuse you shall die.”

He tried to calm me but I was roused at last, and drawing my long knife barred his way.

Then I told him how they would find Dr. Archer in the cellar with his throat open, and I laughed in his face when I thought of Vance and his knife, and the order signed by me.

“Ah, you are the King,” I cried, “but I shall be King. Who are you to keep me from Empire over all the habitable earth! I was born the cousin of a king, but I shall be King!”

Louis stood white and rigid before me. Suddenly a man came running up Fourth Street, entered the gate of the Lethal Temple, traversed the path to the bronze doors at full speed, and plunged into the death chamber with the cry of one demented, and I laughed until I wept tears, for I had recognized Vance, and knew that Hawberk and his daughter were no longer in my way.

“Go,” I cried to Louis, “you have ceased to be a menace. You will never marry Constance now, and if you marry any one else in your exile, I will visit you as I did my doctor last night. Mr. Wilde takes charge of you to-morrow.” Then I turned and darted into South Fifth Avenue, and with a cry of terror Louis dropped his belt and sabre and followed me like the wind. I heard him close behind me at the corner of Bleecker Street, and I dashed into the doorway under Hawberk’s sign. He cried, “Halt, or I fire!” but when he saw that I flew up the stairs leaving Hawberk’s shop below, he left me, and I heard him hammering and shouting at their door as though it were possible to arouse the dead.

Mr. Wilde’s door was open, and I entered crying, “It is done, it is done! Let the nations rise and look upon their King!” but I could not find Mr. Wilde, so I went to the cabinet and took the splendid diadem from its case. Then I drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow Sign, and placed the crown upon my head. At last I was King, King by my right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my mind had sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I was King! The first gray pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two hemispheres. Then as I stood, my every nerve pitched to the highest tension, faint with the joy and splendor of my thought, without, in the dark passage, a man groaned.

I seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door. The cat passed me like a demon, and the tallow dip went out, but my long knife flew swifter than she, and I heard her screech, and I knew that my knife had found her. For a moment I listened to her tumbling and thumping about in the darkness, and then when her frenzy ceased, I lighted a lamp and raised it over my head. Mr. Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. At first I thought he was dead, but as I looked, a green sparkle came into his sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his mouth from ear to ear. For a moment my terror and despair gave place to hope, but as I bent over him his eyeballs rolled clean around in his head, and he died. Then while I stood, transfixed with rage and despair, seeing my crown, my empire, every hope and every ambition, my very life, lying prostrate there with the dead master, they came, seized me from behind, and bound me until my veins stood out like cords, and my voice failed with the paroxysms of my frenzied screams. But I still raged, bleeding and infuriated among them, and more than one policeman felt my sharp teeth. Then when I could no longer move they came nearer; I saw old Hawberk, and behind him my cousin Louis’ ghastly face, and farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

“Ah! I see it now!” I shrieked. “You have seized the throne and the empire. Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”

[EDITOR’S NOTE.—Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal Insane.]

THE MASK

CAMILLA:  You, sir, should unmask.

STRANGER:  Indeed?

CASSILDA:  Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.

STRANGER:  I wear no mask.

CAMILLA:  (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

The King in Yellow:
Act 1—Scene 2d.

THE MASK

I

Although I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame, and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam, which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting. At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the flower. “There is no danger,” he explained, “if you choose the right moment. That golden ray is the signal.”

He held the lily toward me and I took it in my hand. It had turned to stone, to the purest marble.

“You see,” he said, “it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce it?”

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its heart.

“Don’t ask me the reason of that,” he smiled, noticing my wonder. “I have no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are. Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève’s gold fish,—there it is.”

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest crystal.

“If I should touch it now?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “but you had better not try.”

“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said, “and that is where the ray of sunlight came from.”

“It looked like a sunbeam true enough,” he said. “I don’t know, it always comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,” he continued smiling, “perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from whence it came.”

I saw he was mocking and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only laughed and changed the subject.

“Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.”

“I saw her going to early mass,” I said, “and she looked as fresh and sweet as that lily—before you destroyed it.”

“Do you think I destroyed it?” said Boris gravely.

“Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?”

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of The Fates. He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor’s chisel and squinting at his work.

“By the way,” he said, “I have finished pointing up that old academic Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It’s all I have ready this year, but after the success the Madonna brought me I feel ashamed to send a thing like that.”

The Madonna, an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been the sensation of last year’s Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the world would expect something better of him than that. Still, it was impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon, that splendid terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. The Fates would have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the strength of his having been born in America, although his father was French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the same familiar way; Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him. The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod’s Mass. But I was always glad when she changed that mood for what we called her “April Manoeuvres.” She was often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of Geneviève when he spoke again.

“What do you think of my discovery, Alec?”

“I think it wonderful.”

“I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity so far as may be and the secret will die with me.”

“It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose more than we ever gain by photography.”

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

“This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall never confide the secret to any one,” he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a duplicate of the object in stone. This I confess had never interested me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long silence.

“I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself. When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in metallic scales—”

“What new element?”

“Oh, I haven’t thought of naming it, and I don’t believe I ever shall. There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.”

I pricked up my ears. “Have you struck gold, Boris?”

“No, better;—but see here, Alec!” he laughed, starting up. “You and I have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look already!” I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery gray from head to foot. The light glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking at Boris,

“You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon.” This also was something new. She had always asked me herself until to-day.

“I did,” said Boris shortly.

“And you said yes, I hope,” she turned to me with a charming conventional smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I made her a low bow. “J’avais bien l’honneur, madame,” [“I indeed have the honor, madame.”] but refusing to take up our usual bantering tone she murmured a hospitable commonplace and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

“I had better go home, don’t you think?” I asked.

“Hanged if I know!” he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully beautiful, but her color was too deep and her lovely eyes were too bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

“Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache but I haven’t. Come here, Boris”; and she slipped her other arm through his. “Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won’t hurt him.”

“A la bonheur!” I cried, “who says there are no thunderstorms in April?”

“Are you ready?” chanted Boris. “Aye ready”; and arm in arm we raced into the dining-room scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three and I not quite twenty-one.

II

Some work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for Geneviève’s boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hôtel in the rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days labored hard but as we pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris all over clay stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-colored marble excepting the floor which was tessellated in rose and gray. In the centre was a square pool sunken below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The whole interior was Boris’ work and mine. Boris, in his working clothes of white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modeling wax from his handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

“I see you,” he insisted, “don’t try to look the other way and pretend not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!”

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid’s sentiments in these conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. “Good God!” he said, “I forgot the pool is full of the solution!”

I shivered a little, and drily advised him to remember better where he had stored the precious liquid.

“In Heaven’s name, why do you keep a small lake of that grewsome stuff here of all places!” I asked.

“I want to experiment on something large,” he replied.

“On me, for instance!”

“Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that big white rabbit,” he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in, appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on, looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together to visit the Luxembourg gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a landscape of Monet’s were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève’s boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes, I had as many different outlines of the little beggar.

“Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?” I inquired.

“Whichever monsieur pleases,” he replied with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work, but was so thoroughly out of humor, that it took me the rest of the afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette, stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève’s apartments, no room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It was a queer chaos of odds and ends, hung with threadbare tapestry. A sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons of Indian and Turkish armor over the mantel, two or three good pictures, and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole, more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon, the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions, I found my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume floats above a box of sandal wood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out “Geneviève!”

She dropped at my voice, and, I had time to curse myself while I made a light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

“I can’t find Boris nor any of the servants,” I said.

“I know,” she answered faintly, “Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I did not remember when I sent you for him just now.”

“But he can’t get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and—are you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I was only half awake.”

“Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for letting you stay here all this time.”

“I have had a long nap,” I laughed, “so sound that I did not know whether I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the old spinet? You must have played very softly.”

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably and said in her natural voice: “Alec, I tripped on that wolf’s head, and I think my ankle is sprained. Please call Marie and then go home.”

I did as she bade me and left her there when the maid came in.

III

At noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about his studio.

“Geneviève is asleep just now,” he told me, “the sprain is nothing, but why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can’t account for it; or else he will not,” he muttered.

“Geneviève has a fever?” I asked.

“I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in the world,—and she keeps saying her heart’s broken, and she wants to die!”

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn “over the mouth’s good mark, that made the smile.” The maid had orders to summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited, and Boris growing restless wandered about, fussing with modelling wax and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. “Come and see my rose-colored bath full of death,” he cried.

“Is it death?” I asked to humor his mood.

“You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,” he answered. As he spoke he plucked a solitary gold fish squirming and twisting out of its globe. “We’ll send this one after the other—wherever that is,” he said. There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted and glistening with opalescent drops.

“Child’s play,” he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,—as if I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into the “game” as he called it with ardor. Nothing would do but to try the experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a book at random I sat down in the studio to read. Alas! I had found The King in Yellow. After a few moments which seemed ages, I was putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above, and a cry came from the sick room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next moment he called, “Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you. Alec, come here.”

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris’s gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and sank back, closing her eyes, and then—then—as we still bent above her, she opened them again, looked straight into Boris’s face, poor fever-crazed girl, and told her secret. At the same instant, our three lives turned into new channels; the bond that had held us so long together snapped forever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me with its clamor. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

“It is not your fault, Alec; don’t grieve so if she loves you—” but he could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room, saying—“Ah, the fever!” I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the street, saying, “Boris would rather be alone.” We crossed the street to our own apartments and that night, seeing I was going to be ill too, he went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any distinctness was hearing Jack say, “For Heaven’s sake, doctor, what ails him, to wear a face like that?” and I thought of The King in Yellow and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, “I love you, but I think I love Boris best” told on me at last. I had never imagined that it could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them, had I betrayed my sorrow even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris’ basin,—of the wolf’s head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling beside it. I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic colors of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, “Not upon us, oh King, not upon us!” Feverishly I struggled to put it from me, but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, The Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud rifts which fluttered and flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow. Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for existing, was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost him, but he did stand there and bend over me once at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed, and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile feebly, as Jack’s eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly if I wanted anything, I could whisper, “Yes, Boris.” Jack moved to the head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his face, but he answered heartily, “You must wait, Alec, you are too weak to see even Boris.”

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would, but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in Jack’s reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them, lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said over and over to myself, how would it be when life began again for us all. We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other’s eyes, and there would be neither rancor nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home, and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their lives forever. Boris would know, Geneviève—the only comfort was that she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said—

“Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to Geneviève.…”

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone forever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris’ house, I took them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very quietly.

“Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be able to explain any more than I, what has happened. I suspect that you would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the telling. I shall use few words.

“That day when I left you in the doctor’s care and came back to Boris, I found him working on The Fates. Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I saw that the third figure of the group—the one looking straight ahead, out over the world—bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to find an explanation, but I never shall.

“Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way until nearly midnight. Then we heard the door open and shut sharply, and a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart.” Jack stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin cheeks twitched. “I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps, I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fireplace, so I built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris’ cabinet I burnt every paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into a coal scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last, not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor. He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public. Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet with stories of Boris’ and Geneviève’s travels in distant lands, from whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature and knows when to pity a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and asked no questions of me.”

Then lifting his head from his hands, he said, “Open the letter, Alec; it is for us both.”

I tore it open. It was Boris’ will dated a year before. He left everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott, the management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother’s family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and gentleness.

“Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that never would have been except for her.”

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, “Courage, Alec.” Next morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.

IV

The same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away. Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in. I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack’s letters replying to one of mine.

“What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice of course troubles me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died. I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.”

Towards the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India so unlike any thing that I had ever known of him that I decided to return at once to Paris. He wrote: “I am well and sell all my pictures as artists do, who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless expectancy, of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out. Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay or will you come to Paris?”

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris lay.

“Shall we place The Fates in the little grove above him?” Jack asked, and I answered,

“I think only the Madonna should watch over Boris’ grave.” But Jack was none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

“You see I do you harm and not good,” I said. “Try a change without me.” So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands and I went back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris’ house, now mine, since my return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack; there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms—all but one. I could not bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand, and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life’s passion to the sealed door of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending with a breaking heart I touched the marble drapery with my lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the house and asked what should be done with it. I told her to let it loose in the walled garden behind the house and opened my letter. It was from Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he said—he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold fish were swimming: “Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by interrupting me,” I said.

With a half suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house; the two beautiful marble fish were gone and she had just found those common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and sent her away saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio; there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble of the Easter Lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended and sprang through the hall-way to the marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face and through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted her flushed face from her marble couch, and opened her sleepy eyes.

IN THE COURT OF THE DRAGON

Oh Thou who burn’st in heart for those who burn

In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;

How long be crying,—“Mercy on them, God!”

Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?

—The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

IN THE COURT OF THE DRAGON

In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle, sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C——.

My chair was near the chancel rail. I now turned toward the west end of the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too. There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting. Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the French quality of taste; taste reigned supreme, self-controlled, dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse, a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon. Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation, who do not love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there seemed small hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows of the kneeling nuns, still turned toward the altar, lost none of their devout abstraction, under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C——. For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the rest I had counted on, when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble: the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favorite church for healing. For I had been reading The King in Yellow.

“The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in their dens.” Monseigneur C—— delivered his text in a calm voice, glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why, toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white as his coat was black. “Good riddance!” I thought, “with your wicked music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.”

With a feeling of relief with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned back to the mild face in the pulpit, and settled myself to listen. Here, at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.

“My children,” said the preacher, “one truth the human soul finds hardest of all to learn; that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see that nothing can really harm it.”

“Curious doctrine!” I thought, “for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he will reconcile that with the Fathers.”

“Nothing can really harm the soul,” he went on, in his coolest, clearest tones, “because——”

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery the same way. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank; and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church, straight into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me so? Me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which have not even colored glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him: I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbor supernatural horrors! That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C——, his collected manner, and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady, supporting one corner of the pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else, from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that grim old dame, to, yes, alas! Monseigneur C——, himself. For all devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it, for the jingle in my ears of

“The skirts of St. Paul has reached.

Having preached us those six Lent lectures,

More unctuous than ever he preached:”

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing, but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back—a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of gray stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench, children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him, where he went down the broad crowded Avenue, that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far out beyond it—I know not where I went, but after a long while as it seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now since I had seen him. Physical fatigue, and mental suffering had left me no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the rue de Rennes to the rue du Dragon.

It is an “Impasse”; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the entrance on the rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon. Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken pavement collects unsavory pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavory as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard, honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone. When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and I took it.

From the Arc to the rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour, especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the mercy of Sunday fête makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon’s wings, to meet my enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our concierge and his wife walked among them with their black poodle, keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, half way down the court, reached by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open door, the friendly, old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw him, ten paces off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by the entrance on the rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway, and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the rue du Dragon were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors their cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows; the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I set my back against the barred doors and defied him.

•      •      •      •      •      •

There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse’s staff in the south aisle, preceding Monseigneur C—— to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbor, rose also, with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture-chambers of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. Had I escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him—they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful little church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door; the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the Lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”

THE YELLOW SIGN

Let the red dawn surmise

What we shall do,

When this blue starlight dies

And all is through.

—Bliss Carman,
Songs of the Sea Children

THE YELLOW SIGN

I

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Silvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To think that this also is a little ward of God!”

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the color out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly color into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

“Is it something I’ve done?” she said.

“No,—I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,” I replied.

“Don’t I pose well?” she insisted.

“Of course, perfectly.”

“Then it’s not my fault?”

“No. It’s my own.”

“I am very sorry,” she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look over the illustrations in the Courier Français.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed I strove to arrest it, but now the color on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water. Vigorously I plied palette knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all the time what a séance I should hold with Duval who had sold me the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was defective nor yet the colors of Edward. “It must be the turpentine,” I thought angrily, “or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.” I called Tessie, the model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the air.

“What have you been doing to it?” she exclaimed.

“Nothing,” I growled, “it must be this turpentine!”

“What a horrible color it is now,” she continued. “Do you think my flesh resembles green cheese?”

“No, I don’t,” I said angrily; “did you ever know me to paint like that before?”

“No, indeed!”

“Well, then!”

“It must be the turpentine, or something,” she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of which reached Tessie’s ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: “That’s it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!”

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until, thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the shoulder.

“Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the church-yard,” she announced.

“Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,” I said, yawning. I looked at my watch.

“It’s after six, I know,” said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the mirror.

“Yes,” I replied, “I didn’t mean to keep you so long.” I leaned out of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval and leaned from the window.

“Is that the man you don’t like?” she whispered.

I nodded.

“I can’t see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,” she continued, turning to look at me, “he reminds me of a dream,—an awful dream I once had. Or,” she mused, looking down at her shapely shoes, “was it a dream after all?”

“How should I know?” I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

“You were in it,” she said, “so perhaps you might know something about it.”

“Tessie! Tessie!” I protested, “don’t you dare flatter by saying that you dream about me!”

“But I did,” she insisted; “shall I tell you about it?”

“Go ahead,” I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

“One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be afraid; everything outside seemed so—so black and uncomfortable. Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was soaked.”

“But where did I come into the dream?” I asked.

“You—you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.”

“In the coffin?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know? Could you see me?”

“No; I only knew you were there.”

“Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?” I began laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

“Hello! What’s up?” I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the window.

“The—the man below in the churchyard;—he drove the hearse.”

“Nonsense,” I said, but Tessie’s eyes were wide with terror. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone. “Come, Tessie,” I urged, “don’t be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.”

“Do you think I could forget that face?” she murmured. “Three times I saw the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and—and soft? It looked dead—it looked as if it had been dead a long time.”

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

“Look here, Tessie,” I said, “you go to the country for a week or two, and you’ll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when night comes your nerves are upset. You can’t keep this up. Then again, instead of going to bed when your day’s work is done, you run off to picnics at Sulzer’s Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real hearse. That was a soft-shell crab dream.”

She smiled faintly.

“What about the man in the churchyard?”

“Oh, he’s only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.”

“As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who drove the hearse!”

“What of it?” I said. “It’s an honest trade.”

“Then you think I did see the hearse?”

“Oh,” I said diplomatically, “if you really did, it might not be unlikely that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.”

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, “Good-night, Mr. Scott,” and walked out.

II

The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the Herald and a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter, whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been my own rooms, and who insisted on his r’s with a nasal persistence which revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape, an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister was a good man, but when he bellowed: “And the Lorrrd said unto Moses, the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sworrrd!” I wondered how many centuries of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

“Who bought the property?” I asked Thomas.

“Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this ’ere ’Amilton flats was lookin’ at it. ’E might be a bildin’ more studios.”

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming repugnance took possession of me.

“By-the-way, Thomas,” I said, “who is that fellow down there?”

Thomas sniffed. “That there worm, sir? ’E’s night-watchman of the church, sir. ’E maikes me tired a-sittin’ out all night on them steps and lookin’ at you insultin’ like. I’d a punched ’is ’ed, sir—beg pardon, sir—”

“Go on, Thomas.”

“One night a comin’ ’ome with ’Arry, the other English boy, I sees ’im a sittin’ there on them steps. We ’ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two girls on the tray service, an’ ’e looks so insultin’ at us that I up and sez: ‘Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?’—beg pardon, sir, but that’s ’ow I sez, sir. Then ’e don’t say nothin’ and I sez, ‘Come out and I’ll punch that puddin’ ’ed.’ Then I hopens the gate an’ goes in, but ’e don’t say nothin’, only looks insultin’ like. Then I ’its ’im one, but, ugh! ’is ’ed was that cold and mushy it ’ud sicken you to touch ’im.”

“What did he do then?” I asked curiously.

“’Im? Nawthin’.”

“And you, Thomas?”

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

“Mr. Scott, sir, I ain’t no coward, an’ I can’t make it out at all why I run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an’ was shot by the wells.”

“You don’t mean to say you ran away?”

“Yes, sir; I run.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an’ run, an’ the rest was as frightened as I.”

“But what were they frightened at?”

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years’ sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas’ cockney dialect but had given him the American’s fear of ridicule.

“You won’t believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?”

“Yes, I will.”

“You will lawf at me, sir?”

“Nonsense!”

He hesitated. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of ’is fingers come off in me ’and.”

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas’ face must have been reflected in my own for he added:

“It’s orful, an’ now when I see ’im I just go away. ’E maikes me hill.”

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of his right hand was missing.

At nine o’clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a merry “good-morning, Mr. Scott.” When she had reappeared and taken her pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas much to her delight. She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to chatter.

“Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor’s.”

“Who are ‘we’?” I demanded.

“Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte’s model, and Pinkie McCormick—we call her Pinkie because she’s got that beautiful red hair you artists like so much—and Lizzie Burke.”

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said: “Well, go on.”

“We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and—and all the rest. I made a mash.”

“Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?”

She laughed and shook her head.

“He’s Lizzie Burke’s brother, Ed. He’s a perfect gen’l’man.”

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing, which she took with a bright smile.

“Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,” she said, examining her chewing gum, “but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.”

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what an accomplished young man he was, and how he thought nothing of squandering half a dollar for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the woollen department of Macy’s. Before she finished I began to paint, and she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

“That’s better,” she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my models she was my favorite. It would have troubled me very much indeed had she become “tough” or “fly,” as the phrase goes, but I never noticed any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she would do what she liked in spite of me. Still, I did hope she would steer clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris. Yet, having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case, there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything, including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good. A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then, again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for my pretty model until she should fall in love. But then I knew that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice in her tumbler.

“Do you know that I also had a dream last night?” I observed.

“Not about that man,” she laughed.

“Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.”

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little tact the average painter has.

“I must have fallen asleep about 10 o’clock,” I continued, “and after a while I dreamed that I awoke. So plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you, Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient and tried to move but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on my breast so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses attached to the wagon and even the breathing of the driver. Then another sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on the first floor and a figure all in white stood looking down into the street. It was you.”

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her elbow.

“I could see your face,” I resumed, “and it seemed to me to be very sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane. Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with fear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin-lid—”

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

“Why, Tess,” I said, “I only told you this to show you what influence your story might have on another person’s dreams. You don’t suppose I really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don’t you see that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?”

She laid her head between her arms and sobbed as if her heart would break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

“Tessie dear, forgive me,” I said; “I had no business to frighten you with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to believe in dreams.”

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

“Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.”

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

“It’s all humbug, Tessie; you surely are not afraid that any harm will come to you because of that.”

“No,” she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

“Then what’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

“Yes. Not for myself.”

“For me, then?” I demanded gayly.

“For you,” she murmured in a voice almost inaudible, “I—I care for you.”

At first I started to laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed through me and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her and reassure her as to my health, I could simply point out that it was impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts, and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back out now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie. The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany. Was it buried forever? Hope cried “No!” For three years I had been listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? “No!” cried Hope.

I said that I was no good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late for me to regret what had occurred during the day. Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless I wished to bruise an innocent heart my path lay marked before me. The fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it. I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps as long as she had decided to love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least, could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered the usual termination of Platonic liaisons, and thought how disgusted I had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreaded the future, but never for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing, or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away. If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill, recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand if she tired of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch, I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me anyway and the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put on my evening dress for the little faintly perfumed note on my dresser said, “Have a cab at the stage door at eleven,” and the note was signed “Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre.”

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I, at Solari’s and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed among the trees and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odor of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It was this:

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss. She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down before the easel.

“Hello! Where’s the study I began yesterday?” I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the piles of canvases, saying, “Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take advantage of the morning light.”

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by the screen with her clothes still on.

“What’s the matter,” I asked, “don’t you feel well?”

“Yes.”

“Then hurry.”

“Do you want me to pose as—as I have always posed?”

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course, the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and native innocence were dreams of the past—I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: “I will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put it.”

“No,” I said, “we will begin something new”; and I went into my wardrobe and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted. When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends, curled about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her face, smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket and drawing out a gold chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

“It’s yours, Tessie.”

“Mine?” she faltered.

“Yours. Now go and pose,” Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the screen and presently re-appeared with a little box on which was written my name.

“I had intended to give it to you when I went home to-night,” she said, “but I can’t wait now.”

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither Arabic nor Chinese, nor as I found afterwards did it belong to any human script.

“It’s all I had to give you for a keepsake,” she said, timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

“How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,” I said.

“I did not buy it,” she laughed.

“Where did you get it?”

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

“That was last winter,” she said, “the very day I had the first horrid dream about the hearse.”

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas, and Tessie stood motionless on the model stand.

III

The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches until despair seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church, driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my elbow. I knew every volume by its color and examined them all, passing slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase. I did not remember it and from the floor could not decipher the pale lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie. She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The King in Yellow.”

I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous mottled binding as I would at a snake.

“Don’t touch it, Tessie,” I said; “come down.”

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

“Tessie!” I cried, entering the library, “listen, I am serious. Put that book away. I do not wish you to open it!” The library was empty. I went into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had hidden herself so well that it was half an hour later when I discovered her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her foolishness. The King in Yellow lay at her feet, but the book was open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She had opened The King in Yellow. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose and entering the unused store-room took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning to end.

When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at me.

•      •      •      •      •      •

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh, the sin of writing such words,—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words,—words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be glad to know what it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now and not a sound came up from the misty streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a gray blot in the gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine and I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other, swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelop me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie’s soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy—they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor—the livid corpse of the watchman from the church: “I have no theory, no explanation. That man must have been dead for months!”

•      •      •      •      •      •

I think I am dying. I wish the priest would—

THE DEMOISELLE D’YS

Mais je croy que je

Suis descendu on puiz

Tenebreux onquel disoit

Heraclytus estre Verité cachée.

[But I believe that I descended into a dark well where Heraclitus said truth was hidden.]

—Rabelais,
Gargantua et Pantagruel

THE DEMOISELLE D’YS

There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not:

The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.

—Proverbs 30:18–19.

I

The utter desolation of the scene began to have its effect; I sat down to face the situation and, if possible, recall to mind some landmark which might aid me in extricating myself from my present position. If I could only find the ocean again all would be clear, for I knew one could see the island of Groix from the cliffs.

I laid down my gun, and kneeling behind a rock lighted a pipe. Then I looked at my watch. It was nearly four o’clock. I might have wandered far from Kerselec since daybreak.

Standing the day before on the cliffs below Kerselec with Goulven, looking out over the sombre moors among which I had now lost my way, these downs had appeared to me level as a meadow, stretching to the horizon, and although I knew how deceptive is distance, I could not realize that what from Kerselec seemed to be mere grassy hollows were great valleys covered with gorse and heather, and what looked like scattered boulders were in reality enormous cliffs of granite.

“It’s a bad place for a stranger,” old Goulven had said; “you’d better take a guide”; and I had replied, “I shall not lose myself.” Now I knew that I had lost myself, as I sat there smoking, with the sea-wind blowing in my face. On every side stretched the moorland, covered with flowering gorse and heath and granite boulders. There was not a tree in sight, much less a house. After a while, I picked up the gun, and turning my back on the sun tramped on again.

There was little use in following any of the brawling streams which every now and then crossed my path, for, instead of flowing into the sea, they ran inland to reedy pools in the hollows of the moors. I had followed several, but they all led me to swamps or silent little ponds from which the snipe rose peeping and wheeled away in an ecstasy of fright. I began to feel fatigued, and the gun galled my shoulder in spite of the double pads. The sun sank lower and lower, shining level across yellow gorse and the moorland pools.

As I walked my own gigantic shadow led me on, seeming to lengthen at every step. The gorse scraped against my leggings, crackled beneath my feet, showering the brown earth with blossoms, and the brake bowed and billowed along my path. From tufts of heath rabbits scurried away through the bracken, and among the swamp grass I heard the wild duck’s drowsy quack. Once a fox stole across my path, and again, as I stooped to drink at a hurrying rill, a heron flapped heavily from the reeds beside me. I turned to look at the sun. It seemed to touch the edges of the plain. When at last I decided that it was useless to go on, and that I must make up my mind to spend at least one night on the moors, I threw myself down thoroughly fagged out. The evening sunlight slanted warm across my body, but the sea-winds began to rise, and I felt a chill strike through me from my wet shooting-boots. High overhead gulls were wheeling and tossing like bits of white paper; from some distant marsh a solitary curlew called. Little by little the sun sank into the plain, and the zenith flushed with the after-glow. I watched the sky change from palest gold to pink and then to smouldering fire. Clouds of midges danced above me, and high in the calm air a bat dipped and soared. My eyelids began to droop. Then as I shook off the drowsiness a sudden crash among the bracken roused me. I raised my eyes. A great bird hung quivering in the air above my face. For an instant I stared, incapable of motion; then something leaped past me in the ferns and the bird rose, wheeled, and pitched headlong into the brake.

I was on my feet in an instant peering through the gorse. There came the sound of a struggle from a bunch of heather close by, and then all was quiet. I stepped forward, my gun poised, but when I came to the heather the gun fell under my arm again, and I stood motionless in silent astonishment. A dead hare lay on the ground, and on the hare stood a magnificent falcon, one talon buried in the creature’s neck, the other planted firmly on its limp flank. But what astonished me, was not the mere sight of a falcon sitting upon its prey. I had seen that more than once. It was that the falcon was fitted with a sort of leash about both talons, and from the leash hung a round bit of metal like a sleigh-bell. The bird turned its fierce yellow eyes on me, and then stooped and struck its curved beak into the quarry. At the same instant hurried steps sounded among the heather, and a girl sprang into the covert in front. Without a glance at me she walked up to the falcon, and passing her gloved hand under its breast, raised it from the quarry. Then she deftly slipped a small hood over the bird’s head, and holding it out on her gauntlet, stooped and picked up the hare.

She passed a cord about the animal’s legs and fastened the end of the thong to her girdle. Then she started to retrace her steps through the covert. As she passed me I raised my cap and she acknowledged my presence with a scarcely perceptible inclination. I had been so astonished, so lost in admiration of the scene before my eyes, that it had not occurred to me that here was my salvation. But as she moved away I recollected that unless I wanted to sleep on a windy moor that night I had better recover my speech without delay. At my first word she hesitated, and as I stepped before her I thought a look of fear came into her beautiful eyes. But as I humbly explained my unpleasant plight, her face flushed and she looked at me in wonder.

“Surely you did not come from Kerselec!” she repeated.

Her sweet voice had no trace of the Breton accent nor of any accent which I knew, and yet there was something in it I seemed to have heard before, something quaint and indefinable, like the theme of an old song.

I explained that I was an American, unacquainted with Finistère, shooting there for my own amusement.

“An American,” she repeated in the same quaint musical tones. “I have never before seen an American.”

For a moment she stood silent, then looking at me she said: “If you should walk all night you could not reach Kerselec now, even if you had a guide.”

This was pleasant news.

“But,” I began, “if I could only find a peasant’s hut where I might get something to eat, and shelter.”

The falcon on her wrist fluttered and shook its head. The girl smoothed its glossy back and glanced at me.

“Look around,” she said gently. “Can you see the end of these moors? Look, north, south, east, west. Can you see anything but moorland and bracken?”

“No,” I said.

“The moor is wild and desolate. It is easy to enter, but sometimes they who enter never leave it. There are no peasants’ huts here.”

“Well,” I said, “if you will tell me in which direction Kerselec lies, to-morrow it will take me no longer to go back than it has to come.”

She looked at me again with an expression almost like pity.

“Ah,” she said, “to come is easy and takes hours; to go is different—and may take centuries.”

I stared at her in amazement but decided that I had misunderstood her. Then before I had time to speak she drew a whistle from her belt and sounded it.

“Sit down and rest,” she said to me; “you have come a long distance and are tired.”

She gathered up her pleated skirts and motioning me to follow picked her dainty way through the gorse to a flat rock among the ferns.

“They will be here directly,” she said, and taking a seat at one end of the rock invited me to sit down on the other edge. The after glow was beginning to fade in the sky and a single star twinkled faintly through the rosy haze. A long wavering triangle of water-fowl drifted southward over our heads and from the swamps around plover were calling.

“They are very beautiful—these moors,” she said quietly.

“Beautiful, but cruel to strangers,” I answered.

“Beautiful and cruel,” she repeated dreamily, “beautiful and cruel.”

“Like a woman,” I said stupidly.

“Oh,” she cried with a little catch in her breath and looked at me. Her dark eyes met mine and I thought she seemed angry or frightened.

“Like a woman,” she repeated under her breath, “how cruel to say so!” Then after a pause, as though speaking aloud to herself, “how cruel for him to say that!”

I don’t know what sort of an apology I offered for my inane, though harmless speech, but I know that she seemed so troubled about it that I began to think I had said something very dreadful without knowing it, and remembered with horror the pitfalls and snares which the French language sets for foreigners. While I was trying to imagine what I might have said, a sound of voices came across the moor and the girl rose to her feet.

“No,” she said, with a trace of a smile on her pale face, “I will not accept your apologies, Monsieur, but I must prove you wrong and that shall be my revenge. Look. Here come Hastur and Raoul.”

Two men loomed up in the twilight. One had a sack across his shoulders and the other carried a hoop before him as a waiter carries a tray. The hoop was fastened with straps to his shoulders and around the edge of the circlet sat three hooded falcons fitted with tinkling bells. The girl stepped up to the falconer, and with a quick turn of her wrist transferred her falcon to the hoop where it quickly sidled off and nestled among its mates who shook their hooded heads and ruffled their feathers till the belled jesses tinkled again. The other man stepped forward and bowing respectfully took up the hare and dropped it into the game-sack.

“These are my piqueurs,” said the girl turning to me with a gentle dignity. “Raoul is a good fauconnier and I shall some day make him grand veneur. Hastur is incomparable.”

The two silent men saluted me respectfully.

“Did I not tell you, Monsieur, that I should prove you wrong?” she continued. “This then is my revenge, that you do me the courtesy of accepting food and shelter at my own house.”

Before I could answer she spoke to the falconers who started instantly across the heath, and with a gracious gesture to me she followed. I don’t know whether I made her understand how profoundly grateful I felt, but she seemed pleased to listen, as we walked over the dewy heather.

“Are you not very tired?” she asked.

I had clean forgotten my fatigue in her presence and I told her so.

“Don’t you think your gallantry is a little old-fashioned,” she said; and when I looked confused and humbled, she added quietly, “oh, I like it, I like everything old-fashioned, and it is delightful to hear you say such pretty things.”

The moorland around us was very still now under its ghostly sheet of mist. The plovers had ceased their calling; the crickets and all the little creatures of the fields were silent as we passed, yet it seemed to me as if I could hear them beginning again far behind us. Well in advance the two tall falconers strode across the heather and the faint jingling of the hawk’s bells came to our ears in distant murmuring chimes.

Suddenly a splendid hound dashed out of the mist in front, followed by another and another until half a dozen or more were bounding and leaping around the girl beside me. She caressed and quieted them with her gloved hand, speaking to them in quaint terms which I remembered to have seen in old French manuscripts.

Then the falcons on the circlet borne by the falconer ahead began to beat their wings and scream, and from somewhere out of sight the notes of a hunting-horn floated across the moor. The hounds sprang away before us and vanished in the twilight, the falcons flapped and squealed upon their perch and the girl taking up the song of the horn began to hum. Clear and mellow her voice sounded in the night air.

Chasseur, chasseur, chassez encore,

Quittez Rosette et Jeanneton,

Tonton, tonton, tontaine, tonton,

Ou, pour, rabattre, dès l’aurore,

Que les Amours soient de planton,

Tonton, tontaine, tonton.

As I listened to her lovely voice a gray mass which rapidly grew more distinct loomed up in front, and the horn rang out joyously through the tumult of the hounds and falcons. A torch glimmered at a gate, a light streamed through an opening door, and we stepped upon a wooden bridge which trembled under our feet and rose creaking and straining behind us as we passed over the moat and into a small stone court, walled on every side. From an open doorway a man came and bending in salutation presented a cup to the girl beside me. She took the cup and touched it with her lips, then lowering it turned to me and said in a low voice, “I bid you welcome.”

At that moment one of the falconers came with another cup, but before handing it to me, presented it to the girl, who tasted it. The falconer made a gesture to receive it, but she hesitated a moment and then stepping forward offered me the cup with her own hands. I felt this to be an act of extraordinary graciousness, but hardly knew what was expected of me, and did not raise it to my lips at once. The girl flushed crimson. I saw that I must act quickly.

“Mademoiselle,” I faltered, “a stranger whom you have saved from dangers he may never realize, empties this cup to the gentlest and loveliest hostess of France.”

“In His name,” she murmured, crossing herself as I drained the cup. Then stepping into the doorway she turned to me with a pretty gesture and taking my hand in hers, led me into the house, saying again and again: “You are very welcome, indeed you are welcome to the Château d’Ys.”

II

I awoke next morning with the music of the horn in my ears, and leaping out of the ancient bed, went to a curtained window where the sunlight filtered through little deep-set panes. The horn ceased as I looked into the court below.

A man who might have been brother to the two falconers of the night before stood in the midst of a pack of hounds. A curved horn was strapped over his back, and in his hand he held a long-lashed whip. The dogs whined and yelped, dancing around him in anticipation; there was the stamp of horses too in the walled yard.

“Mount!” cried a voice in Breton, and with a clatter of hoofs the two falconers, with falcons upon their wrists, rode into the courtyard among the hounds. Then I heard another voice which sent the blood throbbing through my heart: “Piriou Louis, hunt the hounds well and spare neither spur nor whip. Thou Raoul and thou Gaston, see that the epervier does not prove himself niais, and if it be best in your judgment, faites courtoisie à l’oiseau. Jardiner un oiseau like the mué there on Hastur’s wrist, is not difficult, but thou, Raoul mayest not find it so simple to govern that hagard. Twice last week he foamed au vif and lost the beccade although he is used to the leurre. The bird acts like a stupid branchier. Paître un hagard n’est pas si facile.”

Was I dreaming? The old language of falconry which I had read in yellow manuscripts—the old forgotten French of the middle ages was sounding in my ears while the hounds bayed and the hawk’s bells tinkled accompaniment to the stamping horses. She spoke again in the sweet forgotten language:

“If you would rather attach the longe and leave thy hagard au bloc, Raoul, I shall say nothing; for it were a pity to spoil so fair a day’s sport with an ill-trained sors. Essimer abaisser—it is possibly the best way. Ça lui donnera des reins. I was perhaps hasty with the bird. It takes time to pass à la filière and the exercises d’escap.”

Then the falconer Raoul bowed in his stirrups and replied: “If it be the pleasure of Mademoiselle, I shall keep the hawk.”

“It is my wish,” she answered. “Falconry I know, but you have yet to give me many a lesson in Autourserie, my poor Raoul. Sieur Piriou Louis, mount!”

The huntsman sprang into an archway and in an instant returned, mounted upon a strong black horse, followed by a piqueur also mounted.

“Ah!” she cried joyously, “speed Glemarec René! speed! speed all! Sound thy horn Sieur Piriou!”

The silvery music of the hunting-horn filled the courtyard, the hounds sprang through the gateway and galloping hoof-beats plunged out of the paved court; loud on the drawbridge, suddenly muffled, then lost in the heather and bracken of the moors. Distant and more distant sounded the horn, until it became so faint that the sudden carol of a soaring lark drowned it in my ears. I heard the voice below responding to some call from within the house.

“I do not regret the chase, I will go another time. Courtesy to the stranger, Pelagie, remember!”

And a feeble voice came quavering from within the house, “Courtoisie.”

I stripped, and rubbed myself from head to foot in the huge earthen basin of icy water which stood upon the stone floor at the foot of my bed. Then I looked about for my clothes. They were gone, but on a settle near the door lay a heap of garments which I inspected with astonishment. As my clothes had vanished I was compelled to attire myself in the costume which had evidently been placed there for me to wear while my own clothes dried. Everything was there, cap, shoes, and hunting doublet of silvery gray homespun; but the close-fitting costume and seamless shoes belonged to another century, and I remembered the strange costumes of the three falconers in the courtyard. I was sure that it was not the modern dress of any portion of France or Brittany; but not until I was dressed and stood before a mirror between the windows did I realize that I was clothed much more like a young huntsman of the middle ages than like a Breton of that day. I hesitated and picked up the cap. Should I go down and present myself in that strange guise? There seemed to be no help for it, my own clothes were gone and there was no bell in the ancient chamber to call a servant, so I contented myself with removing a short hawk’s feather from the cap, and opening the door went downstairs.

By the fireplace in the large room at the foot of the stairs an old Breton woman sat spinning with a distaff. She looked up at me when I appeared, and, smiling frankly, wished me health in the Breton language, to which I laughingly replied in French. At the same moment my hostess appeared and returned my salutation with a grace and dignity that sent a thrill to my heart. Her lovely head with its dark curly hair was crowned with a head-dress which set all doubts as to the epoch of my own costume at rest. Her slender figure was exquisitely set off in the homespun hunting-gown edged with silver, and on her gauntlet-covered wrist she bore one of her petted hawks. With perfect simplicity she took my hand and led me into the garden in the court, and seating herself before a table invited me very sweetly to sit beside her. Then she asked me in her soft quaint accent how I had passed the night and whether I was very much inconvenienced by wearing the clothes which old Pelagie had put there for me while I slept. I looked at my own clothes and shoes, drying in the sun by the garden-wall, and hated them. What horrors they were compared with the graceful costume which I now wore! I told her this laughing, but she agreed with me very seriously.

“We will throw them away,” she said in a quiet voice. In my astonishment I attempted to explain that I not only could not think of accepting clothes from anybody, although for all I knew it might be the custom of hospitality in that part of the country, but that I should cut an impossible figure if I returned to France clothed as I was then.

She laughed and tossed her pretty head, saying something in old French which I did not understand, and then Pelagie trotted out with a tray on which stood two bowls of milk, a loaf of white bread, fruit, a platter of honey-comb, and a flagon of deep red wine. “You see I have not yet broken my fast because I wished you to eat with me. But I am very hungry,” she smiled.

“I would rather die than forget one word of what you have said!” I blurted out, while my cheeks burned, “She will think me mad,” I added to myself, but she turned to me with sparkling eyes.

“Ah!” she murmured. “Then Monsieur knows all that there is of chivalry—”

She crossed herself and broke bread—I sat and watched her white hands, not daring to raise my eyes to hers.

“Will you not eat,” she asked; “why do you look so troubled?”

Ah, why? I knew it now. I knew I would give my life to touch with my lips those rosy palms—I understood now that from the moment when I looked into her dark eyes there on the moor last night I had loved her. My great and sudden passion held me speechless.

“Are you ill at ease?” she asked again.

Then, like a man who pronounces his own doom I answered in a low voice: “Yes, I am ill at ease for love of you.” And as she did not stir nor answer, the same power moved my lips in spite of me and I said, “I, who am unworthy of the lightest of your thoughts, I who abuse hospitality and repay your gentle courtesy with bold presumption, I love you.”

She leaned her head upon her hands, and answered softly, “I love you. Your words are very dear to me. I love you.”

“Then I shall win you.”

“Win me,” she replied.

But all the time I had been sitting silent, my face turned toward her. She also silent, her sweet face resting on her upturned palm, sat facing me, and as her eyes looked into mine, I knew that neither she nor I had spoken human speech; but I knew that her soul had answered mine, and I drew myself up feeling youth and joyous love coursing through every vein. She, with a bright color in her lovely face, seemed as one awakened from a dream, and her eyes sought mine with a questioning glance which made me tremble with delight. We broke our fast, speaking of ourselves. I told her my name and she told me hers, the Demoiselle Jeanne d’Ys.

She spoke of her father and mother’s death, and how the nineteen of her years had been passed in the little fortified farm alone with her nurse Pelagie, Glemarec René the piqueur, and the four falconers, Raoul, Gaston, Hastur, and the Sieur Piriou Louis, who had served her father. She had never been outside the moorland—never even had seen a human soul before, except the falconers and Pelagie. She did not know how she had heard of Kerselec; perhaps the falconers had spoken of it. She knew the legends of Loup Garou [werewolf] and Jeanne la Flamme from her nurse Pelagie. She embroidered and spun flax. Her hawks and hounds were her only distraction. When she had met me there on the moor she had been so frightened that she almost dropped at the sound of my voice. She had, it was true, seen ships at sea from the cliffs, but as far as the eye could reach the moors over which she galloped were destitute of any sign of human life. There was a legend which old Pelagie told, how anybody once lost in the unexplored moorland might never return, because the moors were enchanted. She did not know whether it was true, she never had thought about it until she met me. She did not know whether the falconers had even been outside or whether they could go if they would. The books in the house which Pelagie the nurse had taught her to read were hundreds of years old.

All this she told me with a sweet seriousness seldom seen in any one but children. My own name she found easy to pronounce and insisted, because my first name was Philip, I must have French blood in me. She did not seem curious to learn anything about the outside world, and I thought perhaps she considered it had forfeited her interest and respect from the stories of her nurse.

We were still sitting at the table and she was throwing grapes to the small field birds which came fearlessly to our very feet.

I began to speak in a vague way of going, but she would not hear of it, and before I knew it I had promised to stay a week and hunt with hawk and hound in their company. I also obtained permission to come again from Kerselec and visit her after my return.

“Why,” she said innocently, “I do not know what I should do if you never came back”; and I, knowing that I had no right to awaken her with the sudden shock which the avowal of my own love would bring to her, sat silent, hardly daring to breathe.

“You will come very often?” she asked.

“Very often,” I said.

“Every day?”

“Every day.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “I am very happy—come and see my hawks.”

She rose and took my hand again with a childlike innocence of possession, and we walked through the garden and fruit trees to a grassy lawn which was bordered by a brook. Over the lawn were scattered fifteen or twenty stumps of trees—partially imbedded in the grass—and upon all of these except two sat falcons. They were attached to the stumps by thongs which were in turn fastened with steel rivets to their legs just above the talons. A little stream of pure spring water flowed in a winding course within easy distance of each perch.

The birds set up a clamor when the girl appeared, but she went from one to another caressing some, taking others for an instant upon her wrist, or stooping to adjust their jesses.

“Are they not pretty?” she said. “See, here is a falcon-gentil. We call it ‘ignoble,’ because it takes the quarry in direct chase. This is a blue falcon. In falconry we call it ‘noble’ because it rises over the quarry, and wheeling, drops upon it from above. This white bird is a gerfalcon from the north. It is also ‘noble!’ Here is a merlin, and this tiercelet is a falcon-heroner.”

I asked her how she had learned the old language of falconry. She did not remember, but thought her father must have taught it to her when she was very young.

Then she led me away and showed me the young falcons still in the nest. “They are termed niais in falconry,” she explained. “A branchier is the young bird which is just able to leave the nest and hop from branch to branch. A young bird which has not yet moulted is called a sors, and a mué is a hawk which has moulted in captivity. When we catch a wild falcon which has changed its plumage we term it a hagard. Raoul first taught me to dress a falcon. Shall I teach you how it is done?”

She seated herself on the bank of the stream among the falcons and I threw myself at her feet to listen.

Then the Demoiselle d’Ys held up one rosy-tipped finger and began very gravely.

“First one must catch the falcon.”

“I am caught,” I answered.

She laughed very prettily and told me my dressage would perhaps be difficult, as I was noble.

“I am already tamed,” I replied; “jessed and belled.”

She laughed, delighted. “Oh, my brave falcon; then you will return at my call?”

“I am yours,” I answered gravely.

She sat silent for a moment. Then the color heightened in her cheeks and she held up her finger again saying, “Listen; I wish to speak of falconry—”

“I listen, Countess Jeanne d’Ys.”

But again she fell into the reverie, and her eyes seemed fixed on something beyond the summer clouds.

“Philip,” she said at last.

“Jeanne,” I whispered.

“That is all,—that is what I wished,” she sighed,—“Philip and Jeanne.”

She held her hand toward me and I touched it with my lips.

“Win me,” she said, but this time it was the body and soul which spoke in unison.

After a while she began again: “Let us speak of falconry.”

“Begin,” I replied; “we have caught the falcon.”

Then Jeanne d’Ys took my hand in both of hers and told me how with infinite patience the young falcon was taught to perch upon the wrist, how little by little it became used to the belled jesses and the chaperon à cornette.

“They must first have a good appetite,” she said; “then little by little I reduce their nourishment which in falconry we call pât. When after many nights passed au bloc as these birds are now, I prevail upon the hagard to stay quietly on the wrist, then the bird is ready to be taught to come for its food. I fix the pât to the end of a thong or leurre, and teach the bird to come to me as soon as I begin to whirl the cord in circles about my head. At first I drop the pât when the falcon comes, and he eats the food on the ground. After a little he will learn to seize the leurre in motion as I whirl it around my head, or drag it over the ground. After this it is easy to teach the falcon to strike at game, always remembering to ‘faire courtoisie á l’oiseau,’ that is, to allow the bird to taste the quarry.”

A squeal from one of the falcons interrupted her, and she arose to adjust the longe which had become whipped about the bloc, but the bird still flapped its wings and screamed.

“What is the matter?” she said. “Philip, can you see?”

I looked around and at first saw nothing to cause the commotion which was now heightened by the screams and flapping of all the birds. Then my eye fell upon the flat rock beside the stream from which the girl had risen. A gray serpent was moving slowly across the surface of the bowlder, and the eyes in its flat triangular head sparkled like jet.

“A couleuvre,” she said quietly.

“It is harmless, is it not?” I asked.

She pointed to the black V-shaped figure on the neck.

“It is certain death,” she said; “it is a viper.”

We watched the reptile moving slowly over the smooth rock to where the sunlight fell in a broad warm patch.

I started forward to examine it, but she clung to my arm crying, “Don’t, Philip, I am afraid.”

“For me?”

“For you, Philip,—I love you.”

Then I took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips, but all I could say was: “Jeanne, Jeanne, Jeanne.” And as she lay trembling on my breast, something struck my foot in the grass below, but I did not heed it. Then again something struck my ankle, and a sharp pain shot through me. I looked into the sweet face of Jeanne d’Ys and kissed her, and with all my strength lifted her in my arms and flung her from me. Then bending, I tore the viper from my ankle and set my heel upon its head. I remember feeling weak and numb,—I remember falling to the ground. Through my slowly glazing eyes I saw Jeanne’s white face bending close to mine, and when the light in my eyes went out I still felt her arms about my neck, and her soft cheek against my drawn lips.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When I opened my eyes, I looked around in terror. Jeanne was gone. I saw the stream and the flat rock; I saw the crushed viper in the grass beside me, but the hawks and blocs had disappeared. I sprang to my feet. The garden, the fruit trees, the drawbridge and the walled court were gone. I stared stupidly at a heap of crumbling ruins, ivy-covered and gray, through which great trees had pushed their way. I crept forward, dragging my numbed foot, and as I moved, a falcon sailed from the tree-tops among the ruins, and soaring, mounting in narrowing circles, faded and vanished in the clouds above.

“Jeanne, Jeanne,” I cried, but my voice died on my lips, and I fell on my knees among the weeds. And as God willed it, I, not knowing, had fallen kneeling before a crumbling shrine carved in stone for our Mother of Sorrows. I saw the sad face of the Virgin wrought in the cold stone. I saw the cross and thorns at her feet, and beneath it I read:

PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF THE
DEMOISELLE JEANNE D’YS,
WHO DIED IN HER YOUTH
FOR LOVE OF
PHILIP, A STRANGER.
A.D. 1573.

But upon the icy slab lay a woman’s glove still warm and fragrant.

THE PROPHETS’ PARADISE

If but the Vine and Love Abjuring Band

Are in the Prophets’ Paradise to stand,

Alack, I doubt the Prophets’ Paradise,

Were empty as the hollow of one’s hand.

—The Rubáiyát

THE STUDIO

He smiled, saying, “Seek her throughout the world.”

I said, “Why tell me of the world? My world is here, between these walls and the sheet of glass above; here among gilded flagons and dull jewelled arms, tarnished frames and canvases, black chests and high backed chairs, quaintly carved and stained in blue and gold.”

“For whom do you wait?” he said, and I answered, “When she comes I shall know her.”

On my hearth a tongue of flame whispered secrets to the whitening ashes. In the street below I heard footsteps, a voice, and a song.

“For whom then do you wait?” he said, and I answered, “I shall know her.”

Footsteps, a voice, and a song in the street below, and I knew the song but neither the steps nor the voice.

“Fool!” he cried, “the song is the same, the voice and steps have but changed with years!”

On the hearth a tongue of flame whispered above the whitening ashes: “Wait no more; they have passed, the steps and the voice in the street below.”

Then he smiled, saying, “For whom do you wait? Seek her throughout the world!”

I answered, “My world is here between these walls and the sheet of glass above; here among gilded flagons and dull jewelled arms, tarnished frames and canvases, black chests and high-backed chairs, quaintly carved and stained in blue and gold.”

THE PHANTOM

The Phantom of the Past would go no further.

“If it is true,” she sighed, “that you find in me a friend, let us turn back together. You will forget, here, under the summer sky.”

I held her close, pleading, caressing; I seized her, white with anger, but she resisted.

“If it is true,” she sighed, “that you find in me a friend, let us turn back together.”

The Phantom of the Past would go no further.

THE SACRIFICE

I went into a field of flowers, whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.

Far afield a woman cried, “I have killed him I loved!” and from a jar she poured blood upon the flowers whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.

Far afield I followed, and on the jar I read a thousand names, while from within the fresh blood bubbled to the brim.

“I have killed him I loved!” she cried. “The world’s athirst; now let it drink!” She passed, and far afield I watched her pouring blood upon the flowers whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.

DESTINY

I came to the bridge which few may pass.

“Pass!” cried the keeper, but I laughed, saying, “There is time”; and he smiled and shut the gates.

To the bridge which few may pass came young and old. All were refused. Idly I stood and counted them, until, wearied of their noise and lamentations, I came again to the bridge which few may pass.

Those in the throng about the gates shrieked out, “He comes too late!” But I laughed, saying, “There is time.”

“Pass!” cried the keeper as I entered; then smiled and shut the gates.

THE THRONG

There, where the throng was thickest in the street, I stood with Pierrot. All eyes were turned on me.

“What are they laughing at?” I asked, but he grinned, dusting the chalk from my black cloak. “I cannot see; it must be something droll, perhaps an honest thief!”

All eyes were turned on me.

“He has robbed you of your purse!” they laughed.

“My purse!” I cried; “Pierrot—help! it is a thief!”

They laughed: “He has robbed you of your purse!”

Then Truth stepped out, holding a mirror. “If he is an honest thief,” cried Truth, “Pierrot shall find him with this mirror!” but he only grinned, dusting the chalk from my black cloak.

“You see,” he said, “Truth is an honest thief, she brings you back your mirror.”

All eyes were turned on me.

“Arrest Truth!” I cried, forgetting it was not a mirror but a purse I lost, standing with Pierrot, there, where the throng was thickest in the street.

THE JESTER

“Was she fair?” I asked, but he only chuckled, listening to the bells jingling on his cap.

“Stabbed,” he tittered; “think of the long journey, the days of peril, the dreadful nights! Think how he wandered, for her sake, year after year, through hostile lands, yearning for kith and kin, yearning for her!”

“Stabbed,” he tittered, listening to the bells jingling on his cap.

“Was she fair?” I asked, but he only snarled, muttering to the bells jingling on his cap.

“She kissed him at the gate,” he tittered, “but in the hall his brother’s welcome touched his heart.”

“Was she fair?” I asked.

“Stabbed,” he chuckled; “think of the long journey, the days of peril, the dreadful nights! Think how he wandered, for her sake, year after year through hostile lands, yearning for kith and kin, yearning for her!”

“She kissed him at the gate, but in the hall his brother’s welcome touched his heart.”

“Was she fair?” I asked; but he only snarled, listening to the bells jingling in his cap.

THE GREEN ROOM

The Clown turned his powdered face to the mirror.

“If to be fair is to be beautiful,” he said, “who can compare with me in my white mask?”

“Who can compare with him in his white mask?” I asked of Death beside me.

“Who can compare with me?” said Death, “for I am paler still.”

“You are very beautiful,” sighed the Clown, turning his powdered face from the mirror.

THE LOVE TEST

“If it is true that you love,” said Love, “then wait no longer. Give her these jewels which would dishonor her and so dishonor you in loving one dishonored. If it is true that you love,” said Love, “then wait no longer.”

I took the jewels and went to her, but she trod upon them, sobbing: “Teach me to wait,—I love you!”

“Then wait, if it is true,” said Love.

THE STREET OF THE FOUR WINDS

Ferme tes yeux à demi,

Croise tes bras sur ton sein,

Et de ton coeur endormi

Chasse à jamais tout dessein.

[Half close your eyes,

Cross your arms over your breast,

And from your sleeping heart

Chase forever every plan.]

—Paul Verlaine,
“En Sourdine”

THE STREET OF THE FOUR WINDS

Je chante la nature,

Les étoiles du soir, les larmes du matin,

Les couchers de soleil à l’horizon lointain,

Le ciel qui parle au coeur d’existence future!

[I sing of nature,

The stars of the evening, the tears of morning,

The sunsets in the faraway horizon,

The sky that speaks to the heart of future existence!]

I

The animal paused on the threshold, interrogative, alert, ready for flight if necessary. Severn laid down his palette, and held out a hand of welcome. The cat remained motionless, her yellow eyes fastened upon Severn.

“Puss,” he said, in his low, pleasant voice, “come in.”

The tip of her thin tail twitched uncertainly.

“Come in,” he said again.

Apparently she found his voice reassuring, for she slowly settled upon all fours, her eyes still fastened upon him, her tail tucked under her gaunt flanks.

He rose from his easel smiling. She eyed him quietly, and when he walked toward her she watched him bend above her without a wince; her eyes followed his hand until it touched her head. Then she uttered a ragged mew.

It had long been Severn’s custom to converse with animals, probably because he lived so much alone; and now he said “What’s the matter, puss?”

Her timid eyes sought his.

“I understand,” he said gently, “you shall have it at once.”

Then moving quietly about he busied himself with the duties of a host, rinsed a saucer, filled it with the rest of the milk from the bottle on the window-sill, and kneeling down, crumbled a roll into the hollow of his hand.

The creature rose and crept toward the saucer.

With the handle of a palette knife he stirred the crumbs and milk together and stepped back as she thrust her nose into the mess. He watched her in silence. From time to time the saucer klinked upon the tiled floor as she reached for a morsel on the rim; and at last the bread was all gone, and her purple tongue traveled over every unlicked spot until the saucer shone like polished marble. Then she sat up, and coolly turning her back to him, began her ablutions.

“Keep it up,” said Severn much interested, “you need it.”

She flattened one ear but neither turned nor interrupted her toilet. As the grime was slowly removed Severn observed that nature had intended her for a white cat. Her fur had disappeared in patches, from disease or the chances of war, her tail was bony and her spine sharp. But what charms she had were becoming apparent under vigorous licking, and he waited until she had finished before re-opening the conversation. When at last she closed her eyes and folded her forepaws under her breast, he began again very gently: “Puss, tell me your troubles.”

At the sound of his voice she broke into a harsh rumbling which he recognized as an attempt to purr. He bent over to rub her cheek and she mewed again, an amiable inquiring little mew, to which he replied, “Certainly, you are greatly improved, and when you recover your plumage you will be a gorgeous bird.” Much flattered she stood up and marched around and around his legs, pushing her head between them and making pleased remarks, to which he responded with grave politeness.

“Now, what sent you here,” he said, “here into the Street of the Four Winds, and up five flights to the very door where you would be welcome? What was it that prevented your meditated flight when I turned from my canvas to encounter your yellow eyes? Are you a Latin Quarter cat as I am a Latin Quarter man? And why do you wear a rose-colored flowered garter buckled about your neck?” The cat had climbed into his lap and now sat purring as he passed his hand over her thin coat.

“Excuse me,” he continued in lazy soothing tones, harmonizing with her purring, “if I seem indelicate, but I cannot help musing on this rose-colored garter, flowered so quaintly and fastened with a silver clasp. For the clasp is silver; I can see the mint mark on the edge, as is prescribed by the law of the French Republic. Now, why is this garter woven of rose silk and delicately embroidered,—why is this silken garter with its silver clasp about your famished throat? Am I indiscreet when I inquire if its owner is your owner? Is she some aged dame living in memory of youthful vanities, fond, doting on you, decorating you with her intimate personal attire? The circumference of the garter would suggest this, for your neck is thin, and the garter fits you. But then again I notice—I notice most things—that the garter is capable of being much enlarged. These small silver-rimmed eyelets, of which I count five, are proof of that. And now I observe that the fifth eyelet is worn out, as though the tongue of the clasp were accustomed to lie there. That seems to argue a well-rounded form.”

The cat curled her toes in contentment. The street was very still outside.

He murmured on: “Why should your mistress decorate you with an article most necessary to her at all times? Anyway, at most times. How did she come to slip this bit of silk and silver about your neck? Was it the caprice of a moment,—when you, before you had lost your pristine plumpness, marched singing into her bedroom to bid her good-morning? Of course, and she sat up among the pillows, her coiled hair tumbling to her shoulders, as you sprang upon the bed purring: ‘Good-day, my lady.’ Oh, it is very easy to understand,” he yawned, resting his head on the back of the chair. The cat still purred, tightening and relaxing her padded claws over his knee.

“Shall I tell you all about her, cat? She is very beautiful—your mistress,” he murmured drowsily, “and her hair is heavy as burnished gold. I could paint her,—not on canvas—for I should need shades and tones and hues and dyes more splendid than the iris of a splendid rainbow. I could only paint her with closed eyes, for in dreams alone can such colors as I need be found. For her eyes, I must have azure from skies untroubled by a cloud—the skies of dreamland. For her lips, roses from the palaces of slumberland, and for her brow, snow-drifts from mountains which tower in fantastic pinnacles to the moons;—oh, much higher than our moon here,—the crystal moons of dreamland. She is—very—beautiful, your mistress.”

The words died on his lips and his eyelids drooped.

The cat too was asleep, her cheek turned up upon her wasted flank, her paws relaxed and limp.

II

“It is fortunate,” said Severn, sitting up and stretching, “that we have tided over the dinner hour, for I have nothing to offer you for supper but what may be purchased with one silver franc.”

The cat on his knee rose, arched her back, yawned, and looked up at him.

“What shall it be? A roast chicken with salad? No? Possibly you prefer beef? Of course,—and I shall try an egg and some white bread. Now for the wines. Milk for you? Good. I shall take a little water, fresh from the wood,” with a motion toward the bucket in the sink.

He put on his hat and left the room. The cat followed to the door, and after he had closed it behind him, she settled down, smelling at the cracks, and cocking one ear at every creak from the crazy old building.

The door below opened and shut. The cat looked serious, for a moment doubtful, and her ears flattened in nervous expectation. Presently, she rose with a jerk of her tail and started on a noiseless tour of the studio. She sneezed at a pot of turpentine, hastily retreating to the table, which she presently mounted, and having satisfied her curiosity concerning a roll of red modelling wax, returned to the door and sat down with her eyes on the crack over the threshold. Then she lifted her voice in a thin plaint.

When Severn returned he looked grave, but the cat, joyous and demonstrative, marched around him, rubbing her gaunt body against his legs, driving her head enthusiastically into his hand, and purring until her voice mounted to a squeal.

He placed a bit of meat, wrapped in brown paper, upon the table, and with a penknife cut it into shreds. The milk he took from a bottle which had served for medicine, and poured it into the saucer on the hearth.

The cat crouched before it, purring and lapping at the same time.

He cooked his egg and ate it with a slice of bread, watching her busy with the shredded meat, and when he had finished, and had filled and emptied a cup of water from the bucket in the sink, he sat down, taking her into his lap, where she at once curled up and began her toilet. He began to speak again, touching her caressingly at times by way of emphasis.

“Cat, I have found out where your mistress lives. It is not very far away;—it is here, under this same leaky roof, but in the north wing which I had supposed was uninhabited. My janitor tells me this. By chance, he is almost sober this evening. The butcher on the rue de Seine, where I bought your meat, knows you, and old Cabane the baker identified you with needless sarcasm. They tell me hard tales of your mistress which I shall not believe. They say she is idle and vain and pleasure-loving; they say she is hare-brained and reckless. The little sculptor on the ground floor, who was buying rolls from old Cabane, spoke to me to-night for the first time, although we have always bowed to each other. He said she was very good and very beautiful. He has only seen her once, and does not know her name. I thanked him;—I don’t know why I thanked him so warmly. Cabane said, ‘Into this cursed Street of the Four Winds, the four winds blow all things evil.’ The sculptor looked confused, but when he went out with his rolls, he said to me, ‘I am sure, Monsieur, that she is as good as she is beautiful.’”

The cat had finished her toilet and now, springing softly to the floor, went to the door and sniffed. He knelt beside her, and unclasping the garter held it for a moment in his hands. After a while he said: “There is a name engraved upon the silver clasp beneath the buckle. It is a pretty name, Sylvia Elven. Sylvia is a woman’s name, Elven is the name of a town. In Paris, in this quarter, above all, in this Street of the Four Winds, names are worn and put away as the fashions change with the seasons. I know the little town of Elven, for there I met Fate face to face and Fate was unkind. But do you know that in Elven Fate had another name, and that name was Sylvia?”

He replaced the garter and stood up looking down at the cat crouched before the closed door.

“The name of Elven has a charm for me. It tells me of meadows and clear rivers. The name of Sylvia troubles me like perfume from dead flowers.”

The cat mewed.

“Yes, yes,” he said soothingly, “I will take you back. Your Sylvia is not my Sylvia; the world is wide and Elven is not unknown. Yet in the darkness and filth of poorer Paris, in the sad shadows of this ancient house, these names are very pleasant to me.”

He lifted her in his arms and strode through the silent corridors to the stairs. Down five flights and into the moonlit court, past the little sculptor’s den, and then again in at the gate of the north wing and up the worm-eaten stairs he passed, until he came to a closed door. When he had stood knocking for a long time, something moved behind the door; it opened and he went in. The room was dark. As he crossed the threshold, the cat sprang from his arms into the shadows. He listened but heard nothing. The silence was oppressive and he struck a match. At his elbow stood a table and on the table a candle in a gilded candlestick. This he lighted, then looked around. The chamber was vast, the hangings heavy with embroidery. Over the fireplace towered a carved mantel, gray with the ashes of dead fires. In a recess by the deep-set windows stood a bed, from which the bed-clothes, soft and fine as lace, trailed to the polished floor. He lifted the candle above his head. A handkerchief lay at his feet. It was faintly perfumed. He turned toward the windows. In front of them was a canapé and over it were flung, pell-mell, a gown of silk, a heap of lace-like garments, white and delicate as spiders’ meshes, long, crumpled gloves, and, on the floor beneath, the stockings, the little pointed shoes, and one garter of rosy silk, quaintly flowered and fitted with a silver clasp. Wondering, he stepped forward and drew the heavy curtains from the bed. For a moment the candle flared in his hand; then his eyes met two other eyes, wide open, smiling, and the candle-flame flashed over hair heavy as gold.

She was pale, but not as white as he; her eyes were untroubled as a child’s; but he stared, trembling from head to foot while the candle flickered in his hand.

At last he whispered: “Sylvia, it is I.”

Again he said, “It is I.”

Then, knowing that she was dead, he kissed her on the mouth. And through the long watches of the night, the cat purred on his knee, tightening and relaxing her padded claws, until the sky paled above the Street of the Four Winds.

THE STREET OF THE FIRST SHELL

Be of Good Cheer, the Sullen Month will die,

And a young Moon requite us by and by:

Look how the Old one, meagre, bent, and wan

With age and Fast, is fainting from the sky.

—The Rubáiyát

THE STREET OF THE FIRST SHELL

I

The room was already dark. The high roofs opposite cut off what little remained of the December daylight. The girl drew her chair nearer the window and choosing a large needle, threaded it, knotting the thread over her fingers. Then she smoothed the baby garment across her knees, and bending, bit off the thread and drew the smaller needle from where it rested in the hem. When she had brushed away the stray threads and bits of lace, she laid it again over her knees caressingly. Then she slipped the threaded needle from her corsage and passed it through a button, but as the button spun down the thread, her hand faltered, the thread snapped, and the button rolled across the floor. She raised her head. Her eyes were fixed on a strip of waning light above the chimneys. From somewhere in the city came sounds like the distant beating of drums, and beyond, far beyond, a vague muttering, now growing, swelling, rumbling in the distance like the pounding of surf upon the rocks, now like the surf again, receding, growling, menacing. The cold had become intense, a bitter piercing cold which strained and snapped at joist and beam and turned the slush of yesterday to flint. From the street below every sound broke sharp and metallic—the clatter of sabots, the rattle of shutters or the rare sound of a human voice. The air was heavy, weighted with the black cold as with a pall. To breathe was painful, to move an effort.

In the desolate sky there was something that wearied, in the brooding clouds, something that saddened. It penetrated the freezing city cut by the freezing river, the splendid city with its towers and domes, its quays and bridges and its thousand spires. It entered the squares, it seized the avenues and the palaces, stole across bridges and crept among the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, gray under the gray of the December sky. Sadness, utter sadness. A fine icy sleet was falling, powdering the pavement with a tiny crystalline dust. It sifted against the window-panes and drifted in heaps along the sill. The light at the window had nearly failed, and the girl bent low over her work. Presently she raised her head, brushing the curls from her eyes.

“Jack?”

“Dearest?”

“Don’t forget to clean your palette.”

He said, “all right,” and picking up the palette, sat down upon the floor in front of the stove. His head and shoulders were in the shadow, but the firelight fell across his knees and glimmered red on the blade of the palette knife. Full in the firelight beside him stood a color-box. On the lid was carved,

J. TRENT.
École des Beaux Arts.
1870.

This inscription was ornamented with an American and a French flag.

The sleet blew against the window-panes, covering them with stars and diamonds, then, melting from the warmer air within, ran down and froze again in fern-like traceries.

A dog whined and the patter of small paws sounded on the zinc behind the stove.

“Jack, dear, do you think Hercules is hungry?”

The patter of paws was redoubled behind the stove.

“He’s whining,” she continued nervously, “and if it isn’t because he’s hungry it is because—”

Her voice faltered. A loud humming filled the air, the windows vibrated.

“Oh, Jack,” she cried, “another—” but her voice was drowned in the scream of a shell tearing through the clouds overhead.

“That is the nearest yet,” she murmured.

“Oh, no,” he answered cheerfully, “it probably fell way over by Montmartre,” and as she did not answer, he said again with exaggerated unconcern, “They wouldn’t take the trouble to fire at the Latin Quarter; anyway they haven’t a battery that can hurt it.”

After a while she spoke up brightly: “Jack, dear, when are you going to take me to see Monsieur West’s statues?”

“I will bet,” he said, throwing down his palette and walking over to the window beside her, “that Colette has been here to-day.”

“Why?” she asked, opening her eyes very wide. Then, “Oh, it’s too bad!—really, men are tiresome when they think they know everything! And I warn you that if Monsieur West is vain enough to imagine that Colette—”

From the north another shell came whistling and quavering through the sky, passing above them with long-drawn screech which left the windows singing.

“That,” he blurted out, “was too near for comfort.”

They were silent for a while, then he spoke again gayly: “Go on, Sylvia, and wither poor West,”: but she only sighed, “Oh, dear, I can never seem to get used to the shells.”

He sat down on the arm of the chair beside her.

Her scissors fell jingling to the floor; she tossed the unfinished frock after them, and putting both arms about his neck drew him down into her lap.

“Don’t go out to-night, Jack.”

He kissed her uplifted face; “You know I must; don’t make it hard for me.”

“But when I hear the shells and—and know you are out in the city—”

“But they all fall in Montmartre—”

“They may all fall in the Beaux Arts; you said yourself that two struck the Quai d’Orsay—”

“Mere accident—”

“Jack, have pity on me! Take me with you!”

“And who will there be to get dinner?”

She rose and flung herself on the bed.

“Oh, I can’t get used to it, and I know you must go, but I beg you not to be late to dinner. If you knew what I suffer! I—I—cannot help it, and you must be patient with me, dear.”

He said, “It is as safe there as it is in our own house.”

She watched him fill for her the alcohol lamp, and when he had lighted it and had taken his hat to go, she jumped up and clung to him in silence. After a moment he said: “Now, Sylvia, remember my courage is sustained by yours. Come, I must go!” She did not move and he repeated: “I must go.” Then she stepped back and he thought she was going to speak and waited, but she only looked at him, and, a little impatiently, he kissed her again, saying: “Don’t worry, dearest.”

When he had reached the last flight of stairs on his way to the street a woman hobbled out of the housekeeper’s lodge waving a letter and calling: “Monsieur Jack! Monsieur Jack! this was left by Monsieur Fallowby!”

He took the letter, and leaning on the threshold of the lodge, read it:

Dear Jack,

I believe Braith is dead broke and I’m sure Fallowby is. Braith swears he isn’t, and Fallowby swears he is, so you can draw your own conclusions. I’ve got a scheme for a dinner, and if it works, I will let you fellows in.

Yours faithfully,

WEST.

P.S.—Fallowby has shaken Hartman and his gang, thank the Lord! There is something rotten there,—or it may be he’s only a miser.

P.P.S.—I’m more desperately in love than ever, but I’m sure she does not care a straw for me.

“All right,” said Trent, with a smile, to the concierge; “but tell me, how is Papa Cottard?”

The old woman shook her head and pointed to the curtained bed in the lodge.

“Père Cottard!” he cried cheerily, “how goes the wound to-day?”

He walked over to the bed and drew the curtains. An old man was lying among the tumbled sheets.

“Better?” smiled Trent.

“Better,” repeated the man wearily; and, after a pause; “Have you any news, Monsieur Jack?”

“I haven’t been out to-day. I will bring you any rumor I may hear, though goodness knows I’ve got enough of rumors,” he muttered to himself. Then aloud: “Cheer up; you’re looking better.”

“And the sortie?”

“Oh, the sortie, that’s for this week. General Trochu sent orders last night.”

“It will be terrible.”

“It will be sickening,” thought Trent as he went out into the street and turned the corner toward the rue de Seine; “slaughter, slaughter, phew! I’m glad I’m not going.”

The street was almost deserted. A few women muffled in tattered military capes crept along the frozen pavement, and a wretchedly clad gamin hovered over the sewer hole on the corner of the Boulevard. A rope around his waist held his rags together. From the rope hung a rat, still warm and bleeding.

“There’s another in there,” he yelled at Trent; “I hit him but he got away.”

Trent crossed the street and asked: “How much?”

“Two francs for a quarter of a fat one; that’s what they give at the St. Germain Market.”

A violent fit of coughing interrupted him, but he wiped his face with the palm of his hand and looked cunningly at Trent.

“Last week you could buy a rat for six francs, but,” and here he swore vilely, “the rats have quit the rue de Seine and they kill them now over by the new hospital. I’ll let you have this for seven francs; I can sell it for ten in the Isle St. Louis.”

“You lie,” said Trent, “and let me tell you that if you try to swindle anybody in this quarter the people will make short work of you and your rats.”

He stood a moment eyeing the gamin, who pretended to snivel. Then he tossed him a franc, laughing. The child caught it, and thrusting it into his mouth wheeled about to the sewer hole. For a second he crouched, motionless, alert, his eyes on the bars of the drain, then leaping forward he hurled a stone into the gutter, and Trent left him to finish a fierce gray rat that writhed squealing at the mouth of the sewer.

“Suppose Braith should come to that,” he thought; “poor little chap”; and hurrying, he turned in the dirty passage des Beaux Arts and entered the third house to the left.

“Monsieur is at home,” quavered the old concierge.

Home? A garret absolutely bare, save for the iron bedstead in the corner and the iron basin and pitcher on the floor.

West appeared at the door, winking with much mystery and motioned Trent to enter. Braith, who was painting in bed to keep warm, looked up, laughed, and shook hands.

“Any news?”

The perfunctory question was answered as usual by: “nothing but the cannon.”

Trent sat down on the bed.

“Where on earth did you get that?” he demanded, pointing to a half-finished chicken nestling in a wash-basin.

West grinned.

“Are you millionaires, you two? Out with it.”

Braith, looking a little ashamed, began, “Oh, it’s one of West’s exploits,” but was cut short by West, who said he would tell the story himself.

“You see, before the siege, I had a letter of introduction to a ‘type’ here, a fat banker, German-American variety. You know the species, I see. Well, of course I forgot to present the letter, but this morning, judging it to be a favorable opportunity, I called on him.

“The villain lives in comfort;—fires, my boy!—fires in the ante-rooms! The Buttons finally condescends to carry my letter and card up, leaving me standing in the hallway, which I did not like, so I entered the first room I saw and nearly fainted at the sight of a banquet on a table by the fire. Down comes Buttons, very insolent. No, oh, no, his master, ‘is not at home, and in fact is too busy to receive letters of introduction just now; the siege, and many business difficulties—’

“I deliver a kick to Buttons, pick up this chicken from the table, toss my card on to the empty plate, and addressing Buttons as a species of Prussian pig, march out with the honors of war.”

Trent shook his head.

“I forgot to say that Hartman often dines there, and I draw my own conclusions,” continued West. “Now about this chicken, half of it is for Braith and myself, and half for Colette, but of course you will help me eat my part because I’m not hungry.”

“Neither am I,” began Braith, but Trent, with a smile at the pinched faces before him, shook his head saying, “What nonsense! You know I’m never hungry!”

West hesitated, reddened, and then slicing off Braith’s portion, but not eating any himself, said good-night, and hurried away to number 470 rue Serpente, where lived a pretty girl named Colette, orphan after Sedan, and Heaven alone knew where she got the roses in her cheeks, for the siege came hard on the poor.

“That chicken will delight her, but I really believe she’s in love with West,” said Trent. Then walking over to the bed: “See here, old man, no dodging, you know, how much have you left?”

The other hesitated and flushed.

“Come, old chap,” insisted Trent.

Braith drew a purse from beneath his bolster, and handed it to his friend with a simplicity that touched him.

“Seven sous,” he counted; “you make me tired! Why on earth don’t you come to me? I take it d———d ill, Braith! How many times must I go over the same thing and explain to you that because I have money it is my duty to share it, and your duty and the duty of every American to share it with me? You can’t get a cent, the city’s blockaded, and the American Minister has his hands full with all the German riff-raff and deuce knows what! Why don’t you act sensibly?”

“I—I will, Trent, but it’s an obligation that perhaps I can never even in part repay, I’m poor and—”

“Of course you’ll pay me! If I were a usurer I would take your talent for security. When you are rich and famous—”

“Don’t, Trent—”

“All right, only no more monkey business.”

He slipped a dozen gold pieces into the purse and tucking it again under the mattress smiled at Braith.

“How old are you?” he demanded.

“Sixteen.”

Trent laid his hand lightly on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m twenty-two, and I have the rights of a grandfather as far as you are concerned. You’ll do as I say until you’re twenty-one.”

“The siege will be over then I hope,” said Braith, trying to laugh, but the prayer in their hearts: “How long, O Lord, how long!” was answered by the swift scream of a shell soaring among the storm-clouds of that December night.

II

West, standing in the doorway of a house in the rue Serpente, was speaking angrily. He said he didn’t care whether Hartman liked it or not; he was telling him, not arguing with him.

“You call yourself an American!” he sneered; “Berlin and hell are full of that kind of American. You come loafing about Colette with your pockets stuffed with white bread and beef, and a bottle of wine at thirty francs and you can’t really afford to give a dollar to the American Ambulance and Public Assistance, which Braith does, and he’s half starved!”

Hartman retreated to the curbstone, but West followed him, his face like a thunder-cloud. “Don’t you dare to call yourself a countryman of mine,” he growled,—“no,—nor an artist either! Artists don’t worm themselves into the service of the Public Defense where they do nothing but feed like rats on the people’s food! And I’ll tell you now,” he continued dropping his voice, for Hartman had started as though stung, “you might better keep away from that Alsatian Brasserie and the smug-faced thieves who haunt it. You know what they do with suspects!”

“You lie, you hound!” screamed Hartman, and flung the bottle in his hand straight at West’s face. West had him by the throat in a second, and forcing him against the dead wall shook him wickedly.

“Now you listen to me,” he muttered, through his clenched teeth. “You are already a suspect and—I swear—I believe you are a paid spy! It isn’t my business to detect such vermin, and I don’t intend to denounce you, but understand this! Colette don’t like you and I can’t stand you, and if I catch you in this street again I’ll make it somewhat unpleasant. Get out, you sleek Prussian!”

Hartman had managed to drag a knife from his pocket, but West tore it from him and hurled him into the gutter. A gamin who had seen this, burst into a peal of laughter, which rattled harshly in the silent street. Then everywhere windows were raised and rows of haggard faces appeared demanding to know why people should laugh in the starving city.

“Is it a victory?” murmured one.

“Look at that,” cried West as Hartman picked himself up from the pavement, “look! you miser! look at those faces!” But Hartman gave him a look which he never forgot, and walked away without a word. Trent, who suddenly appeared at the corner, glanced curiously at West, who merely nodded toward his door saying, “come in; Fallowby’s upstairs.”

“What are you doing with that knife?” demanded Fallowby, as he and Trent entered the studio.

West looked at his wounded hand, which still clutched the knife, but saying: “cut myself by accident,” tossed it into a corner and washed the blood from his fingers.

Fallowby, fat and lazy, watched him without comment, but Trent, half divining how things had turned, walked over to Fallowby smiling.

“I’ve a bone to pick with you!” he said.

“Where is it? I’m hungry,” replied Fallowby with affected eagerness, but Trent, frowning, told him to listen.

“How much did I advance you a week ago?”

“Three hundred and eighty francs,” replied the other, with a squirm of contrition.

“Where is it?”

Fallowby began a series of intricate explanations which were soon cut short by Trent.

“I know; you blew it in;—you always blow it in. I don’t care a rap what you did before the siege: I know you are rich and have a right to dispose of your money as you wish to, and I also know that, generally speaking, it is none of my business. But now it is my business as I have to supply the funds until you get some more, which you won’t until the siege is ended one way or another. I wish to share what I have, but I won’t see it thrown out of the window. Oh, yes, of course I know you will reimburse me, but that isn’t the question; and, anyway, it’s the opinion of your friends, old man, that you will not be worse off for a little abstinence from fleshly pleasures. You are positively a freak in this famine-cursed city of skeletons!”

“I am rather stout,” he admitted.

“Is it true you are out of money?” demanded Trent.

“Yes, I am,” sighed the other.

“That roast sucking pig on the rue St. Honoré,—is it there yet?” continued Trent.

“Wh—at?” stammered the feeble one.

“Ah—I thought so! I caught you in ecstasy before that sucking pig at least a dozen times!”

Then laughing, he presented Fallowby with a roll of twenty franc pieces saying: “If these go for luxuries you must live on your own flesh,” and went over to aid West, who sat beside the wash-basin binding up his hand.

West suffered him to tie the knot, and then said: “You remember, yesterday, when I left you and Braith to take the chicken to Colette.”

“Chicken! Good heavens!” moaned Fallowby.

“Chicken,” repeated West, enjoying Fallowby’s grief;—“I—that is, I must explain that things are changed. Colette and I—are to be married—”

“What—what about the chicken?” groaned Fallowby.

“Shut up!” laughed Trent, and slipping his arm through West’s, walked to the stairway.

“The poor little thing,” said West, “just think, not a splinter of firewood for a week and wouldn’t tell me because she thought I needed it for my clay figure. Whew! When I heard it I smashed that smirking clay nymph to pieces, and the rest can freeze and be hanged!” After a moment he added timidly:—“Won’t you call on your way down and say bon soir? It’s No. 17.”

“Yes,” said Trent, and he went out softly closing the door behind.

He stopped on the third landing, lighted a match, scanned the numbers over the row of dingy doors, and knocked at No. 17.

“C’est toi Georges?” The door opened.

“Oh, pardon, Monsieur Jack, I thought it was Monsieur West”; then blushing furiously; “Oh, I see you have heard! Oh, thank you so much for your wishes, and I’m sure we love each other very much,—and I’m dying to see Sylvia and tell her and—”

“And what?” laughed Trent.

“I am very happy,” she sighed.

“He’s pure gold,” returned Trent, and then gayly: “I want you and George to come and dine with us to-night. It’s a little treat,—you see to-morrow is Sylvia’s fête. She will be nineteen. I have written to Thorn, and the Guernalecs will come with their cousin Odile. Fallowby has engaged not to bring anybody but himself.”

The girl accepted shyly, charging him with loads of loving messages to Sylvia, and he said good-night.

He started up the street, walking swiftly for it was bitter cold, and cutting across the rue de la Lune he entered the rue de Seine. The early winter night had fallen, almost without warning, but the sky was clear and myriads of stars glittered in the heavens. The bombardment had become furious—a steady rolling thunder from the Prussian cannon punctuated by the heavy shocks from Mont Valérien.

The shells streamed across the sky leaving trails like shooting stars, and now, as he turned to look back, rockets blue and red flared above the horizon from the Fort of Issy, and the Fortress of the North flamed like a bonfire.

“Good news!” a man shouted over by the Boulevard St. Germain. As if by magic the streets were filled with people,—shivering, chattering people with shrunken eyes.

“Jacques!” cried one,—“The Army of the Loire!”

“Eh! mon vieux, it has come then at last! I told thee! I told thee! To-morrow—to-night—who knows?”

“Is it true? Is it a sortie?”

Some one said: “Oh, God—a sortie—and my son?” Another cried: “to the Seine? They say one can see the signals of the Army of the Loire from the Pont Neuf.”

There was a child standing near Trent who kept repeating: “Mamma, Mamma, then to-morrow we may eat white bread?” and beside him, an old man swaying, stumbling, his shrivelled hands crushed to his breast, muttering as if insane.

“Could it be true? Who has heard the news? The shoemaker on the rue de Buci had it from a Mobile who had heard a Franctireur repeat it to a captain of the National Guard.”

Trent followed the throng surging through the rue de Seine to the river.

Rocket after rocket clove the sky, and now, from Montmartre, the cannon clanged, and the batteries on Montparnasse joined in with a crash. The bridge was packed with people.

Trent asked: “Who has seen the signals of the Army of the Loire?”

“We are waiting,” was the reply.

He looked toward the north. Suddenly the huge silhouette of the Arc de Triomphe sprang into black relief against the flash of a cannon. The boom of the gun rolled along the quay and the old bridge vibrated.

Again over by the Point du Jour a flash and heavy explosion shook the bridge, and then the whole eastern bastion of the fortifications blazed and crackled, sending a red flame into the sky.

“Has any one seen the signals yet?” he asked again.

“We are waiting,” was the reply.

“Yes, waiting,” murmured a man behind him, “waiting, sick, starved, freezing, but waiting. Is it a sortie? They go gladly. Is it to starve? They starve. They have no time to think of surrender. Are they heroes,—these Parisians? answer me, Trent!”

The American Ambulance surgeon turned about and scanned the parapets of the bridge.

“Any news, Doctor,” asked Trent mechanically.

“News?” said the doctor; “I don’t know any;—I haven’t time to know any. What are these people after?”

“They say that the Army of the Loire has signalled Mont Valérien.”

“Poor devils.” The doctor glanced about him for an instant, and then: “I’m so harried and worried that I don’t know what to do. After the last sortie we had the work of fifty ambulances on our poor little corps. To-morrow there’s another sortie and I wish you fellows could come over to headquarters. We may need volunteers. How is madame?” he added abruptly.

“Well,” replied Trent, “but she seems to grow more nervous every day. I ought to be with her now.”

“Take care of her,” said the doctor, then with a sharp look at the people: “I can’t stop now—good-night!” and he hurried away muttering, “poor devils!”

Trent leaned over the parapet and blinked at the black river surging through the arches. Dark objects, carried swiftly on the breast of the current, struck with a grinding tearing noise against the stone piers, spun around for an instant, and hurried away into the darkness. The ice from the Marne.

As he stood staring into the water, a hand was laid on his shoulder. “Hello, Southwark!” he cried, turning around; “this is a queer place for you!”

“Trent, I have something to tell you. Don’t stay here,—don’t believe in the Army of the Loire”: and the attaché of the American Legation slipped his arm through Trent’s and drew him toward the Louvre.

“Then it’s another lie!” said Trent bitterly.

“Worse—we know at the Legation—I can’t speak of it. But that’s not what I have to say. Something happened this afternoon. The Alsatian Brasserie was visited and an American named Hartman has been arrested. Do you know him?”

“I know a German who calls himself an American;—his name is Hartman.”

“Well, he was arrested about two hours ago. They mean to shoot him.”

“What!”

“Of course we at the Legation can’t allow them to shoot him off-hand, but the evidence seems conclusive.”

“Is he a spy?”

“Well, the papers seized in his rooms are pretty damning proofs, and besides he was caught, they say, swindling the Public Food Committee. He drew rations for fifty, how, I don’t know. He claims to be an American artist here and we have been obliged to take notice of it at the Legation. It’s a nasty affair.”

“To cheat the people at such a time is worse than robbing the poor-box,” cried Trent angrily. “Let them shoot him!”

“He’s an American citizen.”

“Yes, oh yes,” said the other with bitterness. “American citizenship is a precious privilege when every goggle-eyed German—” His anger choked him.

Southwark shook hands with him warmly. “It can’t be helped, we must own the carrion. I am afraid you may be called upon to identify him as an American artist,” he said with a ghost of a smile on his deep-lined face; and walked away through the Cours la Reine.

Trent swore silently for a moment and then drew out his watch. Seven o’clock. “Sylvia will be anxious,” he thought, and hurried back to the river. The crowd still huddled shivering on the bridge, a sombre pitiful congregation, peering out into the night for the signals of the Army of the Loire: and their hearts beat time to the pounding of the guns, their eyes lighted with each flash from the bastions, and hope rose with the drifting rockets.

A black cloud hung over the fortifications. From horizon to horizon the cannon smoke stretched in wavering bands, now capping the spires and domes with cloud, now blowing in streamers and shreds along the streets, now descending from the housetops, enveloping quays, bridges, and river, in a sulphurous mist. And through the smoke pall the lightning of the cannon played while from time to time a rift above showed a fathomless black vault set with stars.

He turned again into the rue de Seine, that sad abandoned street, with its rows of closed shutters and desolate ranks of unlighted lamps. He was a little nervous and wished once or twice for a revolver, but the slinking forms which passed him in the darkness were too weak with hunger to be dangerous, he thought, and he passed on unmolested to his doorway. But there somebody sprang at his throat. Over and over the icy pavement he rolled with his assailant, tearing at the noose about his neck, and then with a wrench sprang to his feet.

“Get up,” he cried to the other.

Slowly and with great deliberation, a small gamin picked himself out of the gutter and surveyed Trent with disgust.

“That’s a nice clean trick,” said Trent; “a whelp of your age! You’ll finish against a dead wall! Give me that cord!”

The urchin handed him the noose without a word.

Trent struck a match and looked at his assailant. It was the rat-killer of the day before.

“H’m! I thought so,” he muttered.

“Tiens, c’est toi?” said the gamin tranquilly.

The impudence, the overpowering audacity of the ragamuffin took Trent’s breath away.

“Do you know, you young strangler,” he gasped, “that they shoot thieves of your age?”

The child turned a passionless face to Trent.

“Shoot, then.”

That was too much, and he turned on his heel and entered his hôtel.

Groping up the unlighted stairway, he at last reached his own landing and felt about in the darkness for the door. From his studio came the sound of voices, West’s hearty laugh and Fallowby’s chuckle, and at last he found the knob and, pushing back the door, stood a moment confused by the light.

“Hello, Jack!” cried West, “you’re a pleasant creature, inviting people to dine and letting them wait. Here’s Fallowby weeping with hunger—”

“Shut up,” observed the latter, “perhaps he’s been out to buy a turkey.”

“He’s been out garroting, look at his noose!” laughed Guernalec.

“So now we know where you get your cash!” added West; “vive le coup du Père François!”

Trent shook hands with everybody and laughed at Sylvia’s pale face.

“I didn’t mean to be late; I stopped on the bridge a moment to watch the bombardment. Were you anxious, Sylvia?”

She smiled and murmured, “Oh, no!” but her hand dropped into his and tightened convulsively.

“To the table!” shouted Fallowby, and uttered a joyous whoop.

“Take it easy,” observed Thorne, with a remnant of manners; “you are not the host, you know.”

Marie Guernalec, who had been chattering with Colette, jumped up and took Thorne’s arm and Monsieur Guernalec drew Odile’s arm through his.

Trent, bowing gravely, offered his own arm to Colette, West took in Sylvia, and Fallowby hovered anxiously in the rear.

“You march around the table three times singing the Marseillaise,” explained Sylvia, “and Monsieur Fallowby pounds on the table and beats time.”

Fallowby suggested that they could sing after dinner, but his protest was drowned in the ringing chorus—

Aux armes!
Formez vos bataillons!

Around the room they marched singing,

Marchons! Marchons!

with all their might, while Fallowby with very bad grace, hammered on the table, consoling himself a little with the hope that the exercise would increase his appetite. Hercules, the black and tan, fled under the bed, from which retreat he yapped and whined until dragged out by Guernalec and placed in Odile’s lap.

“And now,” said Trent gravely, when everybody was seated, “listen!” and he read the menu.

Beef Soup à la Siège de Paris.

——————

Fish
Sardines à la père Lachaise.
(White Wine)

——————

Rôti (Red Wine).
Fresh Beef à la sortie.

——————

Vegetables.
Canned Beans à la chasse-pot,
Canned Peas Gravelotte,
Potatoes Irlandaises,
Miscellaneous.

——————

Cold Corned Beef à la Thiers,
Stewed Prunes à la Garibaldi.

——————

Dessert.
Dried prunes—White bread,
Currant Jelly,
Tea—Café,
Liqueurs,
Pipes and Cigarettes.

Fallowby applauded frantically, and Sylvia served the soup.

“Isn’t it delicious?” sighed Odile.

Marie Guernalec sipped her soup in rapture.

“Not at all like horse, and I don’t care what they say, horse doesn’t taste like beef,” whispered Colette to West. Fallowby, who had finished, began to caress his chin and eye the tureen.

“Have some more, old chap?” inquired Trent.

“Monsieur Fallowby cannot have any more,” announced Sylvia; “I am saving this for the concierge.” Fallowby transferred his eyes to the fish.

The sardines, hot from the grille, were a great success. While the others were eating Sylvia ran downstairs with the soup for the old concierge and her husband, and when she hurried back, flushed and breathless, and had slipped into her chair with a happy smile at Trent, that young man arose, and silence fell over the table. For an instant he looked at Sylvia and thought he had never seen her so beautiful.

“You all know,” he began, “that to-day is my wife’s nineteenth birthday—”

Fallowby, bubbling with enthusiasm, waved his glass in circles about his head to the terror of Odile and Colette, his neighbours, and Thorne, West and Guernalec refilled their glasses three times before the storm of applause which the toast of Sylvia had provoked, subsided.

Three times the glasses were filled and emptied to Sylvia, and again to Trent who protested.

“This is irregular,” he cried, “the next toast is to the twin Republics, France and America?”

“To the Republics! To the Republics!” they cried, and the toast was drunk amid shouts of “Vive la France! Vive l’Amérique! Vive la Nation!”

Then Trent, with a smile at West, offered the toast, “To a Happy Pair!” and everybody understood, and Sylvia leaned over and kissed Colette while Trent bowed to West.

The beef was eaten in comparative calm, but when it was finished and a portion of it set aside for the old people below, Trent cried: “Drink to Paris! May she rise from her ruins and crush the invader!” and the cheers rang out, drowning for a moment the monotonous thunder of the Prussian guns.

Pipes and cigarettes were lighted, and Trent listened an instant to the animated chatter around him, broken by ripples of laughter from the girls or the mellow chuckle of Fallowby. Then he turned to West.

“There is going to be a sortie to-night,” he said. “I saw the American Ambulance surgeon just before I came in and he asked me to speak to you fellows. Any aid we can give him will not come amiss.”

Then dropping his voice and speaking in English, “As for me, I shall go out with the ambulance to-morrow morning. There is of course no danger, but it’s just as well to keep it from Sylvia.”

West nodded. Thorne and Guernalec, who had heard, broke in and offered assistance, and Fallowby volunteered with a groan.

“All right,” said Trent rapidly,—“no more now, but meet me at Ambulance headquarters to-morrow morning at eight.”

Sylvia and Colette, who were becoming uneasy at the conversation in English, now demanded to know what they were talking about.

“What does a sculptor usually talk about?” cried West, with a laugh.

Odile glanced reproachfully at Thorne, her fiancé.

“You are not French, you know, and it is none of your business, this war,” said Odile with much dignity.

Thorne looked meek, but West assumed an air of outraged virtue.

“It seems,” he said to Fallowby, “that a fellow cannot discuss the beauties of Greek sculpture in his mother tongue, without being openly suspected.”

Colette placed her hand over his mouth and turning to Sylvia, murmured, “They are horridly untruthful, these men.”

“I believe the word for ambulance is the same in both languages,” said Marie Guernalec saucily; “Sylvia, don’t trust Monsieur Trent.”

“Jack,” whispered Sylvia, “promise me—”

A knock at the studio door interrupted her.

“Come in!” cried Fallowby, but Trent sprang up, and opening the door, looked out. Then with a hasty excuse to the rest, he stepped into the hall-way and closed the door.

When he returned he was grumbling.

“What is it, Jack?” cried West.

“What is it?” repeated Trent savagely; “I’ll tell you what it is. I have received a dispatch from the American Minister to go at once and identify and claim, as a fellow-countryman and a brother artist, a rascally thief and a German spy!”

“Don’t go,” suggested Fallowby.

“If I don’t they’ll shoot him at once.”

“Let them,” growled Thorne.

“Do you fellows know who it is?”

“Hartman!” shouted West, inspired.

Sylvia sprang up deathly white, but Odile slipped her arm around her and supported her to a chair, saying calmly, “Sylvia has fainted,—it’s the hot room,—bring some water.”

Trent brought it at once.

Sylvia opened her eyes, and after a moment rose, and supported by Marie Guernalec and Trent, passed into the bedroom.

It was the signal for breaking up, and everybody came and shook hands with Trent, saying they hoped Sylvia would sleep it off and that it would be nothing.

When Marie Guernalec took leave of him, she avoided his eyes, but he spoke to her cordially and thanked her for her aid.

“Anything I can do, Jack?” inquired West, lingering, and then hurried downstairs to catch up with the rest.

Trent leaned over the banisters, listening to their footsteps and chatter, and then the lower door banged and the house was silent. He lingered, staring down into the blackness, biting his lips; then with an impatient movement, “I am crazy!” he muttered, and lighting a candle, went into the bedroom. Sylvia was lying on the bed. He bent over her, smoothing the curly hair on her forehead.

“Are you better, dear Sylvia?”

She did not answer, but raised her eyes to his. For an instant he met her gaze, but what he read there sent a chill to his heart and he sat down covering his face with his hands.

At last she spoke in a voice, changed and strained,—a voice which he had never heard, and he dropped his hands and listened, bolt upright in his chair.

“Jack, it has come at last. I have feared it and trembled,—ah! how often have I lain awake at night with this on my heart and prayed that I might die before you should ever know of it! For I love you, Jack, and if you go away I cannot live. I have deceived you;—it happened before I knew you, but since that first day when you found me weeping in the Luxembourg and spoke to me, Jack, I have been faithful to you in every thought and deed. I loved you from the first, and did not dare to tell you this—fearing that you would go away; and since then my love has grown—grown—and oh! I suffered!—but I dared not tell you. And now you know, but you do not know the worst. For him—now—what do I care? He was cruel—oh, so cruel!”

She hid her face in her arms.

“Must I go on? Must I tell you—can you not imagine, oh! Jack—”

He did not stir; his eyes seemed dead.

“I—I was so young, I knew nothing, and he said—said that he loved me—”

Trent rose and struck the candle with his clenched fist, and the room was dark.

The bells of St. Sulpice tolled the hour, and she started up, speaking with feverish haste,—“I must finish! When you told me you loved me—you—you asked me nothing; but then, even then, it was too late, and that other life which binds me to him, must stand forever between you and me! For there is another whom he has claimed, and is good to. He must not die,—they cannot shoot him, for that other’s sake!”

Trent sat motionless, but his thoughts ran on in an interminable whirl.

Sylvia, little Sylvia, who shared with him his student life,—who bore with him the dreary desolation of the siege without complaint,—this slender blue-eyed girl whom he was so quietly fond of, whom he teased or caressed as the whim suited, who sometimes made him the least bit impatient with her passionate devotion to him,—could this be the same Sylvia who lay weeping there in the darkness?

Then he clinched his teeth. “Let him die! Let him die!”—but then,—for Sylvia’s sake, and,—for that other’s sake,—Yes, he would go,—he must go,—his duty was plain before him. But Sylvia,—he could not be what he had been to her, and yet a vague terror seized him, now all was said. Trembling, he struck a light.

She lay there, her curly hair tumbled about her face, her small white hands pressed to her breast.

He could not leave her, and he could not stay. He never knew before that he loved her. She had been a mere comrade, this girl wife of his. Ah! he loved her now with all his heart and soul, and he knew it, only when it was too late. Too late? Why? Then he thought of that other one, binding her, linking her forever to the creature, who stood in danger of his life. With an oath he sprang to the door, but the door would not open,—or was it that he pressed it back,—locked it,—and flung himself on his knees beside the bed, knowing that he dared not for his life’s sake leave what was his all in life.

III

It was four in the morning when he came out of the Prison of the Condemned with the Secretary of the American Legation. A knot of people had gathered around the American Minister’s carriage, which stood in front of the prison, the horses stamping and pawing in the icy street, the coachman huddled on the box, wrapped in furs. Southwark helped the Secretary into the carriage, and shook hands with Trent, thanking him for coming.

“How the scoundrel did stare,” he said; “your evidence was worse than a kick, but it saved his skin for the moment at least,—and prevented complications.”

The Secretary sighed; “we have done our part. Now let them prove him a spy and we wash our hands of him. Jump in, Captain! Come along Trent!”

“I have a word to say to Captain Southwark, I won’t detain him,” said Trent hastily, and dropping his voice, “Southwark, help me now. You know the story from the blackguard. You know the—the child is at his rooms. Get it, and take it to my own apartment, and if he is shot, I will provide a home for it.”

“I understand,” said the Captain gravely.

“Will you do this at once?”

“At once,” he replied.

Their hands met in a warm clasp and then Captain Southwark climbed into the carriage motioning Trent to follow; but he shook his head saying, “good-bye!” and the carriage rolled away.

He watched the carriage to the end of the street, then started toward his own quarter, but after a step or two, hesitated, stopped and finally turned away in the opposite direction. Something—perhaps it was the sight of the prisoner he had so recently confronted nauseated him. He felt the need of solitude and quiet to collect his thoughts. The events of the evening had shaken him terribly, but he would walk it off, forget, bury everything, and then go back to Sylvia. He started on swiftly, and for a time the bitter thoughts seemed to fade, but when he paused at last, breathless, under the Arc de Triomphe, the bitterness and the wretchedness of the whole thing—yes, of his whole misspent life came back with a pang. Then the face of the prisoner, stamped with the horrible grimace of fear, grew in the shadows before his eyes.

Sick at heart he wandered up and down under the great Arc, striving to occupy his mind, peering up at the sculptured cornices to read the names of the heroes and battles which he knew were engraved there, but always the ashen face of Hartman followed him, grinning with terror!—or was it terror?—was it not triumph?— At the thought he leaped like a man who feels a knife at his throat, but after a savage tramp around the square, came back again and sat down to battle with his misery.

The air was cold, but his cheeks were burning with angry shame. Shame? Why? Was it because he had married a girl whom chance had made a mother? Did he love her? Was this miserable bohemian existence then his end and aim in life? He turned his eyes upon the secrets of his heart, and read an evil story,—the story of the past, and he covered his face for shame, while, keeping time to the dull pain throbbing in his head, his heart beat out the story for the future. Shame and disgrace.

Roused at last from a lethargy which had begun to numb the bitterness of his thoughts, he raised his head and looked about. A sudden fog had settled in the streets; the arches of the Arc were choked with it. He would go home. A great horror of being alone seized him. But he was not alone. The fog was peopled with phantoms. All around him in the mist they moved, drifting through the arches in lengthening lines, and vanished, while from the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized, and bore him with them through the mist. Down a dim avenue, through lanes and alleys white with fog, they moved, and if they spoke their voices were dull as the vapor which shrouded them. At last in front, a bank of masonry and earth cut by a massive iron barred gate towered up in the fog. Slowly and more slowly they glided, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. Then all movement ceased. A sudden breeze stirred the fog. It wavered and eddied. Objects became more distinct. A pallor crept above the horizon, touching the edges of the watery clouds, and drew dull sparks from a thousand bayonets. Bayonets—they were everywhere, cleaving the fog or flowing beneath it in rivers of steel. High on the wall of masonry and earth a great gun loomed, and around it figures moved in silhouettes. Below, a broad torrent of bayonets swept through the iron barred gateway, out into the shadowy plain. It became lighter. Faces grew more distinct among the marching masses and he recognized one.

“You, Philippe!”

The figure turned its head.

Trent cried, —“is there room for me?” but the other only waved his arm in a vague adieu and was gone with the rest. Presently the cavalry began to pass, squadron on squadron, crowding out into the darkness; then many cannon, then an ambulance, then again the endless lines of bayonets. Beside him a cuirassier sat on his steaming horse, and in front, among a group of mounted officers he saw a general, with the astrakan collar of his dolman turned up about his bloodless face.

Some women were weeping near him and one was struggling to force a loaf of black bread into a soldier’s haversack. The soldier tried to aid her, but the sack was fastened, and his rifle bothered him, so Trent held it, while the woman unbuttoned the sack and forced in the bread, now all wet with her tears. The rifle was not heavy. Trent found it wonderfully manageable. Was the bayonet sharp? He tried it. Then a sudden longing, a fierce, imperative desire took possession of him.

“Chouette!” cried a gamin, clinging to the barred gate; “encore toi mon vieux?”

Trent looked up, and the rat-killer laughed in his face. But when the soldier had taken the rifle again, and thanking him, ran hard to catch his battalion, he plunged into the throng about the gateway.

“Are you going?” he cried to a marine who sat in the gutter bandaging his foot.

“Yes.”

Then a girl,—a mere child—caught him by the hand and led him into the café which faced the gate. The room was crowded with soldiers, some, white and silent, sitting on the floor, others groaning on the leather-covered settees. The air was sour and suffocating.

“Choose!” said the girl with a little gesture of pity; “they can’t go!”

In a heap of clothing on the floor he found a capote and képi.

She helped him buckle his knapsack, cartridge box, and belt, and showed him how to load the chasse-pot rifle, holding it on her knees.

When he thanked her she started to her feet.

“You are a foreigner!”

“American,” he said, moving toward the door, but the child barred his way.

“I am a Bretonne. My father is up there with the cannon of the marine. He will shoot you if you are a spy.”

They faced each other for a moment. Then sighing, he bent over and kissed the child. “Pray for France, little one,” he murmured, and she repeated with a pale smile: “for France and you, beau Monsieur.”

He ran across the street and through the gateway. Once outside, he edged into line and shouldered his way along the road. A corporal passed, looked at him, repassed, and finally called an officer. “You belong to the 60th,” growled the corporal looking at the number on his képi.

“We have no use for Franc-tireurs,” added the officer, catching sight of his black trousers.

“I wish to volunteer in place of a comrade,” said Trent, and the officer shrugged his shoulders and passed on.

Nobody paid much attention to him, one or two merely glancing at his trousers. The road was deep with slush and mud ploughed and torn by wheels and hoofs. A soldier in front of him wrenched his foot in an icy rut and dragged himself to the edge of the embankment groaning. The plain on either side of them was gray with melting snow. Here and there behind dismantled hedge-rows stood wagons, bearing white flags with red crosses. Sometimes the driver was a priest in rusty hat and gown, sometimes a crippled Mobile. Once they passed a wagon driven by a Sister of Charity. Silent empty houses with great rents in their walls, and every window blank, huddled along the road. Further on, within the zone of danger, nothing of human habitation remained except here and there a pile of frozen bricks or a blackened cellar choked with snow.

For some time Trent had been annoyed by the man behind him who kept treading on his heels. Convinced at last that it was intentional, he turned to remonstrate and found himself face to face with a fellow-student from the Beaux Arts. Trent stared.

“I thought you were in the hospital!”

The other shook his head, pointing to his bandaged jaw.

“I see, you can’t speak. Can I do anything?”

The wounded man rummaged in his haversack and produced a crust of black bread.

“He can’t eat it, his jaw is smashed, and he wants you to chew it for him,” said the soldier next to him.

Trent took the crust, and grinding it in his teeth morsel by morsel, passed it back to the starving man.

From time to time, mounted orderlies sped to the front covering them with slush. It was a chilly silent march through sodden meadows wreathed in fog. Along the railroad embankment across the ditch, another column moved parallel to their own. Trent watched it, a sombre mass, now distinct, now vague, now blotted out in a puff of fog. Once for half an hour he lost it, but when again it came into view, he noticed a thin line detach itself from the flank, and, bellying in the middle, swing rapidly to the west. At the same moment a prolonged crackling broke out in the fog in front. Other lines began to slough off from the column, swinging east and west, and the crackling became continuous. A battery passed at full gallop and he drew back with his comrades to give it way. It went into action a little to the right of his battalion, and as the shot from the first rifled piece boomed through the mist, the cannon from the fortifications opened with a mighty roar. An officer galloped by shouting something which Trent did not catch, but he saw the ranks in front suddenly part company with his own, and disappear in the twilight. More officers rode up and stood beside him peering into the fog. Away in front the crackling had become one prolonged crash. It was dreary waiting. Trent chewed some bread for the man behind, who tried to swallow it, and after a while shook his head, motioning Trent to eat the rest himself. A corporal offered him a little brandy and he drank it, but when he turned around to return the flask, the corporal was lying on the ground. Alarmed, he looked at the soldier next to him, who shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth to speak, but something struck him and he rolled over and over into the ditch below. At that moment the horse of one of the officers gave a bound and backed into the battalion, lashing out with his heels. One man was ridden down; another was kicked in the chest and hurled through the ranks. The officer sank his spurs into the horse and forced him to the front again, where he stood trembling. The cannonade seemed to draw nearer. A staff officer, riding slowly up and down the battalion suddenly collapsed in his saddle and clung to his horse’s mane. One of his boots dangled, crimsoned and dripping, from the stirrup. Then out of the mist in front, men came running. The roads, the fields, the ditches were full of them, and many of them fell. For an instant he imagined he saw horsemen riding about like ghosts in the vapors beyond, and a man behind him cursed horribly, declaring he too had seen them and that they were Uhlans; but the battalion stood inactive and the mist fell again over the meadows.

The colonel sat heavily upon his horse, his bullet-shaped head buried in the astrakan collar of his dolman, his fat legs sticking straight out in the stirrups.

The buglers clustered about him with bugles poised, and behind him a staff officer in a pale blue jacket, smoked a cigarette and chatted with a captain of hussars. From the road in front came the sound of furious galloping and an orderly reined up beside the colonel, who motioned him to the rear without turning his head. Then on the left a confused murmur arose which ended in a shout. A hussar passed like the wind, followed by another and another, and then squadron after squadron whirled by them into the sheeted mists. At that instant the colonel reared in his saddle, the bugles clanged and the whole battalion scrambled down the embankment, over the ditch and started across the soggy meadow. Almost at once Trent lost his cap. Something snatched it from his head, he thought it was a tree branch. A good many of his comrades rolled over in the slush and ice, and he imagined that they had slipped. One pitched right across his path and he stopped to help him up, but the man screamed when he touched him and an officer shouted, “forward! forward!” so he ran on again. It was a long jog through the mist, and he was often obliged to shift his rifle. When at last they lay panting behind the railroad embankment, he looked about him. He had felt the need of action, of a desperate physical struggle, of killing and crushing. He had been seized with a desire to fling himself among masses and tear right and left. He longed to fire, to use the thin sharp bayonet on his chasse-pot. He had not expected this. He wished to become exhausted, to struggle and cut until incapable of lifting his arm. Then he had intended to go home. He heard a man say that half the battalion had gone down in the charge, and he saw another examining a corpse under the embankment. The body, still warm, was clothed in a strange uniform, but even when he noticed the spiked helmet lying a few inches further away, he did not realize what had happened.

The colonel sat on his horse a few feet to the left, his eyes sparkling under the crimson képi. Trent heard him reply to an officer: “I can hold it, but another charge, and I won’t have enough men left to sound a bugle.”

“Were the Prussians here?” Trent asked of a soldier who sat wiping the blood trickling from his hair.

“Yes. The hussars cleaned them out. We caught their cross fire.”

“We are supporting a battery on the embankment,” said another.

Then the battalion crawled over the embankment and moved along the lines of twisted rails. Trent rolled up his trousers and tucked them into his woollen socks: but they halted again, and some of the men sat down on the dismantled railroad track. Trent looked for his wounded comrade from the Beaux Arts. He was standing in his place, very pale. The cannonade had become terrific. For a moment the mist lifted. He caught a glimpse of the first battalion motionless on the railroad track in front, of regiments on either flank, and then, as the fog settled again, the drums beat and the music of the bugles began away on the extreme left. A restless movement passed among the troops, the colonel threw up his arm, the drums rolled, and the battalion moved off through the fog. They were near the front now, for the battalion was firing as it advanced. Ambulances galloped along the base of the embankment to the rear, and the hussars passed and repassed like phantoms. They were in the front at last, for all about them was movement and turmoil, while from the fog, close at hand, came cries and groans and crashing volleys. Shells fell everywhere, bursting along the embankment, splashing them with frozen slush. Trent was frightened. He began to dread the unknown, which lay there crackling and flaming in obscurity. The shock of the cannon sickened him. He could even see the fog light up with a dull orange as the thunder shook the earth. It was near, he felt certain, for the colonel shouted “forward!” and the first battalion was hastening into it. He felt its breath, he trembled, but hurried on. A fearful discharge in front terrified him. Somewhere in the fog men were cheering, and the colonel’s horse, streaming with blood plunged about in the smoke.

Another blast and shock, right in his face, almost stunned him, and he faltered. All the men to the right were down. His head swam; the fog and smoke stupefied him. He put out his hand for a support and caught something. It was the wheel of a gun carriage, and a man sprang from behind it, aiming a blow at his head with a rammer, but stumbled back shrieking with a bayonet through his neck, and Trent knew that he had killed. Mechanically he stooped to pick up his rifle, but the bayonet was still in the man who lay, beating with red hands against the sod. It sickened him and he leaned on the cannon. Men were fighting all around him now, and the air was foul with smoke and sweat. Somebody seized him from behind and another in front, but others in turn seized them or struck them solid blows. The click! click! click! of bayonets infuriated him, and he grasped the rammer and struck out blindly until it was shivered to pieces.

A man threw his arm around his neck and bore him to the ground, but he throttled him and raised himself on his knees. He saw a comrade seize the cannon, and fall across it with his skull crushed in; he saw the colonel tumble clean out of his saddle into the mud; then consciousness fled.

When he came to himself, he was lying on the embankment among the twisted rails. On every side huddled men who cried out and cursed and fled away into the fog, and he staggered to his feet and followed them. Once he stopped to help a comrade with a bandaged jaw, who could not speak but clung to his arm for a time and then fell dead in the freezing mire; and again he aided another, who groaned: “Trent c’est moi—Philippe,” until a sudden volley in the midst relieved him of his charge.

An icy wind swept down from the heights, cutting the fog into shreds. For an instant, with an evil leer the sun peered through the naked woods of Vincennes, sank like a blood clot in the battery smoke, lower, lower, into the blood-soaked plain.

IV

When midnight sounded from the belfry of St. Sulpice the gates of Paris were still choked with fragments of what had once been an army.

They entered with the night, a sullen horde, spattered with slime, faint with hunger and exhaustion. There was little disorder at first and the throng at the gates parted silently as the troops tramped along the freezing streets. Confusion came as the hours passed. Swiftly and more swiftly, crowding squadron after squadron and battery on battery, horses plunging and caissons jolting, the remnants from the front surged through the gates, a chaos of cavalry and artillery struggling for the right of way. Close upon them stumbled the infantry; here a skeleton of a regiment marching with a desperate attempt at order, there a riotous mob of Mobiles crushing their way to the streets, then a turmoil of horsemen, cannon, troops without officers, officers without men, then again a line of ambulances, the wheels groaning under their heavy loads.

Dumb with misery the crowd looked on.

All through the day the ambulances had been arriving, and all day long the ragged throng whimpered and shivered by the barriers. At noon the crowd was increased ten-fold, filling the squares about the gates, and swarming over the inner fortifications.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the German batteries suddenly wreathed themselves in smoke, and the shells fell fast on Montparnasse. At twenty minutes after four two projectiles struck a house in the rue de Bac, and a moment later the first shell fell in the Latin Quarter.

Braith was painting in bed when West came in very much scared.

“I wish you would come down; our house has been knocked into a cocked hat, and I’m afraid that some of the pillagers may take it into their heads to pay us a visit to-night.”

Braith jumped out of bed and bundled himself into a garment which had once been an overcoat.

“Anybody hurt?” he inquired, struggling with a sleeve full of dilapidated lining.

“No. Colette is barricaded in the cellar, and the concierge ran away to the fortifications. There will be a rough gang there if the bombardment keeps up. You might help us—”

“Of course,” said Braith; but it was not until they had reached the rue Serpente and had turned in the passage which led to West’s cellar, that the latter cried: “Have you seen Jack Trent to-day?”

“No,” replied Braith looking troubled, “he was not at Ambulance Headquarters.”

“He stayed to take care of Sylvia, I suppose.”

A bomb came crashing through the roof of a house at the end of the alley and burst in the basement, showering the street with slate and plaster. A second struck a chimney and plunged into the garden, followed by an avalanche of bricks, and another exploded with a deafening report in the next street.

They hurried along the passage to the steps which led to the cellar. Here again Braith stopped.

“Don’t you think I had better run up to see if Jack and Sylvia are well intrenched? I can get back before dark.”

“No. Go in and find Colette and I’ll go.”

“No, no, let me go, there’s no danger.”

“I know it,” replied West calmly; and dragging Braith into the alley, pointed to the cellar steps. The iron door was barred.

“Colette! Colette!” he called. The door swung inward, and the girl sprang up the stairs to meet them. At that instant, Braith, glancing behind him, gave a startled cry, and pushing the two before him into the cellar jumped down after them and slammed the iron door. A few seconds later a heavy jar from the outside shook the hinges.

“They are here,” muttered West, very pale.

“That door,” observed Colette calmly, “will hold forever.”

Braith examined the low iron structure, now trembling with the blows rained on it from without. West glanced anxiously at Colette, who displayed no agitation, and this comforted him.

“I don’t believe they will spend much time here,” said Braith; “they only rummage in cellars for spirits, I imagine.”

“Unless they hear that valuables are buried there.”

“But surely nothing is buried here?” exclaimed Braith uneasily.

“Unfortunately there is,” growled West. “That miserly landlord of mine—”

A crash from the outside followed by a yell cut him short; then blow after blow shook the doors until there came a sharp snap, a clinking of metal and a triangular bit of iron fell inwards, leaving a hole through which struggled a ray of light.

Instantly West knelt, and shoving his revolver through the aperture fired every cartridge. For a moment the alley resounded with the racket of the revolver, then absolute silence followed.

Presently a single questioning blow fell upon the door, and a moment later another and another, and then a sudden crack zigzagged across the iron plate.

“Here,” said West, seizing Colette by the wrist, “you follow me, Braith!” and he ran swiftly toward a circular spot of light at the further end of the cellar. The spot of light came from a barred man-hole above. West motioned Braith to mount on his shoulders,

“Push it over. You must!”

With little effort Braith lifted the barred cover, scrambled out on his stomach, and easily raised Colette from West’s shoulders.

“Quick, old chap!” cried the latter.

Braith twisted his legs around a fence chain and leaned down again. The cellar was flooded with a yellow light, and the air reeked with the stench of petroleum torches. The iron door still held, but a whole plate of metal was gone, and now as they looked a figure came creeping through holding a torch.

“Quick!” whispered Braith, “Jump!” and West hung dangling until Colette grasped him by the collar and he was dragged out. Then her nerves gave way and she wept hysterically, but West threw his arm around her and led her across the gardens into the next street, where Braith, after replacing the man-hole cover and piling some stone slabs from the wall over it, rejoined them. It was almost dark. They hurried through the street now only lighted by burning buildings or the swift glare of the shells. They gave wide berth to the fires, but at a distance saw the flitting forms of pillagers among the débris. Sometimes they passed a female fury crazed with drink shrieking anathemas upon the world, or some slouching lout whose blackened face and hands betrayed his share in the work of destruction. At last they reached the Seine and passed the bridge, and then Braith said: “I must go back. I am not sure of Jack and Sylvia.” As he spoke, he made way for a crowd which came trampling across the bridge, and along the river wall by the d’Orsay barracks. In the midst of it West caught the measured tread of a platoon. A lantern passed, a file of bayonets, then another lantern which glimmered on a deathly face behind, and Colette gasped, “Hartman!” and he was gone. They peered fearfully across the embankment, holding their breath. There was a shuffle of feet on the quay and the gate of the barracks slammed. A lantern shone for a moment at the postern, the crowd pressed to the grille, then came the clang of the volley from the stone parade.

One by one the petroleum torches flared up along the embankment, and now the whole square was in motion. Down from the Champs Elysées and across the Place de la Concorde straggled the fragments of the battle, a company here, and a mob there. They poured in from every street followed by women and children, and a great murmur, borne on the icy wind, swept through the Arc de Triomphe and down the dark avenue,—“Perdus! perdus!”

A ragged end of a battalion was pressing past, the spectre of annihilation. West groaned. Then a figure sprang from the shadowy ranks and called West’s name, and when he saw it was Trent he cried out. Trent seized him, white with terror.

“Sylvia?”

West stared speechless, but Colette moaned, “Oh, Sylvia! Sylvia!—and they are shelling the Quarter!”

“Trent!” shouted Braith; but he was gone, and they could not overtake him.

The bombardment ceased as Trent crossed the Boulevard St. Germain, but the entrance to the rue de Seine was blocked by a heap of smoking bricks. Everywhere the shells had torn great holes in the pavement. The café was a wreck of splinters and glass, the book-store tottered, ripped from roof to basement, and the little bakery, long since closed, bulged outward above a mass of slate and tin.

He climbed over the steaming bricks and hurried into the rue de Tournon. On the corner a fire blazed, lighting up his own street, and on the blank wall, beneath a shattered gas lamp, a child was writing with a bit of cinder,

HERE FELL THE FIRST SHELL.

The letters stared him in the face. The rat-killer finished and stepped back to view his work, but catching sight of Trent’s bayonet, screamed and fled, and as Trent staggered across the shattered street, from holes and crannies in the ruins fierce women fled from their work of pillage, cursing him.

At first he could not find his house, for the tears blinded him, but he felt along the wall and reached the door. A lantern burned in the concierge’s lodge and the old man lay dead beside it. Faint with fright he leaned a moment on his rifle, then, snatching the lantern, sprang up the stairs. He tried to call, but his tongue hardly moved. On the second floor he saw plaster on the stairway, and on the third the floor was torn and the concierge lay in a pool of blood across the landing. The next floor was his, theirs. The door hung from its hinges, the walls gaped. He crept in and sank down by the bed, and there two arms were flung around his neck, and a tear-stained face sought his own.

“Sylvia!”

“O Jack! Jack! Jack!”

From the tumbled pillow beside them a child wailed.

“They brought it; it is mine,” she sobbed.

“Ours,” he whispered, with his arms around them both.

Then from the stairs below came Braith’s anxious voice.

“Trent! Is all well?”

THE STREET OF OUR LADY OF THE FIELDS

Et tout les jours passés dans la tristesse

Nous sont comptés comme des jours heureux!

[And every day passed in sadness

We have counted as happy days!]

THE STREET OF OUR LADY OF THE FIELDS

I

The street is not fashionable, neither is it shabby. It is a pariah among streets—a street without a Quarter. It is generally understood to lie outside the pale of the aristocratic Avenue de l’Observatoire. The students of the Montparnasse Quarter consider it swell and will have none of it. The Latin Quarter, from the Luxembourg, its northern frontier, sneers at its respectability and regards with disfavor the correctly costumed students who haunt it. Few strangers go into it. At times, however, the Latin Quarter students use it as a thoroughfare between the rue de Rennes and the Bullier, but except for that and the weekly afternoon visits of parents and guardians to the Convent near the rue Vavin, the street of Our Lady of the Fields is as quiet as a Passy boulevard. Perhaps the most respectable portion lies between the rue de la Grande Chaumière and the rue Vavin, at least this was the conclusion arrived at by the Reverend Joel Byram, as he rambled through it with Hastings in charge. To Hastings the street looked pleasant in the bright June weather, and he had begun to hope for its selection when the Reverend Byram shied violently at the cross on the Convent opposite.

“Jesuits,” he muttered.

“Well,” said Hastings wearily, “I imagine we won’t find anything better. You say yourself that vice is triumphant in Paris, and it seems to me that in every street we find Jesuits or something worse.”

After a moment he repeated, “Or something worse, which of course I would not notice except for your kindness in warning me.”

Dr. Byram sucked in his lips and looked about him. He was impressed by the evident respectability of the surroundings. Then, frowning at the Convent he took Hastings’ arm and shuffled across the street to an iron gateway which bore the number 201 bis painted in white on a blue ground. Below this was a notice printed in English:

1. For Porter please oppress once.

2. For Servant please oppress twice.

3. For Parlor please oppress thrice.

Hastings touched the electric button three times, and they were ushered through the garden and into the parlor by a trim maid. The dining-room door, just beyond, was open, and from the table in plain view, a stout woman hastily arose and came toward them. Hastings caught a glimpse of a young man with a big head and several snuffy old gentlemen at breakfast, before the door closed and the stout woman waddled into the room, bringing with her an aroma of coffee and a black poodle.

“It ees a plaisir to you receive!” she cried; “Monsieur is Anglish? No? Americain? Off course. My pension it ees for Americains surtout. Here all spik Angleesh, c’est à dire, ze personnelle; ze sairvants do spik, plus ou moins, a little. I am happy to have you comme pensionnaires—”

“Madame,” began Dr. Byram, but was cut short again.

“Ah, yess, I know, ah! mon Dieu! you do not spik Frainch but you have come to lairne! My husband does spik Frainch wiss ze pensionnaires. We have at ze moment a family Americaine who learn of my husband Frainch—”

Here the poodle growled at Dr. Byram and was promptly cuffed by his mistress.

Veux tu!” she cried, with a slap, “veux tu! Oh! le vilain, oh! le vilain!”

“Mais, madame,” said Hastings, smiling, “il n’a pas l’air très féroce.”

The poodle fled, and his mistress cried, “Ah, ze accent charming! He does spik already Frainch like a Parisien young gentleman!”

Then Dr. Byram managed to get in a word or two and gathered more or less information with regard to prices.

“It ees a pension serieux; my clientèle ees of ze best, indeed a pension de famille where one ees at ’ome.”

Then they went upstairs to examine Hastings’ future quarters, test the bed-springs and arrange for the weekly towel allowance. Dr. Byram appeared satisfied.

Madame Marotte accompanied them to the door and rang for the maid, but as Hastings stepped out into the gravel walk, his guide and mentor paused a moment and fixed Madame with his watery eyes.

“You understand,” he said, “that he is a youth of most careful bringing up, and his character and morals are without a stain. He is young and has never been abroad, never even seen a large city, and his parents have requested me, as an old family friend living in Paris, to see that he is placed under good influences. He is to study art, but on no account would his parents wish him to live in the Latin Quarter if they knew of the immorality which is rife there.”

A sound like the click of a latch interrupted him and he raised his eyes, but not in time to see the maid slap the big-headed young man behind the parlor-door.

Madame coughed, cast a deadly glance behind her and then beamed on Dr. Byram.

“It ees well zat he come here. The pension more serious, il n’en existe pas, eet ees not any!” she announced with conviction.

So, as there was nothing more to add, Dr. Byram joined Hastings at the gate.

“I trust,” he said, eyeing the Convent, “that you will make no acquaintances among Jesuits!”

Hastings looked at the Convent until a pretty girl passed before the gray façade, and then he looked at her. A young fellow with a paint-box and canvas came swinging along, stopped before the pretty girl, said something during a brief but vigorous handshake at which they both laughed, and he went his way, calling back, “À demain Valentine!” as in the same breath she cried, “À demain!”

“Valentine,” thought Hastings, “what a quaint name”; and he started to follow the Reverend Joel Byram who was shuffling toward the nearest tramway station.

II

“An’ you are pleas wiz Paris, Monsieur ’Astang?” demanded Madame Marotte the next morning as Hastings came into the breakfast-room of the pension, rosy from his plunge in the limited bath above.

“I am sure I shall like it,” he replied, wondering at his own depression of spirits.

The maid brought him coffee, and rolls. He returned the vacant glance of the big-headed young man and acknowledged diffidently the salutes of the snuffy old gentlemen. He did not try to finish his coffee, and sat crumbling a roll, unconscious of the sympathetic glances of Madame Marotte who had tact enough not to bother him.

Presently a maid entered with a tray on which was balanced two bowls of chocolate, and the snuffy old gentlemen leered at her ankles. The maid deposited the chocolate at a table near the window and smiled at Hastings. Then a thin young lady, followed by her counterpart in all except years, marched into the room and took the table near the window. They were evidently American, but Hastings, if he expected any sign of recognition, was disappointed. To be ignored by compatriots intensified his depression. He fumbled with his knife and looked at his plate.

The thin young lady was talkative enough. She was quite aware of Hastings’ presence, ready to be flattered if he looked at her, but on the other hand she felt her superiority for she had been three weeks in Paris and he, it was easy to see, had not yet unpacked his steamer-trunk.

Her conversation was complacent. She argued with her mother upon the relative merits of the Louvre and the Bon Marché, but her mother’s part of the discussion was mostly confined to the observation, “Why, Susie!”

The snuffy old gentlemen had left the room in a body, outwardly polite and inwardly raging. They could not endure the Americans, who filled the room with their chatter.

The big-headed young man looked after them with a knowing cough, murmuring, “Gay old birds!”

“They look like bad old men, Mr. Bladen,” said the girl.

To this Mr. Bladen smiled and said, “They’ve had their day,” in a tone which implied that he was now having his.

“And that’s why they all have baggy eyes,” cried the girl. “I think it’s a shame for young gentlemen—”

“Why, Susie,” said the mother, and the conversation lagged.

After a while Mr. Bladen threw down the Petit Journal, which he daily studied at the expense of the house, and turning to Hastings, started to make himself agreeable. He began by saying, “I see you are American.”

To this brilliant and original opening, Hastings, deadly homesick, replied gratefully, and the conversation was judiciously nourished by observations from Miss Susie Byng distinctly addressed to Mr. Bladen. In the course of events Miss Susie, forgetting to address herself exclusively to Mr. Bladen, and Hastings replying to her general question, the entente cordiale was established, and Susie and her mother extended a protectorate over what was clearly neutral territory.

“Mr. Hastings, you must not desert the pension every evening as Mr. Bladen does. Paris is an awful place for young gentlemen, and Mr. Bladen is a horrid cynic.”

Mr. Bladen looked gratified.

Hastings answered, “I shall be at the studio all day, and I imagine I shall be glad enough to come back at night.”

Mr. Bladen, who, at a salary of fifteen dollars a week, acted as agent for the Pewly Manufacturing Company of Troy, N.Y., smiled a skeptical smile and withdrew to keep an appointment with a customer on the Boulevard Magenta.

Hastings walked into the garden with Mrs. Byng and Susie, and, at their invitation, sat down in the shade before the iron gate.

The chestnut trees still bore their fragrant spikes of pink and white and the bees hummed among the roses, trellised on the white-walled house.

A faint freshness was in the air. The watering carts moved up and down the street, and a clear stream bubbled over the spotless gutters of the rue de la Grande Chaumière. The sparrows were merry along the curb-stones, taking bath after bath in the water and ruffling their feathers with delight. In a walled garden across the street a pair of blackbirds whistled among the almond trees.

Hastings swallowed the lump in his throat, for the song of the birds and the ripple of water in a Paris gutter brought back to him the sunny meadows of Millbrook.

“That’s a blackbird,” observed Miss Byng; “see him there on the bush with pink blossoms. He’s all black except his bill, and that looks as if it had been dipped in an omelet, as some Frenchman says—”

“Why, Susie!” said Mrs. Byng.

“That garden belongs to a studio inhabited by two Americans,” continued the girl serenely, “and I often see them pass. They seem to need a great many models, mostly young and feminine—”

“Why, Susie!”

“Perhaps they prefer painting that kind, but I don’t see why they should invite five, with three more young gentlemen, and all get into two cabs and drive away singing. This street,” she continued, “is dull. There is nothing to see except the garden and a glimpse of the Boulevard Montparnasse through the rue de la Grande Chaumière. No one ever passes except a policeman. There is a convent on the corner.”

“I thought it was a Jesuit College,” began Hastings, but was at once overwhelmed with a Baedecker [guidebook] description of the place, ending with, “on one side stand the palatial hotels of Jean Paul Laurens and Guillaume Bouguereau, and opposite, in the little Passage Stanislas, Carolus Duran paints the masterpieces which charm the world.”

The blackbird burst into a ripple of golden throaty notes, and from some distant green spot in the city, an unknown wild-bird answered with a frenzy of liquid trills until the sparrows paused in their ablutions to look up with restless chirps.

Then a butterfly came and sat on a cluster of heliotrope and waved his crimson-banded wings in the hot sunshine. Hastings knew him for a friend and before his eyes there came a vision of tall mullins and scented milkweed alive with painted wings, a vision of a white house and woodbine-covered piazza,—a glimpse of a man reading and a woman leaning over the pansy bed,—and his heart was full. He was startled a moment later by Miss Byng.

“I believe you are homesick!” Hastings blushed. Miss Byng looked at him with a sympathetic sigh and continued: “Whenever I felt homesick at first I used to go with mamma and walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. I don’t know why it is but those old-fashioned gardens seemed to bring me nearer home than anything in this artificial city.”

“But they are full of marble statues,” said Mrs. Byng mildly, “I don’t see the resemblance myself.”

“Where is the Luxembourg?” inquired Hastings after a silence.

“Come with me to the gate,” said Miss Byng. He rose and followed her, and she pointed out the rue Vavin at the foot of the street.

“You pass by the convent to the right,” she smiled; and Hastings went.

III

The Luxembourg was a blaze of flowers.

He walked slowly through the long avenues of trees, past mossy marbles and old-time columns, and threading the grove by the bronze lion, came upon the tree-crowned terrace above the fountain. Below lay the basin shining in the sunlight. Flowering almonds encircled the terrace and, in a greater spiral, groves of chestnuts wound in and out and down among the moist thickets by the western palace wing. At one end of the avenue of trees, the Observatory rose, its white domes piled up like an eastern mosque; at the other end stood the heavy palace, with every window-pane ablaze in the fierce sun of June.

Around the fountain, children and white-capped nurses armed with bamboo poles, were pushing toy boats, whose sails hung limp in the sunshine. A dark policeman, wearing red epaulettes and a dress sword, watched them for a while and then went away to remonstrate with a young man who had unchained his dog. The dog was pleasantly occupied in rubbing grass and dirt into his back while his legs waved into the air.

The policeman pointed at the dog. He was speechless with indignation.

“Well, Captain,” smiled the young fellow.

“Well, Monsieur Student,” growled the policeman.

“What do you come and complain to me for?”

“If you don’t chain him I’ll take him,” shouted the policeman.

“What’s that to me, mon capitaine?”

“Wha—t! Isn’t that bulldog yours?”

“If it was, don’t you suppose I’d chain him?”

The officer glared for a moment in silence, then deciding that as he was a student he was wicked, grabbed at the dog, who promptly dodged. Around and around the flower-beds they raced, and when the officer came too near for comfort, the bulldog cut across a flower-bed which perhaps was not playing fair.

The young man was amused, and the dog also seemed to enjoy the exercise.

The policeman noticed this and decided to strike at the fountain-head of the evil. He stormed up to the student and said, “As the owner of this public nuisance I arrest you!”

“But,” objected the other, “I disclaim the dog.”

That was a poser. It was useless to attempt to catch the dog until three gardeners lent a hand, but then the dog simply ran away and disappeared in the rue de Medici.

The policeman shambled off to find consolation among the white-capped nurses, and the student, looking at his watch, stood up yawning. Then catching sight of Hastings, he smiled and bowed. Hastings walked over to the marble, laughing.

“Why, Clifford,” he said, “I didn’t recognize you.”

“It’s my moustache,” sighed the other. “I sacrificed it to humor a whim of—of—a friend. What do you think of my dog?”

“Then he is yours?” cried Hastings.

“Of course. It’s a pleasant change for him, this playing tag with policemen, but he is known now and I’ll have to stop it. He’s gone home. He always does when the gardeners take a hand. It’s a pity; he’s fond of rolling on lawns.” Then they chatted for a moment of Hastings’ prospects, and Clifford politely offered to stand his sponsor at the studio.

“You see, old tabby, I mean Dr. Byram, told me about you before I met you,” explained Clifford, “and Elliott and I will be glad to do anything we can.” Then looking at his watch again, he muttered, “I have just ten minutes to catch the Versailles train; au revoir,” and started to go, but catching sight of a girl advancing by the fountain took off his hat with a confused smile.

“Why are you not at Versailles?” she said, with an almost imperceptible acknowledgment of Hastings’ presence.

“I—I’m going,” murmured Clifford.

For a moment they faced each other, and then Clifford, very red, stammered, “With your permission I have the honor of presenting to you my friend Monsieur Hastings.”

Hastings bowed low. She smiled very sweetly, but there was something of malice in the quiet inclination of her small Parisienne head.

“I could have wished,” she said, “that Monsieur Clifford might spare me more time when he brings with him so charming an American.”

“Must—must I go, Valentine?” began Clifford.

“Certainly,” she replied.

Clifford took his leave with very bad grace, wincing, when she added, “And give my dearest love to Cécile!” As he disappeared in the rue d’Assas, the girl turned as if to go, but then suddenly remembering Hastings, looked at him and shook her head.

“Monsieur Clifford is so perfectly hair-brained,” she smiled, “it is embarrassing sometimes. You have heard, of course, all about his success at the Salon?”

He looked puzzled and she noticed it.

“You have been to the Salon of course?”

“Why no,” he answered, “I only arrived in Paris three days ago.”

She seemed to pay little heed to his explanation, but continued: “Nobody imagined he had the energy to do anything good, but on varnishing day, the Salon was astonished by the entrance of Monsieur Clifford, who strolled about as bland as you please with an orchid in his buttonhole, and a beautiful picture on the line.”

She smiled to herself at the reminiscence, and looked at the fountain.

“Monsieur Bouguereau told me that Monsieur Julian was so astonished that he only shook hands with Monsieur Clifford in a dazed manner, and actually forgot to pat him on the back! Fancy,” she continued with much merriment, “fancy papa Julian forgetting to pat one on the back.”

Hastings, wondering at her acquaintance with the great Bouguereau, looked at her with respect. “May I ask,” he said diffidently, “whether you are a pupil of Bouguereau?”

“I,” she said in some surprise. Then she looked at him curiously. Was he permitting himself the liberty of joking on such short acquaintance?

His pleasant serious face questioned hers.

“Tiens,” she thought, “what a droll man.”

“You surely study art?” he said.

She leaned back on the crooked stick of her parasol, and looked at him. “Why do you think so?”

“Because you speak as if you did.”

“You are making fun of me,” she said, “and it is not good taste.”

She stopped, confused, as he colored to the roots of his hair.

“How long have you been in Paris?” she said at length.

“Three days,” he replied gravely.

“But—but—surely you are not a nouveau! You speak French too well!”

Then after a pause, “Really are you a nouveau?”

“I am,” he said.

She sat down on the marble bench lately occupied by Clifford, and tilting her parasol over her small head looked at him.

“I don’t believe it.”

He felt the compliment, and for a moment hesitated to declare himself one of the despised. Then mustering up his courage, he told her how new and green he was, and all with a frankness which made her blue eyes open very wide and her lips part in the sweetest of smiles.

“You have never seen a studio?”

“Never.”

“Nor a model?”

“No.”

“How funny,” she said solemnly. Then they both laughed.

“And you,” he said, “have seen studios?”

“Hundreds.”

“And models?”

“Millions.”

“And you know Bouguereau?”

“Yes, and Henner, and Constant and Laurens, and Puvis de Chavannes and Dagnan and Courtois, and—and all the rest of them!”

“And yet you say you are not an artist.”

“Pardon,” she said gravely, “did I say I was not?”

“Won’t you tell me?” he hesitated.

At first she looked at him, shaking her head and smiling, then of a sudden her eyes fell and she began tracing figures with her parasol in the gravel at her feet. Hastings had taken a place on the seat and now, with his elbows on his knees, sat watching the spray drifting above the fountain jet. A small boy dressed as a sailor, stood poking his yacht and crying, “I won’t go home! I won’t go home!” His nurse raised her hands to Heaven.

“Just like a little American boy,” thought Hastings, and a pang of homesickness shot through him.

Presently the nurse captured the boat and the small boy stood at bay.

“Monsieur René, when you decide to come here you may have your boat.”

The boy backed away scowling.

“Give me my boat I say,” he cried, “and don’t call me René, for my name’s Randall and you know it!”

“Hello!” said Hastings,—“Randall?—that’s English.”

“I am American,” announced the boy in perfectly good English, turning to look at Hastings, “and she’s such a fool she calls me René because mamma calls me Ranny—”

Here he dodged the exasperated nurse and took up his station behind Hastings, who laughed, and catching him around the waist lifted him into his lap.

“One of my countrymen,” he said to the girl beside him. He smiled while he spoke, but there was a queer feeling in his throat.

“Don’t you see the stars and stripes on my yacht?” demanded Randall. Sure enough, the American colors hung limply under the nurse’s arm.

“Oh,” cried the girl, “he is charming,” and impulsively stooped to kiss him, but the infant Randall wriggled out of Hastings’ arms, and his nurse pounced upon him with an angry glance at the girl.

She reddened and then bit her lips as the nurse, with eyes still fixed on her, dragged the child away and ostentatiously wiped his lips with her handkerchief.

Then she stole a look at Hastings and bit her lip again.

“What an ill-tempered woman,” he said. “In America, most nurses are flattered when people kiss their children.”

For an instant she tipped the parasol to hide her face, then closed it with a snap and looked at him defiantly.

“Do you think it strange that she objected?”

“Why not?” he said in surprise.

Again she looked at him with quick searching eyes.

His eyes were clear and bright, and he smiled back, repeating, “Why not?”

“You are droll,” she murmured, bending her head.

“Why?”

But she made no answer, and sat silent, tracing curves and circles in the dust with her parasol. After a while he said—“I am glad to see that young people have so much liberty here. I understood that the French were not at all like us. You know in America—or at least where I live in Milbrook, girls have every liberty,—go out alone and receive their friends alone, and I was afraid I should miss it here. But I see how it is now, and I am glad I was mistaken.”

She raised her eyes to his and kept them there.

He continued pleasantly—“Since I have sat here I have seen a lot of pretty girls walking alone on the terrace there,—and then you are alone too. Tell me, for I do not know French customs,—do you have the liberty of going to the theatre without a chaperone?”

For a long time she studied his face, and then with a trembling smile said, “Why do you ask me?”

“Because you must know, of course,” he said gaily.

“Yes,” she replied indifferently, “I know.”

He waited for an answer, but getting none, decided that perhaps she had misunderstood him.

“I hope you don’t think I mean to presume on our short acquaintance,” he began,—“in fact it is very odd but I don’t know your name. When Mr. Clifford presented me he only mentioned mine. Is that the custom in France?”

“It is the custom in the Latin Quarter,” she said with a queer light in her eyes. Then suddenly she began talking almost feverishly.

“You must know, Monsieur Hastings, that we are all un peu sans gêne [“A little unconventional”] here in the Latin Quarter. We are very Bohemian and etiquette and ceremony are out of place. It was for that Monsieur Clifford presented you to me with small ceremony, and left us together with less,—only for that, and I am his friend, and I have many friends in the Latin Quarter, and we all know each other very well—and I am not studying art, but—but—”

“But what?” he said, bewildered.

“I shall not tell you,—it is a secret,” she said with an uncertain smile. On both cheeks a pink spot was burning, and her eyes were very bright.

Then in a moment her face fell. “Do you know Monsieur Clifford very intimately?”

“Not very.”

After a while she turned to him, grave and a little pale.

“My name is Valentine—Valentine Tissot. Might—might I ask a service of you on such very short acquaintance?”

“Oh,” he cried, “I should be honored.”

“It is only this,” she said gently, “it is not much. Promise me not to speak to Monsieur Clifford about me. Promise me that you will speak to no one about me.”

“I promise,” he said, greatly puzzled.

She laughed nervously. “I wish to remain a mystery. It is a caprice.”

“But,” he began, “I had wished, I had hoped that you might give Monsieur Clifford permission to bring me, to present me at your house.”

“My—my house!” she repeated.

“I mean, where you live, in fact, to present me to your family.”

The change in the girl’s face shocked him.

“I beg your pardon,” he cried, “I have hurt you.”

And as quick as a flash she understood him because she was a woman.

“My parents are dead,” she said.

Presently he began again, very gently.

“Would it displease you if I beg you to receive me? It is the custom?”

“I cannot,” she answered. Then glancing up at him, “I am sorry; I should like to; but believe me, I cannot.”

He bowed seriously and looked vaguely uneasy.

“It isn’t because I don’t wish to. I—I like you; you are very kind to me.”

“Kind?” he cried, surprised and puzzled.

“I like you,” she said slowly, “and we will see each other sometimes if you will.”

“At friends’ houses.”

“No, not at friends’ houses.”

“Where?”

“Here,” she said with defiant eyes.

“Why,” he cried, “in Paris you are much more liberal in your views than we are.”

She looked at him curiously.

“Yes, we are very Bohemian.”

“I think it is charming,” he declared.

“You see, we shall be in the best of society,” she ventured timidly, with a pretty gesture toward the statues of the dead queens, ranged in stately ranks above the terrace.

He looked at her, delighted, and she brightened at the success of her innocent little pleasantry.

“Indeed,” she smiled, “I shall be well chaperoned, because you see we are under the protection of the gods themselves; look, there are Apollo, and Juno, and Venus, on their pedestals,” counting them on her small gloved fingers, “and Ceres, Hercules, and—but I can’t make out—”

Hastings turned to look up at the winged god under whose shadow they were seated.

“Why, it’s Love,” he said.

IV

“There is a nouveau here,” drawled Laffat, leaning around his easel and addressing his friend Bowles, “there is a nouveau here who is so tender and green and appetizing that Heaven help him if he should fall into a salad bowl.”

“Hayseed?” inquired Bowles, plastering in a background with a broken palette knife and squinting at the effect with approval.

“Yes, Squeedunk or Oshkosh, and how he ever grew up among the daisies and escaped the cows, Heaven alone knows!”

Bowles rubbed his thumb across the outlines of his study to “throw in a little atmosphere,” as he said, glared at the model, pulled at his pipe and finding it out struck a match on his neighbor’s back to relight it.

“His name,” continued Laffat, hurling a bit of bread at the hat-rack, “his name is Hastings. He is a berry. He knows no more about the world,”—and here Mr. Laffat’s face spoke volumes for his own knowledge of that planet,—“than a maiden cat on its first moonlight stroll.”

Bowles now having succeeded in lighting his pipe, repeated the thumb touch on the other edge of the study and said, “Ah!”

“Yes,” continued his friend, “and would you imagine it, he seems to think that everything here goes on as it does in his d———d little backwoods ranch at home; talks about the pretty girls who walk alone in the street; says how sensible it is; and how French parents are misrepresented in America; says that for his part he finds French girls,—and he confessed to only knowing one,—as jolly as American girls. I tried to set him right, tried to give him a pointer as to what sort of ladies walk about alone or with students, and he was either too stupid or too innocent to catch on. Then I gave it to him straight, and he said I was a vile-minded fool and marched off.”

“Did you assist him with your shoe?” inquired Bowles, languidly interested.

“Well, no.”

“He called you a vile-minded fool.”

“He was correct,” said Clifford from his easel in front.

“What—what do you mean?” demanded Laffat, turning red.

“That,” replied Clifford.

“Who spoke to you? Is this your business?” sneered Bowles, but nearly lost his balance as Clifford swung about and eyed him.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “it’s my business.”

No one spoke for some time.

Then Clifford sang out, “I say, Hastings!”

And when Hastings left his easel and came around, he nodded toward the astonished Laffat.

“This man has been disagreeable to you, and I want to tell you that any time you feel inclined to kick him, why, I will hold the other creature.”

Hastings, embarrassed, said, “Why no, I don’t agree with his ideas, nothing more.”

Clifford said “Naturally,” and slipping his arm through Hastings’, strolled about with him, and introduced him to several of his own friends, at which all the nouveaux opened their eyes with envy, and the studio were given to understand that Hastings, although prepared to do menial work as the latest nouveau, was already within the charmed circle of the old, respected and feared, the truly great.

The rest finished, the model resumed his place, and work went on in a chorus of songs and yells and every ear-splitting noise which the art student utters when studying the beautiful.

Five o’clock struck,—the model yawned, stretched and climbed into his trousers, and the noisy contents of six studios crowded through the hall and down into the street. Ten minutes later, Hastings found himself on top of a Montrouge tram and shortly afterward was joined by Clifford.

They climbed down at the rue Gay Lussac.

“I always stop here,” observed Clifford, “I like the walk through the Luxembourg.”

“By the way,” said Hastings, “how can I call on you when I don’t know where you live?”

“Why, I live opposite you.”

“What—the studio in the garden where the almond trees are and the blackbirds—”

“Exactly,” said Clifford. “I’m with my friend Elliott.”

Hastings thought of the description of the two American artists which he had heard from Miss Susie Byng, and looked blank.

Clifford continued, “Perhaps you had better let me know when you think of coming so,—so that I will be sure to—to be there,” he ended rather lamely.

“I shouldn’t care to meet any of your model friends there,” said Hastings smiling. “You know—my ideas are rather straight laced,—I suppose you would say, Puritanical. I shouldn’t enjoy it and wouldn’t know how to behave.”

“Oh, I understand,” said Clifford, but added with great cordiality,—“I’m sure we’ll be friends although you may not approve of me and my set, but you will like Severn and Selby because—because, well, they are like yourself, old chap.”

After a moment he continued, “There is something I want to speak about. You see, when I introduced you, last week, in the Luxembourg, to Valentine—”

“Not a word!” cried Hastings, smiling; “you must not tell me a word of her!”

“Why—”

“No—not a word!” he said gaily. “I insist,—promise me upon your honor you will not speak of her until I give you permission; promise!”

“I promise,” said Clifford, amazed.

“She is a charming girl,—we had such a delightful chat after you left, and I thank you for presenting me, but not another word about her until I give you permission.”

“Oh,” murmured Clifford.

“Remember your promise,” he smiled, as he turned into his gateway.

Clifford strolled across the street and, traversing the ivy-covered alley, entered his garden.

He felt for his studio key, muttering, “I wonder—I wonder,—but of course he doesn’t!”

He entered the hallway, and fitting the key into the door, stood staring at the two cards tacked over the panels.

FOXHALL CLIFFORD.

RICHARD OSBORNE ELLIOTT.

“Why the devil doesn’t he want me to speak of her?”

He opened the door, and, discouraging the caresses of two brindle bulldogs, sank down on the sofa.

Elliott sat smoking and sketching with a piece of charcoal by the window.

“Hello,” he said, without looking around.

Clifford gazed absently at the back of his head, murmuring, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid that man is too innocent. I say, Elliott,” he said, at last, “Hastings,—you know the chap that old Tabby Byram came around here to tell us about—the day you had to hide Colette in the armoire—”

“Yes, what’s up?”

“Oh, nothing. He’s a brick.”

“Yes,” said Elliott, without enthusiasm.

“Don’t you think so?” demanded Clifford.

“Why yes, but he is going to have a tough time when some of his illusions are dispelled.”

“More shame to those who dispel ’em!”

“Yes,—wait until he comes to pay his call on us, unexpectedly, of course—”

Clifford looked virtuous and lighted a cigar.

“I was just going to say,” he observed, “that I have asked him not to come without letting us know, so I can postpone any orgie you may have intended—”

“Ah!” cried Elliott indignantly, “I suppose you put it to him in that way.”

“Not exactly,” grinned Clifford. Then more seriously, “I don’t want anything to occur here to bother him. He’s a brick and it’s a pity we can’t be more like him.”

“I am,” observed Elliott complacently, “only living with you—”

“Listen!” cried the other. “I have managed to put my foot in it in great style. Do you know what I’ve done? Well—the first time I met him in the street,—or rather, it was in the Luxembourg, I introduced him to Valentine!”

“Did he object?”

“Believe me,” said Clifford, solemnly, “this rustic Hastings has no more idea that Valentine is—is—in fact is Valentine, than he has that he himself is a beautiful example of moral decency in a Quarter where morals are as rare as elephants. I heard enough in a conversation between that blackguard Loffat and the little immoral eruption, Bowles, to open my eyes. I tell you Hastings is a trump! He’s a healthy, clean minded young fellow, bred in a small country village, brought up with the idea that saloons are way stations to hell—and as for women—”

“Well?” demanded Elliott.

“Well,” said Clifford, “his idea of the dangerous woman is probably a painted Jezebel.”

“Probably,” replied the other.

“He’s a trump!” said Clifford, “and if he swears the world is as good and pure as his own heart, I’ll swear he’s right.”

Elliott rubbed his charcoal on his file to get a point and turned to his sketch saying, “He will never hear any pessimism from Richard Osborne E.”

“He’s a lesson to me,” said Clifford. Then he unfolded a small perfumed note, written on rose-colored paper, which had been lying on the table before him.

He read it, smiled, whistled a bar or two from “Miss Helyett,” and sat down to answer it on his best cream-laid note-paper. When it was written and sealed, he picked up his stick and marched up and down the studio two or three times, whistling.

“Going out?” inquired the other, without turning.

“Yes,” he said, but lingered a moment over Elliott’s shoulder, watching him pick out the lights in his sketch with a bit of bread.

“To-morrow is Sunday,” he observed after a moment’s silence.

“Well?” inquired Elliott.

“Have you seen Colette?”

“No, I will to-night. She and Rowden and Jacqueline are coming to Boulant’s. I suppose you and Cécile will be there?”

“Well, no,” replied Clifford. “Cécile dines at home to-night, and I—I had an idea of going to Mignon’s.”

Elliott looked at him with disapproval.

“You can make all the arrangements for La Roche without me,” he continued, avoiding Elliott’s eyes.

“What are you up to now?”

“Nothing,” protested Clifford.

“Don’t tell me,” replied his chum, with scorn; “fellows don’t rush off to Mignon’s when the set dine at Boulant’s. Who is it now?—but no, I won’t ask that,—what’s the use!” Then he lifted up his voice in complaint and beat upon the table with his pipe. “What’s the use of ever trying to keep track of you? What will Cécile say,—oh, yes, what will she say? It’s a pity you can’t be constant two months, yes, by Jove! and the Quarter is indulgent, but you abuse its good nature and mine too!”

Presently, he arose, and jamming his hat on his head, marched to the door.

“Heaven alone knows why any one puts up with your antics, but they all do and so do I. If I were Cécile or any of the other pretty fools after whom you have toddled and will, in all human probabilities, continue to toddle, I say, if I were Cécile I’d spank you! Now I’m going to Boulant’s, and as usual I shall make excuses for you and arrange the affair, and I don’t care a continental where you are going, but, by the skull of the studio skeleton! if you don’t turn up to-morrow with your sketching-kit under one arm and Cécile under the other,—if you don’t turn up in good shape, I’m done with you, and the rest can think what they please. Good-night.”

Clifford said good-night with as pleasant a smile as he could muster, and then sat down with his eyes on the door. He took out his watch and gave Elliott ten minutes to vanish, then rang the concierge’s call, murmuring, “Oh dear, oh dear, why the devil do I do it?”

“Alfred,” he said, as that gimlet-eyed person answered the call, “make yourself clean and proper, Alfred, and replace your sabots with a pair of shoes. Then put on your best hat and take this letter to the big white house in the Rue de Dragon. There is no answer, mon petit Alfred.”

The concierge departed with a snort in which unwillingness for the errand and affection for M. Clifford were blended. Then with great care the young fellow arrayed himself in all the beauties of his and Elliott’s wardrobe. He took his time about it, and occasionally interrupted his toilet to play his banjo or make pleasing diversion for the bulldogs by gambling about on all fours. “I’ve got two hours before me,” he thought, and borrowed a pair of Elliott’s silken foot-gear, with which he and the dogs played ball until he decided to put them on. Then he lighted a cigarette and inspected his dress-coat. When he had emptied it of four handkerchiefs, a fan, and a pair of crumpled gloves as long as his arm, he decided it was not suited to add éclat to his charms and cast about in his mind for a substitute. Elliott was too thin, and, anyway, his coats were now under lock and key. Rowden probably was as badly off as himself. Hastings! Hastings was the man! But when he threw on a smoking-jacket and sauntered over to Hastings’ house, he was informed that he had been gone over an hour.

“Now, where in the name of all that’s reasonable could he have gone!” muttered Clifford, looking down the street.

The maid didn’t know, so he bestowed upon her a fascinating smile and lounged back to the studio.

Hastings was not far away. The Luxembourg is within five minutes’ walk of the rue Notre Dame des Champs, and there he sat under the shadow of a winged god, and there he had sat for an hour, poking holes in the dust and watching the steps which lead from the northern terrace to the fountain. The sun hung, a purple globe, above the misty hills of Meudon. Long streamers of clouds touched with rose swept low on the western sky and the dome of the distant Invalides burned like an opal through the haze. Behind the Palace, the smoke from a high chimney mounted straight into the air, purple until it crossed the sun where it changed to a bar of smouldering fire. High above the darkening foliage of the chestnuts the twin towers of St. Sulpice rose, an ever-deepening silhouette.

A sleepy blackbird was carolling in some near thicket and pigeons passed and repassed with the whisper of soft winds in their wings. The light on the Palace windows had died away, and the dome of the Pantheon swam aglow above the northern terrace, a fiery Valhalla in the sky, while below in grim array, along the terrace ranged, the marble ranks of queens, looked out into the west.

From the end of the long walk by the northern façade of the Palace came the noise of omnibuses and the cries of the street. Hastings looked at the Palace clock. Six, and as his own watch agreed with it, he fell to poking holes in the gravel again. A constant stream of people passed between the Odeon and the fountain. Priests in black, with silver-buckled shoes, line soldiers, slouchy and rakish, neat girls without hats bearing milliners’ boxes, students with black portfolios and high hats, students with bérets and big canes, nervous, quick-stepping officers, symphonies in turquoise and silver, ponderous jangling cavalrymen all over dust, pastry cooks’ boys skipping along with utter disregard for the safety of the basket balanced on the impish head, and then the lean outcast, the shambling Paris tramp, slouching with shoulders bent and little eye furtively scanning the ground for smokers’ refuse;—all these moved in a steady stream across the fountain circle and out into the city by the Odeon, whose long arcades were now beginning to flicker with gas-jets. The melancholy bells of St Sulpice struck the hour and the clock-tower of the Palace lighted up. Then hurried steps sounded across the gravel and Hastings raised his head.

“How late you are,” he said, but his voice was hoarse and only his flushed face told how long had seemed the waiting.

She said, “I was kept—indeed, I was so much annoyed—and—and I may only stay a moment.”

She sat down beside him casting a furtive glance over her shoulder at the god upon his pedestal.

“What a nuisance, that intruding cupid still there?”

“Wings and arrows too,” said Hastings, unheeding her motion to be seated.

“Wings,” she murmured, “oh, yes—to fly away with when he’s tired of his play. Of course it was a man who conceived the idea of wings, otherwise Cupid would have been insupportable.”

“Do you think so?”

“Ma foi, it’s what men think.”

“And women?”

“Oh,” she said, with a toss of her small head, “I really forget what we were speaking of.”

“We were speaking of love,” said Hastings.

“I was not,” said the girl. Then looking up at the marble god, “I don’t care for this one at all. I don’t believe he knows how to shoot his arrows—no indeed, he is a coward;—he creeps up like an assassin in the twilight. I don’t approve of cowardice,” she announced, and turned her back on the statue.

“I think,” said Hastings quietly, “that he does shoot fairly—yes, and even gives one warning.”

“Is it your experience, Monsieur Hastings?”

He looked straight into her eyes and said, “He is warning me.”

“Heed the warning then,” she cried, with a nervous laugh. As she spoke she stripped off her gloves, and then carefully proceeded to draw them on again. When this was accomplished she glanced at the Palace clock, saying, “Oh, dear, how late it is!” furled her umbrella then unfurled it, and finally looked at him.

“No,” he said, “I shall not heed his warning.”

“Oh, dear,” she sighed again, “still talking about that tiresome statue!” Then stealing a glance at his face, “I suppose—I suppose you are in love.”

“I don’t know,” he muttered, “I suppose I am.”

She raised her head with a quick gesture. “You seem delighted at the idea,” she said, but bit her lip and trembled as his eyes met hers. Then sudden fear came over her and she sprang up, staring into the gathering shadows.

“Are you cold?” he said, but she only answered, “Oh, dear, oh, dear, it is late—so late. I must go—good-night.”

She gave him her gloved hand a moment and then withdrew it with a start.

“What is it?” he insisted, “are you frightened?”

She looked at him strangely.

“No—no—not frightened,—you are very good to me—”

“By Jove!” he burst out, “what do you mean by saying I’m good to you? That’s at least the third time, and I don’t understand!”

The sound of a drum from the guard-house at the palace cut him short. “Listen,” she whispered, “they are going to close. It’s late, oh, so late!”

The rolling of the drum came nearer and nearer, and then the silhouette of the drummer cut the sky above the eastern terrace. The fading light lingered a moment on his belt and bayonet, then he passed into the shadows, drumming the echoes awake. The roll became fainter along the eastern terrace, then grew and grew and rattled with increasing sharpness when he passed the avenue by the bronze lion and turned down the western terrace walk. Louder and louder the drum sounded and the echoes struck back the notes from the gray palace wall; and now the drummer loomed up before them—his red trousers a dull spot in the gathering gloom, the brass of his drum and bayonet touched with a pale spark, his epaulettes tossing on his shoulders. He passed, leaving the crash of the drum in their ears, and far into the alley of trees they saw his little tin cup shining on his haversack. Then the sentinels began the monotonous cry: “on ferme! on ferme!” [“Closing time! Closing time!”] and the bugle blew from the barracks in the rue de Tournon.

“On ferme! on ferme!”

“Good-night,” she whispered, “I must return alone to-night.”

He watched her until she reached the northern terrace, and then sat down on the marble seat until a hand on his shoulder and a glimmer of bayonets warned him away.

She passed on through the grove, and turning into the rue de Medici, traversed it to the Boulevard. At the corner she bought a bunch of violets and walked on along the Boulevard to the rue des Écoles. A cab was drawn up before Boulant’s and a pretty girl aided by Elliott jumped out.

“Valentine!” cried the girl, “come with us!”

“I can’t,” she said, stopping a moment—“I have a rendezvous at Mignon’s.”

“Not Victor?” cried the girl laughing, but she passed with a little shiver, nodding good-night, then turning into the Boulevard St. Germain, she walked a little faster to escape a gay party sitting before the Café Cluny who called to her to join them. At the door of the Restaurant Mignon stood a coal-black negro in buttons. He took off his peaked cap as she mounted the carpeted stairs.

“Send Eugene to me,” she said at the office, and passing through the hallway to the right of the dining-room stopped before a row of panelled doors. A waiter passed and she repeated her demand for Eugene, who presently appeared, noiselessly skipping, and bowed murmuring, “Madame.”

“Who is here?”

“No one in the cabinets, madame; in the hall Madame Madelon and Monsieur Gay, Monsieur de Clamart, Monsieur Clisson, Madame Marie and their set.” Then he looked around and bowing again murmured, “Monsieur awaits madame since half an hour,” and he knocked at one of the panelled doors bearing the number six.

Clifford opened the door and the girl entered.

The garçon bowed her in, and whispering, “will Monsieur have the goodness to ring,” vanished.

He helped her off with her jacket and took her hat and umbrella. When she was seated at the little table with Clifford opposite, she smiled and leaned forward on both elbows looking him in the face.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Waiting,” he replied, in accents of adoration.

For an instant she turned and examined herself in the glass. The wide blue eyes, the curling hair, the straight nose and short curled lip flashed in the mirror an instant only, and then its depths reflected her pretty neck and back. “Thus do I turn my back on vanity,” she said, and then leaning forward again, “what are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you,” repeated Clifford, slightly troubled.

“And Cécile.”

“Now don’t, Valentine—”

“Do you know,” she said calmly, “I dislike your conduct?”

He was a little disconcerted, and rang for Eugene to cover his confusion.

The soup was bisque, and the wine Pommery, and the courses followed each other with the usual regularity until Eugene brought coffee, and there was nothing left on the table but a small silver lamp.

“Valentine,” said Clifford, after having obtained permission to smoke, “is it the Vaudeville or the Eldorado—or both, or the Nouveau Cirque, or—”

“It is here,” said Valentine.

“Well,” he said, greatly flattered, “I’m afraid I couldn’t amuse you—”

“Oh, yes, you are funnier than the Eldorado.”

“Now see here, don’t guy me, Valentine. You always do, and, and,—you know what they say,—a good laugh kills—”

“What?”

“Er—er—love and all that.”

She laughed until her eyes were moist with tears. “Tiens,” she cried, “he is dead, then!”

Clifford eyed her with growing alarm.

“Do you know why I came?” she said.

“No,” he replied uneasily, “I don’t.”

“How long have you made love to me?”

“Well,” he admitted, somewhat startled,—“I should say,—for about a year.”

“It is a year, I think. Are you not tired?”

He did not answer.

“Don’t you know that I like you too well to—to ever fall in love with you?” she said. “Don’t you know that we are too good comrades,—too old friends for that? And were we not,—do you think that I do not know your history, Monsieur Clifford?”

“Don’t be—don’t be so sarcastic,” he urged; “don’t be unkind, Valentine.”

“I’m not. I’m kind. I’m very kind,—to you and to Cécile.”

“Cécile is tired of me.”

“I hope she is,” said the girl, “for she deserves a better fate. Tiens, do you know your reputation in the Quarter? Of the inconstant, the most inconstant,—utterly incorrigible and no more serious than a gnat on a summer night. Poor Cécile!”

Clifford looked so uncomfortable that she spoke more kindly.

“I like you. You know that. Everybody does. You are a spoiled child here. Everything is permitted you and every one makes allowance, but every one cannot be a victim to caprice.”

“Caprice!” he cried. “By Jove, if the girls of the Latin Quarter are not capricious—”

“Never mind,—never mind about that! You must not sit in judgment—you of all men. Why are you here to-night? Oh,” she cried, “I will tell you why! Monsieur receives a little note; he sends a little answer; he dresses in his conquering raiment—”

“I don’t,” said Clifford, very red.

“You do, and it becomes you,” she retorted with a faint smile. Then again, very quietly, “I am in your power, but I know I am in the power of a friend. I have come to acknowledge it to you here,—and it is because of that that I am here to beg of you—a—a favor.”

Clifford opened his eyes, but said nothing.

“I am in—great distress of mind. It is Monsieur Hastings.”

“Well?” said Clifford, in some astonishment.

“I want to ask you,” she continued in a low voice, “I want to ask you to—to—in case you should speak of me before him,—not to say,—not to say—”

“I shall not speak of you to him,” he said quietly.

“Can—can you prevent others?”

“I might if I was present. May I ask why?”

“That is not fair,” she murmured; “you know how—how he considers me,—as he considers every woman. You know how different he is from you and the rest. I have never seen a man,—such a man as Monsieur Hastings.”

He let his cigarette go out unnoticed.

“I am almost afraid of him—afraid he should know—what we all are in the Quarter. Oh, I do not wish him to know! I do not wish him to—to turn from me—to cease from speaking to me as he does! You—you and the rest cannot know what it has been to me. I could not believe him,—I could not believe he was so good and—and noble. I do not wish him to know—so soon. He will find out—sooner or later, he will find out for himself, and then he will turn away from me. Why!” she cried passionately, “why should he turn from me and not from you?”

Clifford, much embarrassed, eyed his cigarette.

The girl rose, very white. “He is your friend—you have a right to warn him.”

“He is my friend,” he said at length.

They looked at each other in silence.

Then she cried, “By all that I hold to me most sacred, you need not warn him!”

“I shall trust your word,” he said pleasantly.

V

The month passed quickly for Hastings, and left few definite impressions after it. It did leave some, however. One was a painful impression of meeting Mr. Bladen on the Boulevard des Capucines in company with a very pronounced young person whose laugh dismayed him, and when at last he escaped from the café where Mr. Bladen had hauled him to join them in a bock [beer] he felt as if the whole boulevard was looking at him, and judging him by his company. Later, an instinctive conviction regarding the young person with Mr. Bladen sent the hot blood into his cheek and he returned to the pension in such a miserable state of mind that Miss Byng was alarmed and advised him to conquer his homesickness at once.

Another impression was equally vivid. One Saturday morning feeling lonely, his wanderings about the city brought him to the Gare St. Lazare. It was early for breakfast, but he entered the Hôtel Terminus and took a table near the window. As he wheeled about to give his order, a man passing rapidly along the aisle collided with his head, and looking up to received the expected apology, he was met instead by a slap on the shoulder and a hearty, “what the deuce are you doing here, old chap?” It was Rowden, who seized him and told him to come along. So, mildly protesting, he was ushered into a private dining-room where Clifford, rather red, jumped up from the table and welcomed him with a startled air which was softened by the unaffected glee of Rowden and the extreme courtesy of Elliott. The latter presented him to three bewitching girls who welcomed him so charmingly and seconded Rowden in his demand that Hastings should make one of the party, that he consented at once. While Elliott briefly outlined the projected excursion to La Roche, Hastings, delightedly ate his omelet, and returned the smiles of encouragement from Cécile and Colette and Jacqueline. Meantime Clifford in a bland whisper was telling Rowden what an ass he was. Poor Rowden looked miserable until Elliott, divining how affairs were turning, frowned on Clifford and found a moment to let Rowden know that they were all going to make the best of it.

“You shut up,” he observed to Clifford, “it’s fate, and that settles it.”

“It’s Rowden and that settles it,” murmured Clifford, concealing a grin. For after all he was not Hastings’ wet nurse. So it came about that the train which left the Gare St. Lazare at 9.15 A.M. stopped a moment in its career toward Havre and deposited at the red-roofed station of La Roche a merry party, armed with sunshades, trout-rods, and one cane, carried by the non-combatant, Hastings. Then, when they had established their camp in a grove of sycamores which bordered the little river Ept, Clifford, the acknowledged master of all that pertained to sportsmanship, took command.

“You, Rowden,” he said, “divide your flies with Elliott and keep an eye on him or else he’ll be trying to put on a float and sinker. Prevent him by force from grubbing about for worms.”

Elliott protested, but was forced to smile in the general laugh.

“You make me ill,” he asserted; “do you think this is my first trout?”

“I shall be delighted to see your first trout,” said Clifford, and dodging a fly hook, hurled with intent to hit, proceeded to sort and equip three slender rods destined to bring joy and fish to Cécile, Colette, and Jacqueline. With perfect gravity he ornamented each line with four split shot, a small hook, and a brilliant quill float.

“I shall never touch the worms,” announced Cécile with a shudder.

Jacqueline and Colette hastened to sustain her, and Hastings pleasantly offered to act in the capacity of general baiter and taker off of fish. But Cécile, doubtless fascinated by the gaudy flies in Clifford’s book, decided to accept lessons from him in the true art, and presently disappeared up the Ept with Clifford in tow.

Elliott looked doubtfully at Colette.

“I prefer gudgeons,” said that damsel with decision, “and you and Monsieur Rowden may go away when you please; may they not, Jacqueline?”

“Certainly,” responded Jacqueline.

Elliott, undecided, examined his rod and reel.

“You’ve got your reel on wrong side up,” observed Rowden.

Elliott wavered, and stole a glance at Colette.

“I—I—have almost decided to—er—not to flip the flies about just now,” he began. “There’s the pole that Cécile left—”

“Don’t call it a pole,” corrected Rowden.

“Rod then,” continued Elliott, and started off in the wake of the two girls, but was promptly collared by Rowden.

“No you don’t! Fancy a man fishing with a float and sinker when he has a fly rod in his hand! You come along!”

Where the placid little Ept flows down between its thickets to the Seine, a grassy bank shadows the haunt of the gudgeon, and on this bank sat Colette and Jacqueline and chattered and laughed and watched the swerving of the scarlet quills, while Hastings, his hat over his eyes, his head on a bank of moss, listened to their soft voices and gallantly unhooked the small and indignant gudgeon when a flash of a rod and a half suppressed scream announced a catch. The sunlight filtered through the leafy thickets awaking to song the forest birds. Magpies in spotless black and white flirted past, alighting near by with a hop and bound and twitch of the tail. Blue and white jays with rosy breasts shrieked through the trees, and a low-sailing hawk wheeled among the fields of ripening wheat, putting to flight flocks of twittering hedge birds.

Across the Seine a gull dropped on the water like a plume. The air was pure and still. Scarcely a leaf moved. Sounds from a distant farm came faintly the shrill cock-crow and dull baying. Now and then a steam-tug with big raking smoke-pipe, bearing the name, Guêpe 27, ploughed up the river dragging its interminable train of barges, or a sailboat dropped down with the current toward sleepy Rouen.

A faint fresh odor of earth and water hung in the air, and through the sunlight, orange-tipped butterflies danced above the marsh grass, soft velvety butterflies flapped through the mossy woods.

Hastings was thinking of Valentine. It was two o’clock when Elliott strolled back, and frankly admitting that he had eluded Rowden, sat down beside Colette and prepared to doze with satisfaction.

“Where are your trout?” said Colette severely.

“They still live,” murmured Elliott and went fast asleep.

Rowden returned shortly after, and casting a scornful glance at the slumbering one, displayed three crimson-flecked trout.

“And that,” smiled Hastings lazily, “that is the holy end to which the faithful plod,—the slaughter of these small fish with a bit of silk and feather.”

Rowden disdained to answer him. Colette caught another gudgeon and awoke Elliott who protested and gazed about for the lunch baskets, as Clifford and Cécile came up demanding instant refreshment. Cécile’s skirts were soaked, and her gloves torn but she was happy, and Clifford, dragging out a two pound trout, stood still to receive the applause of the company.

“Where the deuce did you get that?” demanded Elliott.

Cécile, wet and enthusiastic, recounted the battle, and then Clifford eulogized her powers with the fly, and, in proof, produced from his creel a defunct chub, which, he observed, just missed being a trout.

They were all very merry at luncheon and Hastings was voted “charming.” He enjoyed it immensly,—only it seemed to him at moments that flirtation went further in France than in Millbrook, Connecticut, and he thought that Cécile might be a little less enthusiastic about Clifford, that perhaps it would be quite as well if Jacqueline sat further away from Rowden and that possibly Colette could have, for a moment, at least, taken her eyes from Elliott’s face. Still, he enjoyed it—except when his thoughts drifted to Valentine and then he felt that he was very far away from her. La Roche is at least an hour and a half from Paris. It is also true that he felt a happiness, a quick heart-beat when, at eight o’clock that night the train which bore them from La Roche rolled into the Gare St. Lazare and he was once more in the city of Valentine.

“Good-night,” they said, pressing around him. “You must come with us next time!”

He promised, and watched them, two by two, drift into the darkening city, and stood so long that, when again he raised his eyes, the vast Boulevard was twinkling with gas-jets through which the electric lights stared like moons.

VI

It was with another quick heart-beat that he awoke next morning, for his first thought was of Valentine.

The sun already gilded the towers of Notre Dame, the clatter of workmen’s sabots awoke sharp echoes in the street below, and across the way a blackbird in a pink almond tree was going into an ecstasy of trills.

He determined to awake Clifford for a brisk walk in the country, hoping later to beguile that gentleman into the American church for his soul’s sake. He found Alfred the gimlet-eyed, washing the asphalt walk which led to the studio.

“Monsieur Elliott?” he replied to the perfunctory inquiry, “je ne sais pas.”

“And Monsieur Clifford,”—began Hastings somewhat astonished.

“Monsieur Clifford,” said the concierge with fine irony, “will be pleased to see you, as he retired early; in fact he has just come in.”

Hastings hesitated while the concierge pronounced a fine eulogy on people who never stayed out all night and then came battering at the lodge gate during hours which even a gendarme held sacred to sleep. He also discoursed eloquently upon the beauties of temperance, and took an ostentatious draught from the fountain in the court.

“I do not think I will come in,” said Hastings.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” growled the concierge, “perhaps it would be well to see Monsieur Clifford. He possibly needs aid. Me he drives forth with hair-brushes and boots. It is a mercy if he has not set fire to something with his candle.”

Hastings hesitated for an instant, but swallowing his dislike of such a mission, walked slowly through the ivy-covered alley and across the inner garden to the studio. He knocked. Perfect silence. Then he knocked again, and this time something struck the door from within with a crash.

“That,” said the concierge, “was a boot.” He fitted his duplicate key into the lock and ushered Hastings in. Clifford, in disordered evening dress, sat on the rug in the middle of the room. He held in his hand a shoe, and did not appear astonished to see Hastings.

“Good-morning, do you use Pears’ soap?” he inquired with a vague wave of his hand and a vaguer smile.

Hastings’ heart sank. “For Heaven’s sake,” he said, “Clifford, go to bed.”

“Not while that—that Alfred pokes his shaggy head in here an’ I have a shoe left.”

Hastings blew out the candle, picked up Clifford’s hat and cane, and said, with an emotion he could not conceal, “This is terrible, Clifford.—I—never knew you did this sort of thing.”

“Well, I do,” said Clifford.

“Where is Elliott?”

“Ole chap,” returned Clifford, becoming maudlin, “Providence which feeds—feeds—er—sparrows an’ that sort of thing watcheth over the intemperate wanderer—”

“Where is Elliott?”

But Clifford only wagged his head and waved his arm about. “He’s out there,—somewhere about.” Then suddenly feeling a desire to see his missing chum, lifted up his voice and howled for him.

Hastings, thoroughly shocked, sat down on the lounge without a word. Presently, after shedding several scalding tears, Clifford brightened up and rose with great precaution.

“Ole chap,” he observed, “do you want to see er—er miracle? Well, here goes. I’m goin’ to begin.”

He paused, beaming at vacancy.

“Er miracle,” he repeated.

Hastings supposed he was alluding to the miracle of his keeping his balance and said nothing.

“I’m goin’ to bed,” he announced, “poor ole Clifford’s goin’ to bed, an’ that’s er miracle!”

And he did with a nice calculation of distance and equilibrium which would have rung enthusiastic yells of applause from Elliott had he been there to assist en connaisseur [as an expert]. But he was not. He had not yet reached the studio. He was on his way, however, and smiled with magnificent condescension on Hastings, who, half an hour later, found him reclining upon a bench in the Luxembourg. He permitted himself to be aroused, dusted and escorted to the gate. Here, however, he refused all further assistance, and bestowing a patronizing bow upon Hastings, steered a tolerably true course for the rue Vavin.

Hastings watched him out of sight, and then slowly retraced his steps toward the fountain. At first he felt gloomy and depressed, but gradually the clear air of the morning lifted the pressure from his heart, and he sat down on the marble seat under the shadow of the winged god.

The air was fresh and sweet with perfume from the orange flowers. Everywhere pigeons were bathing, dashing the water over their iris-hued breasts, flashing in and out of the spray or nestling almost to the neck along the polished basin. The sparrows, too, were abroad in force, soaking their dust-colored feathers in the limpid pool and chirping with might and main. Under the sycamores which surround the duck pond opposite the fountain of Marie de Medici, the water-fowl cropped the herbage, or waddled in rows down the bank to embark on some solemn aimless cruise.

Butterflies, somewhat lame from a chilly night’s repose under the lilac leaves, crawled over and over the white phlox, or took a rheumatic flight toward some sun-warmed shrub. The bees were already busy among the heliotrope and one or two great gray flies with brick-colored eyes sat in a spot of sunlight beside the marble seat, or chased each other about, only to return again to the spot of sunshine and rub their forelegs, exulting.

The sentries paced briskly before the painted boxes, pausing at times to look toward the guard-house for their relief.

They came at last, with a shuffle of feet and click of bayonets, the word was passed, the relief fell out, and away they went, crunch, crunch, across the gravel.

A mellow chime floated from the clock-tower of the palace, the deep bell of St. Sulpice, echoed the stroke. Hastings sat dreaming in the shadow of the god, and while he mused, somebody came and sat down beside him. At first he did not raise his head. It was only when she spoke that he sprang up.

“You! At this hour?”

“I was restless, I could not sleep.” Then in a low happy voice—“and you! at this hour?”

“I—I slept, but the sun awoke me.”

“I could not sleep,” she said, and her eyes seemed, for a moment, touched with an indefinable shadow. Then, smiling, “I am so glad—I seemed to know you were coming. Don’t laugh, I believe in dreams.”

“Did you really dream of,—of my being here?”

“I think I was awake when I dreamed it,” she admitted. Then for a time they were mute, acknowledging by silence the happiness of being together. And after all their silence was eloquent, for faint smiles, and glances born of their thoughts, crossed and recrossed, until lips moved and words were formed, which seemed almost superfluous. What they said was not very profound. Perhaps the most valuable jewel that fell from Hastings’ lips bore direct reference to breakfast.

“I have not yet had my chocolate,” she confessed, “but what a material man you are.”

“Valentine,” he said impulsively, “I wish,—I do wish that you would,—just for this once,—give me the whole day,—just for this once.”

“Oh dear,” she smiled, “not only material, but selfish.”

“Not selfish, hungry,” he said, looking at her.

“A cannibal too, oh, dear!”

“Will you, Valentine?”

“But my chocolate—”

“Take it with me.”

“But déjeuner—”

“Together, at St. Cloud.”

“But I can’t—”

“Together,—all day,—all day long; will you Valentine?”

She was silent.

“Only for this once.”

Again that indefinable shadow fell across her eyes, and when it was gone she sighed. “Yes,—together, only for this once.”

“All day?” he said, doubting his happiness.

“All day,” she smiled, “and oh, I am so hungry.”

He laughed, enchanted.

“What a material young lady it is.”

On the Boulevard St. Michel there is a Crémerie painted white and blue outside, and neat and clean as a whistle inside. The auburn-haired young woman who speaks French like a native, and rejoices in the name of Murphy, smiled at them as they entered, and tossing a fresh napkin over the zinc tête-à-tête table, whisked before them two cups of chocolate and a basket full of crisp, fresh croissons.

The primrose-colored pats of butter, each stamped with a shamrock in relief, seemed saturated with the fragrance of Normandy pastures.

“How delicious!” they said in the same breath, and then laughed at the coincidence.

“With but a single thought,” he began.

“How absurd!” she cried with cheeks all rosy. “I’m thinking I’d like a croisson.”

“So am I,” he replied triumphant, “that proves it.”

Then they had a quarrel; she accusing him of behavior unworthy of a child in arms, and he denying it, and bringing counter charges, until Mademoiselle Murphy laughed in sympathy, and the last croisson was eaten under a flag of truce. Then they rose, and she took his arm with a bright nod to Mlle. Murphy, who cried them a merry: “Bonjour, Madam! bonjour, Monsieur!” and watched them hail a passing cab and drive away. “Dieu! qu’il est beau,” she sighed, adding after a moment, “Do they be married, I dunno,—ma foi ils ont bien l’air.” [they certainly give the impression]

The cab swung around the rue de Medici, turned into the rue de Vaugirard, followed it to where it crosses the rue de Rennes, and taking that noisy thoroughfare, drew up before the Gare Montparnasse. They were just in time for a train and scampered up the stairway and out to the cars as the last note from the starting gong rang through the arched station. The guard slammed the door of their compartment, a whistle sounded, answered by a screech from the locomotive, and the long train glided from the station, faster, faster, and sped out into the morning sunshine. The summer wind blew in their faces from the open window, and sent the soft hair dancing on the girl’s forehead.

“We have the compartment to ourselves,” said Hastings.

She leaned against the cushioned window-seat, her eyes bright and wide open, her lips parted. The wind lifted her hat, and fluttered the ribbons under her chin. With a quick movement she untied them and drawing a long hat pin from her hat, laid it down on the seat beside her. The train was flying.

The color surged in her cheeks and with each quick-drawn breath, her breath rose and fell under the cluster of lilies at her throat. Trees, houses, ponds, danced past, cut by a mist of telegraph poles.

“Faster! faster!” she cried.

His eyes never left her, but hers, wide open and blue as the summer sky, seemed fixed on something far ahead,—something which came no nearer, but fled before them as they fled.

Was it the horizon, cut now by the grim fortress on the hill, now by the cross of a country chapel? Was it the summer moon, ghost-like, slipping through the vaguer blue above?

“Faster! faster!” she cried.

Her parted lips burned scarlet.

The car shook and shivered and the fields streamed by like an emerald torrent. He caught the excitement and his faced glowed.

“Oh,” she cried, and with an unconscious movement caught his hand, drawing him to the window beside her. “Look! lean out with me!”

He only saw her lips move; her voice was drowned in the roar of a trestle, but his hand closed in hers and he clung to the sill. The wind whistled in their ears. “Not so far out, Valentine, take care!” he gasped.

Below, through the ties of the trestle, a broad river flashed into view and out again, as the train thundered along a tunnel, and away once more through the freshet of green fields. The wind roared about them. The girl was leaning far out from the window, and he caught her by the waist, crying, “Not too far!” but she only murmured, “Faster! faster! away out of the city, out of the land, faster, faster! away out of the world!”

“What are you saying all to yourself,” he said, but his voice was broken, and the wind whirled it back into his throat.

She heard him, and, turning from the window looked down at his arm about her. Then she raised her eyes to his. The car shook and the windows rattled. They were dashing through a forest now, and the sun swept the dewy branches with running flashes of fire. He looked into her troubled eyes; he drew her to him and kissed the half-parted lips, and she cried out, a bitter, hopeless cry, “—Not that—not that!”

But he held her close and strong, whispering words of honest love and passion, and when she sobbed—“Not that—not that—I have promised! You must—you must know—I am—not—worthy—” In the purity of his own heart her words were, to him, meaningless then, meaningless forever after. Presently her voice ceased, and her head rested on his breast. He leaned against the window, his ears swept by the furious wind, his heart in a joyous tumult. The forest was passed, and the sun slipped from behind the trees, flooding the earth again with brightness. She raised her eyes and looked out into the world from the window. Then she began to speak, but her voice was faint and he bent his head close to hers and listened. “I cannot turn from you; I am too weak. You were long ago my master—master of my heart and soul. I have broken my word to one who trusted me, but I have told you all;—what matters the rest?” He smiled at her innocence and she worshipped his. She spoke again: “Take me or cast me away;—what matters it? Now with a word you can kill me, and it might be easier to die than to look upon happiness as great as mine.”

He took her in his arms; “Hush, what are you saying? Look,—look out at the sunlight, the meadows and the streams. We shall be very happy in so bright a world.”

She turned to the sunlight. From the window, the world below seemed very fair to her.

Trembling with happiness, she sighed: “Is this the world? Then I have never known it.”

“Nor have I, God forgive me,” he murmured.

Perhaps it was our gentle Lady of the Fields who forgave them both.

RUE BARRÉE

For let Philosopher and Doctor preach

Of what they will and what they will not,—each

Is but one link in an eternal chain

That none can slip nor break nor over-reach.

—The Rubáiyát

RUE BARRÉE

Crimson nor yellow roses nor

The savour of the mounting sea

Are worth the perfume I adore

That clings to thee.

The languid-headed lilies tire,

The changeless waters weary me;

I ache with passionate desire

Of thine and thee.

There are but these things in the world—

Thy mouth of fire,

Thy breasts, thy hands, thy hair upcurled

And my desire.

—Theodore Wratislaw,
“Eρος δ’αυτε …”

I

One morning at Julian’s, a student said to Selby; “That is Foxhall Clifford,” pointing with his brushes at a young man who sat before an easel, doing nothing.

Selby, shy and nervous, walked over and began: “My name is Selby,— I have just arrived in Paris, and bring a letter of introduction—” His voice was lost in the crash of a falling easel, the owner of which promptly assaulted his neighbor, and for a time the noise of battle rolled through the studios of MM. Boulanger and Lefebvre, presently subsiding into a scuffle on the stairs outside. Selby, apprehensive as to his own reception in the studio, looked at Clifford, who sat serenely watching the fight.

“It’s a little noisy here,” said Clifford, “but you will like the fellows when you know them.” His unaffected manner delighted Selby. Then with a simplicity that won his heart, he presented him to half a dozen students of as many nationalities. Some were cordial, all were polite. Even the majestic creature who held the position of Massier, unbent enough to say: “My friend, when a man speaks French as well as you do, and is also a friend of Monsieur Clifford, he will have no trouble in this studio. You expect, of course, to fill the stove until the next new man comes?”

“Of course.”

“And you don’t mind chaff?”

“No,” replied Selby, who hated it.

Clifford, much amused, put on his hat, saying, “You must expect lots of it at first.”

Selby placed his own hat on his head and followed him to the door.

As they passed the model stand there was a furious cry of “Chapeau! Chapeau!” and a student sprang from his easel menacing Selby, who reddened but looked at Clifford.

“Take off your hat for them,” said the latter, laughing.

A little embarrassed, he turned and saluted the studio.

“Et moi?” cried the model.

“You are charming,” replied Selby, astonished at his own audacity, but the studio rose as one man, shouting: “He has done well! he’s all right!” while the model, laughing, kissed her hand to him and cried: “À demain beau jeune homme!”

All that week Selby worked at the studio unmolested. The French students christened him “l’Enfant Prodigue,” which was freely translated, “The Prodigious Infant,” “The Kid,” “Kid Selby,” and “Kidby.” But the disease soon ran its course from “Kidby” to “Kidney,” and then naturally to “Tidbits” where it was arrested by Clifford’s authority and ultimately relapsed to “Kid.”

Wednesday came, and with it M. Boulanger. For three hours the students writhed under his biting sarcasms,—among the others Clifford, who was informed that he knew even less about a work of art than he did about the art of work. Selby was more fortunate. The professor examined his drawing in silence, looked at him sharply, and passed on with a noncommittal gesture. He presently departed arm in arm with Bouguereau, to the relief of Clifford who was then at liberty to jam his hat on his head and depart.

The next day, he did not appear, and Selby, who had counted on seeing him at the studio, a thing which he learned later it was vanity to count on, wandered back to the Latin Quarter alone.

Paris was still strange and new to him. He was vaguely troubled by its splendor. No tender memories stirred his American bosom at the Place du Châtelet, nor even by Notre Dame. The Palais de Justice with its clock and turrets and stalking sentinels in blue and vermilion, the Place St. Michel with its jumble of omnibuses and ugly water-spitting griffins, the hill of the Boulevard St. Michel, the tooting trams, the policemen dawdling two by two, and the table-lined terraces of the Café Vacehett, were nothing to him, as yet, nor did he even know, when he stepped from the stones of the Place St. Michel to the asphalt of the Boulevard, that he had crossed the frontier and entered the student zone,—the famous Latin Quarter.

A cabman hailed him as “bourgeois,” and urged the superiority of driving over walking. A gamin, with an appearance of great concern, requested the latest telegraphic news from London, and then, standing on his head, invited Selby to feats of strength. A pretty girl gave him a glance from a pair of violet eyes. He did not see her, but she, catching her own reflection in a window, wondered at the color burning in her cheeks. Turning to resume her course, she met Foxhall Clifford, and hurried on. Clifford, open-mouthed, followed her with his eyes; then he looked after Selby, who had turned into the Boulevard St. Germain toward the rue de Seine. Then he examined himself in the shop window. The result seemed to be unsatisfactory.

“I’m not a beauty,” he mused, “but neither am I a hobgoblin. What does she mean by blushing at Selby? I never before saw her look at a fellow in my life,—neither has any one in the Quarter. Anyway, I can swear she never looks at me, and goodness knows I have done all that respectful adoration can do.”

He sighed, and murmuring a prophecy concerning the salvation of his immortal soul swung into that graceful lounge which at all times characterized Clifford. With no apparent exertion, he overtook Selby at the corner, and together they crossed the sunlit Boulevard and sat down under the awning of the Café du Cercle. Clifford bowed to everybody on the terrace, saying, “You shall meet them all later, but now let me present you to two of the sights of Paris, Mr. Richard Elliott and Mr. Stanley Rowden.”

The “sights” looked amiable, and took vermouth.

“You cut the studio to-day,” said Elliott, suddenly turning on Clifford who avoided his eyes.

“To commune with nature?” observed Rowden.

“What’s her name this time?” asked Elliott, and Rowden answered promptly, “Name, Yvette; nationality, Breton—”

“Wrong,” replied Clifford blandly, “it’s Rue Barrée.”

The subject changed instantly, and Selby listened in surprise to names which were new to him, and eulogies on the latest Prix de Rome winner. He was delighted to hear opinions boldly expressed and points honestly debated, although the vehicle was mostly slang, both English and French. He longed for the time when he too should be plunged into the strife for fame.

The bells of St. Sulpice struck the hour, and the Palace of the Luxembourg answered chime on chime. With a glance at the sun, dipping low in the golden dust behind the Palais Bourbon, they rose, and turning to the east, crossed the Boulevard St. Germain and sauntered toward the École de Medecine. At the corner a girl passed them, walking hurriedly. Clifford smirked, Elliott and Rowden were agitated, but they all bowed, and, without raising her eyes, she returned their salute. But Selby, who had lagged behind, fascinated by some gay shop window, looked up to meet two of the bluest eyes he had ever seen. The eyes were dropped in an instant, and the young fellow hastened to overtake the others.

“By Jove,” he said, “do you fellows know I have just seen the prettiest girl—” An exclamation broke from the trio, gloomy, foreboding, like the chorus in a Greek play.

“Rue Barrée!”

“What!” cried Selby, bewildered.

The only answer was a vague gesture from Clifford.

Two hours later, during dinner, Clifford turned to Selby and said, “You want to ask me something; I can tell by the way you fidget about.”

“Yes, I do,” he said, innocently enough; “it’s about that girl. Who is she?”

In Rowden’s smile there was pity, in Elliott’s bitterness.

“Her name,” said Clifford solemnly, “is unknown to any one, at least,” he added with much conscientiousness, “as far as I can learn. Every fellow in the Quarter bows to her and she returns the salute gravely, but no man has ever been known to obtain more than that. Her profession, judging from her music-roll, is that of a pianist. Her residence is in a small and humble street which is kept in a perpetual process of repair by the city authorities, and from the black letters painted on the barrier which defends the street from traffic, she has taken the name by which we know her,—Rue Barrée. Mr. Rowden, in his imperfect knowledge of the French tongue, called our attention to it as Roo Barry—”

“I didn’t,” said Rowden hotly.

“And Roo Barry, or Rue Barrée, is to-day an object of adoration to every rapin in the Quarter—”

“We are not rapins,” corrected Elliott.

“I am not,” returned Clifford, “and I beg to call to your attention, Selby, that these two gentlemen have at various and apparently unfortunate moments, offered to lay down life and limb at the feet of Rue Barrée. The lady possesses a chilling smile which she uses on such occasions and,” here he became gloomily impressive, “I have been forced to believe that neither the scholarly grace of my friend Elliott nor the buxom beauty of my friend Rowden have touched that heart of ice.”

Elliott and Rowden, boiling with indignation, cried out, “And you!”

“I,” said Clifford blandly, “do fear to tread where you rush in.”

II

Twenty-four hours later Selby had completely forgotten Rue Barrée. During the week he worked with might and main at the studio, and Saturday night found him so tired that he went to bed before dinner and had a nightmare about a river of yellow ochre in which he was drowning. Sunday morning, apropos of nothing at all, he thought of Rue Barrée and ten seconds afterwards he saw her. It was at the flower market on the marble bridge. She was examining a pot of pansies. The gardener had evidently thrown heart and soul into the transaction, but Rue Barrée shook her head.

It is a question whether Selby would have stopped then and there to inspect a cabbage-rose had not Clifford unwound for him the yarn of the previous Tuesday. It is possible that his curiosity was piqued, for with the exception of a hen-turkey, a boy of nineteen is the most openly curious biped alive. From twenty until death he tries to conceal it. But, to be fair to Selby, it is also true that the market was attractive. Under a cloudless sky the flowers were packed and heaped along the marble bridge to the parapet. The air was soft, the sun spun a shadowy lacework among the palms and glowed in the hearts of a thousand roses. Spring had come,—was in full tide. The watering carts and sprinklers, spread freshness over the Boulevard, the sparrows had become vulgarly obtrusive and the credulous Seine angler anxiously followed his gaudy quill, floating among the soapsuds of the lavoirs. The white-spiked chestnuts clad in tender green, vibrated with the hum of bees. Shoddy butterflies flaunted their winter rags among the heliotrope. There was a smell of fresh earth in the air, an echo of the woodland brook in the ripple of the Seine, and swallows soared and skimmed among the anchored river craft. Somewhere in a window, a caged bird was singing its heart out to the sky.

Selby looked at the cabbage-rose and then at the sky. Something in the song of the caged bird may have moved him, or perhaps it was that dangerous sweetness in the air of May.

At first he was hardly conscious that he had stopped, then he was scarcely conscious why he had stopped, then he thought he would move on, then he thought he wouldn’t, then he looked at Rue Barrée.

The gardener said; “Mademoiselle, this is undoubtedly a fine pot of pansies.”

Rue Barrée shook her head.

The gardener smiled. She evidently did not want the pansies. She had bought many pots of pansies there, two or three every spring, and never argued. What did she want then? The pansies were evidently a feeler toward a more important transaction. The gardener rubbed his hands and gazed about him.

“These tulips are magnificent,” he observed, “and these hyacinths—” He fell into a trance at the mere sight of the scented thickets.

“That,” murmured Rue, pointing to a splendid rose-bush with her furled parasol, but in spite of her, her voice trembled a little. Selby noticed it, more shame to him that he was listening, and the gardener noticed it, and, burying his nose in the roses, scented a bargain. Still, to do him justice, he did not add a centime to the honest value of the plant, for after all, Rue was probably poor, and any one could see she was charming.

“Fifty francs, Mademoiselle.”

The gardener’s tone was grave. Rue felt that argument would be wasted. They both stood silent for a moment. The gardener did not eulogize his prize,—the rose-tree was gorgeous and any one could see it.

“I will take the pansies,” said the girl, and drew two francs from a worn purse. Then she looked up. A teardrop stood in the way, refracting the light like a diamond, but as it rolled into a little corner by her nose a vision of Selby replaced it, and when a brush of the handkerchief had cleared the startled blue eyes, Selby himself appeared, very much embarrassed. He instantly looked up into the sky, apparently devoured with a thirst for astronomical research, and as he continued his investigations for fully five minutes, the gardener looked up too and so did a policeman. Then Selby looked at the tips of his boots, the gardener looked at him and the policeman slouched on. Rue Barrée had been gone some time.

“What,” said the gardener, “may I offer Monsieur?”

Selby never knew why, but he suddenly began to buy flowers. The gardener was electrified. Never before had he sold so many flowers, never at such satisfying prices, and never, never with such absolute unanimity of opinion with a customer. But he missed the bargaining, the arguing, the calling of Heaven to witness. The transaction lacked spice.

“These tulips are magnificent!”

“They are!” cried Selby warmly.

“But alas, they are dear.”

“I will take them.”

“Dieu!” murmured the gardener in a perspiration, “he’s madder than most Englishmen.”

“This cactus—”

“Is gorgeous!”

“Alas—”

“Send it with the rest.”

The gardener braced himself against the river wall.

“That splendid rose-bush,” he began faintly.

“That is a beauty. I believe it is fifty francs—” He stopped, very red. The gardener relished his confusion. Then a sudden cool self-possession took the place of his momentary confusion and he held the gardener with his eye, and bullied him.

“I’ll take that bush. Why did not the young lady buy it?”

“Mademoiselle is not wealthy.”

“How do you know?”

“Dame, I sell her many pansies; pansies are not expensive.”

“Those are the pansies she bought?”

“These Monsieur, the blue and gold.”

“Then you intend to send them to her?”

“At midday after the market.”

“Take this rose-bush with them, and”—here he glared at the gardener—“don’t you dare say from whom they came.” The gardener’s eyes were like saucers, but Selby, calm and victorious, said: “Send the others to the Hôtel du Sénat, 7 rue de Tournon. I will leave directions with the concierge.”

Then he buttoned his glove with much dignity and stalked off, but when well around the corner and hidden from the gardener’s view, the conviction that he was an idiot came home to him in a furious blush. Ten minutes later he sat in his room in the Hôtel du Sénat repeating with an imbecile smile: “What an ass I am, what an ass!”

An hour later found him in the same chair, in the same position, his hat and gloves still on, his stick in his hand, but he was silent, apparently lost in contemplation of his boot toes, and his smile was less imbecile and even a bit retrospective.

III

About five o’clock that afternoon, the little sad-eyed woman who fills the position of concierge at the Hôtel du Sénat, held up her hands in amazement to see a wagon-load of flower-bearing shrubs draw up before the doorway. She called Joseph, the intemperate garçon, who, while calculating the value of the flowers in petits verres, gloomily disclaimed any knowledge as to their destination.

“Voyons,” said the little concierge, “cherchons la femme!”

“You?” he suggested.

The little woman stood a moment pensive and then sighed. Joseph caressed his nose, a nose which for gaudiness could vie with any floral display.

Then the gardener came in, hat in hand, and a few minutes later Selby stood in the middle of his room, his coat off, his shirt-sleeves rolled up. The chamber originally contained, besides the furniture, about two square feet of walking room, and now this was occupied by a cactus. The bed groaned under crates of pansies, lilies and heliotrope, the lounge was covered with hyacinths and tulips, and the washstand supported a species of young tree warranted to bear flowers at some time or other.

Clifford came in a little later, fell over a box of sweet peas, swore a little, apologized, and then, as the full splendor of the floral fête burst upon him, sat down in astonishment upon a geranium. The geranium was a wreck, but Selby said, “don’t mind,” and glared at the cactus.

“Are you going to give a ball?” demanded Clifford.

“N—no,—I’m very fond of flowers,” said Selby, but the statement lacked enthusiasm.

“I should imagine so.” Then, after a silence, “That’s a fine cactus.”

Selby contemplated the cactus, touched it with the air of a connoisseur, and pricked his thumb.

Clifford poked a pansy with his stick. Then Joseph came in with the bill, announcing the sum total in a loud voice, partly to impress Clifford, partly to intimidate Selby into disgorging a pourboire [gratuity] which he would share, if he chose, with the gardener. Clifford tried to pretend that he had not heard, while Selby paid bill and tribute without a murmur. Then he lounged back into the room with an attempt at indifference which failed entirely when he tore his trousers on the cactus.

Clifford made some commonplace remark, lighted a cigarette and looked out of the window to give Selby a chance. Selby tried to take it, but getting as far as—“Yes, spring is here at last,” froze solid. He looked at the back of Clifford’s head. It expressed volumes. Those little perked-up ears seemed tingling with suppressed glee. He made a desperate effort to master the situation, and jumped up to reach for some Russian cigarettes as an incentive to conversation, but was foiled by the cactus, to whom again he fell a prey. The last straw was added.

“Damn the cactus.” This observation was wrung from Selby against his will,—against his own instinct of self-preservation, but the thorns on the cactus were long and sharp and at their repeated prick his pent-up wrath escaped. It was too late now; it was done, and Clifford had wheeled around.

“See here, Selby, why the deuce did you buy those flowers?”

“I’m fond of them,” said Selby.

“What are you going to do with them? You can’t sleep here.”

“I could, if you’d help me take the pansies off the bed.”

“Where can you put them?”

“Couldn’t I give them to the concierge?”

As soon as he said it he regretted it. What in Heaven’s name would Clifford think of him! He had heard the amount of the bill. Would he believe that he had invested in these luxuries as a timid declaration to his concierge? And would the Latin Quarter comment upon it in their own brutal fashion? He dreaded ridicule, and he knew Clifford’s reputation.

Then somebody knocked.

Selby looked at Clifford with a hunted expression which touched that young man’s heart. It was a confession and at the same time a supplication. Clifford jumped up, threaded his way through the floral labyrinth, and putting an eye to the crack of the door, said, “Who the devil is it?”

This graceful style of reception is indigenous to the Quarter.

“It’s Elliott,” he said, looking back, “and Rowden too, and their bulldogs.” Then he addressed them through the crack.

“Sit down on the stairs; Selby and I are coming out directly.”

Discretion is a virtue. The Latin Quarter possesses few, and discretion seldom figures on the list. They sat down and began to whistle.

Presently Rowden called out, “I smell flowers. They feast within!”

“You ought to know Selby better than that,” growled Clifford behind the door, while the other hurriedly exchanged his torn trousers for others.

“We know Selby,” said Elliott with emphasis.

“Yes,” said Rowden, “he gives receptions with floral decorations and invites Clifford, while we sit on the stairs.”

“Yes, while the youth and beauty of the Quarter revel,” suggested Rowden; then, with sudden misgiving; “Is Odette there?”

“See here,” demanded Elliott, “is Colette there?”

Then he raised his voice in a plaintive howl, “Are you there, Colette, while I’m kicking my heels on these tiles?”

“Clifford is capable of anything,” said Rowden; “his nature is soured since Rue Barrée sat on him.”

Elliott raised his voice: “I say, you fellows, we saw some flowers carried into Rue Barrée’s house at noon.”

“Posies and roses,” specified Rowden.

“Probably for her,” added Elliott, caressing his bulldog.

Clifford turned with sudden suspicion upon Selby. The latter hummed a tune, selected a pair of gloves and, choosing a dozen cigarettes, placed them in a case. Then walking over to the cactus, he deliberately detached a blossom, drew it through his buttonhole and picking up hat and stick, smiled upon Clifford, at which the latter was mightily troubled.

IV

Monday morning at Julian’s, students fought for places; students with prior claims drove away others who had been anxiously squatting on coveted tabourets since the door was opened in hopes of appropriating them at roll-call; students squabbled over palettes, brushes, portfolios, or rent the air with demands for Ciceri and bread. The former, a dirty ex-model, who had in palmier days posed as Judas, now dispensed stale bread at one sou and made enough to keep himself in cigarettes. Monsieur Julian walked in, smiled a fatherly smile and walked out. His disappearance was followed by the apparition of the clerk, a foxy creature who flitted through the battling hordes in search of prey.

Three men who had not paid dues were caught and summoned. A fourth was scented, followed, outflanked, his retreat toward the door cut off, and finally captured behind the stove. About that time, the revolution assuming an acute form, howls rose for “Jules!”

Jules came, umpired two fights with a sad resignation in his big brown eyes, shook hands with everybody and melted away in the throng, leaving an atmosphere of peace and good will. The lions sat down with the lambs, the massiers marked the best places for themselves and friends, and, mounting the model stands, opened the roll-calls.

The word was passed, “They begin with C this week.”

They did.

“Clisson!”

Clisson jumped like a flash and marked his name on the floor in chalk before a front seat.

“Caron!”

Caron galloped away to secure his place. Bang! went an easel. “Nom de Dieu!” in French,—“Where in h——l are you goin’!” in English. Crash! a paint box fell with brushes and all on board. “Dieu de Dieu de—” spat! A blow, a short rush, a clinch and scuffle, and the voice of the massier, stern and reproachful:

“Cochon!”

Then the roll-call was resumed.

“Clifford!”

The massier paused and looked up, one finger between the leaves of the ledger.

“Clifford!”

Clifford was not there. He was about three miles away in a direct line and every instant increased the distance. Not that he was walking fast,—on the contrary, he was strolling with that leisurely gait peculiar to himself. Elliott was beside him and two bulldogs covered the rear. Elliott was reading the Gil Blas, from which he seemed to extract amusement, but deeming boisterous mirth unsuitable to Clifford’s state of mind, subdued his amusement to a series of discreet smiles. The latter, moodily aware of this, said nothing, but leading the way into the Luxembourg Gardens installed himself upon a bench by the northern terrace and surveyed the landscape with disfavor. Elliott, according to the Luxembourg regulations, tied the two dogs and then with an interrogative glance toward his friend, resumed the Gil Blas and the discreet smiles.

The day was perfect. The sun hung over Notre Dame, setting the city in a glitter. The tender foliage of the chestnuts cast a shadow over the terrace and flecked the paths and walks with tracery so blue that Clifford might here have found encouragement for his violent “impressions” had he but looked; but as usual in this period of his career, his thoughts were anywhere except in his profession. Around about, the sparrows quarrelled and chattered their courtship songs, the big rosy pigeons sailed from tree to tree, the flies whirled in the sunbeams and the flowers exhaled a thousand perfumes which stirred Clifford with languorous wistfulness. Under this influence he spoke.

“Elliott, you are a true friend—”

“You make me ill,” replied the latter, folding his paper. “It’s just as I thought,—you are tagging after some new petticoat again. And,” he continued wrathfully, “if this is what you’ve kept me away from Julian’s for,—if it’s to fill me up with the perfections of some little idiot—”

“Not idiot,” remonstrated Clifford gently.

“See here,” cried Elliott, “have you the nerve to try to tell me that you are in love again?”

“Again?”

“Yes, again and again and again and—by George, have you?”

“This,” observed Clifford sadly, “is serious.”

For a moment Elliott would have laid hands on him, then he laughed from sheer helplessness. “Oh, go on, go on; let’s see, there’s Clémence and Marie Tellec and Cosette and Fifine, Colette, Marie Verdier—”

“All of whom are charming, most charming, but I never was serious—”

“So help me, Moses,” said Elliott, solemnly, “each and every one of those named have separately and in turn torn your heart with anguish and have also made me lose my place at Julian’s in this same manner; each and every one, separately and in turn. Do you deny it?”

“What you say may be founded on facts—in a way—but give me the credit of being faithful to one at a time—”

“Until the next came along.”

“But this,—this is really very different. Elliott, believe me, I am all broken up.”

Then there being nothing else to do, Elliott gnashed his teeth and listened.

“It’s—it’s Rue Barrée.”

“Well,” observed Elliott, with scorn, “if you are moping and moaning over that girl,—the girl who has given you and myself every reason to wish that the ground would open and engulf us,—well, go on!”

“I’m going on,—I don’t care; timidity has fled—”

“Yes, your native timidity.”

“I’m desperate, Elliott. Am I in love? Never, never did I feel so d——n miserable. I can’t sleep; honestly, I’m incapable of eating properly.”

“Same symptoms noticed in the case of Colette.”

“Listen, will you?”

“Hold on a moment, I know the rest by heart. Now let me ask you something. Is it your belief that Rue Barrée is a pure girl?”

“Yes,” said Clifford, turning red.

“Do you love her,—not as you dangle and tiptoe after every pretty inanity—I mean, do you honestly love her?”

“Yes,” said the other doggedly, “I would—”

“Hold on a moment; would you marry her?”

Clifford turned scarlet. “Yes,” he muttered.

“Pleasant news for your family,” growled Elliott in suppressed fury. “‘Dear father, I have just married a charming grisette whom I’m sure you’ll welcome with open arms, in company with her mother, a most estimable and cleanly washlady.’ Good heavens! This seems to have gone a little further than the rest. Thank your stars, young man, that my head is level enough for us both. Still, in this case, I have no fear. Rue Barrée sat on your aspirations in a manner unmistakably final.”

“Rue Barrée,” began Clifford, drawing himself up, but he suddenly ceased, for there where the dappled sunlight glowed in spots of gold, along the sun-flecked path, tripped Rue Barrée. Her gown was spotless, and her big straw hat, tipped a little from the white forehead, threw a shadow across her eyes.

Elliott stood up and bowed. Clifford removed his head covering with an air so plaintive, so appealing, so utterly humble that Rue Barrée smiled.

The smile was delicious, and when Clifford, incapable of sustaining himself on his legs from sheer astonishment, toppled slightly, she smiled again in spite of herself. A few moments later she took a chair on the terrace and drawing a book from her music-roll, turned the pages, found the place, and then placing it open downwards in her lap, sighed a little, smiled a little, and looked out over the city. She had entirely forgotten Foxhall Clifford.

After a while she took up her book again, but instead of reading began to adjust a rose in her corsage. The rose was big and red. It glowed like fire there over her heart and like fire it warmed her heart now fluttering under the silken petals. Rue Barrée sighed again. She was very happy. The sky was so blue, the air so soft and perfumed, the sunshine so caressing, and her heart sang within her, sang to the rose in her breast. This is what it sang: “Out of the throng of passers by, out of the world of yesterday, out of the millions passing, one has turned aside to me.”

So her heart sang under his rose on her breast. Then two big mouse-colored pigeons came whistling by and alighted on the terrace where they bowed and strutted and bobbed and turned until Rue Barrée laughed in delight, and looking up beheld Clifford before her. His hat was in his hand and his face was wreathed in a series of appealing smiles which would have touched the heart of a Bengal tiger.

For an instant Rue Barrée frowned, then she looked curiously at Clifford, then when she saw the resemblance between his bows and the bobbing pigeons, in spite of herself, her lips parted in the most bewitching laugh. Was this Rue Barrée? So changed, so changed that she did not know herself; but oh! that song in her heart which drowned all else, which trembled on her lips, struggling for utterance, which rippled forth in a laugh at nothing,—at a strutting pigeon,—and Mr. Clifford.

•      •      •      •      •      •

“And you think because I return the salute of the students in the Quarter, that you may be received in particular as a friend? I do not know you Monsieur, but vanity is man’s other name;—be content, Monsieur Vanity, I shall be punctilious—oh most punctilious in returning your salute.”

“But I beg—I implore you to let me render you that homage which has so long—”

“Oh dear, I don’t care for homage.”

“Let me only be permitted to speak to you now and then,—occasionally—very occasionally.”

“And if you, why not another?”

“Not at all,—I will be discretion itself.”

“Discretion—why?”

Her eyes were very clear and Clifford winced for a moment, but only for a moment. Then the devil of recklessness seizing him he sat down and offered himself, soul and body, goods and chattels. And all the time he knew he was a fool and that infatuation is not love, and that each word he uttered bound him in honor from which there was no escape. And all the time Elliott was scowling down on the fountain plaza and savagely checking both bulldogs from their desire to rush to Clifford’s rescue,—for even they felt there was something wrong, as Elliott stormed within himself and growled maledictions.

When Clifford finished, he finished in a glow of excitement, but Rue Barrée’s response was long in coming and his ardor cooled while the situation slowly assumed its just proportions. Then regret began to creep in, but he put that aside and broke out again in protestations. At the first word Rue Barrée checked him.

“I thank you,” she said, speaking very gravely. “No man has ever before offered me marriage.” She turned and looked out over the city. After a while she spoke again. “You offer me a great deal. I am alone, I have nothing, I am nothing.” She turned again and looked at Paris, brilliant, fair, in the sunshine of a perfect day. He followed her eyes.

“Oh,” she murmured, “it is hard,—hard to work always—always alone with never a friend you can have in honor, and the love that is offered means the streets, the boulevard—when passion is dead. I know it,—we know it,—we others who have nothing,—have no one, and who give ourselves, unquestioning—when we love,—yes, unquestioning—heart and soul, knowing the end.”

She touched the rose at her breast. For a moment she seemed to forget him, then quietly—“I thank you, I am very grateful.” She opened the book and, plucking a petal from the rose dropped it between the leaves. Then looking up she said gently, “I cannot accept.”

V

It took Clifford a month to entirely recover, although at the end of the first week he was pronounced convalescent by Elliott, who was an authority, and his convalescence was aided by the cordiality with which Rue Barrée acknowledged his solemn salutes. Forty times a day he blessed Rue Barrée for her refusal and thanked his lucky stars, and at the same time, oh wondrous heart of ours!—he suffered the tortures of the blighted.

Elliott was annoyed, partly by Clifford’s reticence, partly by the unexplainable thaw in the frigidity of Rue Barrée. At their frequent encounters, when she, tripping along the rue de Seine, with music-roll and big straw hat would pass Clifford and his familiars steering an easterly course to the Café Vachette, and at the respectful uncovering of the band, would color and smile at Clifford, Elliott’s slumbering suspicions awoke. But he never found out anything and finally gave it up as beyond his comprehension, merely qualifying Clifford as an idiot and reserving his opinion of Rue Barrée. And all this time Selby was jealous. At first he refused to acknowledge it to himself and cut the studio for a day in the country, but the woods and fields of course aggravated his case, and the brooks babbled of Rue Barrée and the mowers calling to each other across the meadow ended in a quavering “Rue Bar-rée-e!” That day spent in the country made him angry for a week, and he worked sulkily at Julian’s, all the time tormented by a desire to know where Clifford was and what he might be doing. This culminated in an erratic stroll on Sunday which ended at the flower-market on the Pont au Change, began again, was gloomily extended to the morgue, and again ended at the marble bridge. It would never do, and Selby felt it, so he went to see Clifford who was convalescing on mint juleps in his garden.

They sat down together and discussed morals and human happiness, and each found the other most entertaining, only Selby failed to pump Clifford to the other’s unfeigned amusement. But the juleps spread balm on the sting of jealousy, and trickled hope to the blighted, and when Selby said he must go, Clifford went too, and when Selby, not to be outdone, insisted on accompanying Clifford back to his door, Clifford determined to see Selby back half way, and then finding it hard to part they decided to dine together and “flit.” To flit, a verb applied to Clifford’s nocturnal prowls, expressed, perhaps, as well as anything, the gayety proposed. Dinner was ordered at Mignon’s and while Selby interviewed the chef, Clifford kept a fatherly eye on the butler. The dinner was a success, or was of the sort generally termed a success. Toward the dessert Selby heard some one say as at a great distance, “Kid Selby, drunk as a lord.”

A group of men passed near them; it seemed to him that he shook hands and laughed a great deal, and that everybody was very witty. There was Clifford opposite swearing undying confidence in his chum Selby, and there seemed to be others there, either seated beside them or continually passing with the swish of skirts on the polished floor. The perfume of roses, the rustle of fans, the touch of rounded arms and the laughter grew vaguer and vaguer. The room seemed enveloped in mist. Then, all in a moment each object stood out painfully distinct, only forms and visages were distorted and voices piercing. He drew himself up, calm, grave, for the moment master of himself, but very drunk. He knew he was drunk, and was as guarded and alert, as keenly suspicious of himself as he would have been of a thief at his elbow. His self-command enabled Clifford to hold his head safely under some running water, and repair to the street considerably the worse for wear, but never suspecting that his companion was drunk. For a time he kept his self-command. His face was only a bit paler, a bit tighter than usual; he was only a trifle slower and more fastidious in his speech. It was midnight when he left Clifford peacefully slumbering in somebody’s arm-chair, with a long suede glove dangling in his hand and a plumy boa twisted about his neck to protect his throat from drafts. He walked through the hall and down the stairs, and found himself on the sidewalk in a quarter he did not know. Mechanically he looked up at the name of the street. The name was not familiar. He turned and steered his course toward some lights clustered at the end of the street. They proved farther away than he had anticipated and after a long quest he came to the conclusion that his eyes had been mysteriously removed from their proper places and had been reset on either side of his head like those of a bird. It grieved him to think of the inconvenience this transformation might occasion him, and he attempted to cock up his head, hen-like, to test the mobility of his neck. Then an immense despair stole over him,—tears gathered in the tear ducts, his heart melted, and he collided with a tree. This shocked him into comprehension; he stifled the violent tenderness in his breast, picked up his hat and moved on more briskly. His mouth was white and drawn, his teeth tightly clinched. He held his course pretty well and strayed but little, and after an apparently interminable length of time found himself passing a line of cabs. The brilliant lamps, red, yellow, and green annoyed him, and he felt it might be pleasant to demolish them with his cane, but mastering this impulse he passed on. Later an idea struck him that it would save fatigue to take a cab, and he started back with that intention but the cabs seemed already so far away and the lanterns were so bright and confusing that he gave it up, and pulling himself together looked around.

A shadow, a mass, huge, undefined, rose to his right. He recognized the Arc de Triomphe and gravely shook his cane at it. Its size annoyed him. He felt it was too big. Then he heard something fall clattering to the pavement and thought probably it was his cane but it didn’t much matter. When he had mastered himself and regained control of his right leg which betrayed symptoms of insubordination, he found himself traversing the Place de la Concorde at a pace which threatened to land him at the Madeleine. This would never do. He turned sharply to the right and crossing the bridge passed the Palais Bourbon at a trot and wheeled into the Boulevard St. Germain. He got on well enough although the size of the War Office struck him as a personal insult, and he missed his cane which it would have been pleasant to drag along the iron railings as he passed. It occurred to him, however, to substitute his hat, but when he found it, he forgot what he wanted it for and replaced it upon his head with gravity. Then he was obliged to battle with a violent inclination to sit down and weep. This lasted until he came to the rue de Rennes, but there he became absorbed in contemplating the dragon on the balcony overhanging the Cour du Dragon, and time slipped away until he remembered vaguely that he had no business there, and marched off again. It was slow work. The inclination to sit down and weep had given place to a desire for solitary and deep reflection. Here his right leg forgot its obedience and attacking the left, outflanked it and brought him up against a wooden board which seemed to bar his path. He tried to walk around it, but found the street closed. He tried to push it over, and found he couldn’t. Then he noticed a red lantern standing on a pile of paving stones inside the barrier. This was pleasant. How was he to get home if the boulevard was blocked? But he was not on the boulevard. His treacherous right leg had beguiled him into a detour, for there, behind him lay the boulevard with its endless line of lamps,—and here, what was this narrow dilapidated street piled up with earth and mortar and heaps of stone? He looked up. Written in staring black letters on the barrier was

RUE BARRÉE.

He sat down. Two policemen whom he knew came by and advised him to get up, but he argued the question from a standpoint of personal taste, and they passed on, laughing. For he was at that moment absorbed in a problem. It was, how to see Rue Barrée. She was somewhere or other in that big house with the iron balconies, and the door was locked, but what of that? The simple idea struck him to shout until she came. This idea was replaced by another equally lucid,—to hammer on the door until she came; but finally rejecting both of these as too uncertain, he decided to climb into the balcony, and, opening a window, politely inquire for Rue Barrée. There was but one lighted window in the house that he could see. It was on the second floor, and toward this he cast his eyes. Then mounting the wooden barrier and clambering over the piles of stones, he reached the sidewalk and looked up at the façade for a foothold. It seemed impossible. But a sudden fury seized him, a blind, drunken obstinacy, and the blood rushed to his head, leaping, beating in his ears like the dull thunder of an ocean. He set his teeth, and springing at a window-sill, dragged himself up and hung to the iron bars. Then reason fled; there surged in his brain the sound of many voices, his heart leaped up beating a mad tattoo, and gripping at cornice and ledge he worked his way along the façade, clung to pipes and shutters, and dragged himself up, over and into the balcony by the lighted window. His hat fell off and rolled against the pane. For a moment he leaned breathless against the railing,—then the window was slowly opened from within.

They stared at each other for some time. Presently the girl took two unsteady steps back into the room. He saw her face,—all crimsoned now,—he saw her sink into a chair by the lamplit table, and without a word he followed her into the room, closing the big door-like panes behind him. Then they looked at each other in silence.

The room was small and white; everything was white about it,—the curtained bed, the little wash-stand in the corner, the bare walls, the china lamp,—and his own face,—had he known it, but the face and neck of Rue were surging in the color that dyed the blossoming rose-tree there on the hearth beside her. It did not occur to him to speak. She seemed not to expect it. His mind was struggling with the impressions of the room. The whiteness, the extreme purity of everything occupied him—began to trouble him. As his eye became accustomed to the light, other objects grew from the surroundings and took their places in the circle of lamplight. There was a piano and a coal-scuttle and a little iron trunk and a bath-tub. Then there was a row of wooden pegs against the door, with a white chintz curtain covering the clothes underneath. On the bed lay an umbrella and a big straw hat, and on the table, a music-roll unfurled, an ink-stand, and sheets of ruled paper. Behind him stood a wardrobe faced with a mirror, but somehow he did not care to see his own face just then. He was sobering.

The girl sat looking at him without a word. Her face was expressionless, yet the lips at times trembled almost imperceptibly. Her eyes, so wonderfully blue in the daylight, seemed dark and soft as velvet, and the color on her neck deepened and whitened with every breath. She seemed smaller and more slender than when he had seen her in the street, and there was now something in the curve of her cheek almost infantine. When at last he turned and caught his own reflection in the mirror behind him, a shock passed through him as though he had seen a shameful thing, and his clouded mind and his clouded thoughts grew clearer. For a moment their eyes met, then his sought the floor, his lips tightened, and the struggle within him bowed his head and strained every nerve to the breaking. And now it was over, for the voice within had spoken. He listened, dully interested but already knowing the end,—indeed it little mattered;—the end would always be the same for him;—he understood now,—always the same for him, and he listened, dully interested, to a voice which grew within him. After a while he stood up, and she rose at once, one small hand resting on the table. Presently he opened the window, picked up his hat, and shut it again. Then he went over to the rosebush and touched the blossoms with his face. One was standing in a glass of water on the table, and mechanically the girl drew it out, pressed it with her lips and laid it on the table beside him. He took it without a word and crossing the room, opened the door. The landing was dark and silent but the girl lifted the lamp and gliding past him slipped down the polished stairs to the hallway. Then unchaining the bolts, she drew open the iron wicket.

Through this he passed with his rose.

THE MAKER OF MOONS

(1896)

TO MY FATHER

CONTENTS:

The Maker of Moons
The Silent Land
The Black Water
A Pleasant Evening
** In The Name of the Most High
** The Boy’s Sister
** The Crime
The Man at the Next Table

** = general fiction

MAIN ToC     INDEX

THE MAKER OF MOONS

I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is—And I say there is in fact no evil;

(Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the land, or to me, as anything else.)

•        •        •        •        •        •

Each is not for its own sake;

I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the sky are for Religion’s sake.

I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough;

None has ever adored or worshipped half enough;

None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.

—Walt Whitman

THE MAKER OF MOONS

I have heard what the Talkers were talking,—the talk

Of the beginning and the end;

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

I

Concerning Yue-Laou and the Xin I know nothing more than you shall know. I am miserably anxious to clear the matter up. Perhaps what I write may save the United Stares Government money and lives, perhaps it may arouse the scientific world to action; at any rate it will put an end to the terrible suspense of two people. Certainty is better than suspense.

If the Government dares to disregard this warning and refuses to send a thoroughly equipped expedition at once, the people of the State may take swift vengeance on the whole region and leave a blackened devastated waste where to-day forest and flowering meadow land border the lake in the Cardinal Woods.

You already know part of the story; the New York papers have been full of alleged details. This much is true: Barris caught the “Shiner,” red-handed, or rather yellow-handed, for his pockets and boots and dirty fists were stuffed with lumps of gold. I say gold, advisedly. You may call it what you please. You also know how Barris was—but unless I begin at the beginning of my own experiences you will be none the wiser after all.

On the third of August of this present year, I was standing in Tiffany’s, chatting with George Godfrey of the designing department. On the glass counter between us lay a coiled serpent, an exquisite specimen of chiselled gold.

“No,” replied Godfrey to my question, “it isn’t my work; I wish it was. Why, man, it’s a masterpiece!”

“Whose?” I asked.

“Now I should be very glad to know also,” said Godfrey. “We bought it from an old jay who says he lives in the country somewhere about the Cardinal Woods. That’s near Starlit Lake, I believe—”

“Lake of the Stars?” I suggested.

“Some call it Starlit Lake,—it’s all the same. Well, my rustic Reuben says that he represents the sculptor of this snake for all practical and business purposes. He got his price too. We hope he’ll bring us something more. We have sold this already to the Metropolitan Museum.”

I was leaning idly on the glass case, watching the keen eyes of the artist in precious metals as he stooped over the gold serpent.

“A masterpiece!” he muttered to himself fondling the glittering coil; “look at the texture! whew!” But I was not looking at the serpent. Something was moving,—crawling out of Godfrey’s coat pocket,—the pocket nearest to me,—something soft and yellow with crab-like legs all covered with coarse yellow hair.

“What in Heaven’s name,” said I, “have you got in your pocket? It’s crawling out—it’s trying to creep up your coat, Godfrey!”

He turned quickly and dragged the creature out with his left hand.

I shrank back as he held the repulsive object dangling before me, and he laughed and placed it on the counter.

“Did you ever see anything like that?” he demanded.

“No,” said I truthfully, “and I hope I never shall again. What is it?”

“I don’t know. Ask them at the Natural History Museum—they can’t tell you. The Smithsonian is all at sea too. It is, I believe, the connecting link between a sea-urchin, a spider, and the devil. It looks venomous but I can’t find either fangs or mouth. Is it blind? These things may be eyes but they look as if they were painted. A Japanese sculptor might have produced such an impossible beast, but it is hard to believe that God did. It looks unfinished too. I have a mad idea that this creature is only one of the parts of some larger and more grotesque organism,—it looks so lonely, so hopelessly dependent, so cursedly unfinished. I’m going to use it as a model. If I don’t out-Japanese the Japs my name isn’t Godfrey.”

The creature was moving slowly across the glass case towards me. I drew back.

“Godfrey,” I said, “I would execute a man who executed any such work as you propose. What do you want to perpetuate such a reptile for? I can stand the Japanese grotesque but I can’t stand that—spider—”

“It’s a crab.”

“Crab or spider or blind-worm—ugh! What do you want to do it for? It’s a nightmare—it’s unclean!”

I hated the thing. It was the first living creature that I had ever hated.

For some time I had noticed a damp acrid odour in the air, and Godfrey said it came from the reptile.

“Then kill it and bury it,” I said; “and by the way, where did it come from?”

“I don’t know that either,” laughed Godfrey; “I found it clinging to the box that this gold serpent was brought in. I suppose my old Reuben is responsible.”

“If the Cardinal Woods are the lurking places for things like this,” said I, “I am sorry that I am going to the Cardinal Woods.”

“Are you?” asked Godfrey; “for the shooting?”

“Yes, with Barris and Pierpont. Why don’t you kill that creature?”

“Go off on your shooting trip, and let me alone,” laughed Godfrey.

I shuddered at the “crab,” and bade Godfrey good-bye until December.

That night, Pierpont, Barris, and I sat chatting in the smoking-car of the Quebec Express when the long train pulled out of the Grand Central Depot. Old David had gone forward with the dogs; poor things, they hated to ride in the baggage car, but the Quebec and Northern road provides no sportsman’s cars, and David and the three Gordon setters were in for an uncomfortable night.

Except for Pierpont, Barris, and myself, the car was empty. Barris, trim, stout, ruddy, and bronzed, sat drumming on the window ledge, puffing a short fragrant pipe. His gun-case lay beside him on the floor.

“When I have white hair and years of discretion,” said Pierpont languidly, “I’ll not flirt with pretty serving-maids; will you, Roy?”

“No,” said I, looking at Barris.

“You mean the maid with the cap in the Pullman car?” asked Barris.

“Yes,” said Pierpont.

I smiled, for I had seen it also.

Barris twisted his crisp grey moustache, and yawned.

“You children had better be toddling off to bed,” he said. “That lady’s-maid is a member of the Secret Service.”

“Oh,” said Pierpont, “one of your colleagues?”

“You might present us, you know,” I said; “the journey is monotonous.”

Barris had drawn a telegram from his pocket, and as he sat turning it over and over between his fingers he smiled. After a moment or two he handed it to Pierpont who read it with slightly raised eyebrows.

“It’s rot,—I suppose it’s cipher,” he said; “I see it’s signed by General Drummond—”

“Drummond, Chief of the Government Secret Service,” said Barris.

“Something interesting?” I enquired, lighting a cigarette.

“Something so interesting,” replied Barris, “that I’m going to look into it myself—”

“And break up our shooting trio—”

“No. Do you want to hear about it? Do you, Billy Pierpont?”

“Yes,” replied that immaculate young man.

Barris rubbed the amber mouth-piece of his pipe on his handkerchief, cleared the stem with a bit of wire, puffed once or twice, and leaned back in his chair.

“Pierpont,” he said, “do you remember that evening at the United States Club when General Miles, General Drummond, and I were examining that gold nugget that Captain Mahan had? You examined it also, I believe.”

“I did,” said Pierpont.

“Was it gold?” asked Barris, drumming on the window.

“It was,” replied Pierpont.

“I saw it too,” said I; “of course, it was gold.”

“Professor La Grange saw it also,” said Barris; “he said it was gold.”

“Well?” said Pierpont.

“Well,” said Barris, “it was not gold.”

After a silence Pierpont asked what tests had been made.

“The usual tests,” replied Barris. “The United States Mint is satisfied that it is gold, so is every jeweller who has seen it. But it is not gold,—and yet—it is gold.”

Pierpont and I exchanged glances.

“Now,” said I, “for Barris’ usual coup-de-théâtre: what was the nugget?”

“Practically it was pure gold; but,” said Barris, enjoying the situation intensely, “really it was not gold. Pierpont, what is gold?”

“Gold’s an element, a metal—”

“Wrong! Billy Pierpont,” said Barris coolly.

“Gold was an element when I went to school,” said I.

“It has not been an element for two weeks,” said Barris; “and, except General Drummond, Professor La Grange, and myself, you two youngsters are the only people, except one, in the world who know it,—or have known it.”

“Do you mean to say that gold is a composite metal?” said Pierpont slowly.

“I do. La Grange has made it. He produced a scale of pure gold day before yesterday. That nugget was manufactured gold.”

Could Barris be joking? Was this a colossal hoax? I looked at Pierpont. He muttered something about that settling the silver question, and turned his head to Barris, but there was that in Barris’ face which forbade jesting, and Pierpont and I sat silently pondering.

“Don’t ask me how it’s made,” said Barris, quietly; “I don’t know. But I do know that somewhere in the region of the Cardinal Woods there is a gang of people who do know how gold is made, and who make it. You understand the danger this is to every civilized nation. It’s got to be stopped of course. Drummond and I have decided that I am the man to stop it. Wherever and whoever these people are—these gold-makers,—they must be caught, every one of them,—caught or shot.”

“Or shot,” repeated Pierpont, who was owner of the Cross-Cut Gold Mine and found his income too small; “Professor La Grange will of course be prudent;—science need not know things that would upset the world!”

“Little Willy,” said Barris laughing, “your income is safe.”

“I suppose,” said I, “some flaw in the nugget gave Professor La Grange the tip.”

“Exactly. He cut the flaw out before sending the nugget to be tested. He worked on the flaw and separated gold into its three elements.”

“He is a great man,” said Pierpont, “but he will be the greatest man in the world if he can keep his discovery to himself.”

“Who?” said Barris.

“Professor La Grange.”

“Professor La Grange was shot through the heart two hours ago,” replied Barris slowly.

II

We had been at the shooting box in the Cardinal Woods five days when a telegram was brought to Barris by a mounted messenger from the nearest telegraph station, Cardinal Springs, a hamlet on the lumber railroad which joins the Quebec and Northern at Three Rivers Junction, thirty miles below.

Pierpont and I were sitting out under the trees, loading some special shells as experiments; Barris stood beside us, bronzed, erect, holding his pipe carefully so that no sparks should drift into our powder box. The beat of hoofs over the grass aroused us, and when the lank messenger drew bridle before the door, Barris stepped forward and took the sealed telegram. When he had torn it open he went into the house and presently reappeared, reading something that he had written.

“This should go at once,” he said, looking the messenger full in the face.

“At once, Colonel Barris,” replied the shabby countryman.

Pierpont glanced up and I smiled at the messenger who was gathering his bridle and settling himself in his stirrups. Barris handed him the written reply and nodded good-bye: there was a thud of hoofs on the greensward, a jingle of bit and spur across the gravel, and the messenger was gone. Barris’ pipe went out and he stepped to windward to relight it.

“It is queer,” said I, “that your messenger—a battered native,—should speak like a Harvard man.”

“He is a Harvard man,” said Barris.

“And the plot thickens,” said Pierpont; “are the Cardinal Woods full of your Secret Service men, Barris?”

“No,” replied Barris, “but the telegraph stations are. How many ounces of shot are you using, Roy?”

I told him, holding up the adjustable steel measuring cup. He nodded. After a moment on two he sat down on a camp-stool beside us and picked up a crimper.

“That telegram was from Drummond,” he said; “the messenger was one of my men, as you two bright little boys divined. Pooh! If he had spoken the Cardinal County dialect you wouldn’t have known.”

“His make-up was good,” said Pierpont.

Barris twirled the crimper and looked at the pile of loaded shells. Then he picked up one and crimped it.

“Let ’em alone,” said Pierpont, “you crimp too tight.”

“Does his little gun kick when the shells are crimped too tight?” enquired Barris tenderly; “well, he shall crimp his own shells then,—where’s his little man?”

“His little man” was a weird English importation, stiff, very carefully scrubbed, tangled in his aspirates, named Howlett. As valet, gilly, gun-bearer, and crimper, he aided Pierpont to endure the ennui of existence, by doing for him everything except breathing. Lately, however, Barris’ taunts had driven Pierpont to do a few things for himself. To his astonishment he found that cleaning his own gun was not a bore, so he timidly loaded a shell or two, was much pleased with himself, loaded some more, crimped them, and went to breakfast with an appetite. So when Barris asked where “his little man” was, Pierpont did not reply but dug a cupful of shot from the bag and poured it solemnly into the half filled shell.

Old David came out with the dogs and of course there was a pow-wow when “Voyou,” my Gordon setter, wagged his splendid tail across the loading table and sent a dozen unstopped cartridges rolling over the grass, vomiting powder and shot.

“Give the dogs a mile or two,” said I; “we will shoot over the Sweet Fern Covert about four o’clock, David.”

“Two guns, David,” added Barris.

“Are you not going?” asked Pierpont, looking up, as David disappeared with the dogs.

“Bigger game,” said Barris shortly. He picked up a mug of ale from the tray which Howlett had just set down beside us and took a long pull. We did the same, silently. Pierpont set his mug on the turf beside him and returned to his loading.

We spoke of the murder of Professor La Grange, of how it had been concealed by the authorities in New York at Drummond’s request, of the certainty that it was one of the gang of gold-makers who had done it, and of the possible alertness of the gang.

“Oh, they know that Drummond will be after them sooner on later,” said Barris, “but they don’t know that the mills of the gods have already begun to grind. Those smart New York papers builded better than they knew when their ferret-eyed reporter poked his red nose into the house on 58th Street and sneaked off with a column on his cuffs about the ‘suicide’ of Professor La Grange. Billy Pierpont, my revolver is hanging in your room; I’ll take yours too—”

“Help yourself,” said Pierpont.

“I shall be gone overnight,” continued Barris; “my poncho and some bread and meat are all I shall take except the ‘barkers.’”

“Will they bark to-night?” I asked.

“No, I trust not for several weeks yet. I shall nose about a bit. Roy, did it even strike you how queer it is that this wonderfully beautiful country should contain no inhabitants?”

“It’s like those splendid stretches of pools and rapids which one finds on every trout river and in which one never finds a fish,” suggested Pierpont.

“Exactly,—and Heaven alone knows why,” said Barris; “I suppose this country is shunned by human beings for the same mysterious reasons.”

“The shooting is the better for it,” I observed.

“The shooting is good,” said Barris, “have you noticed the snipe on the meadow by the lake? Why it’s brown with them! That’s a wonderful meadow.”

“It’s a natural one,” said Pierpont, “no human being ever cleaned that land.”

“Then it’s supernatural,” said Barris; “Pierpont, do you want to come with me?”

Pierpont’s handsome face flushed as he answered slowly, “It’s awfully good of you,—if I may.”

“Bosh,” said I, piqued because he had asked Pierpont, “what use is little Willy without his man?”

“True,” said Barris gravely, “you can’t take Howlett, you know.”

Pierpont muttered something which ended in “d——n.”

“Then,” said I, “there will be but one gun on the Sweet Fern Covent this afternoon. Very well, I wish you joy of your cold supper and colder bed. Take your nightgown, Willy, and don’t sleep on the damp ground.”

“Let Pierpont alone,” retorted Barris, “you shall go next time, Roy.”

“Oh, all right,—you mean when there’s shooting going on?”

“And I?” demanded Pierpont, grieved.

“You too, my son; stop quarrelling! Will you ask Howlett to pack our kits—lightly mind you,—no bottles,—they clink.”

“My flask doesn’t,” said Pierpont, and went off to get ready for a night’s stalking of dangerous men.

“It is strange,” said I, “that nobody ever settles in this region. How many people live in Cardinal Springs, Barris?”

“Twenty, counting the telegraph operator and not counting the lumbermen; they are always changing and shifting. I have six men among them.”

“Where have you no men? In the Four Hundred?”

“I have men there also,—chums of Billy’s, only he doesn’t know it. David tells me that there was a strong flight of woodcock last night. You ought to pick up some this afternoon.”

Then we chatted about alder-coven and swamp until Pierpont came out of the house and it was time to part.

“Au revoir,” said Barris, buckling on his kit, “come along, Pierpont, and don’t walk in the damp grass.”

“If you are not back by to-morrow noon,” said I, “I will take Howlett and David and hunt you up. You say your course is due north?”

“Due north.” replied Barris, consulting his compass.

“There is a trail for two miles and a spotted lead for two more,” said Pierpont.

“Which we won’t use for various reasons,” added Barris pleasantly; “don’t worry, Roy, and keep your confounded expedition out of the way; there’s no danger.”

He knew, of course, what he was talking about and I held my peace.

When the tip end of Pierpont’s shooting coat had disappeared in the Long Covert, I found myself standing alone with Howlett. He bore my gaze for a moment and then politely lowered his eyes.

“Howlett,” said I, “take these shells and implements to the gun room, and drop nothing. Did Voyou come to any harm in the briers this morning?”

“No ’arm, Mr. Cardenhe, sir,” said Howlett.

“Then be careful not no drop anything else,” said I, and walked away leaving him decorously puzzled. For he had dropped no cartridges. Poor Howlett!

III

About four o’clock that afternoon I met David and the dogs at the spinney which leads into the Sweet Fern Covent. The three setters, Voyou, Gamin, and Mioche, were in fine feather,—David had killed a woodcock and a brace of grouse over them that morning,—and they were thrashing about the spinney at short range when I came up, gun under arm and pipe lighted.

“What’s the prospect, David,” I asked, trying to keep my feet in the tangle of wagging, whining dogs; “hello, what’s amiss with Mioche?”

“A brier in his foot, sir; I drew it and stopped the wound but I guess the gravel’s got in. If you have no objection, sir, I might take him back with me.”

“It’s safer,” I said; “take Gamin too, I only want one dog this afternoon. What is the situation?”

“Fair sir; the grouse lie within a quarter of a mile of the oak second-growth. The woodcock are mostly on the alders. I saw any number of snipe on the meadows. There’s something else in by the lake,—I can’t just tell what, but the wood-duck set up a clatter when I was in the thicket and they come dashing through the wood as if a dozen foxes was snappin’ an their tail feathers.”

“Probably a fox,” I said; “leash those dogs,—they must learn to stand in. I’ll be back by dinner time.”

“There is one more thing, sir,” said David, lingering with his gun under his arm.

“Well,” said I.

“I saw a man in the woods by the Oak Covern,—at least I think I did.”

“A lumberman?”

“I think not, sir—at least,—do they have Chinamen among them?”

“Chinese? No. You didn’t see a Chinaman in the woods here?”

“I—I think I did, sir,—I can’t say positively. He was gone when I ran into the covert.”

“Did the dogs notice it?”

“I can’t say—exactly. They acted queer like. Gamin here lay down an’ whined—it may have been colic—and Mioche whimpered,—perhaps it was the brier.”

“And Voyou?”

“Voyou, he was most remarkable, sir, and the hair on his back stood up. I did see a groundhog makin’ for a tree near by.”

“Then no wonder Voyou bristled. David, your Chinaman was a stump or tussock. Take the dogs now.”

“I guess it was, sir; good afternoon, sir,” said David, and walked away with the Gordons leaving me alone with Voyou in the spinney.

I looked at the dog and he looked at me.

“Voyou!”

The dog sat down and danced with his fore feet, his beautiful brown eyes sparkling.

“You’re a fraud,” I said; “which shall it be, the alders or the upland? Upland? Good!—now for the grouse,—heel, my friend, and show your miraculous self-restraint.”

Voyou wheeled into my tracks and followed close, nobly refusing to notice the impudent chipmunks and the thousand and one alluring and important smells which an ordinary dog would have lost no time in investigating.

The brown and yellow autumn woods were crisp with drifting heaps of leaves and twigs that crackled underfoot as we turned from the spinney into the forest. Every silent little stream hurrying toward the lake was gay with painted leaves afloat, scarlet maple or yellow oak. Spots of sunlight fell upon the pools, searching the brown depths, illuminating the gravel bottom where shoals of minnows swam to and fro, and to and fro again, busy with the purpose of their little lives. The crickets were chirping in the long brittle grass on the edge of the woods, but we left them far behind in the silence of the deeper forest.

“Now!” said I to Voyou.

The dog sprang to the front, circled once, zigzagged through the ferns around us and, all in a moment, stiffened stock still, rigid as sculptured bronze. I stepped forward, raising my gun, two paces, three paces, ten perhaps, before a great cock-grouse blundered up from the brake and burst through the thicket fringe toward the deeper growth. There was a flash and puff from my gun, a crash of echoes among the low wooded cliffs, and through the faint veil of smoke something dark dropped from mid-air amid a cloud of feathers, brown as the brown leaves underfoot.

“Fetch!”

Up from the ground sprang Voyou, and in a moment he came galloping back, neck arched, tail stiff but waving, holding tenderly in his pink mouth a mass of mottled bronzed feathers. Very gravely he laid the bird at my feet and crouched close beside in, his silky ears across his paws, his muzzle on the ground.

I dropped the grouse into my pocket, held for a moment a silent caressing communion with Voyou, then swung my gun under my arm and motioned the dog on.

It must have been five o’clock when I walked into a little opening in the woods and sat down to breathe. Voyou came and san down in front of me.

“Well?” I enquired.

Voyou gravely presented one paw which I took.

“We will never get back in time for dinner,” said I, “so we might as well take it easy It’s all your fault, you know. Is there a brier in your foot?—let’s see,—there! it’s out my friend, and you are free to nose about and lick it. If you loll your tongue out, you’ll get it all over twigs and moss. Can’t you lie down and try to pant less? No, there is no use in sniffing and looking at that fern patch, for we are going to smoke a little, doze a little, and go home by moonlight. Think what a big dinner we will have! Think of Howlett’s despair when we are not in time! Think of all the stories you will have to tell to Gamin and Mioche! Think what a good dog you have been! There—you are tired old chap; take forty winks with me.”

Voyou was a little tired. He stretched out on the leaves at my feet but whether or not he really slept I could not be certain, until his hind legs twitched and I knew he was dreaming of mighty deeds.

Now I may have taken forty winks, but the sun seemed no be no lower when I sat up and unclosed my lids. Voyou raised his head, saw in my eyes that I was not going yet, thumped his tail half a dozen times on the dried leaves, and settled back with a sigh.

I looked lazily around, and for the first rime noticed what a wonderfully beautiful spot I had chosen for a nap. It was an oval glade in the heart of the forest, level and carpeted with green grass. The trees that surrounded it were gigantic; they formed one towering circular wall of verdure, blotting out all except the turquoise blue of the sky-oval above. And now I noticed that in the centre of the greensward lay a pool of water, crystal clear, glimmering like a mirror in the meadow grass, beside a block of granite. It scarcely seemed possible than the symmetry of tree and lawn and lucent pool could have been one of nature’s accidents. I had never before seen this glade nor had I ever heard it spoken of by either Pierpont or Barris. It was a marvel, this diamond-clear basin, regular and graceful as a Roman fountain, set in the gem of turf. And these great trees,—they also belonged, not in America but in some legend-haunted forest of France, where moss-grown marbles stand neglected in dim glades, and the twilight of the forest shelters fairies and slender shapes from shadow-land.

I lay and watched the sunlight showering the tangled thicket where masses of crimson Cardinal-flowers glowed, or where one long dusty sunbeam tipped the edge of the floating leaves in the pool, running them to palest gilt. There were birds too, passing through the dim avenues of trees like jets of flame,—the gorgeous Cardinal-Bird in his deep stained crimson robe,—the bird that gave to the woods, to the village fifteen miles away, to the whole country, the name of Cardinal.

I rolled over on my back and looked up an the sky. How pale—paler than a robin’s egg—it was. I seemed to be lying at the bottom of a well, walled with verdure, high towering on every side. And, as I lay, all about me the air became sweet scented. Sweeter and sweeter and more penetrating grew the perfume, and I wondered what stray breeze, blowing over acres of lilies, could have brought in. But there was no breeze; the air was still. A gilded fly alighted on my hand,—a honey-fly. It was as troubled as I by the scented silence.

Then, behind me, my dog growled.

I sat quite still at first, hardly breathing, but my eyes were fixed on a shape that moved along the edge of the pool among the meadow grasses. The dog had ceased growling and was now staring, alert and trembling.

At last I nose and walked rapidly down to the pool, my dog following close to heel.

The figure, a woman’s, turned slowly toward us.

IV

She was standing still when I approached the pool. The forest around us was so silent that when I spoke the sound of my own voice startled me.

“No,” she said,—and her voice was smooth as flowing water, “I have not lost my way. Will he come to me, your beautiful dog?”

Before I could speak, Voyou crept to her and laid his silky head against her knees.

“But surely,” said I, “you did not come here alone.”

“Alone? I did come alone.”

“But the nearest settlement is Cardinal, probably nineteen miles from where we are standing.”

“I do not know Cardinal,” she said.

“Ste. Croix in Canada is forty miles at least,—how did you come into the Cardinal Woods?” I asked amazed.

“Into the woods?” she repeated a little impatiently.

“Yes.”

She did not answer at first but stood caressing Voyou with gentle phrase and gesture.

“Your beautiful dog I am fond of, but I am not fond of being questioned,” she said quietly. “My name is Ysonde and I came to the fountain here to see your dog.”

I was properly quenched. After a moment or two I did say that in another hour in would be growing dusky, but she neither replied nor looked at me.

“This,” I ventured, “is a beautiful pool,—you call it a fountain,—a delicious fountain: I have never before seen it. It is hard to imagine that nature did all this.”

“Is it?” she said.

“Don’t you think so?” I asked.

“I haven’t thought; I wish when you go you would leave me your dog.”

“My—my dog?”

“If you don’t mind,” she said sweetly, and looked at me for the first time in the face.

For an instant our glances met, then she grew grave, and I saw that her eyes were fixed on my forehead. Suddenly she rose and drew nearer, looking intently at my forehead. There was a faint mark there, a tiny crescent, just over my eyebrow. It was a birthmark.

“Is that a scar?” she demanded drawing nearer.

“That crescent shaped mark? No.”

“No? Are you sure?” she insisted.

“Perfectly,” I replied, astonished.

“A—a birthmark?”

“Yes,—may I ask why?”

As she drew away from me, I saw that the color had fled from her cheeks. For a second she clasped both hands over her eyes as if to shut out my face, then slowly dropping her hands, she sat down on a long square block of stone which half encircled the basin, and on which to my amazement I saw carving. Voyou went to her again and laid his head in her lap.

“What is your name?” she asked at length.

“Roy Cardenhe.”

“Mine is Ysonde. I carved these dragonflies on the stone, these fishes and shells and butterflies you see.”

“You! They are wonderfully delicate,—but those are not American dragonflies—”

“No—they are more beautiful. See, I have my hammer and chisel with me.”

She drew from a queer pouch at her side a small hammer and chisel and held them toward me.

“You are very talented,” I said, “where did you study?”

“I? I never studied,—I knew how. I saw things and cut them out of stone. Do you like them? Some time I will show you other things that I have done. If I had a great lump of bronze I could make your dog, beautiful as he is.”

Her hammer fell into the fountain and I leaned over and plunged my arm into the water to find it.

“It is there, shining on the sand,” she said, leaning over the pool with me.

“Where,” said I, looking at our reflected faces in the water. For it was only in the water that I had dared, as yet, to look her long in the face.

The pool mirrored the exquisite oval of her head, the heavy hair, the eyes. I heard the silken rustle of her girdle, I caught the flash of a white arm, and the hammer was drawn up dripping with spray.

The troubled surface of the pool grew calm and again I saw her eyes reflected.

“Listen,” she said in a low voice, “do you think you will come again to my fountain?”

“I will come,” I said. My voice was dull; the noise of water filled my ears.

Then a swift shadow sped across the pool; I rubbed my eyes. Where her reflected face had bent beside mine there was nothing mirrored but the rosy evening sky with one pale star glimmering.

I drew myself up and turned. She was gone. I saw the faint star twinkling above me in the afterglow, I saw the tall trees motionless in the still evening air, I saw my dog slumbering at my feet.

The sweet scent in the air had faded, leaving in my nostrils the heavy odor of fern and forest mould. A blind fear seized me, and I caught up my gun and sprang into the darkening woods.

The dog followed me, crashing through the undergrowth at my side. Duller and duller grew the light, but I strode on, the sweat pouring from my face and hair, my mind a chaos. How I reached the spinney I can hardly tell. As I turned up the path I caught a glimpse of a human face peering at me from the darkening thicket,—a horrible human face, yellow and drawn with high-boned cheeks and narrow eyes.

Involuntarily I halted; the dog at my heels snarled. Then I sprang straight at it, floundering blindly through the thicket, but the night had fallen swiftly and I found myself panting and struggling in a maze of twisted shrubbery and twining vines, unable to see the very undergrowth that ensnared me.

It was a pale face, and a scratched one that I carried to a late dinner that night. Howlett served me, dumb reproach in his eyes, for the soup had been standing and the grouse was juiceless.

David brought the dogs in after they had had their supper, and I drew my chair before the blaze and set my ale on a table beside me. The dogs curled up at my feet, blinking gravely at the sparks that snapped and flew in eddying showers from the heavy birch logs.

“David,” said I, “did you say you saw a Chinaman today?”

“I did, sir.”

“What do you think about it now?”

“I may have been mistaken, sir—”

“But you think not. What sort of whiskey did you put in my flask today?”

“The usual, sir.”

“Is there much gone?”

“About three swallows, sir, as usual.”

“You don’t suppose there could have been any mistake about that whiskey,—no medicine could have gotten into it for instance.”

David smiled and said, “No, sir.”

“Well,” said I, “I have had an extraordinary dream.”

When I said “dream,” I felt comforted and reassured. I had scarcely dared to say it before, even to myself.

“An extraordinary dream,” I repeated; “I fell asleep in the woods about five o’clock, in that pretty glade where the fountain—I mean the pool is. You know the place?”

“I do not, sir.”

I described it minutely, twice, but David shook his head.

“Carved stone did you say, sir? I never chanced on it. You don’t mean the New Spring—”

“No, no! This glade is way beyond that. Is it possible that any people inhabit the forest between here and the Canada line?”

“Nobody short of Ste. Croix; at least I have no knowledge of any.”

“Of course,” said I, “when I thought I saw a Chinaman, it was imagination. Of course I had been more impressed than I was aware of by your adventure. Of course you saw no Chinaman, David.”

“Probably not, sir,” replied David dubiously.

I sent him off to bed, saying I should keep the dogs with me all night; and when he was gone, I took a good long draught of ale, “just to shame the devil,” as Pierpont said, and lighted a cigar. Then I thought of Barris and Pierpont, and their cold bed, for I knew they would not dare build a fire, and, in spite of the hot chimney corner and the crackling blaze, I shivered in sympathy.

“I’ll tell Barris and Pierpont the whole story and take them to see the carved stone and the fountain,” I thought to myself; “what a marvelous dream it was—Ysonde—if it was a dream.”

Then I went to the mirror and examined the faint white mark above my eyebrow.

V

About eight o’clock next morning, as I sat listlessly eyeing my coffee cup which Howlett was filling, Gamin and Mioche set up a howl, and in a moment more I heard Barris’ step on the porch.

“Hello, Roy,” said Pierpont, stamping into the dining room, “I want my breakfast by jingo! Where’s Howlett,—none of your café au lait for me,—I want a chop and some eggs. Look at that dog, he’ll wag the hinge off his tail in a moment—”

“Pierpont,” said I, “this loquacity is astonishing but welcome. Where’s Barris? You are soaked from neck to ankle.”

Pierpont sat down and tore off his stiff muddy leggings.

“Barris is telephoning to Cardinal Springs,—I believe he wants some of his men,—down! Gamin, you idiot! Howlett, three eggs poached and more toast,—what was I saying? Oh, about Barris; he’s struck something or other which he hopes will locate these gold-making fellows. I had a jolly time,—he’ll tell you about it.”

“Billy! Billy!” I said in pleased amazement, “you are learning to talk! Dear me! You load your own shells and you carry your own gun and you fire it yourself—hello! here’s Barris all over mud. You fellows really ought to change your rig—whew! what a frightful odor!”

“It’s probably this,” said Barris tossing something onto the hearth where it shuddered for a moment and then began to writhe; “I found it in the woods by the lake. Do you know what it can be, Roy?”

To my disgust I saw it was another of those spidery wormy crablike creatures that Godfrey had in Tiffany’s.

“I thought I recognized that acrid odor,” I said; “for the love of the Saints, take it away from the breakfast table, Barris!”

“But what is it?” he persisted, unslinging his field-glass and revolver.

“I’ll tell you what I know after breakfast,” I replied firmly. “Howlett, get a broom and sweep that thing into the road.—What are you laughing at, Pierpont?” Howlett swept the repulsive creature out, and Barris and Pierpont went to change their dew-soaked clothes for dryer raiment. David came to take the dogs for an airing and in a few minutes Barris reappeared and sat down in his place at the head of the table.

“Well,” said I, “is there a story to tell?”

“Yes, not much. They are near the lake on the other side of the woods—I mean these gold-makers. I shall collar one of them this evening. I haven’t located the main gang with any certainty,—shove the toast rack this way will you, Roy,—no, I am not at all certain, but I’ve nailed one anyway. Pierpont was a great help, really,—and, what do you think, Roy? He wants to join the Secret Service!”

“Little Willy!”

“Exactly. Oh I’ll dissuade him. What sort of a reptile was that I brought in? Did Howlett sweep it away?”

“He can sweep it back again for all I care,” I said indifferently. “I’ve finished my breakfast.”

“No,” said Barris, hastily swallowing his coffee, “it’s of no importance; you can tell me about the beast—”

“Serve you right if I had it brought in on toast,” I returned.

Pierpont came in radiant, fresh from the bath.

“Go on with your story, Roy,” he said; and I told them about Godfrey and his reptile pet.

“Now what in the name of common sense can Godfrey find interesting in that creature?” I ended, tossing my cigarette into the fireplace.

“It’s Japanese, don’t you think?” said Pierpont.

“No,” said Barris, “it is not artistically grotesque, it’s vulgar and horrible,—it looks cheap and unfinished—”

“Unfinished,—exactly,” said I, “like an American humorist—”

“Yes,” said Pierpont, “cheap. What about that gold serpent?”

“Oh, the Metropolitan Museum bought it; you must see it, it’s marvellous.”

Barris and Pierpont had lighted their cigarettes and, after a moment, we all rose and strolled out to the lawn, where chains and hammocks were placed under the maple trees.

David passed, gun under arm, dogs heeling.

“Three guns on the meadows at four this afternoon,” said Pierpont.

“Roy,” said Barris as David bowed and started on, “what did you do yesterday?”

This was the question that I had been expecting. All night long I had dreamed of Ysonde and the glade in the woods, where, at the bottom of the crystal fountain, I saw the reflection of her eyes. All the morning while bathing and dressing I had been persuading myself that the dream was not worth recounting and that a search for the glade and the imaginary stone carving would be ridiculous. But now, as Barris asked the question, I suddenly decided to tell him the whole story.

“See here, you fellows,” I said abruptly, “I am going to tell you something queer. You can laugh as much as you please too, but first I want to ask Barris a question or two. You have been in China, Barris?”

“Yes,” said Barris, looking straight into my eyes.

“Would a Chinaman be likely to turn lumberman?”

“Have you seen a Chinaman?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“I don’t know; David and I both imagined we did.”

Barris and Pierpont exchanged glances.

“Have you seen one also?” I demanded, turning to include Pierpont.

“No,” said Barris slowly; “but I know that there is, or has been, a Chinaman in these woods.”

“The devil!” said I.

“Yes,” said Barris gravely; “the devil, if you like,—a devil,—a member of the Kuen-Yuin.”

I drew my chair close to the hammock where Pierpont lay at full length, holding out to me a ball of pure gold.

“Well?” said I, examining the engraving on its surface, which represented a mass of twisted creatures,—dragons, I supposed.

“Well,” repeated Barris, extending his hand to take the golden ball, “this globe of gold engraved with reptiles and Chinese hieroglyphics is the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.”

“Where did you get it?” I asked, feeling that something startling was impending.

“Pierpont found it by the lake at sunrise this morning. It is the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin,” he repeated, “the terrible Kuen-Yuin, the sorcerers of China, and the most murderously diabolical sect on earth.”

We puffed our cigarettes in silence until Barris rose, and began to pace backward and forward among the trees, twisting his grey moustache.

“The Kuen-Yuin are sorcerers,” he said, pausing before the hammock where Pierpont lay watching him; “I mean exactly what I say,—sorcerers. I’ve seen them,—I’ve seen them at their devilish business, and I repeat to you solemnly, that as there are angels above, there is a race of devils on earth, and they are sorcerers. Bah!” he cried, “talk to me of Indian magic and Yogis and all that clap-trap! Why, Roy, I tell you than the Kuen-Yuin have absolute control of a hundred millions of people, mind and body, body and soul. Do you know what goes on in the interior of China? Does Europe know,—could any human being conceive of the condition of that gigantic hell-pit? You read the papers, you hear diplomatic twaddle about Li-Hung-Chang and the Emperor, you see accounts of battles on sea and land, and you know that Japan has raised a toy tempest along the jagged edge of the great unknown. But you never before heard of the Kuen-Yuin; no, nor has any European except a stray missionary or two, and yet I tell you that when the fires from this pit of hell have eaten through the continent to the coast, the explosion will inundate half a world,—and God help the other half.”

Pierpont’s cigarette went out; he lighted another, and looked hard at Barris.

“But,” resumed Barris quietly, “‘sufficient unto the day,’ you know,—I didn’t intend to say as much as I did,—it would do no good,—even you and Pierpont will forget it—it seems so impossible and so far away—like the burning out of the sun. What I want to discuss is the possibility or probability of a Chinaman,—a member of the Kuen-Yuin, being here, an this moment, in the forest.”

“If he is,” said Pierpont, “possibly the gold-makers owe their discovery to him.”

“I do not doubt it for a second,” said Barris earnestly.

I took the little golden globe in my hand, and examined the characters engraved upon it.

“Barris,” said Pierpont, “I can’t believe in sorcery while I am wearing one of Sanford’s shooting suits in the pocket of which rests an uncut volume of the ‘Duchess.’”

“Neither can I,” I said, “for I read the Evening Post, and I know Mr. Godkin would not allow it. Hello! What’s the matter with this gold ball?”

“What is the matter?” said Barris grimly.

“Why—why—it’s changing color—purple, no, crimson—no, it’s green I mean—good Heavens! these dragons are twisting under my fingers—”

“Impossible!” muttered Pierpont, leaning over me; “those are not dragons—”

“No!” I cried excitedly; “they are pictures of that reptile that Barris brought back—see—see how they crawl and turn—”

“Drop it!” commanded Barris; and I threw the ball on the turf. In an instant we had all knelt down on the grass beside it, but the globe was again golden, grotesquely wrought with dragons and strange signs.

Pierpont, a little red in the face, picked it up, and handed it to Barris. He placed it on a chair, and sat down beside me.

“Whew!” said I, wiping the perspiration from my face, “how did you play us that trick, Barris?”

“Trick?” said Barris contemptuously.

I looked an Pierpont, and my heart sank. If this was not a trick, what was it? Pierpont returned my glance and colored, but all he said was, “It’s devilish queer,” and Barris answered, “Yes, devilish.” Then Barris asked me again to tell my story, and I did, beginning from the time I met David in the spinney to the moment when I sprang into the darkening thicket where than yellow mask had grinned like a phantom skull.

“Shall we try to find the fountain?” I asked after a pause.

“Yes,—and—er—the lady,” suggested Pierpont vaguely.

“Don’t be an ass,” I said a little impatiently, “you need not come, you know.”

“Oh, I’ll come,” said Pierpont, “unless you think I am indiscreet—”

“Shut up, Pierpont,” said Barris, “this thing is serious; I never heard of such a glade or such a fountain, but it’s true that nobody knows this forest thoroughly. It’s worth while trying for; Roy, can you find your way back to it?”

“Easily,” I answered; “when shall we go?”

“It will knock out snipe shooting on the head,” said Pierpont, “but then when one has the opportunity of finding a live dream-lady—”

I rose, deeply offended, but Pierpont was not very penitent and his laughter was irresistible.

“The lady’s yours by right of discovery,” he said. “I’ll promise not to infringe on your dreams,—I’ll dream about other ladies—”

“Come, come,” said I, “I’ll have Howlett put you to bed in a minute. Barris, if you are ready—we can get back to dinner—”

Barris had risen and was gazing at me earnestly.

“What’s the matter?” I asked nervously, for I saw that his eyes were fixed on my forehead, and I thought of Ysonde and the white crescent scar.

“Is that a birthmark?” said Barris.

“Yes—why, Barris?”

“Nothing—an interesting coincidence—”

“What!—for Heaven’s sake!”

“The scar—or rather the birthmark. It is the print of the dragon’s claw,—the crescent symbol of Yue-Laou—”

“And who the devil is Yue-Laou?” I said crossly.

“Yue-Laou, the Moon Maker, Dzil-Nbu of the Kuen-Yuin;—it’s Chinese mythology, but it is believed that Yue-Laou has returned to rule the Kuen-Yuin—”

“The conversation,” interrupted Pierpont, “smacks of peacock’s feathers and yellow-jackets. The chicken-pox has left its card on Roy, and Barris is guying us. Come on, you fellows, and make your call on the dream-lady. Barris, I hear galloping; here come your men.”

Two mud-splashed riders clattered up to the porch and dismounted at a motion from Barris. I noticed that both of them carried repeating rifles and heavy Colt’s revolvers.

They followed Barris, deferentially, into the dining-room, and presently we heard the tinkle of plates and bottles and the low hum of Barris’ musical voice.

Half an hour later they came out again, saluted Pierpont and me, and galloped away in the direction of the Canadian frontier. Ten minutes passed, and, as Barris did not appear, we rose and went into the house, to find him. He was sitting silently before the table, watching the small golden globe, now glowing with scarlet and orange fire, brilliant as a live coal. Howlett, mouth ajar, and eyes starting from the sockets, stood petrified behind him.

“Are you coming,” asked Pierpont, a little startled. Barris did not answer. The globe slowly turned to pale gold again,—but the face that Barris raised to ours was white as a sheet. Then he stood up, and smiled with an effort which was painful to us all.

“Give me a pencil and a bit of paper,” he said.

Howlett brought it. Barris went to the window and wrote rapidly. He folded the paper, placed it in the top drawer of his desk, locked the drawer, handed me the key, and motioned us to precede him.

When again we stood under the maples, he turned to me with an impenetrable expression.

“You will know when to use the key,” he said:

“Come, Pierpont, we must try to find Roy’s fountain.”

VI

At two o’clock that afternoon, at Barris’ suggestion, we gave up the search for the fountain in the glade and cut across the forest to the spinney where David and Howlett were waiting with our guns and the three dogs.

Pierpont guyed me unmercifully about the “dream-lady” as he called her, and, but for the significant coincidence of Ysonde’s and Barris’ questions concerning the white scar on my forehead, I should long ago have been perfectly persuaded that I had dreamed the whole thing.

As it was, I had no explanation to offer. We had not been able to find the glade, although fifty times I came to landmarks which convinced me that we were just about to enter it. Barris was quiet, scarcely uttering a word to either of us during the entire search. I had never before seen him depressed in spirits. However, when we came in sight of the spinney where a cold bit of grouse and a bottle of Burgundy awaited each, Barris seemed to recover his habitual good humor.

“Here’s to the dream-lady!” said Pierpont, raising his glass and standing up.

I did not like it. Even if she was only a dream, it irritated me to hear Pierpont’s mocking voice.

Perhaps Barris understood,—I don’t know, but he bade Pierpont drink his wine without further noise, and that young man obeyed with a childlike confidence which almost made Barris smile.

“What about the snipe, David,” I asked; “the meadows should be in good condition.”

“There is not a snipe on the meadows, sir,” said David solemnly.

“Impossible,” exclaimed Barris, “they can’t have left.”

“They have, sir,” said David in a sepulchral voice which I hardly recognized. We all three looked at the old man curiously, waiting for his explanation of this disappointing but sensational report.

David looked at Howlett and Howlett examined the sky.

“I was going,” began the old man, with his eyes fastened on Howlett, “I was going along by the spinney with the dogs when I heard a noise in the covert and I seen Howlett come walkin’ very fast toward me. In fact,” continued David, “I may say he was runnin’. Was you runnin’, Howlett?”

Howlett said “Yes,” with a decorous cough.

“I beg pardon,” said David, “but I’d rather Howlett told the rest. He saw things which I did not.”

“Go on, Howlett,” commanded Pierpont, much interested.

Howlett coughed again behind his large red hand.

“What David says is true, sir,” he began; “I h’observed the dogs at a distance ’ow they was a workin’ sir, and David stood a lightin’ of ’s pipe be’ind the spotted beech when I see a ’ead pop up in the covert ’oldin a stick like ’e was h’aimin’ at the dogs, sir—”

“A head holding a stick?” said Pierpont severely.

“The ’ead ’ad ’ands, sir,” explained Howlett, “’ands that ’eld a painted stick,—like that, sir. ’Owlett, thinks I to meself, this ’ere’s queer, so I jumps it an’ runs, but the beggar ’e seen me an’ w’en I comes alongside of David, ’e was gone. ‘’Ello ’Owlett,’ sez David, ‘what the ’ell’—I beg pardon, sir,—‘’ow did you come ’ere,’ sez ’e very loud. ‘Run!’ sez I, ‘the Chinaman is harryin’ the dawgs!’ ‘For Gawd’s sake wot Chinaman?’ sez David, h’aimin’ ’is gun at every bush. Then I thinks I see ’im an’ we run an’ run, the dawgs a boundin’ close to heel, sir, but we don’t see no Chinaman.”

“I’ll tell the rest,” said David, as Howlett coughed and stepped in a modest corner behind the dogs.

“Go on,” said Barris in a strange voice.

“Well, sir, when Howlett and I stopped chasin’, we was on the cliff overlooking the south meadow. I noticed that there was hundreds of birds there, mostly yellow-legs and plover, and Howlett seen them too. Then before I could say a word to Howlett, something out in the lake gave a splash—a splash as if the whole cliff had fallen into the water. I was that scared that I jumped straight into the bush and Howlett he sat down quick, and all those snipe wheeled up—there was hundreds,—all a-squealin’ with fright, and the wood-duck came bowlin’ over the meadows as if the old Nick was behind.”

David paused and glanced meditatively at the dogs.

“Go on,” said Barris in the same strained voice.

“Nothing more, sir. The snipe did not come back.”

“But that splash in the lake?”

“I don’t know what it was, sir.”

“A salmon? A salmon couldn’t have frightened the duck and the snipe that way?”

“No—oh no, sir. If fifty salmon had jumped they couldn’t have made that splash. Couldn’t they, Howlett?”

“No ’ow,” said Howlett.

“Roy,” said Barris at length, “what David tells us settles the snipe shooting for to-day. I am going to take Pierpont up to the house. Howlett and David will follow with the dogs,—I have something to say to them. If you care to come, come along; if not, go and shoot a brace of grouse for dinner and be back by eight if you want to see what Pierpont and I discovered last night.”

David whistled Gamin and Mioche to heel and followed Howlett and his hamper toward the house. I called Voyou to my side, picked up my gun and turned to Barris.

“I will be back by eight,” I said; “you are expecting to catch one of the gold-makers, are you not?”

“Yes,” said Barris listlessly.

Pierpont began to speak about the Chinaman, but Barris motioned him to follow, and, nodding to me, took the path that Howlett and David had followed toward the house. When they disappeared, I tucked my gun under my arm and turned sharply into the forest, Voyou trotting close to my heels.

In spite of myself, the continued apparition of the Chinaman made me nervous. If he troubled me again I had fully decided to get the drop on him and find out what he was doing in the Cardinal Woods. If he could give no satisfactory account of himself I would march him in to Barris as a gold-making suspect,—I would march him in anyway, I thought, and rid the forest of his ugly face. I wondered what it was that David had heard in the lake. It must have been a big fish, a salmon, I thought; probably David’s and Howlett’s nerves were overwrought after their Celestial chase.

A whine from the dog broke the thread of my meditation and I raised my head. Then I stopped short in my tracks.

The lost glade lay straight before me.

Already the dog had bounded into it, across the velvet turf to the carved stone where a slim figure sat. I saw my dog lay his silky head lovingly against her silken kirtle; I saw her face bend above him, and I caught my breath and slowly entered the sunlit glade.

Half timidly she held out one white hand.

“Now that you have come,” she said, “I can show you more of my work. I told you that I could do other things besides these dragonflies and moths carved here in stone. Why do you stare at me so? Are you ill?”

“Ysonde,” I stammered.

“Yes,” she said, with a faint color under her eyes.

“I—I never expected to see you again,” I blurted out, “—you—I—I—thought I had dreamed—”

“Dreamed, of me? Perhaps you did, is that strange?”

“Strange? N—no—but—where did you go when—when we were leaning over the fountain together? I saw your face,—your face reflected beside mine and then—then suddenly I saw the blue sky and only a star twinkling.”

“It was because you fell asleep,” she said, “was it not?”

“I—asleep?”

“You slept—I thought you were very tired and I went back—”

“Back?—where?”

“Back to my home where I carve my beautiful images; see, here is one I brought to show you to-day.”

I took the sculptured creature that she held toward me, a massive golden lizard with frail claw-spread wings of gold so thin that the sunlight burned through and fell on the ground in flaming gilded patches.

“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed, “this is astounding! Where did you learn to do such work? Ysonde, such a thing is beyond price!”

“Oh, I hope so,” she said earnestly, “I can’t bear to sell my work, but my step-father takes it and sends it away. This is the second thing I have done and yesterday he said I must give it to him. I suppose he is poor.”

“I don’t see how he can be poor if he gives you gold to model in,” I said, astonished.

“Gold!” she exclaimed, “gold! He has a room full of gold! He makes it.”

I sat down on the turf at her feet completely unnerved.

“Why do you look at me so?” she asked, a little troubled.

“Where does your step-father live?” I said at last.

“Here.”

“Here!”

“In the woods near the lake. You could never find our house.”

“A house!”

“Of course. Did you think I lived in a tree? How silly. I live with my step-father in a beautiful house—a small house, but very beautiful. He makes his gold there but the men who carry it away never come to the house, for they don’t know where it is and if they did they could not get in. My step-father carries the gold in lumps to a canvas satchel. When the satchel is full he takes it out into the woods where the men live and I don’t know what they do with it. I wish he could sell the gold and become rich for then I could go back to Yian where all the gardens are sweet and the river flows under the thousand bridges.”

“Where is this city?” I asked faintly.

“Yian? I don’t know. It is sweet with perfume and the sound of silver bells all day long. Yesterday I carried a blossom of dried lotus buds from Yian, in my breast, and all the woods were fragrant. Did you smell it?”

“Yes.”

“I wondered, last night, whether you did. How beautiful your dog is; I love him. Yesterday I thought most about your dog but last night—”

“Last night,” I repeated below my breath.

“I thought of you. Why do you wear the dragon-claw?”

I raised my hand impulsively to my forehead, covering the scar.

“What do you know of the dragon-claw?” I muttered.

“In is the symbol of Yue-Laou, and Yue-Laou rules the Kuen-Yuin, my step-father says. My step-father tells me everything that I know. We lived in Yian until I was sixteen years old. I am eighteen now; that is two years we have lived in the forest. Look!—see those scarlet birds! What are they? There are birds of the same color in Yian.”

“Where is Yian, Ysonde?” I asked with deadly calmness.

“Yian? I don’t know.”

“But you have lived there?”

“Yes, a very long time.”

“Is it across the ocean, Ysonde?”

“It is across seven oceans and the great river which is longer than from the earth to the moon.”

“Who told you that?”

“Who? My step-father; he tells me everything.”

“Will you tell me his name, Ysonde?”

“I don’t know it, he is my step-father, that is all.”

“And what is your name?”

“You know it, Ysonde.”

“Yes, but what other name?”

“That is all, Ysonde. Have you two names? Why do you look at me so impatiently?”

“Does your step-father make gold? Have you seen him make it?”

“Oh yes. He made it also in Yian and I loved to watch the sparks at night whirling like golden bees. Yian is lovely,—if it is all like our garden and the gardens around. I can see the thousand bridges from my garden and the white mountain beyond—”

“And the people—tell me of the people, Ysonde,” I urged gently.

“The people of Yian? I could see them in swarms like ants—oh! many, many millions crossing and recrossing the thousand bridges.”

“But how did they look? Did they dress as I do?”

“I don’t know. They were very far away, moving specks on the thousand bridges. For sixteen years I saw them every day from my garden but I never went out of my garden into the streets of Yian, for my step-father forbade me.”

“You never saw a living creature near by in Yian?” I asked in despair.

“My birds, oh such tall, wise-looking birds, all over grey and rose color.”

She leaned over the gleaming water and drew her polished hand across the surface.

“Why do you ask me these questions,” she murmured; “are you displeased?”

“Tell me about your step-father,” I insisted. “Does he look as I do? Does he dress, does he speak as I do? Is he American?”

“American? I don’t know. He does not dress as you do and he does not look as you do. He is old, very, very old. He speaks sometimes as you do, sometimes as they do in Yian. I speak also in both manners.”

“Then speak as they do in Yian,” I urged impatiently, “speak as—why, Ysonde! why are you crying? Have I hurt you?—I did not intend,—I did not dream of your caring! There Ysonde, forgive me,—see, I beg you on my knees here at your feet.”

I stopped, my eyes fastened on a small golden ball which hung from her waist by a golden chain. I saw it trembling against her thigh, I saw it change color, now crimson, now purple, now flaming scarlet. It was the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.

She bent over me and laid her fingers gently on my arm.

“Why do you ask me such things?” she said, while the tears glistened on her lashes. “It hurts me here,—” she pressed her hand to her breast,—“it pains.—I don’t know why. Ah, now your eyes are hard and cold again; you are looking at the golden globe which hangs from my waist. Do you wish to know also what that is?”

“Yes,” I muttered, my eyes fixed on the infernal color flames which subsided as I spoke, leaving the ball a pale gilt again.

“It is the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin,” she said in a trembling voice; “why do you ask?”

“Is it yours?”

“Y—yes.”

“Where did you get it?” I cried harshly.

“My—my step-fa——”

Then she pushed me away from her with all the strength of her slender wrists and covered her face.

If I slipped my arm about her and drew her to me,—if I kissed away the tears that fell slowly between her fingers,—if I told her how I loved her—how it cut me to the heart to see her unhappy,—after all that is my own business. When she smiled through her tears, the pure love and sweetness in her eyes lifted my soul higher than the high moon vaguely glimmering through the sunlit blue above. My happiness was so sudden, so fierce and overwhelming that I only knelt there, her fingers clasped in mine, my eyes raised to the blue vault and the glimmering moon. Then something in the long grass beside me moved close to my knees and a damp acrid odor filled my nostrils.

“Ysonde!” I cried, but the touch of her hand was already gone and my two clenched fists were cold and damp with dew.

“Ysonde!” I called again, my tongue stiff with fright;—but I called as one awaking from a dream—a horrid dream, for my nostrils quivered with the damp acrid odor and I felt the crab-reptile clinging to my knee. Why had the night fallen so swiftly,—and where was I—where?—stiff, chilled, torn, and bleeding, lying flung like a corpse over my own threshold with Voyou licking my face and Barris stooping above me in the light of a lamp that flared and smoked in the night breeze like a torch. Faugh! the choking stench of the lamp aroused me and I cried out:

“Ysonde!”

“What the devil’s the manner with him?” muttered Pierpont, lifting me in his arms like a child, “has he been stabbed, Barris?”

VII

In a few minutes I was able to stand and walk stiffly into my bedroom where Howlett had a hot bath ready and a hotter tumbler of Scotch. Pierpont sponged the blood from my throat where it had coagulated. The cut was slight, almost invisible, a mere puncture from a thorn. A shampoo cleaned my mind, and a cold plunge and alcohol friction did the rest.

“Now,” said Pierpont, “swallow your hot Scotch and lie down. Do you want a broiled woodcock? Good, I fancy you are coming about.”

Barris and Pierpont watched me as I sat on the edge of the bed, solemnly chewing on the woodcock’s wishbone and sipping my Bordeaux, very much at my ease.

Pierpont sighed his relief.

“So,” he said pleasantly, “it was a mere case of ten dollars or ten days. I thought you had been stabbed—”

“I was not intoxicated,” I replied, serenely picking up a bit of celery.

“Only jagged?” enquired Pierpont, full of sympathy.

“Nonsense,” said Barris, “let him alone. Want some more celery, Roy?—it will make you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” I answered; “when are you and Pierpont going to catch your gold-maker?”

Barris looked at his watch and closed it with a snap.

“In an hour; you don’t propose to go with us?”

“But I do,—toss me a cup of coffee, Pierpont, will you,—that’s just what I propose to do. Howlett, bring the new box of Panatellas,—the mild imported;—and leave the decanter. Now Barris, I’ll be dressing, and you and Pierpont keep still and listen to what I have to say. Is that door shut night?”

Barris locked it and sat down.

“Thanks,” said I. “Barris, where is the city of Yian?”

An expression akin to terror flashed into Barris’ eyes and I saw him stop breathing for a moment.

“There is no such city,” he said at length, “have I been talking in my sleep?”

“It is a city,” I continued, calmly, “where the river winds under the thousand bridges, where the gardens are sweet-scented and the air is filled with the music of silver bells—”

“Stop!” gasped Barris, and rose trembling from his chair. He had grown ten years older.

“Roy,” interposed Pierpont coolly, “what the deuce are you harrying Barris for?”

I looked at Barris and he looked at me. After a second on two he sat down again.

“Go on, Roy,” he said.

“I must,” I answered, “for now I am certain that I have not dreamed.”

I told them everything; but, even as I told it, the whole thing seemed so vague, so unreal, that at times I stopped with the hot blood tingling in my ears, for it seemed impossible that sensible men, in the year of our Lord 1896, could seriously discuss such matters.

I feared Pierpont, but he did not even smile. As for Barris, he sat with his handsome head sunk on his breast, his unlighted pipe clasped tight in both hands.

When I had finished, Pierpont turned slowly and looked at Barris. Twice he moved his lips as if about to ask something and then remained mute.

“Yian is a city,” said Barris, speaking dreamily; “was that why you wished to know, Pierpont?”

We nodded silently.

“Yian is a city,” repeated Barris, “where the great river winds under the thousand bridges,—where the gardens are sweet-scented, and the air is filled with the music of silver bells.”

My lips formed the question, “Where is this city?”

“It lies,” said Barris, almost querulously, “across the seven oceans and the river which is longer than from the earth to the moon.”

“What do you mean?” said Pierpont.

“Ah,” said Barris, rousing himself with an effort and raising his sunken eyes, “I am using the allegories of another land; let it pass. Have I not told you of the Kuen-Yuin? Yian is the centre of the Kuen-Yuin. It lies hidden in that gigantic shadow called China, vague and vast as the midnight Heavens,—a continent unknown, impenetrable.”

“Impenetrable,” repeated Pierpont below his breath.

“I have seen it,” said Barris dreamily. “I have seen the dead plains of Black Cathay and I have crossed the mountains of Death, whose summits are above the atmosphere. I have seen the shadow of Xangi cast across Abaddon. Better to die a million miles from Yezd and Ater Quedah than to have seen the white water-lotus close in the shadow of Xangi! I have slept among the ruins of Xaindu where the winds never cease and the Wulwulleh is wailed by the dead.”

“And Yian,” I urged gently.

There was an unearthly look on his face as he turned slowly toward me.

“Yian—I have lived there—and loved there. When the breath of my body shall cease, when the dragon’s claw shall fade from my arm,”—he tore up his sleeve, and we saw a white crescent shining above his elbow—“when the light of my eyes has faded forever, then, even then I shall not forget the city of Yian. Why, it is my home—mine! The river and the thousand bridges, the white peak beyond, the sweet-scented gardens, the lilies, the pleasant noise of the summer wind laden with bee music and the music of bells—all these are mine. Do you think because the Kuen-Yuin feared the dragon’s claw on my arm that my work with them is ended? Do you think than because Yue-Laou could give, that I acknowledge his right to take away? Is he Xangi in whose shadow the white water-lotus dares not raise its head? No! No!” he cried violently, “it was not from Yue-Laou, the sorcerer, the Maker of Moons, that my happiness came! It was real, it was not a shadow to vanish like a tinted bubble! Can a sorcerer create and give a man the woman he loves? Is Yue-Laou as great as Xangi then? Xangi is God. In His own time, in His infinite goodness and mercy He will bring me again to the woman I love. And I know she waits for me at God’s feet.”

In the strained silence that followed I could hear my heart’s double beat and I saw Pierpont’s face, blanched and pitiful. Barris shook himself and raised his head. The change in his ruddy face frightened me.

“Heed!” he said, with a terrible glance at me; “the print of the dragon’s claw is on your forehead and Yue-Laou knows it. If you must love, then love like a man, for you will suffer like a soul in hell, in the end. What is her name again?”

“Ysonde,” I answered simply.

VIII

At nine o’clock that night we caught one of the gold-makers. I do not know how Barris had laid his trap; all I saw of the affair can be told in a minute or two.

We were posted on the Cardinal road about a mile below the house, under a butternut tree, Pierpont and I with drawn revolvers on one side, Barris on the other, a Winchester across his knees.

I had just asked Pierpont the hour, and he was feeling for his watch when far up the road we heard the sound of a galloping horse, nearer, nearer, clattering, thundering past. Then Barris’ rifle spat flame and the dark mass, horse and rider, crashed into the dust. Pierpont had the half-stunned horseman by the collar in a second,—the horse was stone dead,—and, as we lighted a pine knot to examine the fellow, Barris’ two riders galloped up and drew bridle beside us.

“Hm!” said Barris with a scowl, “it’s the ‘Shiner,’ or I’m a moonshiner.”

We crowded curiously around to see the “Shiner.” He was red-headed, fat and filthy, and his little red eyes burned in his head like the eyes of an angry pig.

Barris went through his pockets methodically while Pierpont held him and I held the torch. The Shiner was a gold mine; pockets, shirt, bootlegs, hat, even his dirty fists, clutched tight and bleeding, were bursting with lumps of soft yellow gold. Barris dropped this “moonshine gold,” as we had come to call it, into the pockets of his shooting-coat, and withdrew to question the prisoner. He came back again in a few minutes and motioned his mounted men to take the Shiner in charge. We watched them, rifle on thigh, walking their horses slowly away into the darkness, the Shiner, tightly bound, shuffling sullenly between them.

“Who is the Shiner?” asked Pierpont, slipping the revolver into his pocket again.

“A moonshiner, counterfeiter, forger, and highwayman,” said Barris, “and probably a murderer. Drummond will be glad to see him, and I think it likely he will be persuaded to confess to him what he refuses to confess to me.”

“Wouldn’t he talk?” I asked.

“Not a syllable. Pierpont, there is nothing more for you to do.”

“For me to do? Are you not coming back with us, Barris?”

“No,” said Barris.

We walked along the dark road in silence for a while, I wondering what Barris intended to do, but he said nothing more until we reached our own verandah. Here he held out his hand, first to Pierpont, then to me, saying good-bye as though he were going on a long journey.

“How soon will you be back?” I called out to him as he turned away toward the gate. He came across the lawn again and again took our hands with a quiet affection that I had never imagined him capable of.

“I am going,” he said, “to put an end to his gold-making to-night. I know that you fellows have never suspected what I was about on my little solitary evening strolls after dinner. I will tell you. Already I have unobtrusively killed four of these gold-makers—my men put them underground just below the new wash-out at the four mile stone. There are three left alive,—the Shiner whom we have, another criminal named ‘Yellow,’ or ‘Yaller’ in the vernacular, and the third—”

“The third,” repeated Pierpont, excitedly.

“The third I have never yet seen. But I know who and what he is,—I know; and if he is of human flesh and blood, his blood will flow to-night.”

As he spoke a slight noise across the turf attracted my attention. A mounted man was advancing silently in the starlight over the spongy meadowland. When he came nearer Barris struck a match, and we saw that he bore a corpse across his saddle bow.

“Yaller, Colonel Barris,” said the man, touching his slouched hat in salute.

This grim introduction to the corpse made me shudder, and, after a moment’s examination of the stiff, wide-eyed dead man, I drew back.

“Identified,” said Barris, “take him to the four mile post and carry his effects to Washington—under seal, mind, Johnstone.”

Away cantered the rider with his ghastly burden, and Barris took our hands once more for the last time. Then he went away, gaily, with a jest on his lips, and Pierpont and I turned back into the house.

For an hour we sat moodily smoking in the hall before the fire, saying little until Pierpont burst out with: “I wish Barris had taken one of us with him to-night!”

The same thought had been running in my mind, but I said: “Barris knows what he’s about.”

This observation neither comforted us nor opened the lane to further conversation, and after a few minutes Pierpont said good night and called for Howlett and hot water. When he had been warmly tucked away by Howlett, I turned out all but one lamp, sent the dogs away with David and dismissed Howlett for the night.

I was not inclined to retire for I knew I could not sleep. There was a book lying open on the table beside the fire and I opened it and read a page or two, but my mind was fixed on other things.

The window shades were raised and I looked out at the star-set firmament. There was no moon that night, but the sky was dusted all over with sparkling stars and a pale radiance, brighter even than moonlight, fell over meadow and wood. Far away in the forest I heard the voice of the wind, a soft warm wind that whispered a name, Ysonde.

“Listen,” sighed the voice of the wind, and “listen” echoed the swaying trees with every little leaf a-quiver. I listened.

Where the long grasses trembled with the cricket’s cadence I heard her name, Ysonde; I heard it in the rustling woodbine where grey moths hovered; I heard it in the drip, drip, drip of the dew from the porch. The silent meadow brook whispered her name, the rippling woodland streams repeated it, Ysonde, Ysonde, until all earth and sky were filled with the soft thrill, Ysonde, Ysonde, Ysonde.

A night-thrush sang in a thicket by the porch and I stole to the verandah to listen. After a while it began again, a little further on. I ventured out into the road. Again I heard it far away in the forest and I followed it, for I knew it was singing of Ysonde.

When I came to the path that leaves the main road and enters the Sweet-Fern Covert below the spinney, I hesitated; but the beauty of the night lured me on and the night-thrushes called me from every thicket. In the starry radiance, shrubs, grasses, field flowers, stood out distinctly, for there was no moon to cast shadows. Meadow and brook, grove and stream, were illuminated by the pale glow. Like great lamps lighted, the planets hung from the high domed sky and through their mysterious rays the fixed stars, calm, serene, stared from the heavens like eyes.

I waded on waist deep through fields of dewy golden-rod, through late clover and wild-oat wastes, through crimson-fruited sweetbrier, blueberry, and wild plum, until the low whisper of the Wier Brook warned me that the path had ended.

But I would not stop, for the night air was heavy with the perfume of water-lilies and far away, across the low wooded cliffs and the wet meadowland beyond, there was a distant gleam of silver, and I heard the murmur of sleepy waterfowl. I would go to the lake. The way was clear except for the dense young growth and the snares of the moose-bush.

The night-thrushes had ceased but I did not want for the company of living creatures. Slender, quick darting forms crossed my path at intervals, sleek mink, that fled like shadows at my step, wiry weasels and fat muskrats, hurrying onward to some tryst or killing.

I never had seen so many little woodland creatures on the move at night. I began to wonder where they all were going so fast, why they all hurried on in the same direction. Now I passed a hare hopping through the brushwood, now a rabbit scurrying by, flag hoisted. As I entered the beech second-growth, two foxes glided by me; a little further on a doe crashed out of the underbrush, and close behind her stole a lynx, eyes shining like coals.

He neither paid attention to the doe nor to me, but loped away toward the north.

The lynx was in flight.

“From what?” I asked myself, wondering. There was no forest fire, no cyclone, no flood.

If Barris had passed that way, could he have stirred up this sudden exodus? Impossible; even a regiment in the forest could scarcely have put to rout these frightened creatures.

“What on earth,” thought I, turning to watch the headlong flight of a fisher-cat, “what on earth has started the beasts out at this time of night?”

I looked up into the sky. The placid glow of the fixed stars comforted me and I stepped on through the narrow spruce belt that leads down to the borders of the Lake of the Stars.

Wild cranberry and moose-bush entwined my feet, dewy branches spattered me with moisture, and the thick spruce needles scraped my face as I threaded my way over mossy logs and deep spongy tussocks down to the level gravel of the lake shore.

Although there was no wind, the little waves were hurrying in from the lake and I heard them splashing among the pebbles. In the pale star glow, thousands of water-lilies lifted their half-closed chalices toward the sky.

I threw myself full length upon the shore, and, chin on hand, looked out across the lake.

Splash, splash, came the waves along the shore, higher, nearer, until a film of water, thin and glittering as a knife blade, crept up to my elbows. I could not understand it; the lake was rising, but there had been no rain. All along the shore the water was running up; I heard the waves among the sedge grass; the weeds at my side were awash in the ripples. The lilies rocked on the tiny waves, every wet pad rising on the swells, sinking, rising again until the whole lake was glimmering with undulating blossoms. How sweet and deep was the fragrance from the lilies. And now the water was ebbing, slowly, and the waves receded, shrinking from the shore rim until the white pebbles appeared again, shining like froth on a brimming glass.

No animal swimming out in the darkness along the shore, no heavy salmon surging, could have set the whole shore aflood as though the wash from a great boat were rolling in. Could it have been the overflow, through the Weir Brook, of some cloud-burst far back in the forest? This was the only way I could account for it, and yet when I had crossed the Wier Brook I had not noticed that it was swollen.

And as I lay there thinking, a faint breeze sprang up and I saw the surface of the lake whiten with lifted lily pads. All around me the alders were sighing; I heard the forest behind me stir; the crossed branches rubbing softly, bark against bark. Something—it may have been an owl—sailed out of the night, dipped, soared, and was again engulfed, and far across the water I heard its faint cry, Ysonde.

Then first, for my heart was full, I cast myself down upon my face, calling on her name. My eyes were wet when I raised my head,—for the spray from the shore was drifting in again,—and my heart beat heavily; “No more, no more.” But my heart lied, for even as I raised my face to the calm stars, I saw her standing still, close beside me; and very gently I spoke her name, Ysonde.

She held out both hands.

“I was lonely,” she said, “and I went to the glade, but the forest is full of frightened creatures and they frightened me. Has anything happened in the woods? The deer are running toward the heights.”

Her hand still lay in mine as we moved along the shore, and the lapping of the water on rock and shallow was no lower than our voices.

“Why did you leave me without a word, there at the fountain in the glade?” she said.

“I leave you!—”

“Indeed you did, running swiftly with your dog, plunging through thickets and brush,—oh—you frightened me.”

“Did I leave you so?”

“Yes—after—”

“After?”

“You had kissed me—”

Then we leaned down together and looked into the black water set with stars, just as we had bent together over the fountain in the glade.

“Do you remember?” I asked.

“Yes. See, the water is inlaid with silver stars,—everywhere white lilies floating and the stars below, deep, deep down.”

“What is the flower you hold in your hand?”

“White water-lotus.”

“Tell me about Yue-Laou, Dzil-Nbu of the Kuen-Yuin,” I whispered, lifting her head so I could see her eyes.

“Would it please you to hear?”

“Yes, Ysonde.”

“All than I know is yours, now, as I am yours, all than I am. Bend closer. Is it of Yue-Laou you would know? Yue-Laou is Dzil-Nhu of the Kuen-Yuin. He lived in the Moon. He is old—very, very old, and once, before he came to rule the Kuen-Yuin, he was the old man who unites with a silken cord all predestined couples, after which nothing can prevent their union. But all that is changed since he came to rule the Kuen-Yuin. Now he has perverted the Xin,—the good genii of China,—and has fashioned from their warped bodies a monster which he calls the Xin. This monster is horrible, for it not only lives in its own body, but it has thousands of loathsome satellites,—living creatures without mouths, blind, that move when the Xin moves, like a mandarin and his escort. They are part of the Xin although they are not attached. Yet if one of these satellites is injured the Xin writhes with agony. It is fearful—this huge living bulk and these creatures spread out like severed fingers that wriggle around a hideous hand.”

“Who told you this?”

“My step-father.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Yes. I have seen one of the Xin’s creatures.”

“Where, Ysonde?”

“Here in the woods.”

“Then you believe there is a Xin here?”

“There must be,—perhaps in the lake—”

“Oh, Xins inhabit lakes?”

“Yes, and the seven seas. I am not afraid here.”

“Why?”

“Because I wear the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.”

“Then I am not safe,” I smiled.

“Yes you are, for I hold you in my arms. Shall I tell you more about the Xin? When the Xin is about to do to death a man, the Yeth-hounds gallop through the night—”

“What are the Yeth-hounds, Ysonde?”

“The Yeth-hounds are dogs without heads. They are the spirits of murdered children, which pass through the woods at night, making a wailing noise.”

“Do you believe this?”

“Yes, for I have worn the yellow lotus—”

“The yellow lotus—”

“Yellow is the symbol of faith—”

“Where?”

“In Yian,” she said faintly.

After a while I said, “Ysonde, you know there is a God?”

“God and Xangi are one.”

“Have you ever heard of Christ?”

“No,” she answered softly.

The wind began again among the tree tops. I felt her hands closing in mine.

“Ysonde,” I asked again, “do you believe in sorcerers?”

“Yes, the Kuen-Yuin are sorcerers; Yue-Laou is a sorcerer.”

“Have you seen sorcery?”

“Yes, the reptile satellite of the Xin—”

“Anything else?”

“My charm,—the golden ball, the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin. Have you seen it change,—have you seen the reptiles writhe—?”

“Yes,” I said shortly, and then remained silent, for a sudden shiver of apprehension had seized me. Barris also had spoken gravely, ominously of the sorcerers, the Kuen-Yuin, and I had seen with my own eyes the graven reptiles turning and twisting on the glowing globe.

“Still,” said I aloud, “God lives and sorcery is but a name.”

“Ah,” murmured Ysonde, drawing closer to me, “they say, in Yian, the Kuen-Yuin live; God is but a name.”

“They lie,” I whispered fiercely.

“Be careful,” she pleaded, “they may hear you. Remember that you have the mark of the dragon’s claw on your brow.”

“What of it?” I asked, thinking also of the white mark on Barris’ arm.

“Ah don’t you know that those who are marked with the dragon’s claw are followed by Yue-Laou, for good or for evil,—and the evil means death if you offend him?”

“Do you believe that!” I asked impatiently.

“I know it,” she sighed.

“Who told you all this? Your step-father? What in Heaven’s name is he then—a Chinaman?”

“I don’t know; he is not like you.”

“Have—have you told him anything about me?”

“He knows about you—no, I have told him nothing,—ah what is this—see—it is a cord, a cord of silk about your neck—and about mine!”

“Where did that come from?” I asked astonished.

“It must be—it must be Yue-Laou who binds me to you,—it is as my step-father said—he said Yue-Laou would bind us—”

“Nonsense,” I said almost roughly, and seized the silken cord, but to my amazement it melted in my hand like smoke.

“What is all this damnable jugglery!” I whispered angrily, but my anger vanished as the words were spoken, and a convulsive shudder shook me to the feet. Standing on the shone of the lake, a stone’s throw away, was a figure, twisted and bent,—a little old man, blowing sparks from a live coal which he held in his naked hand. The coal glowed with increasing radiance, lighting up the skull-like face above it, and threw a red glow over the sands at his feet. But the face!—the ghastly Chinese face on which the light flickered,—and the snaky slitted eyes, sparkling as the coal glowed hotter. Coal! It was not a coal but a golden globe staining the night with crimson flames—it was the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.

“See! See!” gasped Ysonde, trembling violently, “see the moon rising from between his fingers! Oh I thought it was my step-father and it is Yue-Laou the Maker of Moons—no! no! it is my step-father—ah God! they are the same!”

Frozen with terror, I stumbled to my knees, groping for my revolver which bulged in my coat pocket; but something held me—something which bound me like a web in a thousand strong silky meshes. I struggled and turned but the web grew tighter; it was over us—all around us, drawing, pressing us into each other’s arms until we lay side by side, bound hand and body and foot, palpitating, panting like a pair of netted pigeons.

And the creature on the shore below! What was my horror to see a moon, huge, silvery, rise like a bubble from between his fingers, mount higher, higher into the still air and hang aloft in the midnight sky, while another moon rose from his fingers, and another and yet another until the vast span of Heaven was set with moons and the earth sparkled like a diamond in the white glare.

A great wind began to blow from the east and it bore to our ears a long mournful howl,—a cry so unearthly that for a moment our hearts stopped.

“The Yeth-hounds!” sobbed Ysonde, “do you hear!—they are passing through the forest! The Xin is near!”

Then all around us in the dry sedge grasses came a rustle as if some small animals were creeping, and a damp acrid odor filled the air. I knew the smell, I saw the spidery crablike creatures swarm out around me and drag their soft yellow hairy bodies across the shrinking grasses. They passed, hundreds of them, poisoning the air, rumbling, writhing, crawling with their blind mouthless heads raised. Birds, half asleep and confused by the darkness, fluttered away before them in helpless fright, rabbits sprang from their forms, weasels glided away like flying shadows. What remained of the forest creatures rose and fled from the loathsome invasion; I heard the squeak of a terrified hare, the snort of stampeding deer, and the lumbering gallop of a bear; and all the time I was choking, half suffocated by the poisoned air.

Then, as I struggled no free myself from the silken snare about me, I cast a glance of deadly fear at the sorcerer below, and at the same moment I saw him turn in his tracks.

“Halt!” cried a voice from the bushes.

“Barris!” I shouted, half leaping up in my agony.

I saw the sorcerer spring forward, I heard the bang! bang! bang! of a revolver, and, as the sorcerer fell on the water’s edge, I saw Barris jump out into the white glare and fire again, once, twice, three times, into the writhing figure at his feet.

Then an awful thing occurred. Up out of the black lake reared a shadow, a nameless shapeless mass, headless, sightless, gigantic, gaping from end to end.

A great wave struck Barris and he fell, another washed him up on the pebbles, another whirled him back into the water and then,—and then the thing fell over him,—and I fainted.

•      •      •      •      •      •

•      •      •      •      •      •

•      •      •      •      •      •

This, then, is all that I know concerning Yue-Laou and the Xin. I do not fear the ridicule of scientists or of the press, for I have told the truth. Barris is gone and the thing that killed him is alive to-day in the Lake of the Stars while the spider-like satellites roam through the Cardinal Woods. The game has fled, the forests around the lake are empty of any living creatures save the reptiles than creep when the Xin moves in the depths of the lake.

General Drummond knows what he has lost in Barris, and we, Pierpont and I, know what we have lost also. His will we found in the drawer, the key of which he had handed me. It was wrapped in a bit of paper on which was written:

Yue-Laou the sorcerer is here in the Cardinal Woods. I must kill him or he will kill me. He made and gave to me the woman I loved,—he made her,—I saw him,—he made her out of a white water-lotus bud. When our child was born, he came again before me and demanded from me the woman I loved. Then, when I refused, he went away, and that night my wife and child vanished from my side, and I found upon her pillow a white lotus bud. Roy, the woman of your dream, Ysonde, may be my child. God help you if you love her, for Yue-Laou will give—and take away—as though he were Xangi, which is God. I will kill Yue-Laou before I leave this forest—or he will kill me.

FRANKLYN BARRIS.

Now the world knows what Barris thought of the Kuen-Yuin and of Yue-Laou. I see that the newspapers are just becoming excited over the glimpses that Li-Hung-Chang has afforded them of Black Cathay and the demons of the Kuen-Yuin. The Kuen-Yuin are on the move.

Pierpont and I have dismantled the shooting box in the Cardinal Woods. We hold ourselves ready at a moment’s notice to join and lead the first Government party to drag the Lake of Stars and cleanse the forest of the crab reptiles. But it will be necessary that a large force assembles, and a well-armed force, for we never have found the body of Yue-Laou, and, living or dead, I fear him. Is he living?

Pierpont, who found Ysonde and myself lying unconscious on the lake shore, the morning after, saw no trace of corpse or blood on the sands. He may have fallen into the lake, but I fear and Ysonde fears than he is alive. We never were able to find either her dwelling place or the glade and the fountain again. The only thing that remains to her of her former life is the gold serpent in the Metropolitan Museum and her golden globe, the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin; but the latter no longer changes color.

David and the dogs are waiting for me in the courtyard as I write. Pierpont is in the gun room loading shells, and Howlett brings him mug after mug of my ale from the wood. Ysonde bends over my desk,—I feel her hand on my arm, and she is saying, “Don’t you think you have done enough to-day, dear? How can you write such silly nonsense without a shadow of truth or foundation?”

THE SILENT LAND

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is how.

—Walt Whitman

THE SILENT LAND

And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God.

I

Ferris and I had had a dispute, a bitter one, and, as usual, Ferris had pushed his cap over his eyes until the hair on the back of his head stuck out.

“You can’t do it,” he said, shoving both hands up to the wrists in his canvas fishing-coat.

“I’ll prove it,” said I. “What a stubborn mule you are, Ferris!”

“Stubborn nothing,” he retorted, “you and your theories must have your little airing, I suppose, but I don’t intend to assist.”

“I’m right sometimes,” I said.

“Sometimes you’re wrong, too,” said Ferris. Then he walked off toward the cliffs, whistling, uncompromising, untidy.

“There’s a hole in your leggings!” I called after him, but he did not deign to answer me. “Obstinate ass,” I thought, for we were very fond of each other, “if he wastes his time with the Silver Doctor he’ll rue it.” Then I looked at Solomon and lighted a cigarette.

Solomon was a bird, an enervating bird of the Ibis species, wrinkled and wizened, like the mummies of his native land, which was Egypt. The bird was mine, a sarcastic tribute from Ferris, and the bird and the sarcasm both bore directly on the only disputes which ever arose between Ferris and myself. The cause of these disputes was a trout-fly, an innocent toy of scarlet and tinsel, known to anglers as the “Red Ibis.” I swore by it, Ferris swore at it. In the long winter nights when the streams gurgled under the frozen forests and the lake was a sheet of soggy snow, Ferris and I loafed before the fire pulling tangled masses of leaders and flies about and dragging the silken lines over the rugs to hear the reels click. Every fly known to the brethren of the angle was discussed—every fly except the Red Ibis. We both honestly tried to avoid this bone of contention. We talked of Duns and Hackles, and Spinners and Gnats, but in spite of every precaution the Red Ibis would occasionally rise like a fiery spectre between us, and then we disputed vehemently.

No angler with a rag of self-respect would use the Ibis,” said Ferris, with that obstinate shrug which added gall to the insult, and I—well, the crowning insult came when Ferris sent to Cairo and imported a live Egyptian Ibis for me.

“Pull out his tail feathers when you’re short of Red Ibis,” gasped Ferris, weak with laughter, as I stood silently inspecting the bird in my studio.

“I’ll send him to Central Park,” said I, swallowing my wrath; but I thought better of it, and Solomon, the wizened, became an important member of my household.

The bird was a mystery. I never cared to encounter his filmy eyes. Centuries seemed to roll away when he unclosed them, visions of tombs and obelisks filled my mind—glimpses of desert sunsets and the warm waters of lazy rivers. His black shrivelled head, bare as a skull, lay like a withered gourd among the garish flame-coloured feathers on his breast.

“Solly,” said I, when Ferris disappeared below the cliff, “do you want a frog?”

The bird unclosed one eye. I went to a pail of water in which I kept minnows, and Solomon followed me, solemnly hopping.

“Help yourself, Solly,” said I, uncovering the pail.

I called him Solly because I wished to put myself at ease with this relic of Egyptian Royalty. The splendour of Pharo’s court had not dimmed this hoary prophet’s eye, which was piercing when the sleepy film left it—piercing enough to make me feel thousands of years young, and very bourgeois. In vain I addressed him as Solly, in vain I gave him chocolate creams,—he was the aristocrat, the venerable high-priest of an Empire dead and I was his man-servant, his ass, and his ox.

Solomon dabbed once or twice at a sportive minnow, pecked pensively at the handle of the pail, swallowed a pebble or two, and then, ruffling his scarlet feathers, sidled aimlessly back into the sedge by the frog-pond. I watched him for awhile, brooding dreamily among the rushes, but he paid no further attention either to me or to the small green frogs that squatted on the lily-pads or floated half submerged, watching him with enormous eyes.

A noisy blue-jay flitted through the orchard and alighted on a crab-apple tree solely to insult Solomon. He of course was unsuccessful, and his language became so utterly unfit for publication that I moved away, shocked and annoyed.

The sun was very hot. It glittered with a blinding light across the rippling pond, where dragonflies darted and sailed and chased each other over the water, or flitted among the clouds of dancing midges, searching for prey.

A sweet smell came to me from orchard and sedge; there was an odour of scented rushes in the air, and the lingering summer wind bore puffs of perfume from clover-fields and meadows fragrant with flowering mint. I looked again toward the cliffs. Ferris was not in sight.

“Obstinate mule,” I thought, and, picking up my rod and fly-book, I sauntered toward the forest.

“Ferris,” said I to myself, “is after that big trout by the Red Rock Rapids, but he’ll never raise him with a Silver Doctor, and he’ll come home in a devil of a temper.”

I sat down in a clump of sweet fern and joined my rod. When I had run the silk through the guides and had fastened the nine-foot leader, I opened my fly-book and sought for a Red Ibis fly. There was not one in the book.

“I must send to New York to-morrow,” I thought, turning the aluminum leaves impatiently; fancy my being out of Red Ibis!” I selected a yellow Oak fly for the dropper and a nameless Gnat for the hand-fly, and, drawing the leader down to the reel, started on again, carrying my rod with the tip behind me.

The forest was dim and moist and silent. Where the sunshine fell among the ferns a few flies buzzed in the gilded warmth; but except for this and a strange grey bird which flitted before me silently as I walked, there was no sign of life, nothing stirring, not a rustle among the leaves, not a movement, not a bird-note.

Over moss and dead leaves aglisten in the pale forest light I passed, over crumbling logs, damp and lichen-covered, half submerged in little pools; and the musty fragrance of the forest mould set me dreaming of dryads, and fauns, and lost altars, whose marbles, stained with tender green, glimmer in ancient forests.

This belt of woods was always silent; I often wondered why. There were no birds none except this strange grey creature which kept flitting ahead of me, uttering no note. It was the first bird I had ever seen in the western forest belt—the first bird except Solomon, who occasionally accompanied me on my trips to the long pool in the river which borders the wooded belt on the west.

It was an unknown bird to me,—I could catch fleeting glimpses of it,—and its long slender wings and dark eyes brought no recollections to my mind.

To the north, south, and east the woods were full of thrushes and wood-peckers; full of game, too—grouse, deer, foxes, and an occasional mink and otter, but the shy wood creatures left the western forest belt alone, and even the trout seemed to shun the dark pools where the river swept the edges of the wood until it curved out again by Lynx Peak. I say the trout shunned it, but there was one, a monstrous fish, wily and subtile, that lived in the long amber pool below. Early in the season Ferris had raised him with a Silver Doctor, and Ferris’s madness on the Silver Doctor dated from that moment. His mania for this fly lead him to use it in season and out, and no amount of persuasion or of ridicule moved him.

“Because,” said I, “you had a Silver Doctor snapped off by a big fish, do you imagine it’s the only fly in the world?”

“It’s good enough for me,” he said.

There were two things which Ferris used to say that maddened me. One was, “The Silver Doctor’s good enough for me;” the other was, “New York’s good enough for me.”

We never discussed the latter question after Ferris had alluded to me as a “Latin Quarter Nondescript,” but the battle still raged over the merits of the Silver Doctor and the Red Ibis.

When I came to the wooded slope which overhung the river I buttoned my shooting coat and began a cautious descent, trailing my rod carefully. I headed for the foot of the pool, for one of my theories, which ruffled Ferris, was that certain pools should be fished up stream. This was one of those pools, according to my theory; and when I had reached the rocks and had waded into the rushing water, I faced up stream and cast straight out into the rapids which curled among the boulders at the foot of the pool.

At the second cast I hooked a snag and waded out to disengage it. Fumbling about under the foaming water I found my fly imbedded in something which refused to give way. I tugged cautiously and gently; it was useless. Then I rolled up my sleeve and plunged my arm into the water up to the shoulder. This time it did give way; I drew out my arm and held up something glistening and dripping, in which my hook was firmly imbedded. It was a shoe, small, pointed, high-heeled, and buckled with a silver buckle.

“This,” said I, “is most extraordinary,” and I sat down on a flat rock, holding the shoe close to my eyes.

“Besnard—Paris,” I read stamped on the lining over the heel. And the buckle was of sterling silver. I sat for a moment, thinking.

Our cottage, Ferris’s and mine, was the only house in the whole region that I knew of, except the old house in the glade by the White Moss Spring. That was unoccupied and had been for years—a crumbling, abandoned farm, tottering among the young growth of an advancing forest. But as I sat thinking, I remembered early in the season having seen smoke above the trees once when we were in the neighbourhood of the White Moss Spring, and I recollected that Ferris had spoken of poachers. We had been too lazy to investigate, too lazy even to remember it until, as I sat there holding the small shoe, the incident came back to me, and I wondered whether anybody had taken up an abode in the abandoned farm.

I didn’t like it. The forests and streams belonged to Ferris and me, and although up to the present moment it had not been necessary to employ many keepers, I began to fear that our woods were being invaded and that we should soon be obliged to find protection.

I looked at the shoe, turning it over carefully in my hands. It was new—had scarcely been worn at all.

“Pooh,” I thought, “the owner of this could scarcely do much damage among the game, but of course there may be bigger shoes in company with this, and those bigger shoes had better look out!”

My first impulse was to throw the shoe into the underbrush. I started to do this, and then carefully laid it down on a sun-warmed rock.

“Let it dry,” I muttered; “it’s evidence for Ferris.” But as it happened, Ferris was not destined to see the shoe.

II

I fished the pool twice, once up and once down, and heaven knows I fished it conscientiously; but no trout rose to the flies, although I changed the cast half a dozen times and even violated my feelings by tying a Silver Doctor. It was true I glanced up and down the river to see whether Ferris was in sight before I did so.

“The wily old devil won’t come up,” said I to myself, meaning the trout; “I’ll give him a rest for a while.” And I sat down on the rock where the pointed shoe was drying in the sun, laying my rod beside me.

“What’s the use of speculating about this shoe,” I thought, and straightway began to speculate.

The strange grey bird with the slender wings and dark eyes slipped through the undergrowth along the opposite side of the pool, but it uttered no call, and I caught only fleeting glimpses of it at intervals. Once, for a moment, it flitted quite near, and a sudden sense of having seen it before came over me, but after a little thinking I found myself associating it with a rare bird I had once noticed in Northern France, and of course it was impossible that this could be a French bird.

“It was an association of ideas,” said I to myself, looking at the mark in the slim shoe. Besnard—Paris.” And I began speculating upon the owner of the shoe.

“Young? Probably. Slender? Probably. Pretty? The deuce take the shoe,” I muttered, picking up my rod. Presently I laid it down again, softly.

“Now, perhaps,” said I to myself, “this little shoe has tapped the gravel of the Luxembourg, patted the asphalt of the Boulevard des Italians, brushed the lawns of the Bois—ah me! ah me!—the devil take the shoe!”

The sun beat down upon the rock; the little shoe in my hand was nearly dry.

“No,” said I to myself, “I’ll not show it to Ferris. And I’ll not shove it into my pocket—no—for if Ferris finds it he’ll rag me to death. I’ll throw it away.” I stood up.

“I’ll just throw it away,” I repeated aloud to encourage myself, for I didn’t want to throw it away.

“One, two, three,” said I, with an attempt at carelessness which changed to astonishment as I raised my eyes to the bank above whither I had intended to hurl the shoe.

For an instant I stood rigid, my right hand clutching the shoe, arrested in mid air. Then I placed the shoe very carefully upon the rock beside me and took off my shooting-cap.

“I beg your pardon,” said I, “I did not see you.”

I stood silent, politely holding my shooting-cap against my stomach. But I was confused, for she had answered me in French, pure Parisian French, and my ideas were considerably unbalanced.

I am afraid I stared a little. I tried not to. She was slender and very young. Her dark eyes, half shadowed under black lashes, made me think of the strange, dark-eyed bird that had followed me. She sat on the crooked trunk of a tree over hanging the bank, her feet negligently crossed, her hands in the pockets of a leather shooting-jacket. I’m afraid to say how short her skirts were,—but of course this is the age of bicycles and shooting-kilts.

“Madame,” I said, trying to keep my eyes from one small stockinged foot, I have found a shoe—”

“My shoe, Monsieur,” she said, serenely.

“Permit me, madame,” said I—

“Mademoiselle—” said she—

“Permit me,—a thousand pardons, Mademoiselle,—to return to you your shoe.”

“It was very stupid of me to lose it,” said she.

“It is nearly dry,” said I; “will Mademoiselle pardon the uncommitted stupidity of which I was nearly guilty.”

“You were going to throw it away,” said she.

“I almost perpetrated that unpardonable crime—”

“Give it to me,” she said, with a gracious gesture.

Now when she smiled I smiled too, and picking up the shoe waded across the pool to the bank under her.

“May I come up?” I asked.

“Pardi, Monsieur, how else am I to get my shoe?”

I clambered up, hanging to limbs and branches. It was a miracle I did not break my neck.

“Why do you not take the path?” she asked. “Do you not know you might fall—and all for a shoe?”

“But such a shoe—”

“True, the buckle is silver—”

“Which I claim the privilege of buckling,” said I, dragging myself up beside her.

She deliberately held out her slim stockinged foot, and I slipped the shoe on it.

The silver buckle was not easily buckled. There were difficulties—for the tongue had be come bent and needed straightening.

“You might take the shoe off again to arrange the buckle,” she said.

“I can straighten it without that,” said I.

When at last the buckle was clasped we had been talking so long that I had told her my name, my residence, my profession, and more or less about Ferris. I don’t know why I told her all this. She seemed to be interested. Then I asked her if she lived at the “Brambles.”

“The Brambles?” she repeated, looking at her shoes.

“The deserted Farm by the White Moss Spring—”

“Yes not alone; I have a housekeeper.”

“Aged?”

“Very—and fierce. But I shall do as I please.”

“Did you buy the house?”

“No. It was empty, and I walked in. Next day they sent my twelve trunks from Lynne Centre. The furniture was good.”

“And you have been there for two months?”

“Yes. I have a horse and dog cart too. Rose drives to Lynne Centre twice a week for the marketing. I think I shall keep a cow—I generally do what I please. I choose to amuse myself with you just now.”

“This,” said I, “is a very strange history; did you know that Mr. Ferris and myself existed?”

“It is not a strange history,—no, I once saw your house as I passed through the forest belt, but there was nobody there on the lawn except an ordinary person with little side whiskers.”

“Howlett!” I exclaimed.

“Comment?” she asked.

“A servant, an Englishman.”

“Probably,” said she, looking dreamily at me.

Then I told her all about Ferris and myself; how we came every spring to the Clover Cottage with Howlett, a cook, and three dogs as retinue, how we fished in summer and shot in the autumn, how twice a year men came all the way from Lynne Center to house our hay and repair damages, how the game-keepers lurked at the mouth of the valley, miles to the south, to prevent poachers from entering, but we concluded it was not necessary for keepers to patrol the woods inside the valley.

“Now,” I said, “the poachers are in our very midst—here established—and such dangerous poachers, too! What shall we do with them, Mademoiselle?”

“You mean me,” she said, with wide open eyes.

“No,” said I, “I do not mean you—you are very welcome in our valley.”

“But I am sure you do mean me,” she said, smiling.

Then we talked of other things, of Paris and France; of trout, and flies, and Ferris, of Normandy, and the beauty of the world; but it was nearly five o’clock before we spoke of love.

“I have never loved,” she said, looking at me calmly.

“Oh, how unnecessary!” I thought, for I had believed her clever.

“But,” she continued, gravely, “I think it is time that I did.”

“I think so too,” said I.

“I should like to fall in love,” said she; “I have nothing else to do.”

“I also am very idle,” I said.

“Then,” said she, “the opportunity only is lacking.”

I think I muttered something about poachers—I was not perfectly cool.

“Now,” said she, “I know you mean me!”

“Ah,” said I, “I mean a keener poacher than you or I, a free rover more to be dreaded than an army of riflemen.”

“Then you don’t mean me,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Do you know,” said she, “I should very much like to be the heroine of a romance.”

“I will aid you to be one!” I said, hastily. We had known each other nearly three hours.

“Let us,” said she, “pretend that this is the forest of Versailles in the time of Louis Quinze.”

“Let us indeed!” I cried, enthusiastically.”

“And you are a Count—”

“And you a Marquise—”

“Named Diane; it is my real name.”

“Diane.”

“And you—”

“My real name is Louis—”

“It will do; you may kiss my hand.”

I wondered just where she was going to draw the line. Then, the devil prompting, I entered recklessly into this most extraordinary adventure.

And what an adventure! Words, thoughts even failed me as I looked at her. This woodland maid with the wonderful eyes! There was no mistaking the challenge in her eyes, the half-innocent smile, the utter disregard for every human conventionality.

“How,” thought I “how can such a woman wear a childlike face!” I had known coquettes, many, but the depth of this strange girl’s recklessness I feared to sound I dreaded almost to understand.

“She is too deep,” said I to myself—“too deep for me,” and I looked her questioningly in the eyes.

I don’t know why or how,—I never shall know probably, but a sudden conviction seized me that she was as innocent as she looked. Imagine a man coming to such a conclusion! I felt inclined to laugh, and yet I was as firmly convinced as though I had known her all my life.

“You may kiss my hand,” she said, and held it out to me.

I did. I wished I hadn’t a moment later, for I tumbled head over heels in love with her and fairly gasped at the idea.

“Lovers in the Court of Louis Quinze resembled us, I think,” she said, after a long silence.

“We will try to make the resemblance perfect,” said I, taking both her hands in mine.

She bent her head a little,—there was just a shadow of resistance,—then I kissed her on the lips.

There are moments in a man’s life when he does not know whether he is a-foot or a-horseback. I remember that I sat down on the bank and carefully uprooted several ferns. When I had regained control of my voice, the little maid was very silent, I asked her to tell me of herself, if it might please her to do so.

“I was born,” said the little maid, resting her small head on one hand, “in Rouen. Do you know Rouen?”

“Yes.”

“Papa was an officer, and he killed his general when I was seven years old. It was something about Mama; I never saw her again. Then we went to Canada very quickly; Papa died there. I had been in a convent school; I ran away, and went to New York. I am nineteen, and very reckless.”

“Yes, Diane.”

“I have a great deal of money in banknotes. It was Papa’s. I have never counted it—it is in a big trunk. I understand English, but do not care to speak it. I do not care what becomes of me; I wish it were over—this life. You are the first man who ever kissed me. Do you believe me?”

“Yes, Diane.”

“I wonder you do. Let us go down to the river where the sunlight falls. The descent is easy—”

“Diane—you must not go—”

“With you—will you give me your hand?”

“Come.”

“Did you see that shy grey bird?” said the little maid, hesitating on the slope, her hand in in mine.

I could not see it, for we had already begun the descent.

III

“Where the mischief have you been all day?” demanded Ferris that evening as we sat on the veranda after dinner.

“Well,” said I lighting a pipe, “when you had your fit of sulks I went off for a brace of trout.”

“Did you see anything worth seeing?”

“I saw no trout,” said I.

“Unfortunate, eh?”

“Oh not very,” I said, looking at Solomon.

“Not very?”

“Look at that ridiculous bird, Ferris.”

“Swallowed a frog the wrong way,” said Ferris, watching the solemn contortions of Solomon; “he looks like a little Jew in a crimson overcoat with a stomach ache. What fly did you use, Louis?”

“Everything; couldn’t raise a fin.”

“Oh, you’ve been trying that old devil down by the west woods! I should think you’d let him alone; it’s useless,” yawned Ferris.

“I’m going to try for him every day till I get him,” said I, trying not to lie more than necessary: “Of course you’ll not infringe?”

“Infringe! Not much! You can have the whole west woods to your own sweet self; but you’re an idiot!”

“Not at all,” said I, thankfully; and in a burst of confidence I confessed that I had used a Silver Doctor.

There was a momentary gleam of triumph in Ferris’s eyes, but he was very decent about it and asked me most politely for the loan of a Red Ibis. Oh men of the busy world, learn courtesy from the angler! There are other things you need not learn from anglers.

“My dear fellow,” said I, more touched than I had been for a long time, “I haven’t a Red Ibis left. I shall write Conroy to-night before I retire. If you really do want an Ibis I will catch Solomon and pluck a plume from his tail feathers.”

“I don’t want it enough to inconvenience you or hurt Solomon’s feelings,” said Ferris, laughing.

After a long interval of silent smoking, Ferris rose and yawned at the moon.

“Do you know what a Spirit-bird is, Ferris?” I asked, rapping my pipe on the arm of my chair.

“Spirit-bird—the French one—the Oiseau Saint-Esprit? Yes, I’ve seen one in the Vosges.”

“Grey—with slim wings and big dark eyes?”

“That’s the bird,” said Ferris; “why?”

“Well, I thought I saw one to-day. Of course that’s impossible.”

“Of course,” said Ferris, yawning again! “I’m going to turn in; good-night, old chap.”

“Good-night,” said I, tapping nervously on the veranda with my pipe.

Howlett came out a few moments later with my wading-shoes which he had been oiling.

“Well,” said I, “are the hob-nails all right?”

“Seving ’ob nails is h’out, sir,” replied Howlett, holding up the shoes for my inspection.

“Put them in as soon as they’re dry. Did you oil the bamboo? Good. Is my lamp lighted? Put it out—and you need not sit up, Howlett; I’m going for a stroll.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Howlett,” and Solomon, sir?”

Now it was one of my delights to see Howlett house Solomon. The wily Ibis loved to snoop about in the moonlight, and he was always ready for Howlett when that dignified servant came to round him up.

I looked at Solomon, who stood gloomily brooding among the water-lilies.

“He ought to be in bed,” said I.

Howlett descended the veranda steps with arms extended, but Solomon sidled out into the pond. Howlett pleaded earnestly. He flattered and cajoled, but Solomon was obdurate.

“Nothink I say do move ’im, sir!” said Howlett, stiffly; “he is vicious to-night, sir.”

“Then take the boat,” I said.

Howlett in a boat chasing a sulky Ibis was one of those rare spectacles that few are permitted to witness. Once a week Solomon turned “vicious” and then, at Ferris’s and my suggestion, Howlett took to the boat. A terrestrial Howlett was solemnly ludicrous, but an aquatic Howlett was impossible. Of course Ferris and I never laughed—that is, aloud, but we usually felt rather weak after it was over.

In the course of half an hour Solomon, mad, wet, and rumpled was cornered by Howlett and clasped to his stiff shirt front, muddy, bedraggled, and kicking.

“Are you not mortified, you bad bird?” said I, as Howlett passed toward the kitchen where Kitty the cook was airing his straw-thatched house.

“A vicious bird, sir, good-night, sir,” murmured Howlett.

“Good-night, Howlett; breakfast at seven tomorrow,” said I, and sauntered out into the moonlit valley.

I had been walking almost half an hour when it occurred to me that I should be in bed.

“What the deuce am I sprinting about the valley at this hour for?” I thought, looking around.

Over the shadowy meadows the night mist hung, silvered by the moonlight, and I heard the meadow-brook rippling through the sedge. Slender birches glimmered among the alders, and all the little poplar leaves were quivering, but I felt no breath of air.

Where the dark forest fringed the meadow I saw the moonbeams sparkling on lonely pools, but the depths of the woodland were black and impenetrable, and the forest itself was vague as the mist that shrouded it.

For a long time I stood, looking at the stars and the mist, and little by little I came to understand why I was there alone.

I knew I should go on, I wished to, but I lingered in the moonlight staring at earth and sky until something moved in the thicket beside me, and I followed it, knowing it was the Spirit-bird.

When I entered the forest I could scarcely see my hand, but I felt a trodden path beneath my feet, and I heard before me the whisper of soft wings, and presently I heard the river, rushing through rocks of the western forest, and when I came to the wooded bank, the moonlight fell all around me.

There was a narrow strip in the forest, over grown with silver birch and poplar and lighted by the moon, but I searched it in vain, up and down, up and down, always with the whisper of soft wings in my ears.

At last I called, “Diane,” and before I called again, her hands lay close in mine.

•      •      •      •      •      •

“I came,” said the little maid, “because you were coming.”

“Who told you I was coming?”

“Told me? No one told me. Rose is asleep. Why did you come?”

“Why did you, Diane?”

“I? Because you came. How did you find my bower?”

“Your bower, Diane?”

“It is yours I know; I call it mine; I call it the Silent Land.”

“It is very silent,” I said.

“It is always silent—no birds, not even the noise of the water. Do you think it is sad? There are times when sounds, the song of living creatures and the countless movements of things that live, trouble me. Then I come here. There are flowers.”

“The air is very sweet, too sweet. What is the perfume? The trees are heavy with fragrance. Ah!—are you tired, Diane?”

“No—it is the odour of blossoms; I sleep here sometimes.”

“Your hair is loose—how long it is! Is it the perfume from your hair—is it your breath—”

“The blossoms are very sweet; the moon has gone.”

“There is a star,” how soft your breath is.”

“I do not see the star; where, Louis?”

“It is there;” clouds are veiling it;” there is a mist over all—”

“It is my hair—over your eyes.”

IV

“Howlett,” said I, one warm afternoon, “Solomon is unendurable: he follows me everywhere, and I wish you to see that he minds his own business.”

“A hobstinate bird, sir,” said Howlett, “and vicious when crossed,—which I scorn ’is h’anger,—beg pardon, sir—for ’e’s took to biting wen ’is vittles disagrees.”

“Has he bitten you?”

“Twice, sir,—which appily my h’eyes is huninjured, though h’aimed at by ’is beak.”

“This is intolerable,” said I; “you must punish him, Howlett.”

“’Ow, sir?”

“Tie him up when he bites. Have those flies come from Conroy’s?”

“Nothink ’as came, sir.”

“Where is Mr. Ferris?”

“Mr. Ferris is a whipping of the h’Amber Pool, sir, with three sea-trout to the good and a brace of square tails. Solomon followed ’im, sir, and is h’observing the sport.”

“Then I can get away without that red feathered Paul Pry tiptoeing after me,” I thought, and sent Howlett for my rod-case.

“Tell Mr. Ferris, when he returns, that I may not be back until dinner,” I said, when Howlett brought the case.

I selected a four-ounce split bamboo, pocketed my fly-book and a tin box of floating flies for dry fishing, picked up a landing-net, and walked away toward the western woodland, whistling. I had not fished for three weeks, although every day I went away into the western woods with rod and creel. Ferris laughed at my infatuation for the long pool where the great fish lay and jeered at me when I returned evening after evening with no trout, although the river, except the western stretch, was full of trout. He had never come to the pool,—I should have seen him from the Silent Land if he had, but Solomon sneaked after me on several occasions. Once I caught him craning his neck and peering into the bower,—our bower—and as I did not care to have him pilot Ferris thither, I hustled him off.

The woods were fragrant and warm, stained by the afternoon sun; the quiet murmur of the brook came to me from leafy thickets as I walked, and I heard the river rushing in the distance and the summer wind among the pines. White clouds shimmered in the blue above, sailing, sailing God knows where, but they passed across the azure, one by one, drifting to the south, and I watched them with the vague longing that comes to men who watch white sails at sea.

I had turned my steps toward the long pool, for I had decided to fish that afternoon, wishing to redeem my words to Ferris—at least in part; but as I stepped across the trail I heard the sound of wings, and a shadow glided in front of me toward the forest. It was always so from the first, and now, as always, I turned away, following unquestioningly the Spirit-bird. The noise of the river ceased as I entered the Silent Land. For an instant the grey bird hovered high in the sunshine, then left me alone.

I threw myself full length upon the blossoming bank and waited, chin on hand. And as I waited, she came noiselessly across the moss, so quietly, so silently that I saw her only when her fingers touched mine.

“It has been a long time,” we said; and; “Did you sleep?” and; “When did you awake?”

Then we asked each other a thousand little questions which are asked when lovers meet, and we answered as lovers answer. We spoke of the Spirit-bird as we always did, wondering, and she told me how that morning it had tapped upon her window as the day broke.

“Rose did not hear it,” she said, “but I was already awake and thinking.”

“I awoke at sunrise too,” I said; “for a moment I thought it was a swallow in the chimney that fluttered so—”

“‘The Spirit-bird flies swiftly when Love is dreaming,’—that is a very old proverb of Normandy. What shall we do, Louis there is so much to do and so little time in life! I brought my lute—ah! you are laughing!”

“The lute is such an old-fashioned toy; I didn’t know you played. Will you sing too, Diane? Something very old, older than the lute.”

“I learned a song this morning because I thought you would care for it. That is why I dared to bring my lute into the Silent Land. The song is called, ‘Tristesse.’”

Then the little maid sat up among the blossoms and touched the soft strings, singing:

J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie,

Et mes amis et ma gaité;

J’ai perdu jusqu’ à la fierté

Qui faisait croire à mon génie.

•        •        •        •        •        •

Quand j’ai connu la Vérité

J’ai cru que c’était une amie;

Quand je l’ai comprise et sentie,

J’en etais déjà dégoûté

•        •        •        •        •        •

Et pourtant elle est éternelle

Et ceux qui se sont passés d’elle

Ici-bas ont tout ignoré.

•        •        •        •        •        •

Dieu parle, il faut qu’on lui réponde;

Le seul bien qui me reste au monde

Est d’avoir quelquefois pleuré.

•        •        •        •        •        •

“That is all,” said the little maid.

“Sing, Diane,” I said, but I scarcely heard my own voice.

She laughed and bent above me with a graceful gesture. “Not that,” she said, “for you at least are not sad. There is a chansonnette, shall I sing again? then be very still, here at my feet. Do you not think my lute is sweet?”

Je voudrais pour moi qu’il fut toujours fête

Et tourner la tête

Aux plus orgueilleux;

Être en même temps de glace et de flamme,

La haine dans l’âme,

L’amour dans les yeux.

•        •        •        •        •        •

“You, Diane?” I whispered; but she smiled, and the mystery of love veiled her dark eyes; and she sang:

Je ne voudrais pas à la contredanse,

Sans quelque prudence

Livrer mon bras nu

Puis, au cotillion, laisser ma main blanche

Trainer sur la manche

Du premier venu.

•        •        •        •        •        •

Si mon fin corset, si souple et si juste,

D’un bras trop robuste

Se sentait serré,

J’aurais, je l’avoue, une peur mortelle

Qu’un bout de dentelle

N’en fut déchiré.

•        •        •        •        •        •

She looked at me with soft, unfathomable eyes and touched the lute. When I moved she started from her reverie with a gay little nod to me:

Quand on est coquette, il faut être sage,

L’oiseau de passage

Qui vole â plein coeur

Ne dort pas en l’air comme une hirondelle,

Et peut, d’un coup d’aile

Briser une fleur!

•        •        •        •        •        •

“Sing,” I said in a changed voice.

“I have sung,” she said, and laid her lute in my hands. But I knew nothing of minstrelsy and lay silent, idly touching the strings.

She had fashioned for her fair head a wreath of sweet-fern twined with clustered buds, white as snow and faintly perfumed.

“So I am crowned,” she said, “a princess in the Silent Land. Where I step, all things green shall flourish; where I turn my eyes, blossoms shall open in the summer wind;—am I not queen?”

“Will you not sing again, Diane?”

“No, it pleases me to hear a legend now. You may begin, Louis.”

“Which—the Werewolf or the Man in Purple Tatters or the—”

“No, no—something new.”

“The Seventh Seal?”

“Begin it.”

“And when he opened the Seventh Seal there was silence in Heaven—”

“Dear Saints, have we not silence enough in the Silent Land? Tell me about battles.”

“And the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. I could tell you about battles, Diane.”

“Tell me,—don’t move your arm,—tell me of battles, Louis.”

“There was once a King in Carcosa,” I began. But the little maid was already asleep.

I thought I heard a step in the undergrowth and listened.

The forest was silent.

V

When we awoke it was night. Down from the dark heavens a great star fell, burning like a lamp. Above the low-hanging branches, sombre, drooping, heavy with fragrance, a misty darkness lay like a vast veil spread.

In the stillness I heard her quiet breathing, but we did not speak.

Silence is a Prophet, unveiling mysteries.

Then, through the forest, we heard the sound of wings, and as we moved, stepping together into the shadows, the moon rose above Lynx Peak, gigantic, golden, splendid.

So we passed out of the forest into the star-lit night.

VI

The skies were leaden, the watery clouds hung low over the valley, and a wet wind blew from the west, ruffling the long pool where Diane stood. Kilted and capped in tweeds, creel swinging with every movement of the rod which swayed and bent with her bending wrist, she moved from ripple to shallow, wading noiselessly while the silken line whistled and the gay flies chased each other across the wind-lashed pool.

We spoke in a low voice, glancing at each other when the light cast struck the water.

“Under the alders Diane—” I said; “have you changed the Grey Dun for the Royal?”

“No, what is your new cast?”

“Emerald and Orange Miller—I shall tie an Alder-fly in place of the Miller. Do you think the water warrants a cast of three?”

“It is rough; I don’t know,—Louis, was that an offer?”

“I think it was the spray from the rapids. Shall we move up a little? Do you feel the chill of the water?”

“I am cold to my knees,” said the little maid, “the river is rising I think—ah, what was that?”

“Nothing—you touched a floating leaf in the swirl.”

“Splash!” A great fish flopped over in the pool, a trout, lazy, unwieldy, monstrous.

“Oh! he missed it!” cried Diane, turning a little white.

“Cast again,” I whispered, tossing my rod onto the sandy beach and unslinging my landing-net.

Trembling a little with excitement, she cast across the swirl, once, twice, twenty times, but the monster was invisible. Somewhere in the dusky depths of that amber well the fierce fish lay watching the lightly dropping flies, unmoved. Then we changed the cast; I emptied my fly-book, but nothing stirred except the hurrying water, curling, gurgling, tumbling through the rocks. Finally I broke the silence.

“Diane, it was the spinner that he rose to. He’s after something redder. Have you a Scarlet Ibis?”

“No—have you?”

I almost groaned, for Conroy’s flies had not arrived, and I hadn’t an Ibis in the world.

After a while she reeled in her silken line, and we waded to the sandy beach and sat down.

“Oh, the pity of it,” sighed Diane; “never have I seen such a trout before. I suppose it is useless, Louis.”

I sat moodily poking holes in the sand with the butt of my landing-net.

We spoke of other things for a time, sinking our voices below the roar of the river. Presently a sunbeam stole through the vapour above, lighting the depths of the dark pool. And all at once we saw the trout, hanging just above the pebbly bottom; we saw the scarlet fins move, the great square tail waving gently in the current, the mottled spotted back, the round staring eyes. The swelling of the gills was scarcely perceptible, the broad mouth hardly moved.

For a long time we sat silent, fascinated; then something stirred behind us on the beach and we slowly turned. It was Solomon.

“Ciel!” faltered Diane, “what is that?”

“My bird—an Egyptian Ibis,” I whispered, laughing silently; “he has followed me, after all.”

Solomon ruffled his scarlet plumes, blinked at me, scratched his head with his broad foot, pecked at a bit of mica, and took two solemn steps nearer.

“Diane,” said I, suddenly, “I’ll get a red fly for you; don’t move—the bird will come close to us.”

But Solomon was in no hurry. Inch by inch he sidled nearer, dallying with bits of moss and shining pebbles, often pausing to reflect, but gradually approaching, for his curiosity concerning Diane was great.

“He looks as if he had stepped off an obelisk,” murmured Diane; “I have seen hieroglyphics that resembled him. Oh, what a prehistoric head—so old, so old!”

“His name is Solomon,” I whispered. “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. I’m going to have a small bit of Solomon’s glory—sh—h! ah! I’ve got him!”

It was over in a second, and I do not believe it was painful. There was a flurry of sand, a furious flapping of flame-coloured wings, a squawk! a smothered laugh—nothing more.

Mortified, furious, Solomon marched off, shaking the river sand from wing and foot, and Diane and I, with tears of laughter in our eyes, wound the scarlet feather about a spare hook, tied it close with a thread from my coat, and whipped it firmly to the shank. I looped the improvised fly to Diane’s leader, and she shook the line free. The reel sang a sweet tune as she drew the silk through the guides, and presently she motioned me to follow her out into the rippling shallows, and I went, swinging my landing-net to my shoulder. She cast once. The fly struck the swirl and sank a little, but she drew it to the surface and the current swept it under the alders. For a moment it sank again; then the ripples parted, and a broad crimson-flecked side rolled just below the surface of the water. At the same moment the light rod curved, deeply quivering, the reel screamed like the wind in the chimney, and the straining line cut through the water, moving up the pool with lightning speed.

Strike!” I cried, and she struck heavily, but the reel sang out like a whistling buoy, and the fish tumbled into the churning water under the falls at the head of the pool.

“Now,” said Diane, with a strange quiet in her voice, “I suppose he is gone, Louis.”

But the vicious tug and long, fierce strain contradicted her, and I stepped back a pace or two to let her fight the battle to the bitter end.

The struggle was splendid. Once I believe she became a little frightened,—the rod was staggering under the furious fish,—and she spoke in a queer, small voice: “Are you there, Louis?”

“I am here, Diane.”

“Close behind?”

“Close behind.”

She said nothing more until the great fish lay floating within reach of my net.

“Now!” she gasped.

It was done in a second; and, as I bore the deep-laden net to the beach, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure among the trees on the bank above. Diane was kneeling breathlessly on a rock beside me; she did not see the figure. I did, for an instant. It was Ferris.

VII

Dinner was over. Ferris and I lingered silently over the Burgundy, and Howlett hovered in the corner with a decanter of port until Ferris shook his head.

It had been a silent dinner. Ferris tried to be cordial, and failed. Then he tried to be indifferent, with better success. We exchanged a word or two concerning a new keeper who was to be stationed at the notch in the north, and I spoke to Howlett about cleaning the lamps.

Neither of us mentioned rods or trout, although Howlett had served us a delicious sea-trout that evening which had fallen to Ferris’s rod, over which we ordinarily should have exulted.

Ferris of course knew that I had seen him among the trees on the bank above the long pool. It was my place to speak; we both understood that, but I did not. What was there to say? Suppose I should go back to the beginning and tell him—not all, but all that I was bound in honour to tell him. What would he think if I spoke of the Spirit-bird, of the Silent Land, of my long deception? An explanation was due him—I felt that with a vague sense of anger and humiliation. For weeks I had abandoned him; I never thought about his being lonely, but I knew now that he had felt it deeply. Oh, it was the underhand part of the business that sickened me, the daily deceit, the double dealing. Ferris was no infant. A word would have been enough. I had never by sign or speech spoken that word which would at least have set me right with him, and which I could have spoken honourably. And moreover, if I had spoken that word,—no, not a word even, a look would have been enough,—Ferris would never have entered the western forest belt.

We sat dawdling over our wine in the glow of the long candles while the fire crackled in the chimney place; for the evening was chilly, and Solomon brooded sullenly before the blaze. Howlett, noiseless and pompous, glided from side-board to table, decorously avoiding the evil jabs from Solomon’s curved bill, until Ferris woke up and told him he might retire, which he did with a modest “good-night, sir,” and a haughty glance at Solomon. A half hour of strained silence followed. I leaned on the table, my head on my hands, watching the candle light reflected on the fragile wine glasses. Myriads of little flames glistened on the crystal bowls, deep stained with the red wine’s glow. The fire snapped and sparkled on the hearth, and Solomon slept, his wizened head buried in the depths of his flaming plumage.

And as we sat there, there came a faint tapping at the curtained window. Ferris did not hear it. I did, for it was the Spirit-bird.

“I must go,” said I, rising suddenly.

“Where?” said Ferris.

I looked at him stupidly for a moment, then sank back into my chair.

Solomon stirred in his slumber and I heard the wind rising in the chimney.

Ferris leaned across the table and touched my sleeve.

I looked at him silently.

“I must speak,” he said; “are you ready?”

I did not reply.

“Sadness and silence have no place here, between you and me. Shall I tell you a story I once read?”

“I am half asleep,” I muttered.

“This is the story,” he said, unheeding of my words. “There was once a King in Carcosa—”

My hand fell heavily upon the table.

“——And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies——”

“For God’s sake, Ferris——”

“Yes,” he said, “for God’s sake.”

We sat staring at each other across the table, and if my face was as white as his I do not know, but my hand trembled among the glasses till they tinkled.

“I was born in France,” he said at last. “You did not know it, for I never told you. What do you know about me, after all? Nothing. What have years of friendship taught you about my past? Nothing. Now learn. My father was shot dead by an inferior officer in Rouen. The assassin escaped to Canada where—I found him. He died by his own hand—from choice. I did not know he had a child.”

The dull fear at my heart must have looked from my eyes. Ferris nodded.

“Yes, you know the rest,” he said; “the shame and disgrace of the suicide drove the child away—anywhere to escape it—anywhere—here, into the wilderness the woman fled where she hath a place prepared of God.”

The Spirit-bird was tapping on the window, I heard the noise of wings beating against the pane.

“I must go,” I said, and my voice sounded within me as from a great distance.

“Vengeance is God’s,” said Ferris, quietly: “I am guilty.”

“I must go,” I repeated, steadying myself with my hand on the table.

The noise of wings filled my ears. I knew the summons.

“Do you not hear?” I cried.

“The wind,” said Ferris.

Then the door slowly opened from without, the long candles flared in the wind, and the ashes stirred and drifted among the embers on the hearth. And out of the night came a slender figure, with dark eyes wide, and timid hands outstretched outstretched until they fell into my own and lay there.

“I came from the Silent Land,” she said; “the bird led me; see, it has entered with me, Louis.”

“It is my wife who has entered,” I said quietly to Ferris, and the little maid clung close to me, holding out one slim hand to Ferris.

There was an interval of silence.

“Father Gregory will breakfast with us to morrow,” said Ferris to me.

“A Priest?”

Open the window,” smiled Ferris; “there is a small grey bird here.”

So I opened the window and it flew away.

“Good-night,” whispered the little maid, and kissed her hand to the open window.

“Diane!”

She came to me quietly. Ferris had vanished; Solomon peered dreamily at us with filmy eyes.

“The Spirit-bird has gone,” she said.

Then, with her arms about my neck, I raised her head, touching her white brow with my lips.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When my wife read as far as you have read, she picked up the embroidery which she had dropped beside her on the table.

“Do you like my story?” I asked.

But she only smiled at me from under her straight eyebrows.

The next morning I received her ultimatum; I am to cease writing about beautiful women of doubtful antecedents who inhabit forest glades, I am to stop making fun of Howlett, I am to curb my passion for rod and gun, and, if I insist on writing about my wife, I am to tell the truth concerning her. This I have promised Ysonde to do, and I shall try to, in “The Black Water.”

THE BLACK WATER

Lorsque la coquette Espérance

Nous pousse le coude en passant,

Puis a tire-d’aile s’élance,

Et se retourne en souriant;

Où va l’homme! Où son coeur l’appelle!

L’hirondelle suit le zephyr,

Et moins légère est l’hirondelle

Que l’homme qui suit son désir.

[When the flirtatious Hope

Nudges us in passing,

Then the heart soars,

And turns around smiling;

Where is the man going? Where his heart calls him.

The swallow follows the zephyr,

And less light is the swallow

Than the man who follows his desire.]

—Alfred de Musset

THE BLACK WATER

Oh! could you view the melodie

Of ev’ry grace,

And musick of her face,

You’d drop a teare,

Seeing more harmonie

In her bright eye,

Then now you heare.”

—Lovelace

I

Ysonde swung her racquet. Her laughter was very sweet. A robin on the tip of a balsam-tree cocked his head to listen; a shy snow-bird peered at her through the meadow grass.

What are you laughing at?” I asked, uneasily. I spoke sharply—I had not intended to. The porcupine on the porch lifted his head, his rising quills grating on the piazza; a drab-coloured cow, knee deep in the sedge, stared at me in stupid disapproval.

“I beg your pardon, Ysonde,” I said, sulkily, for I felt the rebuke of the cow. Then Ysonde laughed again; the robin chirped in sympathy, and the snow-bird crept to the edge of the tennis-court.

“Deuce,” I said, picking up a ball, “are you ready?”

She stepped back, making me a mocking reverence. Her eyes were bluer than the flowering flax behind her.

I had intended to send her a swift service, and I should have done so had I not noticed her eyes.

“Deuce,” I repeated, pausing to recover the composure necessary for good tennis. She made a gesture with her racquet. The service was a miserable failure. I drove the second ball into the net, and then, placing the butt of my racquet on the turf, sat down on the rim.

“Vantage out,” said I, gritting my teeth; “what were you laughing at, Ysonde?”

“Vantage out,” she repeated; “I am not laughing.”

“You were,” I said; “you are now.”

She went to the boxwood hedge, picked out one ball and sent it back; then she drove the other over the net and retired to her corner swinging her racquet. I did not move.

“You are spoiling your racquet,” she said.

I was sitting on it. I knew better.

“And your temper,” she said, sweetly.

“Vantage out,” I repeated, and raised my tennis-bat for a smashing service. The ball whisted close to the net, and the white dust flew from her court, but her racquet caught it fair and square and I heard the ring of the strings as the ball shot along my left alley and dropped exactly on the service line. How I got it I don’t know, but the next moment a puff of dust rose in her vantage court, there was a rustle of skirts, a twinkle of small tennis shoes, and the ball rocketed, higher, higher, into the misty sunshine.

“Oh,” gasped Ysonde, and bit her lip.

The ball began to come down. I had time to laugh before it struck,—to laugh quietly and twirl my short mustache.

“I shall place that ball,” said I, where you will not find it easily;” and I did, deliberately.

For a second Ysonde was disappointed, I could see that, but I imagined there was the slightest tremour of relief in her voice when she said:

“Brute force is useless, Bobby; listen to the voice of the Prophetess.”

“I hear,” I said, “the echo of your voice in the throat of every bird.”

“Which is very pretty but unfair,” said Ysonde, looking at the snow-birds beside her. “It is unfair,” she repeated.

“Yes,” said I, “it is unfair; are you ready?”

“Let us finish the game this afternoon,” she suggested; look at these snow-birds, Bobby; if I raise my racquet it will frighten them.”

“And you imagine,” said I, “that these snow birds are going to interrupt the game—this game?”

“What a pity to frighten them; see—look how close they come to me? Do you think the little things are tamed by hunger?”

“Some creatures are not tamed by anything,” I said.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, innocently.

I was glad that I suppressed my anger.

“Ysonde,” I said, “you know what this game means to me—to us.”

“I know nothing about it,” she said, hastily, retreating to her corner; “play—it’s deuce, you know.”

“I know,” I replied, and sent a merciless ball shooting across her deuce court.

“Vantage in,” I observed, trying not to smile.

A swift glance from her wide eyes, a perceptible tremble of the long lashes that was all; but I knew what I knew, for I have hunted wild creatures.

The porcupine on the piazza rose, sniffed, blinked in the sunlight, and lumbered down the steps, every quill erect.

“Billy! Go back this minute!” said Ysonde.

The quills on Billy’s back flattened.

“Billy,” I repeated, “go and climb a tree.”

“If you speak to him he will bristle again,” said Ysonde, walking over to the porcupine.

“Billy, my child, climb this pretty balsam tree for the gentleman; come you are interrupting the game, and the gentleman is impatient.”

“The gentleman is very impatient, Billy,” I said.

I saw Ysonde colour—a soft faint tint, nothing more; I saw Billy receive a gentle impulse—oh, very gentle indeed, from the point of her slender tennis shoe. So the porcupine was hustled up the balsam-tree, where he lay like an old mat, untidy, mortified, nursing his wrath, while two blue-birds tittered among the branches above him.

Ysonde came back and stood in the game court.

“It is vantage, I believe,” she said, indifferently.

“Out,” said I, with significance. Ysonde looked at me.

“Out,” I repeated.

“Play,” she said, desperately.

“No,” I replied, sitting down upon the edge of my racquet again—I knew better—“let us clearly understand the consequences first.”

She swung her racquet and looked me full in the eyes.

“What consequences?” she said.

“The consequences incident upon my winning this set.”

“What consequences?” she insisted, defiantly.

“The forfeit,” said I.

“When you win the set, we will discuss that,” she said. “Do you imagine you will win?”

She was a better player than I; she could give me thirty on each game.

“Yes,” I said, and I believe the misery in my voice would have moved a tigress to pity.

Now perhaps it was because there is nothing of the tigress about Ysonde, perhaps because I showed my fear of her—I don’t know which—but I saw her scarlet lips press one upon the other, and I saw her eyes darken like violet velvet at night.

“Play,” she said; “I am ready.”

The first ball struck the net; the racquet turned in my nerveless hand, and she smiled.

“Play!” I cried, and the second ball bit the lime dust at her feet. I saw the flash of her racquet, I saw a streak of gray lightning, and I lifted my racquet, but something struck me in the face,—the tennis-balls were heavy and wet,—and I staggered about blindly, faint with pain.

“Oh, Bobby!” cried Ysonde, and stood quite still.

“I’m a duffer,” I muttered, trying to open my eye, but the pain sickened me. I placed my hand over it and looked out upon the world with one eye. The drab-coloured cow was watching me; she was chewing her cud; the porcupine had one sardonic eye fixed upon me; the robin, balanced on the tip of the balsam, mocked me. It was plain that the creatures were all on her side. The wild snow-birds scarcely moved as Ysonde hastened across the court to my side. I heard the blue-birds tittering over head, but I did not care; I had heard the tones of Ysonde’s voice, and I was glad that I had been banged in the eye. It was true she had only said, “Oh, Bobby!”

“Is it very painful?” she asked, standing close beside me.

“Yes,” I replied, seriously.

“Let me look,” she said, laying one hand on the sleeve of my cricket shirt.

“Billy will rejoice at this,” said I, removing my handkerchief so she could see the eyes. The pain was becoming intense. With my uninjured eye I could see how white her hand was.

She stood still a moment; my arm grew warm beneath her hand.

“It will cheer Billy,” I suggested; ” did I tell you that he bit me yesterday and I whacked him? No? Well, he did, and I did.”

“How can you!” she murmured; “how can you speak of that ridiculous Billy when you may have—have to be blind?”

“Nonsense,” I said, with a shiver.

She crossed the turf to the spring and brought her handkerchief back soaking and cold as ice. I felt her palm on my cheek as she adjusted it. It was smooth, like an apricot.

“Hold it there,” I said, bribing my conscience; “it is very pleasant.” She thought I meant the wet handkerchief.

“If—if I have ruined your sight—” she began.

Now it was on the tip of my tongue to add “and yet you are going to ruin my life by beating me at tennis,” but my conscience revolted.

“Do you think it is serious?” she asked, in a voice so low that I bent my head involuntarily. She mistook the gesture for one of silent acquiescence. A tear—a large warm one—fell on my wrist; I thought it was a drop of water from the handkerchief at first. Then I opened my uninjured eye and saw her mistake.

“You misunderstood,” I said, wearily. “I don’t believe what the oculist told me; the eye will be all right.”

“But he warned you that a sudden blow would——”

“Might——”

“Oh—did he say might?”

“Yes—but it won’t. I’m all right—don’t take away your hand; are you tired?”

“No, no,” she said, “shall I get some fresh water?”

“Not yet—don’t go. The game was at deuce, wasn’t it?”

Ysonde was silent.

“Was it deuce? Does that point count against me?” I insisted.

“How can you think of the game now?” said Ysonde, in a queer voice—like the note of a very young bird.

I sat down on the turf, and the handkerchief fell from my eye. Ysonde hastened to the spring and returned carrying the heavy stone jar full of water. It must have strained her delicate wrist—she said it did not; and, kneeling beside me, she placed the cold bit of cambric over my eye.

“Thank you,” I said; “will you sit beside me on the turf?” Both of my eyes were aching and closed, but I heard her skirts rustle and felt the momentary pressure of her palm on my cheek.

“Are you seated?” I asked.

“Yes, Bobby.”

“Then tell me whether I lost that point.”

“How can I tell,” she answered; “I would willingly concede it if it were not——”

“For the forfeit,” I added; “then you think I did lose the point?”

“Does your eye pain very much?” she asked.

“Yes,” said I, truthfully. Perhaps it was ungenerous, but I dared not reject such an ally as truth. I opened one eye and looked at Ysonde. She was examining a buttercup.

“All buttercups look as though they had been carefully varnished,” said she, touching one with the tip of her middle finger.

“Did I win the set?” I began again.

“Oh—no—not the set!” she protested.

“Then I lost that point?”

“Oh! why will you dwell upon tennis at such a moment!”

“Because,” said I, “it means so much to me.”

I suppose there was something in my voice that frightened her.

“Forgive me,” I said, bitterly ashamed, for I had broken our compact, not directly, but in substance. “Forgive me, Ysonde,” I said, looking at the porcupine with my left eye.

“Ridiculous Billy,” for that was his name, stared at me with the insolence born of safety, and his white whiskers twitched in derision.

“You old devil,” I thought, remembering the scar on my ankle.

“Where did he bite you?” asked Ysonde unconsciously reading my thoughts. It was a trick of hers.

“In the ankle, it was nothing. I would rather have him bite the other ankle than get any more of his quills into me!” I replied. “See how the snow-birds have followed you. They are there among the wild strawberries.”

She turned her head.

“Hush!” she whispered, raising one palm. It was pinker than the unripe berries. There was an ache in my heart as well as in my eyes, so I said something silly; “There was an old man who said, Hush! I perceive a young bird in this bush—”

“When they said, Is it small? he replied, Not at all! It is four times as big as the bush!” repeated Ysonde, solemnly. We both laughed, but I read a gratitude in her eyes which annoyed me.

“We digress,” I said, “speaking of the game—”

“Oh, but we were not speaking of the game!” she said, half-alarmed, half-smiling; “there! I thought you were going to be sensible, Bobby.”

“I am. I only wish to know whether I lost that game.”

“You know the rules,” she said.

“Yes—I know the rules.”

“If it were not for the forfeit, I should not insist,” she continued, returning to her buttercup. “It seems unfair to take the point;—does the eye pain, Bobby?”

“Not so much,” I replied, sticking to the truth to the bitter end. My ally was becoming a nuisance.

“Let me see it,” she said, gently removing the handkerchief. The eye must have looked bad, for her face changed.

“Oh, you poor fellow,” she said, and I fairly revelled in the delight of my own misery.

“Then I lost that point,” said I, stifling conscience.

She replaced the handkerchief. Her hand had become suddenly steady.

“No,” she said, “you did not lose the point,—I concede it.”

I wondered whether my ears were tricking me.

“Then—if I won the point—I won the set,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And the forfeit—”

“The forfeit was that I should kiss you,” said Ysonde, gravely.

“That was not all—”

“No,—you are to be allowed to tell me that you love me,” continued Ysonde in calm, even tones.

“Then,” said I, flushing uncomfortably, “when will you pay the forfeit?”

“Now, if you wish it. Shall I kiss you?”

She leaned on the turf, one hand hidden by the buttercups. She had dropped the handkerchief, and I picked it up and held it to my eye with my left hand. Then, with my right hand, I took her right hand, listlessly drooping beside her, and I looked her full in the eyes.

“When we made the wager,” I said, “we were boy and girl. That was almost twenty-four hours ago. You need not kiss me, Ysonde.”

“A kiss means more at our age,” she said.

“We were very silly,” said I.

“It should mean love,” she said, faintly.

“Indeed it should,” I said.

Ysonde sat straight up among the field flowers.

“I do not love,” she said.

“I know it,” I replied gaily, and I let the bandage drop from my eye. “The pain is all gone,” I said, closing my left eye to see whether my vision was impaired.

I was totally blind in my right eye.

For an instant the shock staggered me. I don’t know how long I sat, mouth open, staring at the sun with one sound, one sightless eye. Ysonde, her chin on her hands, lay with her face turned toward the White Lady, a towering peak in the east.

“Come,” I said, rising, “your aunt will be impatient; dinner has been served this half hour.”

She sprang to her feet, she had been in a reverie, and gave me a long look which I could not define.

“And your eye doesn’t pain?” she asked, after a moment.

“No,” I said, for the pain had disappeared with the sight; “I am all right except a headache.”

“And you can see perfectly well?”

“Perfectly.”

It was at this point that truth and I parted; for what was a lost eye that it should cause her a moment’s regret?

II

It was about this time that the oculist came to Holderness and visited me at the Rosebud Inn. I was in a dark room; Ysonde thought it better, believing darkness a cure for headache.

When the oculist walked in—his name was Keen—he said, “What the devil are you doing here?”

“I am blind in one eye—will it be noticeable?” I asked.

“Banged in the eye?” he enquired, opening the shutters.

“Banged in the eye,” I repeated, as he bent over me.

His examination lasted scarcely ten seconds. After a moment he rose and closed the shutters, and I stood up in the darkness.

“Will it disfigure me?” I asked again.

“No,—an oculist could tell the difference, perhaps. You may go out in three weeks.”

“Blind?”

“Nonsense,” growled Keen, “you have another eye yet.”

“But I am an artist,” I said in a low voice, “is there hope?”

I heard Keen sit down in the room, and his rocking-chair squeaked through five minutes of the bitterest darkness I ever knew. I could stand it no longer, so I rose and felt my way towards the rocking-chair, I wanted to touch him—I was terrified. Well, it only lasted a few moments—most men pass through crises—I was glad he did not attempt to pity me.

“It was Miss—” he began.

“Hush!” I whispered. “Who told you, Keen?”

“She did,” he replied. “Of course, she need never know you are—”

“Blind,” I said,—“No, she need not know it.”

I heard him feeling for the door.

“Turn your back,” he said.

I did so.

“Three weeks?” I enquired over my shoulder.

“Yes—don’t smoke.”

“What the devil shall I do?” I said, savagely.

Think on your sins, old chap,”—we had studied together in the Latin Quarter—“think of Pepita—”

“I won’t,” I cried. Keen hummed in a mischievous voice,

“Quand le sommeil sur ta famille

Autour de toi s’est repondu,

O Pépita, charmante fille,

Mon amour, à quoi penses-tu?”

“Keen,” I said, “I’ll break your head, if I am one-eyed.”

“I’m a married man,” he replied, “and I refuse your offer; that’s better, I like to hear the old ring in your voice, Bobby—keep a stiff upper lip. Surgery and painting are not the only things we learned in the Quarter.”

I heard the door close behind him, then turned and groped my way toward the bed.

•      •      •      •      •      •

How I ever lived through those three weeks!—Well, I did, and every fresh pipe of Bird’s-eye tasted sweeter for my disobedience.

“Write him,” I dictated through the closed door to Ysonde,—“write him that I am smoking six pipes a day as he directed.” After all, if I was going to be blind in one eye, I did not care whether tobacco hastened the blow, and I was glad to poke a little fun at Keen.

Ysonde could not imagine why the doctor had recommended smoking—she had heard that it weakened the sight—but she wrote as I directed, merely expressing her distrust in Keen, which amused me, for he is now one of the most famous oculists in the world.

“Yes,” said I, through the key-hole, “Keen is young, and has much to learn, but I dare not disobey orders. How is your aunt?”

“My aunt is well, thank you, Bobby; did you like the sherbet she made?”

“Yes—that’s six times you have asked me.” I was wearying of lying. The sherbet reposed among the soapsuds of my toilet jar.

Ysonde’s aunt, a tall aristocratic beauty, whose perfectly arched eye-brows betrayed the complacent vacancy of her mind, had actually prepared, with her own fair hands, a sherbet for me. I cannot bear sweets of any kind.

“Aunt Lynda will make another to-morrow,” cooed Ysonde through the key-hole.

“Thank her for me,” said I faintly; “Ysonde, I am coming out to-night.”

“It is not yet three weeks!” cried Ysonde.

“It will be three weeks to-morrow at 1 p.m. My eyes won’t suffer at night. I should like to smell the woods a little. Will you walk with me this evening?”

“If Aunt Lynda will allow me,” said Ysonde. After a moment she added: “I will ask her now”; and I heard her rise from her chair outside my door.

When she came back, I was lying face downwards on my bed, miserable, dreading the hour when I should first face my own reflection in a mirror. I heard her step on the stairs, and I jumped up and groped my way toward the door.

“Bobby,” she called softly.

“Ysonde,” I answered, with my mouth close to the key-hole. She started—I heard her—for she did not know I was so near. I bent my head to listen.

“Aunt Lynda says you are foolish to go out before to-morrow—”

“The evening won’t hurt me.”

“But suppose—only suppose your disobedience should cost you the sight of your eye?”

“It won’t,” said I.

“Think how I should feel?”

“It won’t,” I repeated. The perspiration suddenly dampened my forehead, and I wiped it away.

“Can’t you wait?” she pleaded.

“No. Have you your aunt’s permission to walk with me this evening?”

“Yes,” she said. “Shall I read to you a little while?”

For an hour I listened to her voice, and if it was Lovelace or Herrick or Isaac Walton, I do not know, upon my soul, but I do know that my dark room was filled with the delicious murmur; and I heard the trees moving in the evening wind and the twitter of sleepy birds from the hedge. It might have been the perfume from the roses under my window—perhaps it was the fragrance of her hair—she bent so close to my door outside—but a sweet smell tinctured the darkness about me, stealing into my senses; and I rose and opened my blinds a little way.

It was night. I heard the rocky river rushing through the alders and the pines swaying on the ridge. The ray from the moon which silvered the windows caused my eyes no pain.

I listened. Through the low music of her voice crept the song of a night-thrush. A breeze stirred the roses under my window; the music of voice and thrush was stilled. Then, in the silence, some wild creature cried out from the mountain side.

“Âme damnée!” I muttered; for my soul was heavy with the dread of the coming morning.

“What are you murmuring in there by your self?” whispered Ysonde, through the door.

“Nothing—was it a lynx on Noon Peak?”

“I heard nothing,” she said.

“Nor I,” said I, opening the door.

The light from the lamp dazzled but did not hurt me. She laid down the book and came swiftly toward me.

“Now,” said I, “we will walk under the stars—with your aunt’s permission.”

I heard her sigh as she took my arm; “Bobby, I am so glad your eye is well. What could you have done if you had lost the sight of an eye?”

III

The morning was magnificent. A gentleman with symmetrical whiskers named Blylock, and I were standing on the verandah of the Rosebud Inn. Blylock’s mind was neutral. His lineage was long, his voice modulated, his every action acutely impersonal. The subdued polish of Harvard was reflected from his shoes to his collar. When he smoked, he smoked judiciously, joylessly.

“And you lost the fish?” said I.

“Yes,” said Blylock, with colourless enthusiasm.

“In the West Branch?”

“Near the Forks,” said Blylock. “Do you know the pool?”

I regretted that I did not. He had once asked me whether I knew the Stryngbenes of Beacon Street, and I had replied with the same regret. Now he learned that I was culpably ignorant of the pool at the West Branch Forks.

Blylock looked at the mountains. The White Lady was capped with mist, but except for that there was not a cloud in the sky. The Gilded Dome towered, clear cut as a cameo, against the pure azure of the northern horizon; Lynx Peak, jagged and cold, shot up above the pines of Crested Hawk, whose sweeping base was washed by the icy river.

“Do you think he might weigh five pounds?” I asked.

“Possibly,” replied Blylock; “I regret exceedingly that I lost him.”

“But, thank God, Plymouth Rock still stands!” was what I felt he expected me to say. I did not; I merely asked him if he had ever experienced emotion. “Why, of course,” he answered seriously, but when I begged him to tell me when, he suspected a joke and smiled. If I had a son who smiled like that I would send him to Tony Pastor’s. Oh, that smile!—gentle, vacant, blank as the verses of a Brook Farm Bard, bleaker than Bunker Hill.

“For sweet charity’s sake,” said I, “tell me why you do it, Blylock.”

“Do what?” he asked.

“Oh,” said I wearily, “nothing—lose a five-pound trout, for instance.”

“I had on a brown hackle,” said Blylock; “it was defective.”

“It bust,” said I, brutally, “did you curse?”

“No,” replied Blylock. Ysonde came out and we took off our shooting-caps.

“Put them on again directly,” said Ysonde, nestling deep into the collar of her jacket; “is it too cold for the trout to rise, Mr. Blylock?”

Blylock looked at the sky and then at his finger tips. There was a seal ring on one of his fingers which I was tired of seeing.

I listened to his even voice, I noticed his graceful carriage—I even noticed the momentary flush on his cold cheeks. Oh, how tired I was of looking at him; it wearied me as it wearies me to read advertisements in the cars of the elevated railroad. But I liked him.

“Blylock,” said I, “get a gait on you, and we’ll whip the stream to the Intervale before dinner.”

“The water will be cold,” said Ysonde. “You ought to have waders.”

Now Ysonde knew that I had no waders. I loathed them. Blylock always wore waders.

“Thank you,” said Blylock, “I will not neglect to wear them.”

I looked at Ysonde and met her eyes.

“Oh,” said I, spoiling everything with intentional obstinacy, “Mr. Blylock never forgets his waders.” For a moment the colour touched her cheek, but she treated me much better than I deserved.

“Bobby,” said Ysonde, “remember that you have been ill, and if you wade the river in knickerbockers you will be obliged to eat sherbet again.”

So she knew the mystery of the soapsuds.

“I have no waders, Ysonde,” I said humbly, “do you think I had better not go?”

“You know best,” she said indifferently; and I got my deserts to the placid satisfaction of Blylock.

Ysonde walked away to join her aunt and I loafed about, sniffing the breeze, sulky, undecided, until Blylock appeared with rod and creel.

“Going?” enquired Blylock.

“No, I shall paint,” I said, after a moment’s silence.

He joined Ysonde and her aunt, and I saw them all walking toward the trail that crosses the river by the White Cascade. Blylock had undertaken to teach Ysonde to cast. I was surprised when she accepted, for I myself had taught her to cast. However I never asked any explanation and she never offered any—to my secret annoyance.

It was just two weeks that I had been out of the dark room. I was totally blind in my right eye, but nobody except Keen and myself knew it. I was becoming used to it—I was only too thankful that the eye, to all appearances, was as perfect as the other eye. But I dreaded to begin painting again. I feared that everything might be colourless and lop-sided, that I should be a ruined man as far as my profession was concerned. I had put off the beginning of work from sheer cowardice. Nobody but an artist can appreciate my mental suffering;—nobody but an artist knows that two eyes are little enough to see with. Had the accident destroyed the balance of my sight? Would my drawing be exaggerated, unstable, badly constructed, out of proportion? Would my colour be weak or brutally crude? I decided to find out without further delay, so when Ysonde and her aunt and Blylock had disappeared, I went to my room, gathered up my well-worn sketching kit, screwed two canvases into the holder, and marched manfully out the door into the sunlit forest.

Ridiculous Billy followed me. This capricious porcupine had taken a violent fancy to me, from the moment I emerged from the dark room. Of course I preferred his friendship to his enmity—I still bore a red scar on my ankle—but what soothed me most was his undisguised hatred of Blylock. Billy bit him whenever he could, and the blood of Bunker Hill appealed to Heaven from the piazza of the Rosebud Inn!

Blylock took it very decently—the porcupine was Ysonde’s property—but although he himself suffered in silence, and Ysonde darned his golf-stockings as partial reparation, I always fancied that his blood was importuning Heaven, and, remembering George III, I trembled for Ridiculous Billy.

Sometimes I was sorry for Blylock, sometimes I was not, especially when Ysonde darned his golf-stockings. Blylock was Lynda Sutherland’s cousin, but I demonstrated to Ysonde that this did not concern her. Sometimes I wished that Blylock would go back to Beacon Street, and yet I had grown fond of him, in a way.

The porcupine followed me into the forest, poking his rat-like muzzle into every soft rotten stump, twitching his white whiskers. A red squirrel followed him from tree to tree, chattering and squealing with rage, but Billy lumbered along, stolid, blasé, entirely wrapped up in his own business. What that business was I dared not enquire, for Billy’s malicious eyes boded evil for interlopers, and I respected his privacy.

Walking along the fragrant brown trail, barred with sunlight, I recalled that cold gray morning in camp when Sutherland—Lynda’s late lamented—waking from the troubled dreams incident on an overdose of hot whiskey and water, called to me, to “take that thing away!” That thing was Billy. From his nest among the pine-clad ridges, he had smelled our pork, and being a free-born American, he had descended to appropriate it. In the gray of the morning, through the smouldering camp-fire smoke, I saw Billy in the act of removing the pork from the crotches of a spruce tree.

“What is it? Take it away for God’s sake!” bellowed Sutherland, associating Billy with other grotesque phantoms incident on overdoses.

“It’s a porcupine,” said I.

“Pink?” faltered Sutherland.

“Go to sleep, you brute,” I muttered, not addressing the porcupine. I took a poncho, a thick one, and ran the porcupine down. Then I enveloped him in the blanket, and got a rope about his neck, tied him to a tree and examined my wounds. One of our guides helped me pull the spines from my person, and that night the other guide led Ridiculous Billy into the settlement which consists of the Rosebud Inn and three barns.

The taking of Billy preceded Sutherland’s death by twenty-four hours; he was mauled by a panther whose cubs he was investigating. His wife, Lynda, who had secured a few month’s reprieve from his presence, and who first heard of his death at Fortress Monroe, came north with Ysonde. Sutherland was buried in New York, and two weeks later Lynda and Ysonde came to the Rosebud Inn. All this happened three years ago, and during those three years, Billy, gorgeous with a silver collar, had never forgiven me for removing him from his native wilds. His attitude toward the household was unmistakable. Lynda he avoided, Ysonde he followed with every mark of approbation, Blylock he loathed, and now, he had taken this sudden shine to me.

Billy and I followed the trail, solemnly, deliberately. The trail was a blind one, now plain, brown and gold with trampled wet leaves, now invisible, a labyrinth of twisted moose-bush and hemlock, badly blazed. But we knew our business, Billy and I, for presently we crossed a swift brook, darkling among mossy hollows, and turning to the right, entered a moist glade all splashed with dewy sunlight.

“Here,” said I, unstrapping my camp-stool, “is a woodland Mecca;” and I drove my white umbrella deep into the bank, where the brook widened in sunny shallows.

Billy eyed me a moment, rolled a pine-cone over with his nose, and mounted a tree. I liked to watch him mount trees. He did not climb, he neither scrambled nor scratched, he simply flowed up the trunk.

“Pleasant dreams,” said I, as he curled up in the first moss-covered crotch; and I began to set my palette.

In the fragrant sun-soaked glade the long grass, already crisp as hay, was vibrating with the hum of insects. Shy forest butterflies waved their soft wings over the Linnea, long-legged gnats with spotted wings danced across the fern patches, and I saw a great sleepy moth hanging from a chestnut twig among the green branches overhead. His powdery wings, soft as felt, glistened like gilded dust.

“An Imperial Moth,” said I to myself, for I was glad to recognize a friend. Then a wood-thrush ruffled his feathers under the spreading ferns, and I saw a baby rabbit sit up and wriggle its nose at me.

“Lucky for you I’m not a fox,” said I, picking up a pointed sable brush; and I drew the outline of the chestnut tree, omitting the porcupine in the branches.

When I had indicated a bit of the forest beyond the glade, using a pointed brush dipped in Garance Rose foncée, I touched in a mousey shadow or two, scrubbed deep warm tones among my trees, using my rag when I pleased, and then, digging up a brushful of sunny greens and yellows, slapped it boldly on the foreground. Over this I drew a wavering sky reflection, indicated a sparkle among the dewy greens, scrubbed more sunlight into the shallow depths of the brook, and leaned back with a nervous sigh. What had God taken from me when he took the light from my eye? I pondered in silence while round me the brown-winged forest flies buzzed and hummed and droned an endless symphony. To me, with my single trembling eye, my painted foreground seemed aglow with sunlight, and the depths of the quiet forest, wrapped in hazy mystery, appeared true and just, slumbering there upon my canvas.

The brook prattled to me of dreams and splendid hopes, the pines whispered of fame, the ferns rustled and nodded consolation. I raised my head. High in the circle of quivering blue above, a gray hawk hung, turning, turning, turning in silence.

A light step sounded among the fallen leaves. Slowly I turned, my sight dazzled by the sky, but before my eye had found its focus I heard her low laughter and felt her touch on my arm.

“You were asleep,” she said, “you must not deny it, do you hear me?”

“I was not asleep,” I answered, rising from my camp-stool.

“Then you are blind,—why, I have been standing there for two minutes.”

“Two minutes? then I believe that I must be blind,” said I, turning so that I could see her better. She stood on my right.

“I expected to be challenged,” said she; “I did not hear your qui vive.”

Then she sat down on my camp-stool and gazed at my canvas with amazement.

I watched her in silence, proud of my work, happy that she should recognize it, for she knew good work every time. After a while I began to chafe at her silence, and I bent my head to see her face. I shall never forget the pained surprise in her eyes nor the quiver of her voice as she said:

“Bobby, this is childish, what on earth do you mean by such work?”

The blow had fallen. At first I was stunned. Then terror seized me, and I grasped a low swinging branch to steady myself, for I felt as though I were falling.

“Bobby, she cried, you are white—are you ill?”

“No,” said I, “that sketch was only a joke,—to tease you.”

“It is a very stupid joke,” she said coldly; “I cannot understand how an artist could bring himself to do such a thing.”

“It was a poor joke,” said I, red as fire, “pardon me, Ysonde, I don’t know what possessed me to paint like that.”

She picked up my paint rag and swept it across the face of my canvas; then turning to me:

“Now you are forgiven; come and talk to me, Bobby.”

The sun climbed to the zenith and still we sat there, she with her round white chin on her wrist, I at her feet.

Billy, who had descended from his perch in the chestnut tree as soon as he heard Ysonde’s voice, rambled about us, snuffing and snooping into every tuft of fern, one evil eye fixed on us, one on the red squirrel who chattered and twitched his brush, and rushed up and down a big oak tree in a delirium of temper.

“No,” replied Ysonde to my question, “Mr. Blylock did not fish; he talked to Lynda most of the time. I came here because I had an intuition that you were going to paint.”

“But,” said I, “how did you know I was coming here? I never before painted in this glade.”

“I don’t know how I knew it,” said Ysonde, slowly.

“Witchcraft?” Tasked.

“Possibly,” she said, with an almost imperceptible frown.

“I have noticed already,” I said, “that you have a mysterious faculty for reading my thoughts and divining my intentions. Are you aware of it?”

“No,” she said shortly.

“But you have,” I persisted.

“You flatter yourself, Bobby. I am not thinking of you every minute.”

“Suppose,” said I, after a moment’s silence, “that you loved me—”

“I shall not suppose so,” she answered haughtily.

“Let us suppose, then,” said I, “that I love you—”

“Really, Bobby, you are more than tiresome.”

I thought for a while in silence. The wood-thrush, who had come quite close to Ysonde—all wild creatures loved her—began to sing. The baby rabbit sat up to listen and wriggle its nose, and the speckled gnats danced giddily.

“Suppose,” said I, with something in my voice that silenced her, “suppose that you loved me, and that I had lost my eye. Would you still love me?”

“Yes,” said Ysonde, with an effort.

“And suppose,” I continued, “I had been born with an eye blind; could you have loved such a man?”

“I do not think I could,” she answered truthfully.

“Probably not,” I repeated, biting the stem of a wild strawberry. After a moment I looked up into the sky. The hawk was not there; but I was not looking for the hawk.

“Come,” said I, rising, “dinner must be ready and your aunt should not be kept waiting.”

I gathered up my sketching kit, tenderly perhaps, for I should never use it again, and whistled Billy to heel,—which he did when he chose.

Perhaps it was something in my face—I don’t know—but Ysonde suddenly came up to me and took both my hands.

“Are you going to be sensible, Bobby?” she asked. Her face was very serious.

“Yes, Ysonde,” I said.

But she did not seem satisfied—there came a faint glow on her face—it may have been a sun beam—and she dropped my hands and whistled to Billy.

“Come!” she cried, with a tinge of anger in her voice that I had never before heard, “heel, Billy!”

But as Billy lingered, sniffing and rooting among the ferns, she picked up a twig and struck Billy on the nose. The blow was gentle—it would not have hurt a mosquito—but I was astounded, for it was the first time I had ever seen her lift her hand in anger to any living creature. Perplexed and wondering I followed her through the forest, my locked colour-box creaking on my shoulder.

IV

“To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath,” said I, knocking my pipe against the verandah railing.

“Scripture,” said Blylock, approvingly.

“For this is the law and the prophets,” I continued, grateful that the Bible had received Boston’s approval.

“Scripture,” repeated Blylock, with the smile of a publisher mentioning the work of a very young author.

“Exactly,” I replied, “also the Koran; I forget whether Tupper mentions it.”

“Probably,” said Blylock seriously.

“Probably,” I repeated, inserting a straw in the stem of my pipe. Ysonde frowned at me. “Blylock,” I continued, smiling at nothing, “have you read Emerson?”

“Heavens!” murmured Blylock under his breath.

I had aroused him. I made it a point to stir him up once every day, satisfied to allow him to relapse into his normal Beacon Street trance afterward.

“Your scriptural quotation,” said Ysonde, with a dangerous light in her eyes, “would indicate that you have suffered a loss.”

“From him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath,” I repeated; “yes, having nothing, I have lost all I have, which,” I continued, “is of course nothing. But I am encroaching on Brook Farm,—and the Koran—”

“And on the patience of your friends,” said Ysonde; “don’t try to be epigrammatic, Bobby.”

There was a glass of water standing on a table to my right. I did not see it, my right eye being sightless, and I knocked it over. I was confused and startled at this—it brought back to me my misfortune so cruelly that I apologized more than was necessary, and received a puzzled stare from Ysonde. I noted it and chafed helplessly. Lynda Sutherland came out on the porch, and I rose and brought her a chair.

“The moonlight reminds me of Venice,” said Lynda, turning her lovely face to the moon.

We all agreed with her, although we knew it was nonsense, for we all had lived in Venice. If she had said it reminded her of peach ice-cream, we would have agreed. She was too beautiful for one to analyze what she said—she was too beautiful to analyze it herself. I remembered with a shock that the late lamented had once referred to his wife’s being “d———nd ornamental,” and I was glad the panther had clawed his besotted soul from his body. But Sutherland had never said a truer thing in his life ; drunkard that he was, he always spoke the truth.

“Lynda,” cooed Ysonde, “do you think that we might camp for a few days with Bobby and Mr. Blylock? They are going to the Black Water to-morrow and Mr. Blylock asked us.”

“We take two guides,” added Blylock, vaguely.

“We will only stay three days,” said I.

“We will have a trout supper,” suggested Blylock.

“And flap-jacks for breakfast,” said I.

“I should so like to go,” pleaded Ysonde.

Blylock examined the moon, and I saw Lynda look at him.

“Is there any danger?” she asked.

I was discreetly silent ; the question was not addressed to me.

“I think not,” said Blylock turning around, “I carry a rifle.”

“Three cheers for Bunker Hill,” I said, “there is nothing to shoot——”

“Except—panthers,” observed Blylock dryly.

At this tactless remark I expected to hear Lynda refuse to go. She did not, although she looked at Blylock a little reproachfully. He, serenely unconscious, examined his seal ring in silence. Possibly Lynda did not believe that panthers ranged so near the Inn, perhaps she was not ungrateful to the last one that had patted her late lamented into a better land.

“There are,” said I, truthfully, “a few panthers ranging between the Gilded Dome and Crested Hawk. Sometimes they get as far as Noon Peak and the White Lady, sometimes even as far as Lynx Peak, but I never heard of any thing bigger than a lynx being seen near the Black Water.”

“I have been in these forests every summer and autumn for twenty years,” said Blylock, “and I never saw either panther or lynx; have you?” he ended, turning toward me. Then, recollecting that I had witnessed the mauling of the late lamented, he turned rosy, and I was pleased to see that he was capable of experiencing two whole emotions in one evening.

I did not answer—it was not necessary, of course. I could show him the panther skin in my studio some day when I wanted to take a rise out of him. It measured nine feet from tip to tip—it might have measured more had the panther had time to nourish himself with Sutherland.

Now Ysonde must have read what was passing in my mind, for she looked shocked and nestled closer to Lynda.

“What is a lynx,” demanded Lynda, shivering.

There are two species found here, replied Blylock, glad to change the subject, “one the big grey Canada lynx, the other the short-tailed American lynx—”

“Otherwise Bob-cat, Lucivee, and wild-cat,”—I interposed; “they make a horrid noise in the woods and are harmless.”

“If you let them alone,” added Blylock, conscientious to the end.

“Which we will,” said Ysonde, gaily, “we are going, are we not, Lynda?”

“No,” said Lynda, firmly.

But the next morning when the first sunbeams scattered the mist which clung to copse and meadow, and sent it rolling up the flanks of the Gilded Dome, Lynda said, “Yes,” and possibly her pretty mountain costume tipped the balance in Ysonde’s favour, for Lynda looked like a fin-de-siecle Diana in that frock and she knew it, bless her fair face!

The guides, Jimmy Ellis and Buck Hanson, were tightening straps and rolling blankets on the lawn outside.

“Buck,” said I, “how many pounds do you take in?”

“Fifty, sir,” drawled Buck, wiping the sweat from his face with the back of his hand.

“And you, Jimmy?” I asked.

Abaout forty, sir, replied Ellis, seriously.

“I cal’late,” added Buck, “the ladies will want extry blankets.”

“They will,” I replied, “the wind is hauling around to the northwest.” Then I took a step nearer and dropped my voice.

“Any panthers seen lately, Jimmy?”

“I hain’t seed none,” replied Ellis.

“What was it killed the white heifer two weeks ago?”

“Waal,” replied Jimmy reflecting a little, “I cal’late ’t war a cat.”

“It maught be a b’ar,” said Buck, “I seed one daown to Drake’s clearin’ last week come Sabbath.”

“Sho!” drawled Ellis, returning to his blankets.

“I understand,” said I, “that Ezra Field found a thirty-pound trap missing last week.”

“Whar?” asked Hanson.

“Back of the gum-camp on Swift River,” I replied.

Ellis looked cynical and Hanson laughed, the silent confiding laughter of the honest.

“Ezry was scairt haf tew deth by a Bob-cat, oncet, into Swift River Forks,” said Ellis; “he sees things whar there hain’t nawthin.”

“Do you think,” said I, after a long pull at my pipe, “that panthers ever attack? I mean, when you let their cubs alone.”

“Hain’t never seed no panther,” replied Buck.

“You saw Mr. Sutherland when he was brought in three years ago.”

“Yes, sir—you and Cy Holman toted him in.”

“Well, you saw the panther we brought in also, didn’t you?”

“Yes sir,—but that was a daid panther,” replied Buck, prosaically.

I laughed and walked toward the piazza.

“All I want to know is whether you fellows have heard that these creatures are bothering honest people who mind their business,” I said over my shoulder; and both the big guides laughed, and answered “No fear o’ that sir!”

Half an hour later we were on the trail to the Black Water.

The morning was perfect, the air keen as September breezes on the moors, and the mottled sunlight spotted our broad trail which twisted and curved through the tangled underbrush along the bank of a mountain stream.

Blylock and Ysonde were well ahead, the latter swinging a light steelshod mountain stick; next came Lynda, beautiful and serene, approving the beauty of the forest in pleased little platitudes. I followed close behind, silent, spellbound by the splendour of the forest, charmed by the soft notes of the nesting thrushes and the softer babble of Lynda and the brook.

Broad dewy leaves slapped our faces, filmy floating spiders meshes crossed our chins and cheeks and tickled Ysonde’s pretty nose.”

“You may walk ahead,” she said to Blylock, “and break the spiders webs for me.”

“With pleasure,” said Blylock, seriously, and I saw him take the lead, his single eyeglass gleaming in the sunshine.

“It is written,” said I, flippantly, “that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first;—I believe that I should take the lead.”

“Please do,” said Ysonde, coolly, “it is your proper place.”

Now Ysonde had never before said anything to me quite as sharp as that, although doubtless I had often invited it.

“Do you want me to go?” I asked inanely.

“If you care to clear the path, I would not object,” said Ysonde.

“For you and Lynda,” said I, feeling that I was speaking regardless of either sound or sense.

“—And for Mr. Blylock,” added Ysonde, quietly.

“With pleasure,” said I, vaguely wishing my tongue might stop wagging before I said some thing hopelessly foolish, “I shall clear the way for you—and Mr. Blylock.”

I had said it; even Lynda raised her lovely eyes to me in disapproval. As for Ysonde, her face wore that pained expression that I dreaded to see—I had never seen it before but once—in the glade—and I felt that my proper place was among the wits of a country store. A boor in the kitchen of the Rosebud Inn would have had more instinctive tact—unless he was jealous!—that is the word!—I was jealous—vulgarly jealous of Blylock. Perhaps Ysonde read the shame in my face, perhaps she had divined my thoughts as she did when she chose, but she saw I was miserable, disgusted with myself, and she raised me to her own level with a smile so sweet and chivalrous that I felt there was manhood left in me yet.

“Bobby,” she said, “you promised to show me how to blaze a trail. Have you forgotten?”

I dropped out of the path to the right, she to the left; Lynda passed us to join Blylock who was waiting, the two big guides tramped by, their boots creaking on the trodden leaves. I drew the light hatchet from my belt, removed the leather blade-cover, and started on.

“This is all it is,” I said, and struck a light shaving from the bark of a hemlock, cutting it at the base with the next stroke so that the bit of bark fell, leaving a white scar on the tree trunk.

“Always on both sides,” said I, repeating the stroke on the other side of the tree. “Will you try it, Ysonde?”

She took the hatchet in her small gloved hand, and the chips flew along the trail until I begged her to spare the forest.

“But the trees don’t die!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Bobby, you’re joking; am I overdoing it?”

“A little,” said I, “a blind man could follow this forest boulevard.”

“You are blind,” she said, calmly.

“Blind?” I cried with a start.

“——To your own interests, Bobby. Aunt Lynda likes you, but she doesn’t like to hear you speak flippantly. If you destroy her trust in you, she will not let us walk together when we please.”

We moved on in silence for a while, until Ysonde, tired of blazing, handed me the hatchet.

“Yes,” said I, “I am blind—I cannot lead you—on any trail.”

“Nor I you,” she said simply.

I did not reply, for who but I should know that through the fragrant forest, bathed in sun and dew, the blind led on the blind.

“You have formed a habit,” said Ysonde, “of muttering to yourself. Are you afraid to have me know your thoughts?”

“Yes,” said I, turning, “I am afraid.”

She did not answer, but I saw her colour deepen, and I feared that I had spoken bitterly.

“I was thinking that I had forgotten my flask,” I continued gaily.

“Mr. Blylock has your flask—you were not thinking of that,” said Ysonde.

“Well,” said I, “then tell me of what I was thinking; you know you can read my thoughts—when you take the trouble,” I added prudently.

“Bobby,” said Ysonde, “I would take more trouble for your sake than you dream of.”

I stopped short in the trail and faced her, but she passed me impatiently. I saw her bite her lips as she always did when annoyed.

The chestnut, oak, and dappled beech-woods were giving place to pines and hemlocks as we wheeled from the Gilded Dome trail into the narrower trail that leads over the long divide to the Black Water. Along the rushing stream alder and hazel waved, silver birches gleamed deep-set in tangled depths, and poplars rose along the water’s edge, quivering as the breezes freshened, every glistening leaf a-tremble.

Under foot, brown pine-needles spread a polished matting over the forest mould, for we had entered the pine belt and the long trail had just begun.

The breeze in the pines! it will always make me think of Ysonde. Wild wind-swept harmonies swelling from the windy ridge, the whisper and sigh and rush of water, the grey ledges, the deep sweep of precipices where lonely rivers glimmer, lost in the sea of trees,—these I remember as I think of Ysonde, these and more too,—the dome of green, the fragments of sky between mixed branches, the silence, broken by a single birdnote.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The trail crossed a sunny glade, mossy and moist, bordered by black birch thickets and carpeted with winter-green. Ysonde leaned upon her steel-shod staff and looked at her own reflection in the placid spring pool, shining among the ferns.

“I am very much tanned,” she said.

“Are you thirsty,” I asked.

“There is a little freckle beside my nose,” observed Ysonde.

“It is becoming,” I said truthfully.

“Yes, I am thirsty,” said Ysonde, “—what do you know about freckles?”

I handed her a cup of water; she drank a little, looked over the rim of the cup reflectively, drank a little more, sighed, smiled, and poured what was left of the water upon the moss.

“A libation to the gods,” she explained.

“To which?” I asked.

“Ah,” she said; “I had not thought of that. Well, then, to—to—”

I looked at her and she tossed the cup to me saying, “I shall not tell you. I am getting into the habit of telling you everything.”

“But—but the gentleman’s name?” I urged.

“No, no! Goodness! may I not have a secret, all my own?”

“Very well,” said I, “you pour out libations to a gentleman god and I shall even up matters. Here’s to the lady!”

“Minerva, of course. You are so wise,” suggested Ysonde.

“It’s neither to Minerva nor to the owl,” said I, “it’s to the Lady Aphrodite.”

“Pooh!” said Ysonde, “you are not clever; Hermes might—”

“Might what?”

“Be careful, Bobby, your sleeve is getting wet—”

“Might what?”

“Now how should I know,” exclaimed Ysonde, “mercy, I’m not a little Greek maiden!”

I strapped the cup to my belt, tightened the buckle of my rod-case, lighted my pipe, and sat down on a log.

“Well, Master Bobby,” said Ysonde in that bantering voice which she used when perfectly happy.

“Well, Mistress Ysonde,” said I.

“Are you going to lose the others?”

I pointed to the foot of the long slope, where, among the tree trunks, something blue fluttered.

“It’s Lynda’s veil,” said Ysonde, “and there is Mr. Blylock, also; they are sitting down.”

“True,” said I, “let us rest also. We have been hours on the trail. Here is a dry spot on this log.”

Ysonde sat down. Now whenever Ysonde seated herself there was something in the pose of her figure that made me think of courts and kings and coronations. The little ceremony of seating herself ended, I resumed my seat also, feeling it a privilege accorded only to the very great. I told her this and she pretended to agree with me.

“You must be something at court,” she said, “you cannot be an earl, for earls are blond and slender; you cannot be a count, for counts are dark and dapper; nor a duke, for dukes are big and always red in the face; you might be a baron—no, they are fierce and merciless—”

“So am I.”

“No you’re not. You can’t be a marquis either, for they are plausible and treacherous—”

“Then I’ll be a Master of ’Ounds,” I insisted, “let the title go by the board.”

She agreed, and I was installed Master of Stag-hounds to her petite Majesty—this position permitting me to sit occasionally in her presence.

“I am thirsty again,” said Ysonde.

I brought her a cup of ice-cold water into which I dropped a dozen wild strawberries. She touched a berry with the tip of her pink tongue, which was bad manners, and I told her so.

“What do you know about Queen’s etiquette?” she said disdainfully, and, finding the berries ripe, she ate three and smiled at me.

A thrush came fearlessly to her very feet and drank from the spring; a mottled wood-toad made futile efforts to clamber up the log into her lap, and two red lizards peeped at her from a cleft in the boulder beside us.

“It’s queer,” said I, watching the scrambling toad, “how you seem to fascinate all wild creatures. Shall I poke the toad away?”

“No, I am not afraid; I am very glad they all come to me.”

“You were possibly a dryad once,” I hazarded.

“Possibly. And you?”

“Probably the oak tree that sheltered you.”

“Sheltered me?”

There is something in the note of a very young bird that I have noticed in Ysonde’s voice, but now, as she laughed—oh, such soft, sweet laughter,—it seemed to me as though the bird had grown, and its note trembled with purer, truer melody.

“Sheltered me! I imagine it!” she said, with a wonderful sweetness in her eyes. “Hark! Mr. Blylock is calling!”

She rose with capricious grace as I answered Blylock in a view-halloo which awoke the echoes among the cliffs above us.

When we came up to them, Lynda linked her arm in Ysonde’s, and Blylock and I pushed ahead after the plodding guides.

Blylock and I discussed trout-flies and casts and philosophy with an occasional question to the guides, and as we moved I could hear the light laughter of Lynda and the clear voice of Ysonde singing old songs that were made in France when hawk’s-bells tinkled in castle courts and tasselled palfreys pawed the drawbridge.

It was noon when we entered the Scaur Valley, and luncheon was grateful; but before the leading guide entered the spotted trail which swings to the west above the third spur of Crested Hawk, the sun had dropped into the notch between Mount Eternity and the White Lady, and the alpen-glow crimsoned every peak as we threw down our packs and looked out across the Black Water. “Here,” said I, “our journey ends; Princess Ysonde,”—I took her gloved hand,—“be seated, for below you lies the Black Water—yours by right of conquest.”

“I cal’late ’t’l be right cold to-night, Ma’am,” said Buck Hanson.

“Yes,” said Ysonde listlessly.

V

Night fell over the Black Water before the shelter was raised, but the great camp-fire lighted up the cleared space among the trees, and I saw Ellis staggering in under loads of freshly-stripped bark for our roof. Buck Hanson finished thatching the exposed ends with hemlock and spruce. The partition, a broad sheet of heavy bark, separated the lean-to into two sections, one for Lynda and Ysonde, the other for Blylock, myself, and the guides.

I had roamed about the underbrush, lopping off balsam twigs for our bedding which Blylock brought in and spread over the pine-needle floor.

When Ellis finished roofing the hut with his thick rolls of bark I sent him to the spring below with the camp kettle, and picking up an axe, called to Buck to follow.

“I should very much like,” said Blylock solemnly, “to chop a tree into sections adequate for the camp fire.”

“Take the axe and my blessing,” said I, “I hate to chop.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Blylock, following Buck into the forest where our firelight glimmered red on rugged trunks towering into the blackness above.

Ysonde came creeping out of her compartment, her eyes and cheeks brilliant in the fire’s glare.

“Lynda is lying down,” she said, “isn’t supper nearly ready? How delicious our bed of balsam smells; what are you doing with your trout rod?”

I knotted the nine-foot leader to the line, slipped on an orange miller for a dropper, tied a big coachman three feet above it, and picked up my landing-net.

“What is home without a dinner?” I asked, “and what is dinner without a trout? Come down to that rock which hangs over the Black Water, and you shall see your future dinner leaping in the moonlight.”

“Bobby the poet,” said Ysonde, steadying her self by my arm in the dark descent to the lake. “Poet Bobby, there is no moon on the Black Water.”

“Look,” said I, pointing to a pale light in the sky above the White Lady, “the moon will come up over that peak in ten minutes; give me your hand, it’s very dark.”

Clinging closely to my arm, she moved through the undergrowth until we felt the firm flat rock under our feet. The rock ran straight out into the water at right angles from the shore like a pier.

“Be careful—oh, be careful,” she urged, “you almost walked off into the water there where the shadows lie so black.”

“Then hold me,” said I diplomatically, and I felt her warm hands close tightly on my left arm.

The moon peeped over the shoulder of the White Lady as I made my first cast into the darkness ahead, and I saw my leader strike the water, now placidly rocking like a lake of molten silver.

“Oh-h!” cried Ysonde, softly, “oh, the wondrous beauty of it all.”

In the silence I heard the thwack of an axe from the woods above and Blylock’s voice quite plainly. The water lapped the edges of the rock below us, catching thin gleams from the shining sheet beyond, and my silk line whistled and whimpered like a keen wind lashing the sea.

Then a wonderful thing occurred. Out of the depths of the burnished water a slim shape shot, showering the black night with spray. Splash! A million little wavelets hurried away into the darkness, crowding, sparkling, dancing in widening circles, while the harsh whirr of the reel rang in my ears, and the silk line melted away like a thread of smoke. The rod staggered in my hand.

“Ysonde, there are two on now!” I whispered.

“Give me the rod!” she said, excitedly. I handed it to her, and for a moment she felt the splendid strain. Then the fish gave a deep surge to the west, and she gasped and pushed the rod into my hands.

“Living wild things struggling for life,” she sighed. “Oh, hurry, Bobby, it pains me so!” and she pressed both hands to her breast.

For a second the joy of the battle left me. I had an impulse to fling the rod into the Black Water; but I am a hunter by instinct.

Deeper and deeper surged the fish, and the rod swayed and bent until the tip brushed my knuckles.

“Oh, kill the creatures,” murmured Ysonde, “it is all so fierce and cruel, I never thought you were like that!”

“I am,” I muttered, checking a savage sweep toward the north,—“quick, Ysonde—pass me my net.”

She did so, and I crawled down to the water’s edge, shortening my line at every step. It was soon over; I washed my hands in the black water, and flung the fish back into the landing-net.

“Now,” said I, tossing rod and net over my shoulder, “we will go to dinner; lean on my shoulder; how brutal you must think me, Ysonde.”

“Yes,” said Ysonde.

She passed me—perhaps it was the moonlight that whitened her cheeks—and I saw her enter the circle of red firelight as Lynda came forward to meet her.

“Hello, Ellis!” I called.

Hallo, sir!” came back from the spring among the rocks below, and Jimmy Ellis appeared, carrying a chunk of pork.

Two, I said, turning the trout out of the landing-net.

“Good fish, sir,” drawled Ellis, “mor’n nuff for dinner, I suspicion.”

“Split them,” said I, “broil both as only you can broil them. Spring all right?”

“Sweet an full. Dinner is ready above.”

Blylock came down with a blazing pine knot to inspect the fish, and I heard him rigging his rod ten minutes later as I walked into camp and sat down, glowing from a dip in the tin bucket below.

Lynda and Ysonde were nibbling away at broiled trout, hot toast, and potted pheasant.

“Dear me,” said Lynda, “I really must not eat like this, I have had three cups of bouillon to begin with. Ysonde says you are the cleverest angler in the world.”

“That, of course,” said Ysonde, “may be an exaggeration, for I have seen very few anglers.”

“Oh, you’re not exaggerating one bit,” I assured her. “Is there any toast over there?”

Lynda deigned to serve me with hot bouillon and Ysonde tossed a slice of toast to me, scandalizing her aunt.

“You little savage,” said Lynda, reproachfully.

“Any trout left?” I asked. “Where is Mr. Blylock?”

“Here’s the trout,” smiled Ysonde, serving me a bit of the crisp pink fish. “Mr. Blylock said ‘ha!’ several times when he saw your two trout and went down to the rock flourishing his rod very recklessly.”

“Mr. Blylock never flourishes anything,” observed Lynda.

“No, he waved it as Merlin might have waved——”

“Why, Ysonde!” said Lynda, warmly.

I was discreet enough to finish my toast in silence; I was very happy.

“Now, Sir Fisherman,” said Ysonde, “a cup of this white wine with your trout? What! a whole bottle? Oh, Lynda, look at him!”

“I see him,” said Lynda, sleepily, “I wonder what time it is.”

Buck and Jimmy, having finished their dinner, which included a trout between them and a gallon or so of coffee, piled half a dozen logs on the fire, backed them with half a tree trunk, said good night very politely, and ambled away with the dishes and a pail of boiling water. Ten minutes later Blylock came in with three fair-sized fish, which Lynda admired and I encored, and then Lynda and Ysonde rose with deep reverences, and mockingly prayed to be allowed to retire.

Buck and Jimmy were already sound asleep.

“If they snore,” said I, “there will be murder done on Black Water shore.”

Blylock lighted a cigar and I my pipe.

“I never sleep well in camp the first night,” said I.

“No?” asked Blylock, politely.

“No, you old jay,” said I, for I was becoming very fond of Blylock. That broke the back of Beacon Street for the moment, and Blylock blossomed out as a story-teller without equal. I laughed till it hurt me, softly, of course, and still Blylock, imperturbable, bland, told story after story, until I marvelled, between my spasms of laughter, at the make-up of this Bostoriian. At last he went to bed, mildly suggesting that I follow his example, which I did after I finished my pipe, although I knew I should sleep but little.

About ten o’clock Buck Hanson snored. I leaned over Blylock, already fast asleep, and poked the wretched Buck until he stopped. Ten minutes later Ellis began a solo which I have never since heard equalled.

“Great heavens!” I muttered, and jabbed him viciously with my rod-butt, but Jimmy Ellis didn’t wake, and before I knew it, Buck Hanson, taking a mean advantage, chimed in with a snort that would have done credit to a rogue elephant. This was not all. I dread to record it, but I am trying to tell the truth in this story—I pray the lady to pardon me if I suggest that from the other side of the bark partition came a sound,—delicate, discreet, but continuous, in short, a gentle—no! no! I can never bring myself to write it down. I am no brute, Madam—and, after all, only men snore.

A black fly got into my neck and bothered me; later a midge followed the example of his erring colleague. To slay them both was my intention, and in doing so I awoke Blylock, who sleepily protested. This was exasperating, and I told him so, but he was asleep again before I finished. Why on earth I should never be able to sleep more than an hour or so on my first night in camp, I who have camped in the forest for years, I never can understand.

I endured the concerted snores of the whole camp as long as I could, then I crawled to the fire outside, hauled two fresh logs into the blaze, swathed myself in my blankets, lighted a fresh pipe, and sat down with my feet to the heat and my back against a sapling.

Outside the wavering ring of firelight the blackness was so profound, so hoplessly impenetrable that I wondered whether a storm was rolling up behind the Scaur. Trees, brush, rocks, and ledges—the whole huge forest, root and branch, seemed woven together into curtains of utter darkness which wavered, advanced, and receded with the ever dying, ever leaping flames. There was no storm, for I saw stars on the strip of darkness above little pale stars, timidly glimmering in the depths of a vast vault. The moon had long ago passed behind the Scaur—that sullen mass of menacing ledges, blackening the fathomless stretch of the Black Water. There were noises in the forest, stealthy steps and timid scratchings—now faint, as if across the rocking lake, now nearer, now so sudden and sharp that I involuntarily leaned forward, striving to pierce the outer circle of gloom beyond the fire ring. Once some thing brushed and rustled among the leaves behind me, and I saw a grey snake glide into the warm glow by my feet.

“Get out,” I whispered, with a gesture of annoyance.

The serpent slowly raised its head, flashed a forked tongue at me, swayed a moment, then noiselessly moved on into the night.

“Salut! O mon Roi!” said a low voice behind me, and Ysonde crept out of her fragrant bed of balsam, and curled up in her blanket at my feet.

“Oh, dear,” she sighed, “I am so sleepy, but I can’t sleep. Why is it, Bobby?—I haven’t closed my eyes once.”

“Then,” said I, under my breath, “it was not you who—”

“Sh-h! Lynda might hear you.”

“Not probable, judging from symptoms.”

“You’re impertinent, Bobby—hark! do you hear? What was it?”

“Anything from a toad to a porcupine; the forest is always full of sounds. Are you warm, Ysonde?”

“Yes, and so sleepy that—ah! what was that?”

“Anything from a wood-mouse to a weasel.”

I don’t believe it.”

“A fawn, perhaps—I heard deer among the pitcher-plants at the head of the Black Water a few minutes ago.”

“Gentle things,” murmured Ysonde, “I wish they would come close to me; I love them I love everything.”

“And everything on earth and sea loves you, Ysonde.”

Her lids were drooping, and she smiled, half asleep.

“Bobby,” she murmured, “I believe I could sleep here by you—you make me sleepy.”

Her head drooped and rested on my blanket. After a moment—it may have been an hour—I whispered, bending above her: “Do you sleep, Ysonde?” and again, “do you sleep?”

The stars flickered and died in the heavens, the flames sank lower, lower, and the great black night crept into the camp, smothering the fading fire with pale shadows, vague and strange, moving, swaying, until my eyes closed and I slept.

Was it a second—was it an hour? I sat bolt upright staring at the dying embers before me. A bit of charred log fell in with a soft crash sending a jet of sparks into the air, where they faded and went out. Went out? There were two—two big green sparks that had not faded with the others, and I, half asleep, watched them, vaguely curious. Ah! they are moving now—no, they are still again, close together.

The hair stirred on my head, my heart ceased, thumped once, stopped—it seemed hours,—and leaped into my throat, almost stifling me with its throbbing. I was not dreaming, for I felt the sweat trickling in my eyebrows, and the roots of my hair were cold and damp.

Ysonde moved in her slumber, frowned and raised her hand.

A low snarl came from the shadows. Slowly the power of thinking returned to me, but my eye never left those two green sparks, now blazing like lamps there in the darkness.

When would the thing spring? Would I have time to fling Ysonde behind me? Would it spring if I called to Blylock? Blylock had a rifle. Would it spring if I moved, or if Ysonde moved again? Gently, scarcely stirring, I tried to free my knees, and the creature snarled twice.

“It’s against all precedent in these woods,” I thought, “for any of the cat tribe to dare attack a camp.” A sudden anger took possession of me, a fury of impatience, and quick as the thought, I sprang among the embers and hurled a glowing branch straight into the creature’s eyes. What happened after that I can scarcely tell; I know a heavy soft mass struck me senseless, but my ears at moments ring yet with that horrid scream which seemed to split and tear the night asunder, wavering, quavering, long after I was hurled on my back, and my eyes seemed stark open in oceans of blood.

VI

When I came to my senses, it was still dark—or so it seemed to me. After a while I felt a hand shifting the bandage which pressed heavily over both eyes, and in a moment or two somebody raised me by the shoulders, somebody else by the knees, and I heard Blylock cock his rifle, and say: “Give me that torch, Buck, and walk faster.”

“Blylock,” I gasped, “they’re lugging me in as I lugged in Sutherland—mauled by a panther,” and I laughed miserably.

“Hello!” said Blylock, in a low voice, “I thought you’d brace up; are you bleeding much?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered; “what in hell’s the matter?”

“Matter!” repeated Blylock, “the forest has gone mad—it’s preposterous, but the woods are full of bob-cats, troops of ’em, and the skulking brutes have actually got the nerve to follow us.”

“Can’t I walk?” I groaned. “Where is Ysonde?” for I was beginning to remember.

“Walk?—yes, if you want to bleed to death—the ladies are here between me and the guides who are toting you.”

“Ysonde,” I murmured, “pardon me for my profanity—I am dazed—where are you?”

“Here, Bobby,” whispered Ysonde,—“close beside you; don’t talk, dear, you are very much hurt.”

“Are you speaking to me, Ysonde?” I said, doubting my senses.

“To you, Bobby,” she whispered close to my ear, “didn’t you know that I loved you? Ah, try to live and you will know!”

My strength was ebbing fast, but I think I muttered something that she understood, for the light touch of her hand was on my cheek, and I felt it tremble. Somebody gave me water,—I was choking,—and my burning lips shrank and cracked beneath the cool draught. I could hear Jimmy Ellis muttering to Buck Hanson, and Hanson’s replies.

“Look out, Buck, here’s a rut,—Mr. Blylock, can you dip your pine knot this side?—so fashion,—steady, Buck.”

“Steady, it is,—hold up his legs,—Mr. Blylock, throw a stun by that windfall,—there’s a lucivee sneakin araound in behind—”

Crack! spoke Blylock’s rifle, and then I heard Buck’s nasal drawl: “A stun is jest’s good, Mr. Blylock, they’re scairt haf tew deth—I suspicion it’s the pork they’re after!”

“Throw that pork into the woods, Jimmy,” said Blylock, “we’ll be in before long. Good heavens! how dark it is—lay him down and throw that pork away—there may be a panther among them.”

“There be,” drawled Buck, “I seen him.”

“You did? Why didn’t you say so! I can’t waste cartridges on those infernal lynxes.”

“I sez to you, Mr. Blylock, sez I, throw stuns, it’s jest as good,” replied Buck, placidly; and I was lifted again, fore and aft.

“It’s incredible,” grumbled Blylock; “what’s got into all these moth-eaten lynxes and mangy panthers; I’ve been twenty years in these woods, and I never before saw even a tom-cat.”

“I ain’t seed nothing like this, there’s three ’r four bob-cats raound us now, and I han’t never seed but one so close before, Jimmy was there that night. I jest disremember if it was abaout gummin’ time—”

Crack! went Blylock’s rifle, and I heard a whine from the thickets on the left.

“Thet’s the panther—let him hev it again,” said Ellis.

Again the rifle cracked.

“The darned cuss!” drawled Buck; “shoot again, Mr. Blylock!”

“No need,” said Ellis—“listen!—There he goes lopin’ off. Hear him snarl!”

“Hit, I guess,” said Buck, and we moved on.

Once I heard Buck complain that a particularly bold lynx kept trotting along the trail behind, “smellin and sniffin almighty close to my shins,” he asserted, and there certainly was an awful yell when Blylock wheeled in his tracks and fired. I heard Ellis laughing, and Buck said, “haow them lucivees du screech!”

“Worse n a screech-owl,” added Ellis.

That is the last thing I remembered until I woke in my bed in the Rosebud Inn.

The bandage was still on my eyes, I felt too weak to raise a finger, and the rest of my body seemed stiff and hard as wood. I heard somebody rocking in a rocking-chair and I spoke.

“I am here,” said Ysonde, but her voice seemed choked and unsteady.

“What time is it?” I asked, incoherently.

“Half past eleven,” said Ysonde.

“I am hungry,” said I, and that was my last effort until they brought me a bowl of beef broth with an egg in it, and I had managed to swallow it all.

I heard the door close, and for a moment I thought I was alone, but presently the rocking-chair creaked, and I called again: “Ysonde.”

“I am here.”

“What is the matter with me?”

“You have been ill.”

“How long?”

“Two days, Bobby. You will get well—the claws poisoned you. Try to sleep now.”

“What claws?”

“The—the panther’s—don’t you remember?”

“No—yes, a little. Where are the lynxes? Where is Blylock?”

Ysonde laughed softly.

“Mr. Blylock has gone to Boston on important business. I will tell you all about it when you can get up. He’s to be married.”

“And Lynda?”

“Lynda is downstairs. Shall I call her?”

“No.”

The next day I drank more broth, and two days later I sat up, it took me half an hour and some groans to do so.

“I think,” said I, listening to the rocking-chair, “that it is high time I saw something. Lift my bandage, please, Ysonde.”

“Only one side,” she said, and lowered the cloth that concealed my right eye—the sightless one.

There was a silence, a wretched moment of suspense, and then Ysonde cried: “What what is it—can’t you see—can’t you see me!—Oh, Bobby!”

When I spoke I hardly knew what I said, but it was something about Keen’s assuring me that nobody but an oculist could tell that I was blind in my right eye. I remember I felt very angry at Keen, and demanded to know how Ysonde could see that my right eye was sightless. I am glad I was spared the agony of her face—I would willingly have been spared the agony of her voice as she cried. “Did I do that?”

I tried to move, but her arms were about me, I tried to explain, but her warm mouth closed my lips; I only thought that it was very pleasant to be blind.

The eyes of an oculist and the eyes of love see everything. Who says that love is blind?

Her tears fell on my cheeks; when she asked pardon, I answered by asking pardon, and she—but, after all, that is our own affair.

“And my left eye,” said I, “is that gone, too?”

“Almost well, said Ysonde, it was a sympathetic shock, or something; I was afraid the claws had struck it, but Dr. Keen—”

“Keen!”

“Yes—he’s gone to Holderness now. Don’t you remember his being here with Dr. Conroy, the surgeon?”

“No,” said I, “I was too badly mauled. I have been clawed by a panther, then?”

“A little,” said Ysonde, with gentle sarcasm.

After a moment I inquired about the present health of the panther, and was assured that he was probably flourishing his tail in excellent spirits somewhere among the Scaur crags.

“Then Blylock didn’t hit him?”

“He hit something, for I heard it scream—Oh, my darling, what a horrible night! and you dying, as I believed, and the tangled brush, and the flare of the torch, and the firing—”

•      •      •      •      •      •

“Are you thirsty?—your lips are burning,” said Ysonde.

•      •      •      •      •      •

I have a joke on Keen—James Keen, the great oculist, the wise, the infallible,—and I trust he will swallow his medicine like a little man when he reads this. It happened in this way.

I was sitting under the trees by the Tennis Court with Ysonde, watching the snow-birds fluttering in the meadow grass, and listening to the robin who, boldly balanced on the tip of his spruce tree, was doing his best. The blue-birds were teaching their young to navigate the air, twittering and tittering at the efforts of their youngsters, a truly frivolous family. The drab-coloured cow had also done her best, and the result was a miniature copy of herself, also an expert cud-chewer.

Billy—Ridiculous Billy, the white-whiskered and malicious, was spread in the low forks of an apple tree, a splendid representation of a disreputable door-mat.

Lynda sat at the bay-window in the Rosebud Inn, embroidering something in white and gold. She also succeeded in doing her best in her own line, which was to look more beautiful every day. I saw Blylock’s shadow behind her.

“When are they to be married, Ysonde?” I asked for the fiftieth time.

“On the twenty-seventh,—oh, Bobby, it’s shocking to keep forgetting and we’re to be best man and bride’s maid, too!”

The sun dazzled my left eye, and I closed it for a second. Then a miraculous thing happened, an everlasting joke on Keen, for, although I had closed my sound eye, and, by rights, should have been blind as a bat, I was nothing of the kind.

“My right eye—Ysonde—I can see!—Do you understand? I can see!” I stammered.

Oh, it was glorious—glorious as the joyous wonder in Ysonde’s eyes!—it was a miracle. I don’t care what Keen says about it having happened before, or about it happening once in ten thousand cases, and I don’t care a brass farthing for his subsequent observations concerning the optic nerve, and partial paralysis, and retinas, and things, it was and must remain one of God’s miracles, and that is enough for Ysonde and for me.

“We will go to the glade and repaint my picture which you erased,” said I.

She understood and forgave me, for I hardly knew what I was saying.

“Come,” she said her eyes were wonderfully sweet, and bluer than the flowering flax around us.

So, with her hand in mine, we walked up the scented path to the Rosebud Inn, Billy lumbering along behind us, twitching his hoary whiskers.

A PLEASANT EVENING

Et pis, doucett’ment on s’endort.

On fait sa carne, on fait sa sorgue.

On ronfle, et, comme un tuyan d’orgue.

L’tuyan s’met à ronfler pus fort…

—Aristide Bruant

A PLEASANT EVENING

I

As I stepped upon the platform of a Broadway cable-car at Forty-second Street, somebody said:

“Hello, Hilton, Jamison’s looking for you.”

“Hello, Curtis,” I replied, “what does Jamison want?”

“He wants to know what you’ve been doing all the week,” said Curtis, hanging desperately to the railing as the car lurched forward; “he says you seem to think that the Manhattan Illustrated Weekly was created for the sole purpose of providing salary and vacations for you.”

“The shifty old tom-cat!” I said, indignantly, “he knows well enough where I’ve been. Vacation! Does he think the State Camp in June is a snap?”

“Oh,” said Curtis, “you’ve been to Peekskill?”

“I should say so,” I replied, my wrath rising as I thought of my assignment.

“Hot?” inquired Curtis, dreamily.

“One hundred and three in the shade,” I answered. “Jamison wanted three full pages and three half pages, all for process work, and a lot of line drawings into the bargain. I could have faked them—I wish I had. I was fool enough to hustle and break my neck to get some honest drawings, and that’s the thanks I get!”

“Did you have a camera?”

“No. I will next time—I’ll waste no more conscientious work on Jamison,” I said sulkily.

“It doesn’t pay,” said Curtis. “When I have military work assigned me, I don’t do the dashing sketch-artist act, you bet; I go to my studio, light my pipe, pull out a lot of old Illustrated London News, select several suitable battle scenes by Caton Woodville—and use ’em too.”

The car shot around the neck-breaking curve at Fourteenth Street.

“Yes,” continued Curtis, as the car stopped in front of the Morton House for a moment, then plunged forward again amid a furious clanging of gongs, “it doesn’t pay to do decent work for the fat-headed men who run the Manhattan Illustrated. They don’t appreciate it.”

“I think the public does,” I said, “but I’m sure Jamison doesn’t. It would serve him right if I did what most of you fellows do—take a lot of Caton Woodville’s and Thulstrup’s drawings, change the uniforms, ‘chic’ a figure or two, and turn in a drawing labelled ‘from life.’ I’m sick of this sort of thing anyway. Almost every day this week I’ve been chasing myself over that tropical camp, or galloping in the wake of those batteries. I’ve got a full page of the ‘camp by moonlight,’ full pages of ‘artillery drill’ and ‘light battery in action,’ and a dozen smaller drawings that cost me more groans and perspiration than Jamison ever knew in all his lymphatic life!”

“Jamison’s got wheels,” said Curtis,—“more wheels than there are bicycles in Harlem. He wants you to do a full page by Saturday.”

“A what?” I exclaimed, aghast.

“Yes he does—he was going to send Jim Crawford, but Jim expects to go to California for the winter fair, and you’ve got to do it.”

“What is it?” I demanded savagely.

“The animals in Central Park,” chuckled Curtis.

I was furious. The animals! Indeed! I’d show Jamison that I was entitled to some consideration! This was Thursday; that gave me a day and a half to finish a full-page drawing for the paper, and, after my work at the State Camp I felt that I was entitled to a little rest. Anyway I objected to the subject. I intended to tell Jamison so—I intended to tell him firmly. However, many of the things that we often intended to tell Jamison were never told. He was a peculiar man, fat-faced, thin-lipped, gentle-voiced, mild-mannered, and soft in his movements as a pussy-cat.

Just why our firmness should give way when we were actually in his presence, I have never quite been able to determine. He said very little—so did we, although we often entered his presence with other intentions.

The truth was that the Manhattan Illustrated Weekly was the best paying, best illustrated paper in America, and we young fellows were not anxious to be cast adrift. Jamison’s knowledge of art was probably as extensive as the knowledge of any “Art editor” in the city. Of course that was saying nothing, but the fact merited careful consideration on our part, and we gave it much consideration.

This time, however, I decided to let Jamison know that drawings are not produced by the yard, and that I was neither a floor-walker nor a hand-me-down. I would stand up for my rights; I’d tell old Jamison a few things to set the wheels under his silk hat spinning, and if he attempted any of his pussy-cat ways on me, I’d give him a few plain facts that would curl what hair he had left.

Glowing with a splendid indignation, I jumped off the car at the City Hall, followed by Curtis, and a few minutes later entered the office of the Manhattan Illustrated News.

“Mr. Jamison would like to see you, sir,” said one of the compositors as I passed into the long hallway. I threw my drawings on the table and passed a handkerchief over my forehead.

“Mr. Jamison would like to see you, sir,” said a small freckle-faced boy with a smudge of ink on his nose.

“I know it,” I said, and started to remove my gloves.

“Mr. Jamison would like to see you, sir,” said a lank messenger who was carrying a bundle of proofs to the floor below.

“The deuce take Jamison,” I said to myself I started toward the dark passage that leads to the abode of Jamison, running over in my mind the neat and sarcastic speech which I had been composing during the last ten minutes.

Jamison looked up and nodded softly as I entered the room. I forgot my speech.

“Mr. Hilton,” he said, “we want a full page of the Zoo before it is removed to Bronx Park. Saturday afternoon at three o’clock the drawing must be in the engraver’s hands. Did you have a pleasant week in camp?”

“It was hot,” I muttered, furious to find that I could not remember my little speech.

“The weather,” said Jamison, with soft courtesy, “is oppressive everywhere. Are your drawings in, Mr. Hilton?”

“Yes. It was infernally hot and I worked like a nigger—”

“I suppose you were quite overcome. Is that why you took a two days’ trip to the Catskills? I trust the mountain air restored you—but—was it prudent to go to Cranston’s for the cotillion Tuesday? Dancing in such uncomfortable weather is really unwise. Good-morning, Mr. Hilton, remember the engraver should have your drawings on Saturday by three.”

I walked out, half hypnotized, half enraged. Curtis grinned at me as I passed—I could have boxed his ears.

“Why the mischief should I lose my tongue whenever that old tom-cat purrs!” I asked myself as I entered the elevator and was shot down to the first floor. “I’ll not put up with this sort of thing much longer—how in the name of all that’s foxy did he know that I went to the mountains? I suppose he thinks I’m lazy because I don’t wish to be boiled to death. How did he know about the dance at Cranston’s? Old cat!”

The roar and turmoil of machinery and busy men filled my ears as I crossed the avenue and turned into the City Hall Park.

From the staff on the tower the flag drooped in the warm sunshine with scarcely a breeze to lift its crimson bars. Overhead stretched a splendid cloudless sky, deep, deep blue, thrilling, scintillating in the gemmed rays of the sun.

Pigeons wheeled and circled about the roof of the grey Post Office or dropped out of the blue above to flutter around the fountain in the square.

On the steps of the City Hall the unlovely politician lounged, exploring his heavy under jaw with wooden toothpick, twisting his drooping black moustache, or distributing tobacco juice over marble steps and close-clipped grass.

My eyes wandered from these human vermin to the calm scornful face of Nathan Hale, on his pedestal, and then to the grey-coated Park policeman whose occupation was to keep little children from the cool grass.

A young man with thin hands and blue circles under his eyes was slumbering on a bench by the fountain, and the policeman walked over to him and struck him on the soles of his shoes with a short club.

The young man rose mechanically, stared about, dazed by the sun, shivered, and limped away.

I saw him sit down on the steps of the white marble building, and I went over and spoke to him.

He neither looked at me, nor did he notice the coin I offered.

“You’re sick,” I said, “you had better go to the hospital.”

“Where?” he asked vacantly—“I’ve been, but they wouldn’t receive me.”

He stooped and tied the bit of string that held what remained of his shoe to his foot.

“You are French,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Have you no friends? Have you been to the French Consul?”

“The Consul!” he replied; “no, I haven’t been to the French Consul.”

After a moment I said, “You speak like a gentleman.”

He rose to his feet and stood very straight, looking me, for the first time, directly in the eyes.

“Who are you?” I asked abruptly.

“An outcast,” he said, without emotion, and limped off, thrusting his hands into his ragged pockets.

“Huh!” said the Park policeman who had come up behind me in time to hear my question and the vagabond’s answer; “don’t you know who that hobo is?—An’ you a newspaper man!”

“Who is he, Cusick?” I demanded, watching the thin shabby figure moving across Broadway toward the river.

“On the level you don’t know, Mr. Hilton?” repeated Cusick, suspiciously.

“No, I don’t; I never before laid eyes on him.”

“Why,” said the sparrow policeman, “that’s ‘Soger Charlie’;—you remember—that French officer what sold secrets to the Dutch Emperor.”

“And was to have been shot? I remember now, four years ago—and he escaped—you mean to say that is the man?”

“Everybody knows it,” sniffed Cusick, “I’d a-thought you newspaper gents would have knowed it first.”

“What was his name?” I asked after a moment’s thought.

“Soger Charlie—”

“I mean his name at home.”

“Oh, some French dago name. No Frenchman will speak to him here; sometimes they curse him and kick him. I guess he’s dyin’ by inches.”

I remembered the case now. Two young French cavalry officers were arrested, charged with selling plans of fortifications and other military secrets to the Germans. On the eve of their conviction, one of them, Heaven only knows how, escaped and turned up in New York. The other was duly shot. The affair had made some noise, because both young men were of good families. It was a painful episode, and I had hastened to forget it. Now that it was recalled to my mind, I remembered the newspaper accounts of the case, but I had forgotten the names of the miserable young men.

“Sold his country,” observed Cusick, watching a group of children out of the corner of his eyes—“you can’t trust no Frenchman nor dagos nor Dutchmen either. I guess Yankees are about the only white men.”

I looked at the noble face of Nathan Hale and nodded.

“Nothin’ sneaky about us, eh, Mr. Hilton?”

I thought of Benedict Arnold and looked at my boots.

Then the policeman said, “Well, so-long, Mr. Hilton,” and went away to frighten a pasty-faced little girl who had climbed upon the railing and was leaning down to sniff the fragrant grass.

“Cheese it, de cop!” cried her shrill-voiced friends, and the whole bevy of small ragamuffins scuttled away across the square.

With a feeling of depression I turned and walked toward Broadway, where the long yellow cable-cars swept up and down, and the din of gongs and the deafening rumble of heavy trucks echoed from the marble walls of the Court House to the granite mass of the Post Office.

Throngs of hurrying busy people passed up town and down town, slim sober-faced clerks, trim cold-eyed brokers, here and there a red-necked politician linking arms with some favourite heeler, here and there a City Hall lawyer, sallow-faced and saturnine. Sometimes a fireman, in his severe blue uniform, passed through the crowd, sometimes a blue-coated policeman, mopping his clipped hair, holding his helmet in his white-gloved hand. There were women too, pale-faced shop girls with pretty eyes, tall blonde girls who might be typewriters and might not, and many, many older women whose business in that part of the city no human being could venture to guess, but who hurried uptown and downtown, all occupied with something that gave to the whole restless throng a common likeness—the expression of one who hastens toward a hopeless goal.

I knew some of those who passed me. There was little Jocelyn of the Mail and Express; there was Hood, who had more money than he wanted and was going to have less than he wanted when he left Wall Street; there was Colonel Tidmouse of the 45th Infantry, N.G.S.N.Y., probably coming from the office of the Army and Navy Journal, and there was Dick Harding who wrote the best stories of New York life that have been printed. People said his hat no longer fitted—especially people who also wrote stories of New York life and whose hats threatened to fit as long as they lived.

I looked at the statue of Nathan Hale, then at the human stream that flowed around his pedestal.

“Quand même,” I muttered and walked out into Broadway, signalling to the gripman of an uptown cable-car.

II

I passed into the Park by the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street gate; I could never bring myself to enter it through the gate that is guarded by the hideous pigmy statue of Thorwaldsen.

The afternoon sun poured into the windows of the New Netherlands Hotel, setting every orange-curtained pane a-glitter, and tipping the wings of the bronze dragons with flame.

Gorgeous masses of flowers blazed in the sunshine from the grey terraces of the Savoy, from the high grilled court of the Vanderbilt palace, and from the balconies of the Plaza opposite.

The white marble façade of the Metropolitan Club was a grateful relief in the universal glare, and I kept my eyes on it until I had crossed the dusty street and entered the shade of the trees.

Before I came to the Zoo I smelled it. Next week it was to be removed to the fresh cool woods and meadows in Bronx Park, far from the stifling air of the city, far from the infernal noise of the Fifth Avenue omnibuses.

A noble stag stared at me from his enclosure among the trees as I passed down the winding asphalt walk. “Never mind, old fellow,” said I, “you will be splashing about in the Bronx River next week and cropping maple shoots to your heart’s content.”

On I went, past herds of staring deer, past great lumbering elk, and moose, and long-faced African antelopes, until I came to the dens of the great carnivora.

The tigers sprawled in the sunshine, blinking and licking their paws; the lions slept in the shade or squatted on their haunches, yawning gravely. A slim panther travelled to and fro behind her barred cage, pausing at times to peer wistfully out into the free sunny world. My heart ached for caged wild things, and I walked on, glancing up now and then to encounter the blank stare of a tiger or the mean shifty eyes of some ill-smelling hyena.

Across the meadow I could see the elephants swaying and swinging their great heads, the sober bison solemnly slobbering over their cuds, the sarcastic countenances of camels, the wicked little zebras, and a lot more animals of the camel and llama tribe, all resembling each other, all equally ridiculous, stupid, deadly uninteresting.

Somewhere behind the old arsenal, an eagle was screaming, probably a Yankee eagle; I heard the “rchug! rchug!” of a blowing hippopotamus, the squeal of a falcon, and the snarling yap! of quarrelling wolves.

“A pleasant place for a hot day!” I pondered bitterly, and I thought some things about Jamison that I shall not insert in this volume. But I lighted a cigarette to deaden the aroma from the hyenas, unclasped my sketching block, sharpened my pencil, and fell to work on a family group of hippopotami.

They may have taken me for a photographer, for they all wore smiles as if “welcoming a friend,” and my sketch block presented a series of wide open jaws, behind which shapeless bulky bodies vanished in alarming perspective.

The alligators were easy; they looked to me as though they had not moved since the founding of the Zoo, but I had a bad time with the big bison, who persistently turned his tail to me, looking stolidly around his flank to see how I stood it. So I pretended to be absorbed in the antics of two bear cubs, and the dreary old bison fell into the trap, for I made some good sketches of him and laughed in his face as I closed the book.

There was a bench by the abode of the eagles, and I sat down on it to draw the vultures and condors, motionless as mummies among the piled rocks. Gradually I enlarged the sketch, bringing in the gravel plaza, the steps leading up to Fifth Avenue, the sleepy park policeman in front of the arsenal—and a slim, white-browed girl, dressed in shabby black, who stood silently in the shade of the willow trees.

After a while I found that the sketch, instead of being a study of the eagles, was in reality a composition in which the girl in black occupied the principal point of interest. Unwittingly I had subordinated everything else to her, the brooding vultures, the trees and walks, and the half indicated groups of sun-warmed loungers.

She stood very still, her pallid face bent, her thin white hands loosely clasped before her.

“Rather dejected reverie,” I thought, “probably she’s out of work.” Then I caught a glimpse of a sparkling diamond ring on the slender third finger of her left hand.

“She’ll not starve with such a stone as that about her,” I said to myself, looking curiously at her dark eyes and sensitive mouth. They were both beautiful, eyes and mouth—beautiful, but touched with pain.

After a while I rose and walked back to make a sketch or two of the lions and tigers. I avoided the monkeys—I can’t stand them, and they never seem funny to me, poor dwarfish, degraded caricatures of all that is ignoble in ourselves.

“I’ve enough now,” I thought; “I’ll go home and manufacture a full page that will probably please Jamison.” So I strapped the elastic band around my sketching block, replaced pencil and rubber in my waistcoat pocket, and strolled off toward the Mall to smoke a cigarette in the evening glow before going back to my studio to work until midnight, up to the chin in charcoal grey and Chinese white.

Across the long meadow I could see the roofs of the city faintly looming above the trees. A mist of amethyst, ever deepening, hung low on the horizon, and through it, steeple and dome, roof and tower, and the tall chimneys where thin fillets of smoke curled idly, were transformed into pinnacles of beryl and flaming minarets, swimming in filmy haze. Slowly the enchantment deepened; all that was ugly and shabby and mean had fallen away from the distant city, and now it towered into the evening sky, splendid, gilded, magnificent, purified in the fierce furnace of the setting sun.

The red disk was half hidden now; the tracery of trees, feathery willow and budding birch, darkened against the glow; the fiery rays shot far across the meadow, gilding the dead leaves, staining with soft crimson the dark moist tree trunks around me.

Far across the meadow a shepherd passed in the wake of a huddling flock, his dog at his heels, faint moving blots of grey.

A squirrel sat up on the gravel walk in front of me, ran a few feet, and sat up again, so close that I could see the palpitation of his sleek flanks.

Somewhere in the grass a hidden field insect was rehearsing last summer’s solos; I heard the tap! tap! tat-tat-t-t-tat! of a woodpecker among the branches overhead and the querulous note of a sleepy robin.

The twilight deepened; out of the city the music of bells floated over wood and meadow; faint mellow whistles sounded from the river craft along the north shore, and the distant thunder of a gun announced the close of a June day.

The end of my cigarette began to glimmer with a redder light; shepherd and flock were blotted out in the dusk, and I only knew they were still moving when the sheep bells tinkled faintly.

Then suddenly that strange uneasiness that all have known—that half-awakened sense of having seen it all before, of having been through it all, came over me, and I raised my head and slowly turned.

A figure was seated at my side. My mind was struggling with the instinct to remember.

Something so vague and yet so familiar—something that eluded thought yet challenged it, something—God knows what! troubled me. And now, as I looked, without interest, at the dark figure beside me, an apprehension, totally involuntary, an impatience to understand, came upon me, and I sighed and turned restlessly again to the fading west.

I thought I heard my sigh re-echoed—I scarcely heeded; and in a moment I sighed again, dropping my burned-out cigarette on the gravel beneath my feet.

“Did you speak to me?” said some one in a low voice, so close that I swung around rather sharply.

“No,” I said after a moment’s silence.

It was a woman. I could not see her face clearly, but I saw on her clasped hands, which lay listlessly in her lap, the sparkle of a great diamond. I knew her at once. It did not need a glance at the shabby dress of black, the white face, a pallid spot in the twilight, to tell me that I had her picture in my sketch-book.

“Do—do you mind if I speak to you?” she asked timidly. The hopeless sadness in her voice touched me, and I said: “Why, no, of course not. Can I do anything for you?”

“Yes,” she said, brightening a little, “if you—you only would.”

“I will if I can,” said I, cheerfully; “what is it? Out of ready cash?”

“No, not that,” she said, shrinking back.

I begged her pardon, a little surprised, and withdrew my hand from my change pocket.

“It is only—only that I wish you to take these,”—she drew a thin packet from her breast,—“these two letters.”

“I?” I asked astonished.

“Yes, if you will.”

“But what am I to do with them?” I demanded.

“I can’t tell you; I only know that I must give them to you. Will you take them?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll take them,” I laughed, “am I to read them?” I added to myself, “It’s some clever begging trick.”

“No,” she answered slowly, “you are not to read them; you are to give them to somebody.”

“To whom? Anybody?”

“No, not to anybody. You will know whom to give them to when the time comes.”

“Then I am to keep them until further instructions?”

“Your own heart will instruct you,” she said, in a scarcely audible voice. She held the thin packet toward me, and to humor her, I took it. It was wet.

“The letters fell into the sea,” she said; “there was a photograph which should have gone with them but the salt water washed it blank. Will you care if I ask you something else?”

“I? Oh, no.”

“Then give me the picture that you made of me to-day.” I laughed again, and demanded how she knew I had drawn her.

“Is it like me?” she said.

“I think it is very like you,” I answered truthfully.

“Will you not give it to me?”

Now it was on the tip of my tongue to refuse, but I reflected that I had enough sketches for a full page without that one, so I handed it to her, nodded that she was welcome, and stood up. She rose also, the diamond flashing on her finger.

“You are sure that you are not in want?” I asked, with a tinge of good-natured sarcasm.

“Hark!” she whispered; “listen!—do you hear the bells of the convent!”

I looked out into the misty night.

“There are no bells sounding,” I said, “and anyway there are no convent bells here. We are in New York, mademoiselle”—I had noticed her French accent—“we are in Protestant Yankee-land, and the bells that ring are much less mellow than the bells of France.”

I turned pleasantly to say good-night. She was gone.

III

“Have you ever drawn a picture of a corpse?” inquired Jamison next morning as I walked into his private room with a sketch of the proposed full page of the Zoo.

“No, and I don’t want to,” I replied, sullenly.

“Let me see your Central Park page,” said Jamison in his gentle voice, and I displayed it. It was about worthless as an artistic production, but it pleased Jamison, as I knew it would.

“Can you finish it by this afternoon?” he asked, looking up at me with persuasive eyes.

“Oh, I suppose so,” I said, wearily; “anything else, Mr. Jamison?”

“The corpse,” he replied, “I want a sketch by to-morrow—finished.”

“What corpse?” I demanded, controlling my indignation as I met Jamison’s soft eyes.

There was a mute duel of glances. Jamison passed his hand across his forehead with a slight lifting of the eyebrows.

“I shall want it as soon as possible,” he said in his caressing voice.

What I thought was, “Damned purring pussy-cat!” What I said was, “Where is this corpse?”

“In the Morgue—have you read the morning papers? No? Ah,—as you very rightly observe you are too busy to read the morning papers. Young men must learn industry first, of course, of course. What you are to do is this: the San Francisco police have sent out an alarm regarding the disappearance of a Miss Tufft—the millionaire’s daughter, you know. To-day a body was brought to the Morgue here in New York, and it has been identified as the missing young lady,—by a diamond ring. Now I am convinced that it isn’t, and I’ll show you why, Mr. Hilton.”

He picked up a pen and made a sketch of a ring on a margin of that morning’s Tribune.

“That is the description of her ring as sent on from San Francisco. You notice the diamond is set in the centre of the ring where the two gold serpents’ tails cross!

“Now the ring on the finger of the woman in the Morgue is like this,” and he rapidly sketched another ring where the diamond rested in the fangs of the two gold serpents.

“That is the difference,” he said in his pleasant, even voice.

“Rings like that are not uncommon,” said I, remembering that I had seen such a ring on the finger of the white-faced girl in the Park the evening before. Then a sudden thought took shape—perhaps that was the girl whose body lay in the Morgue!

“Well,” said Jamison, looking up at me, “what are you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I answered, but the whole scene was before my eyes, the vultures brooding among the rocks, the shabby black dress, and the pallid face,—and the ring, glittering on that slim white hand!

“Nothing,” I repeated, “when shall I go, Mr. Jamison? Do you want a portrait—or what?”

“Portrait,—careful drawing of the ring, and,—er—a centre piece of the Morgue at night. Might as well give people the horrors while we’re about it.”

“But,” said I, “the policy of this paper—”

“Never mind, Mr. Hilton,” purred Jamison, “I am able to direct the policy of this paper.”

“I don’t doubt you are,” I said angrily.

“I am,” he repeated, undisturbed and smiling; “you see this Tufft case interests society. I am—er—also interested.”

He held out to me a morning paper and pointed to a heading.

I read: “Miss Tufft Dead! Her Fiancé was Mr. Jamison, the well known Editor.”

“What!” I cried in horrified amazement. But Jamison had left the room, and I heard him chatting and laughing softly with some visitors in the press-room outside.

I flung down the paper and walked out.

“The cold-blooded toad!” I exclaimed again and again;—“making capital out of his fiancé’s disappearance! Well, I—I’m d——nd! I knew he was a bloodless, heartless grip-penny, but I never thought—I never imagined—” Words failed me.

Scarcely conscious of what I did I drew a Herald from my pocket and saw the column entitled:

“Miss Tufft Found! Identified by a Ring. Wild Grief of Mr. Jamison, her Fiancé.”

That was enough. I went out into the street and sat down in City Hall Park. And, as I sat there, a terrible resolution came to me; I would draw that dead girl’s face in such a way that it would chill Jamison’s sluggish blood, I would crowd the black shadows of the Morgue with forms and ghastly faces, and every face should bear something in it of Jamison. Oh, I’d rouse him from his cold snaky apathy! I’d confront him with Death in such an awful form, that, passionless, base, inhuman as he was, he’d shrink from it as he would from a dagger thrust. Of course I’d lose my place, but that did not bother me, for I had decided to resign anyway, not having a taste for the society of human reptiles. And, as I sat there in the sunny park, furious, trying to plan a picture whose sombre horror should leave in his mind an ineffaceable scar, I suddenly thought of the pale black-robed girl in Central Park. Could it be her poor slender body that lay among the shadows of the grim Morgue! If ever brooding despair was stamped on any face, I had seen its print on hers when she spoke to me in the Park and gave me the letters. The letters! I had not thought of them since, but now I drew them from my pocket and looked at the addresses.

“Curious,” I thought, “the letters are still damp; they smell of salt water too.”

I looked at the address again, written in the long fine hand of an educated woman who had been bred in a French convent. Both letters bore the same address, in French:

Captain d’Yniol.
(Kindness of a Stranger.)

“Captain d’Yniol,” I repeated aloud—“confound it, I’ve heard that name! Now, where the deuce—where in the name of all that’s queer—” Somebody who had sat down on the bench beside me placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

It was the Frenchman, “Soger Charlie.”

“You spoke my name,” he said in apathetic tones.

“Your name!”

“Captain d’Yniol,” he repeated; “it is my name.”

I recognized him in spite of the black goggles he was wearing, and, at the same moment, it flashed into my mind that d’Yniol was the name of the traitor who had escaped. Ah, I remembered now!

“I am Captain d’Yniol,” he said again, and I saw his fingers closing on my coat sleeve.

It may have been my involuntary movement of recoil,—I don’t know,—but the fellow dropped my coat and sat straight up on the bench.

“I am Captain d’Yniol.” he said for the third time, “charged with treason and under sentence of death.”

“And innocent!” I muttered, before I was even conscious of having spoken. What was it that wrung those involuntary words from my lips, I shall never know, perhaps—but it was I, not he, who trembled, seized with a strange agitation, and it was I, not he, whose hand was stretched forth impulsively, touching his.

Without a tremor he took my hand, pressed it almost imperceptibly, and dropped it. Then I held both letters toward him, and, as he neither looked at them nor at me, I placed them in his hand. Then he started.

“Read them,” I said, “they are for you.”

“Letters!” he gasped in a voice that sounded like nothing human.

“Yes, they are for you,—I know it now—”

“Letters!—letters directed to me?”

“Can you not see?” I cried.

Then he raised one frail hand and drew the goggles from his eyes, and, as I looked, I saw two tiny white specks exactly in the centre of both pupils.

“Blind!” I faltered.

“I have been unable to read for two years,” he said.

After a moment he placed the tip of one finger on the letters.

“They are wet,” I said; “shall—would you like to have me read them?” For a long time he sat silently in the sunshine, fumbling with his cane, and I watched him without speaking. At last he said, “Read, Monsieur,” and I took the letters and broke the seals.

The first letter contained a sheet of paper, damp and discoloured, on which a few lines were written:

“My darling, I knew you were innocent—” Here the writing ended, but, in the blur beneath, I read: “Paris shall know—France shall know, for at last I have the proofs and I am coming to find you, my soldier, and to place them in your own dear brave hands. They know, now, at the War Ministry—they have a copy of the traitor’s confession—but they dare not make it public—they dare not withstand the popular astonishment and rage. Therefore I sail on Monday from Cherbourg by the Green Cross Line, to bring you back to your own again, where you will stand before all the world, without fear, without reproach.”

“Aline.”

“This—this is terrible!” I stammered; “can God live and see such things done!”

But with his thin hand he gripped my arm again, bidding me read the other letter; and I shuddered at the menace in his voice.

Then, with his sightless eyes on me, I drew the other letter from the wet, stained envelope. And before I was aware—before I understood the purport of what I saw, I had read aloud these half effaced lines:

“The Lorient is sinking—an iceberg—mid-ocean—goodbye—you are innocent—I love——”

“The Lorient!” I cried; “it was the French steamer that was never heard from—the Lorient of the Green Cross Line! I had forgotten—I—”

The loud crash of a revolver stunned me; my ears rang and ached with it as I shrank back from a ragged dusty figure that collapsed on the bench beside me, shuddered a moment, and tumbled to the asphalt at my feet.

The trampling of the eager hard-eyed crowd, the dust and taint of powder in the hot air, the harsh alarm of the ambulance clattering up Mail Street,—these I remember, as I knelt there, helplessly holding the dead man’s hands in mine.

“Soger Charlie,” mused the sparrow policeman, “shot his-self, didn’t he, Mr. Hilton? You seen him, sir,—blowed the top of his head off, didn’t he, Mr. Hilton?”

“Soger Charlie,” they repeated, “a French dago what shot his-self;” and the words echoed in my ears long after the ambulance rattled away, and the increasing throng dispersed, sullenly, as a couple of policemen cleared a space around the pool of thick blood on the asphalt.

They wanted me as a witness, and I gave my card to one of the policemen who knew me. The rabble transferred its fascinated stare to me, and I turned away and pushed a path between frightened shop girls and ill-smelling loafers, until I lost myself in the human torrent of Broadway.

The torrent took me with it where it flowed—East? West?—I did not notice nor care, but I passed on through the throng, listless, deadly weary of attempting so solve God’s justice—striving to understand His purpose—His laws—His judgments which are “true and righteous altogether.”

IV

“More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold. Sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb!”

I turned sharply toward the speaker who shambled at my elbow. His sunken eyes were dull and lustreless, his bloodless face gleamed pallid as a death mask above the blood-red jersey—the emblem of the soldiers of Christ.

I don’t know why I stopped, lingering, but, as he passed, I said, “Brother, I also was meditating upon God’s wisdom and His testimonies.”

The pale fanatic shot a glance at me, hesitated, and fell into my own pace, walking by my side.

Under the peak of his Salvation Army cap his eyes shone in the shadow with a strange light.

“Tell me more,” I said, sinking my voice below the roar of traffic, the clang! clang! of the cable-cars, and the noise of feet on the worn pavements—“tell me of His testimonies.”

“Moreover by them is Thy servant warned and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand His errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight,—O Lord! My strength and my Redeemer!”

“It is Holy Scripture that you quote,” I said; “I also can read that when I choose. But it cannot clear for me the reasons—it cannot make me understand—”

“What?” he asked, and muttered to himself.

“That, for instance,” I replied, pointing to a cripple, who had been born deaf and dumb and horridly misshapen,—a wretched diseased lump on the sidewalk below St. Paul’s Churchyard,—a sore-eyed thing that mouthed and mewed and rattled pennies in a tin cup as though the sound of copper could stem the human pack that passed hot on the scent of gold.

Then the man who shambled beside me turned and looked long and earnestly into my eyes.

And after a moment a dull recollection stirred within me—a vague something that seemed like the awakening memory of a past, long, long forgotten, dim, dark, too subtle, too frail, too indefinite—ah! the old feeling that all men have known—the old strange uneasiness, that useless struggle to remember when and where it all occurred before.

And the man’s head sank on his crimson jersey, and he muttered, muttered to himself of God and love and compassion, until I saw that the fierce heat of the city had touched his brain, and I went away and left him prating of mysteries that none but such as he dare name.

So I passed on through dust and heat; and the hot breath of men touched my cheek and eager eyes looked into mine. Eyes, eyes,—that met my own and looked through them, beyond—far beyond to where gold glittered amid the mirage of eternal hope. Gold! It was in the air where the soft sunlight gilded the floating moats, it was underfoot in the dust that the sun made gilt, it glimmered from every window pane where the long red beams struck golden sparks above the gasping gold-hunting hordes of Wall Street.

High, high, in the deepening sky the tall buildings towered, and the breeze from the bay lifted the sun-dyed flags of commerce until they waved above the turmoil of the hives below—waved courage and hope and strength to those who lusted after gold.

The sun dipped low behind Castle William as I turned listlessly into the Battery, and the long straight shadows of the trees stretched away over greensward and asphalt walk.

Already the electric lights were glimmering among the foliage although the bay shimmered like polished brass and the topsails of the ships glowed with a deeper hue, where the red sun rays fall athwart the rigging.

Old men tottered along the sea-wall, tapping the asphalt with worn canes, old women crept to and fro in the coming twilight,—old women who carried baskets that gaped for charity or bulged with mouldy stuffs,—food, clothing?—I could not tell; I did not care to know.

The heavy thunder from the parapets of Castle William died away over the placid bay, the last red arm of the sun shot up out of the sea, and wavered and faded into the sombre tones of the afterglow. Then came the night, timidly at first, touching sky and water with grey fingers, folding the foliage into soft massed shapes, creeping onward, onward, more swiftly now, until colour and form had gone from all the earth and the world was a world of shadows.

And, as I sat there on the dusky sea-wall, gradually the bitter thoughts faded and I looked out into the calm night with something of that peace that comes to all when day is ended.

The death at my very elbow of the poor blind wretch in the Park had left a shock, but now my nerves relaxed their tension and I began to think about it all,—about the letters and the strange woman who had given them to me. I wondered where she had found them,—whether they really were carried by some vagrant current in to the shore from the wreck of the fated Lorient.

Nothing but these letters had human eyes encountered from the Lorient, although we believed that fire or berg had been her portion; for there had been no storms when the Lorient steamed away from Cherbourg.

And what of the pale-faced girl in black who had given these letters to me, saying that my own heart would teach me where to place them?

I felt in my pockets for the letters where I had thrust them all crumpled and wet. They were there, and I decided to turn them over to the police. Then I thought of Cusick and the City Hall Park and these set my mind running on Jamison and my own work,—ah! I had forgotten that,—I had forgotten that I had sworn to stir Jamison’s cold, sluggish blood! Trading on his fiancée’s reported suicide,—or murder! True, he had told me that he was satisfied that the body at the Morgue was not Miss Tufft’s because the ring did not correspond with his fiancée’s ring. But what sort of a man was that!—to go crawling and nosing about morgues and graves for a full-page illustration which might sell a few extra thousand papers. I had never known he was such a man. It was strange too—for that was not the sort of illustration that the Weekly used; it was against all precedent—against the whole policy of the paper. He would lose a hundred subscribers where he would gain one by such work.

“The callous brute!” I muttered to myself, “I’ll wake him up—I’ll—”

I sat straight up on the bench and looked steadily at a figure which was moving toward me under the spluttering electric light.

It was the woman I had met in the Park.

She came straight up to me, her pale face gleaming like marble in the dark, her slim hands outstretched.

“I have been looking for you all day—all day,” she said, in the same low thrilling tones,—“I want the letters back; have you them here?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have them here,—take them in Heaven’s name; they have done enough evil for one day!”

She took the letters from my hand; I saw the ring, made of the double serpents, flashing on her slim finger, and I stepped closer, and looked her in the eyes.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I? My name is of no importance to you,” she answered.

“You are right,” I said, “I do not care to know your name. That ring of yours—”

“What of my ring?” she murmured.

“Nothing,—a dead woman lying in the Morgue wears such a ring. Do you know what your letters have done? No? Well I read them to a miserable wretch and he blew his brains out!”

“You read them to a man!”

“I did. He killed himself.”

“Who was that man?”

“Captain d’Yniol—”

With something between a sob and a laugh she seized my hand and covered it with kisses, and I, astonished and angry, pulled my hand away from her cold lips and sat down on the bench.

“You needn’t thank me,” I said sharply; “if I had known that,—but no matter. Perhaps after all the poor devil is better off somewhere in other regions with his sweetheart who was drowned,—yes, I imagine he is. He was blind and ill,—and broken-hearted.”

“Blind?” she asked gently.

“Yes. Did you know him?”

“I knew him.”

“And his sweetheart, Aline?”

“Aline,” she repeated softly,—“she is dead. I come to thank you in her name.”

“For what?—for his death?”

“Ah, yes, for that.”

“Where did you get those letters?” I asked her, suddenly.

She did not answer, but stood fingering the wet letters.

Before I could speak again she moved away into the shadows of the trees, lightly, silently, and far down the dark walk I saw her diamond flashing.

Grimly brooding, I rose and passed through the Battery to the steps of the Elevated Road.

These I climbed, bought my ticket, and stepped out to the damp platform. When a train came I crowded in with the rest, still pondering on my vengeance, feeling and believing that I was to scourge the conscience of the man who speculated on death.

And at last the train stopped at 28th Street, and I hurried out and down the steps and away to the Morgue.

When I entered the Morgue, Skelton, the keeper, was standing before a slab that glistened faintly under the wretched gas jets. He heard my footsteps, and turned around to see who was coming. Then he nodded, saying:

“Mr. Hilton, just take a look at this here stiff—I’ll be back in a moment—this is the one that all the papers take to be Miss Tufft,—but they’re all off, because this stiff has been here now for two weeks.”

I drew out my sketching-block and pencils.

“Which is it, Skelton?” I asked, fumbling for my rubber.

“This one, Mr. Hilton, the girl what’s smilin’. Picked up off Sandy Hook, too. Looks as if she was asleep, eh?”

“What’s she got in her hand—clenched tight? Oh,—a letter. Turn up the gas, Skelton, I want to see her face.”

The old man turned the gas jet, and the flame blazed and whistled in the damp, fetid air. Then suddenly my eyes fell on the dead.

Rigid, scarcely breathing, I stared at the ring, made of two twisted serpents set with a great diamond,—I saw the wet letters crushed in her slender hand,—I looked, and—God help me!—I looked upon the dead face of the girl with whom I had been speaking on the Battery!

“Dead for a month at least,” said Skelton, calmly.

Then, as I felt my senses leaving me, I screamed out, and at the same instant somebody from behind seized my shoulder and shook me savagely—shook me until I opened my eyes again and gasped and coughed.

“Now then, young feller!” said a Park policeman bending over me, “if you go to sleep on a bench, somebody’ll lift your watch!”

I turned, rubbing my eyes desperately.

Then it was all a dream—and no shrinking girl had come to me with damp letters,—I had not gone to the office—there was no such person as Miss Tufft,—Jamison was not an unfeeling villain,—no, indeed!—he treated us all much better than we deserved, and he was kind and generous too. And the ghastly suicide! Thank God that also was a myth,—and the Morgue and the Battery at night where that pale-faced girl had—ugh!

I felt for my sketch-block, found it; turned the pages of all the animals that I had sketched, the hippopotami, the buffalo, the tigers—ah! where was that sketch in which I had made the woman in shabby black the principal figure, with the brooding vultures all around and the crowd in the sunshine—? It was gone.

I hunted everywhere, in every pocket. It was gone.

At last I rose and moved along the narrow asphalt path in the falling twilight.

And as I turned into the broader walk, I was aware of a group, a policeman holding a lantern, some gardeners, and a knot of loungers gathered about something,—a dark mass on the ground.

“Found ’em just so,” one of the gardeners was saying, “better not touch ’em until the coroner comes.”

The policeman shifted his bull’s-eye a little; the rays fell on two faces, on two bodies, half supported against a park bench. On the finger of the girl glittered a splendid diamond, set between the fangs of two gold serpents. The man had shot himself; he clasped two wet letters in his hand. The girl’s clothing and hair were wringing wet, and her face was the face of a drowned person.

“Well, sir,” said the policeman, looking at me; “you seem to know these two people—by your looks—”

“I never saw them before,” I gasped, and walked on, trembling in every nerve.

For among the folds of her shabby black dress I had noticed the end of a paper,—my sketch that I had missed!

IN THE NAME OF THE MOST HIGH

Il n’est pas nécessaire qu’il y ait de l’amour dans un livre pour nous charmer, mais il est nécessaire qu’il y ait beaucoup de tendresse.

[It is not necessary that there be love in a book to charm us, but it is necessary that there be a lot of tenderness.]

—J. Joubert

IN THE NAME OF THE MOST HIGH

I

On the third day toward noon the fire slackened; the smoke from the four batteries on the bluff across the north fork of the river slowly lifted, drifting to the east. The Texas riflemen kept up a pattering fusilade until one o’clock, then their bugles rang “Cease firing,” and the echoes of the last sulky shot died out against the cliffs.

Keenan, crouching behind one of his hot guns, could see the Texas sharpshooters retiring to the bluff, little grey shadows in the scrub-oak thicket gliding, flitting like wild hedge-birds toward the nest of cannon above.

“Don’t let ’em get away like that!” shouted Douglas, “give it to them in the name of God!”

And Keenan smiled, and sent the Texans a messenger in the name of God—a messenger which fell thundering from the sky above them, crushing the face of the iron-stained cliff and the lives of those who had clustered there to breathe a little.

“Amen,” said Keenan, patting his gun.

Douglas crawled out of a hole in the rocks and drew himself up to the edge of the breastworks. Cleymore emerged from a shallow rifle-pit and walked slowly along the intrenchments, motioning his men back into their burrows.

“Because,” he said, “a hole in the hill is worth two in your head—get into that ditch, Morris! Cunningham, if you don’t duck that red head of yours, I’ll dock it!”

“Captain Cleymore,” said Douglas, lowering his field-glass, “two batteries have limbered up, and are trotting toward the cemetery—”

“May they trot into it, and stay there!” said Keenan, examining the wreck of an ammunition chest in the ditch.

Cleymore studied the bluff with his marine glasses for a while, then called to Keenan: “How many guns have you now?”

“Four,” shouted Keenan from the ditch; “all my horses are shot except two mules—” A burst of laughter cut him short—his own tattered artillerymen, to their credit, did not smile, but Douglas and Kellogg laughed and rows of grinning faces emerged from holes and pits along the ditch until Cleymore shouted, “Down!” and his infantry disappeared, chuckling. Keenan, red in the face, turned to his battery-men who were running the guns forward, and put his own ragged shoulder to the wheel. Cleymore sat down on a stone and watched a lank artilleryman splicing the dented staff of the battery guidon.

“I guess that’ll dew, Capting,” he drawled, holding the staff out to Cleymore, who took it and rubbed the polished wood with his sleeve.

“It will do, Pillsbury,” he said, “where is O’Halloran?”

“Shot in the stummick,” said the private, “and unable tew work.”

“Dead?”

“I pre-sume likely he’s daid, sir,” returned Pillsbury through his nose.

“I’ve got a man for the guidon,” called Keenan from the ditch, and a fat freckled cannoneer waddled forward and stood at attention.

“Look out!” sang out Douglas from his post on the breastworks, and “Down!” cried Cleymore, as a shell rose in the air over them and the boom of a gun rolled across the river from the bluff. The scream of the shell ceased; a white cloud shot with lightning appeared in the air above them, and a storm of shrapnel swept the breastworks. Cleymore sprang to his feet, but the fat cannoneer remained on the ground.,

“Get up,” said Cleymore, cautiously, “Pillsbury lift him; is he dead?”

I guess,” said Pillsbury, “he’s sufferin’ from a hereditary disease.”

“Eh? What disease?” snapped Cleymore, stepping forward.

“I guess it’s death,” said Pillsbury, with an expressionless wink.

Cleymore stared at him through his eyeglasses, then turned on his heel.

“I wish,” grumbled Keenan, “that the wounded would make less noise. Douglas, send them another bucket of water, will you? Is the surgeon dead?”

“Dying,” said Kellogg,—“never mind, Douglas, I’ll see to the water; keep your glass on their batteries; what are they doing now?”

“Nothing,” replied Douglas, “wait a bit—ah! here come their sharpshooters again!”

“To hell with them!” muttered Keenan savagely, for his battery-men had been cruelly scourged by the sharpshooters, and he almost foamed with rage when he looked over into the ditch at the foot of the mound. The odour from the ditch had become frightful.

“Look down there, Captain,” he called to Cleymore, his voice trembling with passion, but Cleymore only nodded sadly. He was watching something else. A figure in the uniform of a staff-officer, filthy with grime and sweat, had crawled through what was left of the covered bridge across the South Fork, and was wriggling his way toward the debris of Keenan’s battery. Cleymore watched him with puckered eyes.

“What do you want, sonny?” he asked, as the staff officer crept past him, “orders? Give ’em to me—keep to the ground, you fool,” he added, as a flight of bullets swept overhead. The staff-officer lifted a flushed face, scratched and smeared with dust and sweat, and attempted a salute.

“Colonel Worth’s compliments to Colonel Randal—” he began, but was interrupted by Cleymore: “Colonel Randal’s in the ditch below with most of his regiment piled on top of him. What are your orders? hold on to the bridge till hell freezes? I thought so, I’m Cleymore, Captain in the 10th New York Sharpshooters, yonder’s what’s left of us, and there’s two dozen of Colonel Randal’s Rhode Islanders among ’em, too. Major Wilcox has got a hole in his face, and can’t speak—you see what’s left of Keenan’s battery—four guns, and few to serve ’em except my riflemen. Isn’t General Hooker in sight?”

The staff-officer raised his blue eyes to the wreck of the battery, and then looked questioningly at Cleymore. The latter lay moodily twisting and untwisting the stained leather thong whipped about his sword hilt.

“I’m ranking officer here,” he said, “the rest are dead. My compliments to General Kempner, and tell him his orders shall be obeyed. Both bridges are mined. Murphy is watching for Longstreet—What are you shivering for?”

“Ague,” said the staff-officer in a low voice.

Cleymore spat out a mouthful of dust that a bullet had flung in his face, and wiped his glasses on his sleeve. Who are you from, anyway? he demanded. “I don’t take orders from Colonel Worth.”

“General Kempner is dead,” said the staff-officer simply.

Keenan came up chewing a twig and whistling.

“Captain Cleymore,” said the staff-officer, “my horse has been shot and Colonel Worth is waiting. Will you point out to me the quickest way back?”

“Back!” broke in Keenan, “you can’t get back, my boy!”

“I must,” said the youngster, without glancing at the artillery officer.

“Oh, if it’s a case of must,” said Cleymore in differently, “come ahead,” and he rose to his knees and peered across the swollen South Fork, now a vast torrent of mud.

Crack! Crack! rang the rifles from the opposite shore, and the little staff-officer’s cap was jerked from his head and rolled down the embankment into the river. Keenan cursed.

Come on, sonny, said Cleymore, scrambling down the embankment to the ditch. The ditch was choked with mangled bodies in blue, flung one over the other amid smashed gun-wheels, caissons, knapsacks, and rifles; and the staff-officer hesitated for an instant at the brink.

“Jump!” called Cleymore, “here! Get down behind this rock and keep your nose out of sight; those Texas gentlemen waste few bullets; are you hit?”

“No,” said the little staff-officer.

“Bull luck; did you see Randal’s men? The shells did it—look there.”

He pointed the length of the ditch. The staff-officer turned pale. Everywhere corpses, mere heaps of blue rags, stained yellow by dust and black with stiff blood, everywhere dented canteens, twisted muskets, unsavory scattered clothing, worn shoes, and shrunken blue caps. A big black horse, bloated and dusty lay with both hind legs stark in the air; under him were dead men, mostly Keenan’s, by the red stripes on the faded trousers.

Cleymore pulled his short blond moustache and turned to the staff-officer.

“You see that slaughter pen,” he said; “tell Colonel Worth.”

The staff-officer felt for his cap, remembered it had been shot off his head, and looked gravely at Cleymore.

“I have four guns and two hundred and twenty odd men,” said the latter; “if they bring back their batteries, an hour or two will see us all in the ditch below with Randal; if they don’t we can hold on to the South Fork bridge I fancy. Do you know why they withdrew their batteries?”

“No—unless it was to shell Colonel Worth’s cavalry. His men are in the woods behind the railroad. If you can hold the bridge until night they will keep the line open. Colonel Worth is waiting. I must go back now, Captain.”

Cleymore leaned along the edge of the protecting ledge and handed his field-glasses to the boy.

“Now,” he said, “you can see the bend in the river. There are three pines on the bank above—see?”

“Yes.”

“Take the foot-path by those pines until you come to a burnt barn. Follow the river after that and if the iron bridge isn’t blown up yet you can get across; if it is blown up you can’t join Colonel Worth.”

“But—a—a—boat—”

“A boat in that?”

They looked at the foaming torrent, thundering among the rocks. After a moment the staff-officer pointed to the shot-torn bridge below them.

“Oh,” said Cleymore, “you came that way, didn’t you? Well, miracles happen, and that was one of them, but if you try to get back that way, the performance won’t be encored, and you can bet your curly head on that, my son.”

“It’s the shortest way,” said the little staff-officer.

“Yes, the shortest way to Kingdom come,” said Cleymore, disgusted; “if you’re not shot, the Texans will catch you.”

They were crouching on the hot dried grass, side by side. The sweat poured down Cleymore’s forehead washing the powder grime into thick patches over his young face. He threw his blackened jacket open at the throat, rubbed his forehead with his sleeve and said, “Whew!”

“It’s the shortest way,” repeated the other, rising to his knees.

“You can’t go,” said Cleymore, sharply, “the bridge is mined and Murphy may blow it up any moment.”

The youth handed back the field-glass with a smile. For a moment their eyes met, then Cleymore’s flushed face turned a bright crimson and he caught his breath, murmuring “I’m blest!”

“Captain Cleymore,” said the staff-officer coolly, “you are detaining me from my duty. Have I your permission to leave?”

They eyed each other steadily.

“You must not go,” said Cleymore in a curious, husky voice, “let me send a man—”

“Have I your leave?”

“Come back,” cried Cleymore, “I won’t give it!”—but the youngster sprang to his feet, touched his curly head in quick salute, and started on a run toward the covered bridge, holding his sabre close to his thigh.

“Drop!” shouted Cleymore, and began to swear under his breath, but the youngster ran on, and to Cleymore’s amazement, the rifles of the fierce Texans on the other side of the river were silent.

On and still on ran the boy, until, with a sigh of astonishment and relief, Cleymore saw him push in among the handful of blue-clad engineers at the end of the bridge; but he went no further, for they stopped him with levelled bayonets, shaking their heads and gesticulating, and suddenly Cleymore noticed that the bridge was afire at the further end.

“Murphy’s fired the bridge! ” he called out to Kellogg on the plateau above.

Kellogg’s head appeared over a shattered gun limber. “Then Longstreet’s coming, you bet!”

“I suppose so, can’t you see anything? Call Douglas.”

The Texas rifles cracked again. Kellogg did not answer. “Can’t you see any movement near the woods?” demanded Cleymore from his rock. Then he looked carefully at Kellogg’s head, appearing to rest between two bits of sod, and he saw, in the middle of the forehead, a round dark spot from which a darker line crept slowly down over the nose.

After a second or two he turned from the dead eyes staring fixedly at him, and looked across the river where the rifles were spitting death. The round white blotches of smoke hung along the river bank like shreds of cotton floating. Then he glanced toward the bridge again. There was a commotion there; a group of excited soldiers around a slender figure, bareheaded, gesticulating.

“What’s that hop o’my thumb up to now?” he muttered excitedly, and raised his field-glass. “By Jingo! Trying to cross the bridge, and it’s afire!”

For a moment he knelt, his eye glued to the field-glasses, then with an angry exclamation he turned toward the floating rifle-smoke along the opposite bank. The chances were that he’d be hit, and he knew it, but he only muttered pettishly; “Young fool,” and started, stooping low, toward the swaying knot of men at the bridge.

The chances were ten to one that he’d be hit, and he was, but he only straightened up and ran on. The minie-balls came whining about his head, the blood ran down into his boot, and filled it so that he slopped as he ran. And after all he was too late, for, as he panted up to the bridge, far down the covered way he saw the youngster speeding over the smoking rafters.

“Stop him!” he gasped.

A soldier raised his rifle, but Cleymore jerked it down.

“Not that way,” he said, leaning back on his sword.

Along the dry timbered tunnel crept the boy, for the fire was all about him now. Once he fell but rose again.

“Has the mine been fired—the powder trail?” asked Cleymore, in a dull voice.

A soldier nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but a deafening roar drowned his voice and gave Cleymore his answer.

“Is that all?” asked Cleymore again, as the smoke rushed skyward, and the ground trembled and cracked beneath them.

“One more,” said a sergeant curtly, as Captain Murphy hurried up. The whole further section of the bridge had crumbled into the torrent below. The smoke swept through the tunnel, and when it lifted Cleymore caught a glimpse of a figure dragging itself back from the gulf ahead. The soldiers saw it too.

“He would go,” said one of them, as though speaking to himself.

Cleymore tore off his jacket and held it before his face.

“You can’t do it!” cried Murphy, horrified.

“Let go—I must,” said Cleymore quietly, “cut the match, if you can.”

“The other mines are on fire! In the name of God, Cleymore!” urged the engineer officer, holding him back by both shoulders.

“Damn you, Murphy, let me go!” cried Cleymore fiercely; “let go, I say.”

“I will not, Cleymore; we can’t lose you for a fool of a boy—”

“But it’s a woman!” roared Cleymore, wrenching himself free.

II

As he ran through the smoke-choked bridge, bright little flames shot from the crackling timbers, and he felt the hot breath of the furnace underneath. And all the time he kept repeating as he ran, “I’m a fool, I’m a fool, it’s all up now—”; but he hurried on, shielding his face with his braided jacket, feeling his way through the flurries of smoke and sparks until a whirl of flame blocked his way; and on the edge of the burning depths, he found what he was looking for.

She was very slender and light, in her ragged uniform, and he lifted her and wrapped his jacket about her head. Then he started back, increasing his speed as the black smoke rolled up from the planks underfoot, but it was easier than he had dared dream of, for she revived, and when Murphy loomed up in the gloom, and steadied them with an arm, he laughed aloud from sheer nervousness. Then a terrific explosion threw him on his face, but Murphy helped him up, and he seized his burden again and staggered toward the hill where Keenan’s guns were already thundering, and the crack—crack—crackle of rifles echoed and re-echoed from rock to cliff.

“You’re hit,” said Douglas, as he entered the entrenchment.

“I know it,” said Cleymore, hastily scanning the rifle-pits, “keep the men under cover, Douglas—what’s up? Wait, I’ll be there in a second. Here, Pillsbury, take this wo—this officer to my burrow and stay there until I come!”

Douglas, lying close to the top of the breast works, glasses levelled, began to speak in a monotonous voice: “The two batteries have returned and are unlimbering to the west; they seem to have cavalry too; a heavy column is moving parallel to the railroad—infantry and ammunition convoy; more infantry coming through the cemetery; I can see more on the hill beyond; the batteries have unlimbered—look out!”

“Down!” shouted Cleymore, but the shells sailed high overhead and plunged into the muddy torrent of the South Fork.

“Keenan,” he called, “do you want volunteers?”

“Not yet—damn the Texans!” bawled Keenan through the increasing din.

Douglas began, “Cleymore, they are—” and fell over stone dead.

Cleymore heard the minie-balls thud! thud! as they struck the dead body, half flung across the breastwork, and Keenan, maddened by the bullets which searched his dwindling files, bellowed hoarsely, as one by one his guns flashed and roared, “Now! In the name of God, lads, to hell with them!”

Like red devils in the pit, the cannoneers worked at their guns, looming through the infernal smoke pall, stripped to their waists. Keenan, soaked with sweat and black from eyes to ankle, raged like a fiend from squad to squad while his guns crashed and the whole hill vomited flame.

Thicker and blacker rolled the smoke from the battery emplacement, until it shrouded the hill. Then out of the darkness reeled Keenan howling for volunteers and weeping over the loss of another gun.

“Three left?” motioned Cleymore faintly with his lips.

“Three! Number four dismounted and all killed; send me some of your infantry!” and the artilleryman plunged into the blazing furnace again. Below them the grass and abatis caught fire and the smarting smoke of green wood almost blinded Cleymore. Murphy and his engineers were at work among the crackling logs, but after a while the dull blows of their axes died away and Cleymore knew they were dead.

“More men for the guns!” roared Keenan from the darkness, and a dozen Rhode Islanders tumbled out of their burrows and groped their way into the battery. In another moment Keenan came staggering out again, gasping like a fish and waving his arms blindly.

“They’ve got another gun, Cleymore,—only two now,—more men for the guns!”

Cleymore, half fainting from the loss of blood, motioned to his men for volunteers; and they came, cheering for old New York, and vanished, engulfed in the battery smoke.

The hill was swept by fierce cyclones of lead; bullets flew in streams, whistling, hurtling among the rocks, rebounding into the rifle-pits, carrying death to those below. Great shells tore through the clouds, bursting and shattering the cliff overhead. A whirlwind of flame from the burning bridge swept over the hillside, hiding the river and the heights opposite, and the burning abatis belched smoke and torrents of sparks. Cleymore sat down near the burrow, and picked the bits of cloth from the long tear which the bullet had made in his flesh above the knee. The last of the engineer company came toiling up from the railroad bridge, and the lieutenant nodded to his question, “Yes, the bridge is blown out of the water. Where can I put my men in, Captain?”

Cleymore pointed to the pits, and they went into them, cheering shrilly. A moment later a shell fell into one of the crowded pits and exploded, throwing out a column of sand and bodies torn limb from limb. Only one gun was firing now from Keenan’s battery, but from that one gun the lightning sped continuously, fed by a constantly renewed stream of volunteers. Cleymore, watching Keenan, thought that he had really gone mad. Perhaps he had, and perhaps that is why Heaven directed a bullet to his brain, before the loss of his last gun should kill him with grief. Then a shell smashed up the muzzle of the last gun, and the remnants of the servants dragged themselves away to lie panting like hounds on the scorched earth, or die inch by inch from some gaping wound.

“The jig is up,” said Cleymore aloud to himself.

For a quarter of an hour the enemy’s guns rained shells into the extinct crater—the tomb of Keenan and his cannon. Then, understanding that Keenan had been silenced forever, their fire died out, and Cleymore could hear bugles blowing clearly in the distance.

He staggered to his feet and called to his men, but of the 10th New York Rifles, only thirty came stumbling from the pits. Pillsbury also answered the call, sauntering unconcernedly from the burrow whither he had carried Cleymore’s charge.

All around them the wounded were shrieking for water, and Cleymore aided his men to carry them to the spring which flowed sparkling from the rocks above. It was out of the question to remove them, it was useless to think of burying the dead. The three days’ struggle for the hill had ended, and now all the living would have to leave,—all except one.

“Pillsbury,” said Cleymore, “take my men, and strike for the turnpike due north. I can’t walk—I am too weak yet, but you have time to get out. March!”

The men refused, and Pillsbury called for a litter of rifles, but a volley whistled in among them and they reeled.

“Save thet there flag!” shouted Pillsbury, “I’ve got the guidon!”

Cleymore lay on the ground motionless, and when they lifted him his head fell back.

“Daid,” said Pillsbury, soberly, “poor cuss!”

A rifleman threw his jacket over Cleymore’s face, and started running down the hill to where the colour-guard was closing around a bundle of flags, black and almost dropping from the staffs.

“Save the colours!” they cried, and staggered on toward the north.

III

It may have been thirst, it may have been the groans of the wounded that roused Cleymore. He was lying close by the rivulet that ran from the rock spring, and he plunged hands and head into it and soaked his fill.

The wound on his leg had stiffened, but to his surprise he found it neatly dressed and bandaged. Had aid arrived?

“Hello!” he called.

The deep sigh of a dying man was his only answer. He hardly dared to look around. The air was stifling with the scent of blood and powder and filthy clothing, and he rose painfully to his feet and tottered into the cool burrow among the rocks.

His blanket and flask lay there, but before he raised the flask to his lips he lifted the corner of the blanket nervously. Underneath stood a small oblong box, into which was screwed an electric button. Two insulated wires entered the ground directly in front of the box, which was marked in black letters, “Watson’s Excelsior Soap.”

Cleymore replaced the blanket, swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and lay down, utterly exhausted. It was late in the afternoon when he awoke from the pain in his leg, but somebody had bandaged it again while he slept, and he was able to move out into the intrenchments. Most of the wounded were dead—the rest were dying in silence. He did what he could for Cunningham who joked feebly and watched Morris with quiet eyes. Morris died first, and Cunningham, hearing the death-rattle in his comrade’s throat, murmured: “Phin he lived he bate me, but oi’ll give him a race to the Saints fur his money! Is Dick Morris dead now?”

“Dead,” said Cleymore.

“Thin, good-bye, Captain dear,” whispered Cunningham.

At first Cleymore thought he was sleeping.

The evening fell over the hilltop, and the last of the wounded shivered and died with drawn face upturned to the driving clouds. Cleymore covered the boy’s face—he was scarcely sixteen—and sat down with his back against a rock.

The wreck of Keenan’s battery rose before him in the twilight, stark and mute, silhouetted against the western horizon. Lights began to sparkle along the opposite river bank, and now, from the heights, torches swung in semi-circles signalling victory for the army of the South, death and disaster to the North. Far away over the wooded hills dull sounds came floating on the breeze, the distant rhythmic cadence of volley firing. There were fires too, faint flares of light on the horizon where Thomas was “standing like a rock.” On a nearer slope, a house and barn were burning, lighting up the stumps and rocks in the clearing, and casting strange shadows over the black woods. In the gathering twilight someone came down the cliffs at his back, treading carefully among the shell-split fragments, and Cleymore saw it was the little staff-officer. She did not see him until he called her.

“I want to thank you for dressing that scratch of mine,” he said, rising.

“You are very welcome,” she said, “is it better?”

“Yes—and you?”

“You saved my life,” she said.

“But are you burnt—you must have been—”

“No—only stifled. Are the wounded alive? I did what I could.”

“They are dead,” said Cleymore. She unhooked her sabre, and sat down beside him looking off over the valley.

After a silence he said: “I suppose you are one of our spies—I have heard of the women spies, and I once saw Belle Boyd. How did you hap pen to take the place of an aide-de-camp?”

“Am I to tell all my secrets to an infantry captain?” she said, with a trace of a smile in her blue eyes.

“Oh, I suppose not,” he answered, and relapsed into silence.

Presently she drew a bit of bacon and hard-tack from her pouch and quietly divided it. They both drank from the rivulet after the meal was finished. She brushed the water from her lips with a sun-tanned hand, and looking straight at Cleymore, said: “The hill below the abatis is mined, is it not?”

“Now, really,” said Cleymore, “am I to tell all my secrets to a girl spy?”

She stared at him for a moment, and then smiled.

“I know it already,” she said.

“Oh,” said Cleymore, “and do you know where the wires are buttoned?”

“Wires?” she exclaimed.

“Of course. Be thankful that poor Murphy’s mines at the bridge were old-fashioned. If there had been wires there, you would not be sitting here.”

“And you have stayed to fire this mine?” she said at length.

“Yes.”

“The bridges are gone, and the river is impassable. It will be days before Longstreet’s men can cross.”

“I know it,” said Cleymore, “but when they come, I’ll be here—and so will the mine.”

The spy dropped her clasped hands into her lap.

“I’ll blow them to hell!” said Cleymore savagely, glaring at the silent dead around him. Then he begged her pardon for forgetting himself, and leaned against the rock to adjust his eyeglasses.

“That would be useless butchery,” said the girl, earnestly.

“That will do,” said Cleymore, in a quiet voice.

The girl shrank away as though she had been struck. Cleymore noticed it, and said: “If you are a Government spy, you are subject to army regulations. I would rather treat you as a woman, but I cannot while you wear that uniform or hold a commission. How, in Heaven’s name, did you come to enter the service? You can’t be eighteen—you are of gentle breeding?”

“I am a spy!” she exclaimed, “and I thank God, and I hate the enemies of my country!”

“Amen,” said Cleymore, wondering at her fierce outburst.

“Do you not hate the Confederates?” she demanded.

“No,” he answered, gravely, “but I hate the rebellion.”

“But you must hate your enemies; I do.”

“I don’t; it makes me sick to see them go down—splendid fellows, Americans, and to think that such troops might have stood shoulder to shoulder with our own, under the same flag, against the world! aye, against ten worlds! I hate the rebels? By Heaven, no! Think of Thomas and Grant and Lee and Jackson leading a united army against those thieving French in Mexico! Think of Sherman and Sheridan and Johnston and Stuart facing the fat-brained treachery of England! I tell you I respect the rebels. Look at that heap of dead! Look at those smashed guns! Look at me—the defeated commander, crouching in this slaughter pen, waiting to spring a mine and die. The men who reduced me to this have my respect as soldiers and my love and admiration as Americans, but if I could blow them all to the four winds by one touch of an electric button, I’d do it, and bless the chance!” The girl trembled at his fervour.

“That is a strange creed,” she murmured.

“Creed? The Union, in the Name of God—that’s my creed!”

IV

THE next day it rained. The rebel batteries flung a dozen shells among Keenan’s ruined guns, but, receiving no answer, ceased firing. Cleymore was stiff and ill, but he managed to reach the intrenchment and rest his field-glasses against a rock. The four batteries were in motion, filing along the river bank toward the cemetery where a flag drooped above a marquee, the headquarters of some general. The Texan Riflemen were moving about the scrub-oak, showing themselves fearlessly, and a battalion of engineers was hard at work on the smouldering piers of the bridge. Dark masses of troops appeared on the distant hillsides as far as the eye could reach, and along the railroad track cavalry were riding through the rain.

All day long Cleymore watched the rebel army, and at night he shared his hard-tack and bacon with the girl. They spoke very little to each other, but when Cleymore was looking at the rebels, her eyes never left him. Once, when he crept into his cave to swallow a drop of brandy, she hurried from rifle-pit to rifle-pit, evidently searching for something, but when again he reappeared she was seated listlessly against the rocky wall, her blond head buried in her hands. And that night too, when he was tossing in feverish slumber, she passed like a shadow through the intrenchment, over rocks, down among the dead in the hollows, her lantern shining on distorted faces and clenched hands.

The next day the rain still fell; the engineers were steadily at work on the ruined bridge, but the river had swollen enormously, and Cleymore could not see that they had progressed. He went back to his cave and dropped on the blanket, the box marked “Watson’s Excelsior Soap” at his side. The girl brought him a bit of hard-tack and a cup of water. It was the last crumb left in the camp, except three biscuits which she had in her own pockets. She did not tell him so.

Toward midnight he fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept, she bent over him and looked into his face, lighting a match. Then she softly raised the blanket and saw his arm encircling a box marked “Watson’s Excelsior Soap.” As she stooped to touch the wires he stirred in his sleep and smiled, and she shrank away, covering her eyes with her hands. The next day she brought Cleymore his biscuit and cup of water, for his strength was ebbing, and he could scarcely crawl to the breastworks. She ate nothing herself. The engineers were progressing a little, the sun shone on the wasted hills, and the music of a Confederate band came in gusts across the river from the cemetery.

“They are playing Dixie,” said the girl; but Cleymore only sighed and pulled the dirty blanket over his face. The next day she brought him his biscuit, there was but one left now, and he, not knowing, asked for another, and she gave him the last.

About noon he called to her, and she helped him to the breastworks and held his field-glasses. The engineers had made alarming progress, for the river was falling rapidly.

“They’ll be over to-morrow,” he said.

When he was lying in his blanket once more, he beckoned her to come close beside him.

“Are you ill?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“You are so white and frail I thought you might be ill.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Have you plenty to eat?”

“Plenty.”

“When are you going?”

“Going?” she faltered.

“You must go, of course,” he said, querulously, “they will be over the river to-morrow.”

“And you?” said the girl.

“It’s my business to stay here.”

“And fire the mine?”

“And fire the mine,” he repeated.

“What is the use? They will enter all the same.”

“Not all of them,” said Cleymore, grimly.

“No not all of them—a hundred half-starved young fellows will be mangled—a hundred mothers will be childless—but what matter, Captain Cleymore?”

“What matter,” he repeated, “my orders are to defend this hill until hell freezes over, and I am going to do it.” Then, again, he wearily asked pardon for his words.

Toward evening she saw he was sleeping; his eye-glasses had fallen beside him on the blanket. Almost timidly she picked them up, held them a moment, then bent her head and touched them with her lips.

The morning broke in a burst of splendid sunlight. Over the river the rebel bands were playing when Cleymore’s hot eyes unclosed, but he could not rise from his blanket.

The girl brought him a cup of water and held it while he drank.

“There are no more biscuits,” she said.

“I shall not need them,” he murmured, “what are the rebels doing?”

“They are massing to cross. The bridge is almost ready.”

“And I’m ready,” he said, “good-bye.”

The girl knelt beside him and took both of his hands in hers. “I am not going,” she said.

“I order you,” he muttered.

“I refuse,” she answered gently.

A hectic flush touched the hollows under his eyes and he raised his head. “I order you to leave these works,” he said angrily.

“And I refuse,” she repeated gently.

A burst of music from the river bank came up to them as their eyes met in mute conflict. Cleymore’s hand instinctively felt for the button and the wires, then he gave a great cry and sat up among his rags, and the girl rose slowly to her feet beside him.

Traitor!” he gasped, and pointed at her with shaking hands.

She turned perfectly white for a moment, then a wan smile touched her lips, and she quietly drew a revolver from her jacket.

“I am not a traitor,” she said, I am a Confederate spy, and I cut those wires last night. You are my prisoner, Captain Cleymore.”

The silence was broken by the noise from the bands, now massing about the further end of the completed bridge. Cleymore bent silently over the ruined wires, touched the button, then, turning savagely, whipped his revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. The hammer struck an empty cylinder, and he flung it from him with a sob.

In an instant the girl was on her knees beside him, raised him in her arms, holding his head on her shoulder.

“Is it so hard to surrender to a woman?” she asked, “see, I give you my revolver—here—now shoot me down at your feet! I cut those wires! Shoot fearlessly—Ah, do you think I care for my life?”

Cleymore raised his head a little.

“I surrender,” he sighed, and fainted.

Then there came a great sound of cheering from below, the drums rattled, and the music of the bugles swelled nearer and nearer, until a crash of eager feet sounded among the branches of the abatis and a figure clad in grey leaped upon the breastworks and drove the steel point of a standard into the gravel.

“In the name of God!” he shouted in a voice choked with emotion.

“Let him pray,” muttered the dusty veterans of Longstreet’s infantry as they wheeled into the parallels, “he’s one of Jackson’s men.”

And all these things were done in the Name of the Most High.

THE BOY’S SISTER

Le plus grand tort de la plupart des maris envers leurs femmes, c’est de les avoir épousées.

[The greatest injury of most husbands to their wives is to have married them.]

THE BOY’S SISTER

Je ne me sens jamais plus seul que lorsque je livre mon coeur à quelque ami.

—Maupassant

I

Garland’s profession took him to Ten Pin Corners. His profession was to collect butterflies for the Natural History Museum of New York. Uncle Billy, who kept the Constitution Hotel at Ten Pin Corners, thought “bug huntin’” was a “dampoor bizness, even fur a dood,” and perhaps it was, but that is none of your business or mine. Garland lived at the Constitution Hotel. The hotel did small honour to its name, in fact it would have ruined any other constitution. It was ruining Garland’s by degrees, but a man of twenty-five doesn’t notice such things. So Garland swallowed his saleratus biscuits and bolted pork and beans, and was very glad that he was alive.

He had met the male population of Ten Pin Corners over the bar at the Constitution Hotel,—it being a temperance state—and there he had listened to their views on all that makes life worth living.

He tried to love his fellow-countrymen. When Orrin Hayes spat upon the stove and denounced woman’s suffrage—when Cy Pettingil, whose wife was obliged to sign his name for him, agreed profanely—when the Hon. Hanford Perkins, A.P.A., demonstrated the wickedness of Catholicism, and proffered vague menaces against Rome, Garland conscientiously repressed a shudder.

“They are my countrymen, God bless ’em,” he thought, smiling upon the free-born.

Uncle Billy’s felonious traffic in the “j’yfull juice,” did not prevent his attendance at town meeting, nor his enthusiastic voice against local option.

“I ain’t no dum fool,” he observed to Garland, “let the wimmen hev their way.”

“But don’t you think,” suggested Garland, “that a liberal law would be better?”

“Naw,” replied Uncle Billy.

“But don’t you think even a poor law should be observed until wise legislation can find a remedy?”

“Naw,” said Uncle Billy, and closed the subject.

Sometimes Uncle Billy would come out on the verandah where Garland was sitting in the sun, fussing over some captured caterpillar. His invariable salute was, “More bugs? Gosh!”

Once he brought Garland a cockroach, and suggested the bar-room as a new and interesting collecting ground, but Garland explained that his business did not include such augean projects, and the thrifty old man was baffled.

“What’s them bugs good fur?” he demanded. At length, Garland explained, but Uncle Billy never got over the impression that Garland’s real business was the advertising of Persian Powder. Most of the prominent citizens of Ten Pin Corners came to Garland to engage his services as potato-beetle exterminator, measuring-worm destroyer, and general annihilator of mosquitos, and to each in turn he carefully explained what his profession was.

They were skeptical—sometimes sarcastic. One thing, however, puzzled them; he had never been known to try to sell anybody Persian Powder, for, possessed with the idea that he was some new species of drummer, they found this difficult to reconcile with their suspicions.

“Bin a-buggin, haint ye?” was the usual salute from the free-born whom he met in the fields; and when Garland smiled and nodded, the free-born would expectorate and chuckle, “Oh, yew air slick, Mister Garland, yew’re more ’n a Yankee than I be.”

Ten Pin Corners was built along both sides of the road; the Constitution Hotel stood at one extremity of the main street, the Post Office at the other. Garland once asked why the place was called Ten Pin Corners, and Uncle Billy told him a lie about its having been named from his, Uncle Billy’s, palatial ten pin alley.

“Then why not Ten Pin Alley?” asked Garland.

“Cuz it ain’t no alley,” sniffed Uncle Billy.

“But,” persisted Garland, “why Corners?”

“Becuz there haint no corners,” said Uncle Billy evasively, and retired to his bar, thirsty and irritated. “Asks enough damfool que-estions t’ set a man crazy,” he confided to the Hon. Hanford Perkins; “I’ve hed drummers an’ drummers at the Constitooshun, but I h’aint seen nothin t’ beat him.”

The Hon. Hanford Perkins looked at Uncle Billy and spat gravely upon the stove, and Uncle Billy spat also, to put himself on an equality with the Hon. Hanford Perkins.

Concerning the mendacity of Uncle Billy, there could be no question. Ten Pin Corners had been originally Ten Pines Corners. Half a mile from the terminus of the main street stood a low stone house. It was included in the paternal government of Ten Pin Corners, and it was from this house, surrounded by ten gigantic pines, and from the four cross-roads behind it, now long disused and overgrown with grass and fire weed, that the village name degenerated from Ten Pines to Ten Pin.

Thither Garland was wont to go in the evenings, for the pines were the trysting places of moths—grey moths with pink and black under wings, brown moths with gaudy orange under wings, rusty red moths flecked with silver, nankeen yellow moths, the product of the measuring-worm, big fluffy moths, little busy moths, and moths that you and I know nothing about. The sap from the pines attracted some of these creatures, the lily garden in front of the stone house attracted others, and the whole combination attracted Garland. Also there lived in the stone house a boy’s sister.

One afternoon when Uncle Billy’s continued expectoration and Cy Pettingil’s profanity had driven Garland from the hotel, he wandered down into a fragrant meadow, butterfly net in one hand, trout rod in the other, and pockets stuffed with cyanide jar, fly-book, sandwiches, and Wilson on Hybrids.

The stream was narrow and deep, for the most part flowing silently between level banks fragrant with mint and scented grass; but here and there a small moss-grown dam choked the current into a deeper pool below, into which poured musical waterfalls.

There were trout there, yellow, speckled, and greedy, but devious in their ways, and uncertain as April mornings. There were also frogs there, solemn green ones that snapped at the artificial flies and came out of the water with slim limbs outstretched and belly glistening.

“It’s like pulling up some nude dwarf, when they grab the fly,” wrote Garland to his chief in New York, “really they look so naked and indecent.” Otherwise Garland was fond of frogs; he often sat for hours watching them half afloat along the bank or squatting majestically upon some mossy throne.

That afternoon he had put on a scarlet ibis fly, and the frogs plunged and lunged after it, flopping into the pools and frightening the lurking trout until Garland was obliged to substitute a yellow fly in self defence. But the trout were coy. One great fellow leaped for the fly, missed it, leaped again to see what was wrong, and finding out, fled into the depths, waving his square tail derisively. Garland walked slowly down the brook, casting ahead into the stream, some times catching his fly in the rank grass, some times deftly defeating the larcenous manoeuvres of some fat frog, and now and then landing a plump orange-bellied trout among the perfumed mint, where it flopped until a merciful tap on the nose sent its vital spark into Nirvana and its crimson flecked body into Garland’s moss-lined creel.

Once or twice he dropped his rod in the grass to net some conceited butterfly that flaunted its charms before the serious-minded clover bees, but he seldom found anything worth keeping, and the butterfly was left to pursue its giddy interrupted flight.

As he passed, walking lightly on the flowering turf, the big black crickets sang to him, the katydids scraped for him, and the grasshoppers, big and little, brown, green, and yellow, hopped out of the verdure before him, a tiny escort of out-riders.

It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when he came to the last pool, before the meadow brook flows silently into the woods where slim black trout lurk under submerged rocks and mosquitos swoop thankfully upon the wanderer.

On the bank of the pool sat a beautiful boy watching a cork floating with the current.

“Hello,” said Garland, “you ought to be in school, Tip.”

The boy looked at Garland through gilded tangled curls. “Can’t you see I’m fishin?” he said in a whisper.

“I see,” said Garland, “but you know your sister wouldn’t allow it. Why did you stay away from school, Tip?”

The angelic eyes were lowered a moment, then the boy carefully raised his pole, and, seeing the bait intact, dropped it into the water again.

“Bill Timerson biffed me,” said the child.

“If Willy Timerson struck you, you should not stay away from school,” he said; “did you—er—hit him back?”

“Did I?”

“Did you?” repeated Garland, repressing a smile.

“Heu! Why, Mister Garland, I slammed that d——n mug of his—”

“Tip!” said Garland.

The boy hung his head and looked at the cork. Garland sat down beside him and lighted his pipe.

After a moment he said: “Tip, I thought you promised me not to swear.”

The boy was silent.

“Did you?” said Garland.

“Yes,” replied the boy, sullenly.

“Well?” persisted Garland.

“I lied,” said the boy.

“You forgot,” said Garland, quietly, “you don’t lie, Tip.”

The boy looked at him shyly, then turned to his cork again.

“Tip,” said Garland, “what do you think of these?” he opened his creel and Tip looked in.

“Hell!” said the child softly.

“What!” interrupted Garland.

“There!” said Tip calmly, “I lied again; lam me one in the snoot, Mister Garland.”

Garland touched the boy lightly on the forehead. “You will try,” he said, trying to conceal the despair in his voice.

“Yes,” cried the child fervently, “I will, Mr. Garland, so help me—I mean, cross my heart!” After a moment he added, “I—I brought you a green worm—here it is—”

“Hello! A Smerinthus, eh? Much obliged, Tip; where did you get it?”

“Sister found it on the piazza, she said mebbe you’d want it,” replied the child lifting his line again; “say, Mister Garland, Squire Perkins says you’re loony.”

“What,” laughed Garland.

“Solemn,” continued the child, “he says you was oncet a book agent or a drummer, but you’re loony now and can’t work.”

“The Hon. Hanford Perkins, Tip?” asked Garland, laughing frankly.

“Yep, ole Perkins hisself.”

“To whom did he eulogize me, Tip?”

“What, sir?”

“To whom did he say this?”

“To sister—an Celia turned her back on him; I seen it. Are you loony?”

Garland was laughing but managed to say, “no.”

“That’s what I said,” said Tip, scowling at the water, “and I said you’d kick the hel—you’d kick the stuffin’s outen him if he said it much more. Will you, Mr. Garland?”

“I—I don’t know,” said Garland, trying to control his mirth, “you mustn’t say that sort of thing, you know, Tip.”

“I know it,” said Tip, resignedly, “I hove ’n apple through his hat though, last night.”

Then Garland explained to Tip all about the deference due to age, but so pleasantly that the child listened to every word.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll let the ole man be,—I was plannin to bust a window,” he continued, with a trace of regret, “but I won’t!” he cried in a climax of pious resignation.

Garland watched a distant butterfly critically for a moment, then picked up his rod and creel and shook the ashes from his pipe.

“Goin to see Cis?” inquired Tip.

“Hem! Hum! I—er—may pass by that way,” replied Garland.

“You won’t tell her that I smashed Bill Timerson?”

“Of course not,” said Garland, “that’s for you to tell her.”

“I won’t,” said the child doggedly.

“Very well,” said Garland, walking away.

Tip watched him, but he did not turn, and the child’s face became troubled.

“I will tell, Mr. Garland!” he called across the meadow.

“All right, Tip,” answered Garland, cheerily.

II

Before Garland came In sight of the low stone house he caught the fragrance of the lilies. The sun glittered low on the horizon, long luminous shadows stretched over meadow and pasture, and a thin blue haze floated high among the feathery tops of the pines about the house. A white nanny-goat of tender age, tethered on the velvet turf, cried “me—h! me—h!” watching him with soft silly eyes. Except for the kid, and a Maltese cat asleep on the porch, there was no sign of life about the house. Garland turned and looked out over the pastures. A spot of greyish-pink was moving down there. He watched it for a moment, quietly refilling his pipe, then dropped his rod and net upon the turf, and threw himself on the ground beside them. From time to time he raised his eyes from the pages of Wilson on Hybrids to note the progress of the pink spot in the distant pasture.

Wilson was most interesting on hybrids. What Wilson had to say was this: “There can be no doubt that hybrid forms of these two splendid butterflies, Nymphalis Arthemis and Nyrnphalis Ephestion, exist in the localities frequented by these species. In the little village of Ten Pin Corners, Professor Wormly discovered an unknown hybrid, which, unfortunately, he was unable to capture or describe.”

This was what Wilson had to say on hybrids.

This was what Garland thought: “I’d give fifty dollars to capture one of these hybrids;—I wonder what Celia is doing in the pasture? It may not have been a hybrid; it may only have been a variety. Celia is milking the Alderney, that’s what she’s doing. Still, Wormly ought to know what he’s about. Celia has finished milking; now it’s the Jersey’s turn. I should like to see a hybrid of Arthemis and—hello!—Celia has finished, I fancy.” Then he laid down his book and carefully retied his necktie.

When Celia arrived and placed her milk pail on the porch, Garland jumped to his feet with hypocritical surprise.

“You are milking early,” he said, “did you just come from the pasture?”

The girl looked at her pail and nodded. The sunlight gilded her arms, bare to the shoulder, and glittered in a fierce halo around her burnished hair. She had her brother’s soft blue eyes, fringed with dark lashes, but the beauty of her mouth was indescribable. Garland, as usual, offered to take the milk pail, and she, as usual, firmly declined.

“You never let me,” he said, “I wanted to bring it up from the pasture, but I knew what you’d say.”

“Then you saw me in the pasture,” she asked.

“Er—er—yes,” he admitted.

“I saw you too,” she said, and sat down in the red sunlight under the pines.

Garland sat down also, and made an idle pass at a white butterfly with his net.

“Have you caught any new butterflies today?” she asked, bending to tie her shoe string.

“No, nothing new,” he answered. She straightened up, brushed a drop or two of milk from the hem of her pink skirt, passed a slim hand over her crumpled apron, and leaned back against the tree trunk, touching her hair lightly with her fingers.

“Last night,” she said, “a great green miller-moth came around the lamp. I caught him for you.”

“A Luna,” he said, “thank you, Celia.”

“Luna,” she repeated gravely, “is he rare?”

She had picked up a few phrases from Garland and used them with pretty conscientiousness.

“No,” said Garland, “not very rare—but I will keep this one.”

“I caught some more, too,” she continued, “a yellow miller—”

“Moth, Celia.”

“Miller-moth—”

“No—a moth—”

“A yellow moth,” she continued serenely, “that had eyes on its wings.”

“Saturnia Io,” said Garland.

“Io,” repeated the girl, softly, “is it rare?”

“It is rare here. I will keep it.”

The Maltese cat lifted its voice and rubbed its arched back against the milk pail. Its name was Julia and Garland called it to him.

“Julia has a saucer of milk on the porch; she is only teasing,” said Celia.

But Julia’s voice was sustained and piercing, and Garland rose laughing and poured a few drops of warm fresh milk into the half-filled saucer. Then Julia exposed the depth of her capriciousness; she sniffed at the milk, walked around it twice, touched the saucer playfully, patted a stray leaf with velvet paw, and then suddenly pretending that she was in danger of instant annihilation from some impending calamity, pranced into the middle of the lawn, crooked her tail, rushed halfway up a tree-trunk, slid back, and finally charged on the tethered kid with swollen tail and ears flattened.

Garland went back to his seat on the turf. “It is the way of the world,” he said gaily.

Celia picked up a pine cone and sniffed daintily at the dried apex.

“Julia was not hungry; she only wanted attention,” he added.

“Some people are hungry for attention too, and never get it,” said Celia.

Garland knew what she meant. It was common gossip among the free-born who congregated about the saliva stricken stove at Uncle Billy’s or sat on musty barrels in the Post Office store.

“But,” said Garland, “you do not want his attention,—now.”

“No,” she said indifferently, “I do not want it now, it is too late.”

“Then don’t let’s think about it,” said Garland quickly.

“Think! think!” she answered without impatience, “what else can I do?”

“And you think of him?” he asked.

“No, not of him, but of his injustice,” she said quietly.

They had talked sometimes on the subject—he never knew just how it came about. Perhaps his interest in Tip had moved her to the confidence, if it could be called a confidence, for all the free-born were unbidden participants in the secret. The story was commonplace enough. When Celia was sixteen, four years back, she lived with an elect uncle in the manufacturing town of Highfield, forty miles down the river. One day a road company with more repertoire than cash, stranded at Bowles’ Opera House and drifted back by highway and byway toward Boston. One member of the company, however, did not drift back. His name was Clarence Minster and he said he had found salvation, which was true in one sense, for Celia’s elect uncle clawed him into the fold, and having cleansed his soul, gave him a job to cleanse the stable at very few dollars a month. Celia was young and simple and pitiful. She also possessed five hundred dollars of her own. So Clarence Minster first ran away with her and then with most of her five hundred dollars. Unfortunately the marriage was legal, and the uncle implacable, so Celia took her brother Tip in one hand, and a thinned-out pocket-book in the other, and went to her dead parent’s home, the stone house at Ten Pin Corners. She sometimes heard of Minster, never from him. He had struck the public taste as “Dick Willard,” the hero of the lachrymose melodrama, “Honour,” and his photographs were occasionally seen in Highfield store windows.

This was Celia’s story—part of it. The other part began as she began to listen to Garland, and to bring him delicate winged moths that sought her chamber lamp as she bent over Tip’s patched clothes. Something also was beginning for Garland; he felt it growing as he moved among the lilies in the dusk while Celia held the bullseye lantern, and the great sphinx moths hovered over the pinks. He felt it in the crystal clear mornings when sleepy butterflies clung to the late lilacs, and Celia moved far afield through raspberries and yellow buttercups. He felt it now, as he lay beside her among level shadows and gilt-tipped verdure—he felt it and wondered whether it was love. Perhaps Celia could have told him, I don’t know, but it was plain enough to the tethered kid and the Maltese cat, to the drifting swallows, and the orioles in the linden tree besides the well-sweep. It was simple and self-evident to the Alderney, lowing at the bars, to the Jersey staring stolidly at Celia, to the robins, the hedge birds—yes, to the tireless crickets chirping from every tussock.

Now whether or not it was equally plain to Tip as he came trudging up the gravel walk, I do not know.

He said, “Hello, Cis,” and came and kissed her—a thing he did not often do voluntarily. “I smashed Bill Timerson in the jaw,” he continued, “and he told the teacher, and I dassn’t go back.” Then he glanced humbly at Garland.

Celia had tears in her eyes, and she also turned instinctively to Garland. “Speak to him, please,” she said, “I can do nothing.”

“Yes you can,” said Tip—“you and Mr. Garland together. I’ve told him.”

“Tip will go back to school to-morrow,” said Garland, “and take his thrashing.”

Tip looked doubtful.

“And,” continued Garland, “as Bill Timerson is older and stronger than Tip, Tip will continue to punch him whenever assaulted.”

“Oh—no!” pleaded Celia.

“Let him,” said Garland, smiling. Tip threw his arms around his sister’s neck and kissed her again, and she held him tightly to her milk-stained apron.

“Mr. Garland knows,” she whispered, “my darling, try to be good.”

III

Garland leaned back in his chair in the dingy bar-room of the Constitution Hotel. His abstracted gaze wandered from Uncle Billy to a framed chromo on the wall, a faithful reproduction of some catchup bottles, a boiled lobster and a platter of uninviting oysters. The Hon. Hanford Perkins was speaking he had been speaking for half an hour. For years, like Peffer, he had been telling the Government what to do, but his patience, unlike Peffer’s, was exhausted, and now he had decided to let the country go to the devil. He wrote no more letters to the Highfield Banner, he sulked, and an ungrateful country never even knew it At times, however, under the kindly stimulus of Uncle Billy’s “j’yfull juice,” he condescended to address the free-born in the bar-room of the Constitution Hotel. He was doing it now. He had touched upon silver with the elephantine dexterity of a Populist, he had settled the tariff to the satisfaction of Ten Pin Corners, he spoke of the folly of maintaining a navy, and dismissed the army with a masterly sarcasm in which the phrase, “fuss ’n feathers” was dwelt upon. Uncle Billy, in the popular attitude of a cherub, elbows on the bar, gazed at him with undisguised admiration. Cy Pettingil, fearful that he was not on an equality with the drummer in the corner, spat upon the stove until he was. Then the drummer told an unclean story which was a success, but the Hon. Hanford Perkins, feeling slighted at the loss of attention, told a scandalous bit of gossip which threw the drummer’s story into the shade.

Garland stirred restlessly, and opened Wilson on Hybrids again. He had been reading for a moment or two when a name caught his ear, and he closed his book and raised his eyes.

The Hon. Hanford Perkins was speaking, and Garland leaned over and touched his coat sleeve.

“You are speaking of a woman,” he said, “that is not the tone to use nor is this the place to discuss any woman.”

“Hey?” said the Hon. Hanford, with a laugh, and winked at Uncle Billy.

“I guess he can say what he dam pleases in my house,” said Uncle Billy, expectorating; “the girl’s not yourn.”

“The girl,” added Cy Pettingil, “is a damned little ———”

Then Garland took Cy Pettingil by the throat, swung him around the room twice, and kicked him headlong into the billiard-table, under which Pettingil hastily scrambled.

“Now,” said Garland to the Honourable Hanford Perkins, “do you want to follow Pettingil? If you do, just wag that bunch of whiskers on your chin again.”

The drummer in the corner smiled uneasily, picked up his sample case and key, and said good night in an uncertain voice to Garland. Uncle Billy’s eyes were fixed upon Garland with a fascinated stare, and his jaw slowly dropped. The Hon. Hanford Perkins cast one amazed glance at Pettingil, another at Uncle Billy, and waddled majestically out into the street.

When Garland had picked up his book and left the hotel, Cy Pettingil crawled from beneath the billiard-table and approached Uncle Billy. He expectorated and leaned on the bar, but no amount of ejected saliva could re-establish him in his own estimation—he felt this bitterly.

“I’ll git the law on him,” he said after a moist silence, and rubbed his red hand over his chin. “I’ll hev the law onto him,” he repeated; but Uncle Billy was non-committal.

“Gimme a little bug-juice,” said Cy, after an uncomfortable silence, and tossed a quarter upon the bar, with ostentatious carelessness, “I’m dry, Billy.”

“Yew be?” said Uncle Billy, “wall, yew don’t git no bug-juice nor nawthin here.”

“Hey!” said Pettingil.

“Naw,” said Uncle Billy, scornfully, and retired to the depths of the bar.

Garland walked slowly down the road in the twilight, switching the grass with the bamboo staff of his butterfly-net, angry with himself and nauseated with the free-born. And as he walked he was aware of a light touch on his arm, and a lighter footstep by his side. It was Tip.

“I—I was in the hallway of the hotel,” said Tip, eagerly, “’n I seen what you done to Cy Pettingil—”

“What were you doing there?” said Garland sharply.

“Buyin’ salt for Cis, oh! I just love you, Mister Garland!” And before Garland could raise his eyes, Tip had flung himself into his arms sobbing: “I ain’t big enough to lick all the loafers in town, but I lick all their sons, and Cis says I am growin’ fast. Oh, you do love me and Cis, don’t you, Mister Garland?”

“Yes,” said Garland, gravely, and kissed his wet face. Then he took him by the hand and told him how low and mean a bar-room fight was, and that he must never tell Celia what had happened. He tried to explain to him what was necessary to resent, and what was not; he spoke sympathetically as he always did, and Tip absorbed every word.

“Now let us forget it,” said Garland, “Tip, your grammar is very uncertain. Why do you not try to speak as your sister does?”

“The boys I play with don’t speak that way,” said Tip.

“Neither does Cy Pettingil,—he speaks as you do,” said Garland.

Tip’s hand trembled and clasped Garland’s tighter. “Learn me what to say, Mister Garland,” he said after a silence.

“I will,” replied Garland, “how would you like to go to school in Boston?”

“When?”

“Next winter.”

“Can Cis come too?”

“I hadn’t thought,—you can’t leave her, can you, Tip?”

“No,” said Tip.

“Well—we’ll see—you need not speak of this to your sister; I will—er—discuss the question with her later,” said Garland.

Celia was standing under the pines as they walked up the gravel path. She knew his footsteps and came up on the verandah to greet him.

“Why, you are all over white!” she said; “has Tip spilled the salt on you?”

“Tip and I hugged each other to the detriment of the salt,” said Garland laughing and brushing the white grains from his coat.

“Tip, dear, have you been naughty?” asked Celia.

“Nope,” said Tip so promptly that even Celia laughed, and Tip retired to bed, glowing with virtuous resolves. Celia went up to his room and waited until he had said his prayers. She was troubled by the fervency of his prayer for Garland, but joined faintly in the Amen, and covered Tip with the white sheets.

“Mr. Garland says he loves you, Cis,” said Tip, holding up his lips to be kissed. Celia caught her breath and laid one hand on the bed post.

“Tip,” she faltered.

“Yep—an’ me, too,” said Tip, blissfully.

He fell asleep soon; Celia stood and watched him in the moonlight. She was thinking of Garland; Tip was dreaming of him.

When she came down, Garland was busy among the lilies with bullseye lantern and butterfly net, and she took a chair on the verandah and watched him. Two “Imperial” moths had fallen to his lot, perfect specimens, and he was happy, for had not Professor Wormly cautiously deplored the absence of this species in the whole country?

“One on Wormly,” laughed Garland, dropping the great yellow and violet-brown moths from his cyanide-jar into her lap, “are they not pretty, Celia?”

Since Garland had come, Celia had seen beauty through his eyes wherever his eyes saw it; the shadows on the pasture, the long light over the hills, the massed pines red in the sunset, the morning meadow sheeted with cobwebs. For the first time in her innocent life she had turned to watch the colour in the evening sky, she had stooped to lift a clover-drunk butterfly and examine the rainbow span of its wings, she lingered at the bars, listening to the music of the meadow brook along the alders. So when he asked her if the moths were beautiful, she smiled and saw that they were; and when he asked her to hold his lantern among the lilies, she prettily consented.

Up and down they moved, to and fro through the lilies and clustered pinks, but the moonlight was too clear and the swift sphinx moths did not visit the garden that night.

He was standing still, looking at the lilies, and she was swinging the lantern idly. “About Tip,” he said abruptly, “do you think the school here is good for him?”

“I know it is not,” she said sadly.

“His English is alarming,” said Garland.

“I know it—what can I do?”

“I don’t know; if he goes to school he will play with those children, I suppose.”

“He was such a well-bred child,” said Celia, “before—before we came here. He talked when he was three. I seem to have little influence over him.”

“You have a great deal—not in that way perhaps. Suppose you take Tip out of school, Celia.”

“What would become of him?” exclaimed Celia in gentle alarm.

“It’s better than leaving him there. I—er—I might help him a bit.”

“But—it’s very, very kind of you—but you will go away before winter—will you not?”

“I don’t know,” said Garland, and instinctively laid his hand on hers. At the contact, her cheeks flamed in the darkness.

“Celia,” he said, “I do not want to go.” Her face was turned from him. After a moment his fingers unclosed and her impassive hand fell to her side. The swift touch left him silent and awkward. He tried to speak lightly again but could not. Finally he folded his net, extinguished the lantern and said good-night. Long after he had disappeared she stood among the lilies, her hands softly clasped to her breast.

IV

“Heu!” sniffed Uncle Billy, as he poured out a glass of beer for himself behind the fly-soiled bar at the Constitution Hotel, “there hain’t a man araound taown dass say a word abaout the Minster girl when Mister Garland’s a settin here.”

“Mister Garland’s a skunk!” said Cy Pettingil, morosely.

“He ain’t the skunk that yew be, Cy Pettingil,” retorted Uncle Billy, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Garland came in a moment later, satchel in hand, and laid a roll of bills on the bar. Uncle Billy moistened his thumb with his tongue, counted them, and shoved them into his waistcoat pocket. “C’rect,” he said, shifting his quid, “what can I dew for yew, sir?”

“Send this satchel with my trunk,” said Garland, “good-bye, Uncle Billy.”

Uncle Billy emerged from the bar, wiped his right hand on his trousers and extended it.

“Good luck, an’ many bugs to yew, Mister Garland. I’m real cut up that yew air goin, sir; enny thing in the bug line thet I hev I’ll send t’ Noo York.”

“Thank you, Uncle Billy,” said Garland, and walked out of the hotel, gloves in one hand, cane in the other.

Cy Pettingil sneered when he was gone, but, receiving no sympathy from Uncle Billy, went home and nagged at his wife, a pale woman weighed down with trouble and American pastry until she retorted. Then he struck her.

Garland walked on past the church and school-house, through the sweet-briar lane by the Post Office, and, taking the path above the cemetery, followed it until he came in sight of the stone house among the pines. The Maltese cat trotted out to greet him, the tethered kid stared at him from the lawn, but Celia was invisible, and he stood hesitating under the woodbine on the porch. He had never entered Celia’s house. She had never asked him in, and he knew that she was right. He sat down under the pines and looked off over the pastures where the Alderney and Jersey were feeding along the brookside.

Garland had come to say good-bye. There was nothing that he could do for Tip; Celia was not able to send him to a better school, nor could she have afforded to go with him. Even if she should accept an offer to send Tip to school, what would she do there alone in that scandal nest of the free-born? So Garland sat poking pine cones with his stick and crumpling his gloves in his brown hand until a tangle of sun-warmed curls rose over the fence and Tip appeared, smoking a cigarette. When he saw Garland he dropped the cigarette and looked the other way, whistling.

“Come, Tip,” said Garland, wearily, “let’s have it out before Celia comes.”

Tip went to him at once.

“Who gave you that cigarette?” asked Garland.

“No one, I made it.”

“Tobacco?”

“No, sir, sweet-fern and corn silk.”

“That is not much better. Tip, are you going to stop this?”

The child picked up a pine cone, examined it carefully, and tossed it toward the Maltese cat.

“Answer me,” said Garland.

The child was silent.

“Very well,” said Garland.

“I promise!” cried Tip, “I won’t never smoke nothing, don’t go away, Mr. Garland!”

“Is that your word of honour, Tip?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right,” said Garland, smiling, “now you have promised me not to drink or smoke until you are twenty-one. I know I can trust you, and I am very happy. You need not tell Celia of this.”

“I—I will if you want?” said Tip, humbly.

“No, it will only worry her and you have promised now. What did you do in school to day?”

“I punched Jimmy Bro—”

“I did not ask for an account of your athletic victories,” said Garland, “I merely wished to know in what particular branch of the applied sciences you excelled.”

“Wh—a—at, sir?”

“Were you perfect in reading?”

“N—no, sir.”

“In writing?”

“No—o—”

“In arithmetic?”

Tip stirred restlessly, and looked at the Maltese cat. Then he brightened and said, “A skunk got into the cellar while school was goin’. Teacher told us all about skunks an’ anermals.”

“Oh,” said Garland, “an object lesson in natural history?”

“Yep. Skunk ain’t its real name, its real name is Methodist Americanus——”

“What’s that?” exclaimed Garland.

“Methodist Americanus—”

“Mephetis Americanus, Tip,” said Garland gravely.

“Oh! I thought the man what named it might have had a uncle like mine—”

“Tip!”

“Yes, sir?”

“That will do,” said Garland seriously.

The child nodded contentedly and began an elaborate series of evolutions, the object of which was to capture the Maltese cat. The cat was perfectly aware of this; she allowed the boy to approach her until his hand was within an inch of her back; then she ran a few feet, cocked her ears, switched her tail, and pretended to forget him. After a while they disappeared behind the lilac bushes at the end of the verandah, and Garland leaned back against the tree and poked at pine cones again.

The sun sank lower and lower, flooding the pastures, tinging the calm meadow pools with the splendour of its fading glory. In the evening glow the turf burned like golden tapestry, the swallows twittered among the chimneys or drifted and rose high in the quiet air, and the chickens looked up with restless peeps to their roost in the lilac branches. An orange light, ever deepening, dyed the edges of the pools where the ripples of a rising fish or a low dipping gnat disturbed the surface reflection of the placid evening sky. From palest green to grey the horizon changed until, like a breath creeping over a window, a rosy flush stained the zenith. And the sun had set.

With sunset Celia came, walking slowly over the grass that shone in the shadows with a green almost metallic. She started slightly when Garland moved in the shade of the pines, but came to him, offering her hand.

“Then you are going,” she said simply.

“Yes, I am going. My train leaves at nine to-night. How did you know?”

She glanced at his gloves and stick and smiled gently.

“I am going,” he said, “because they want me in New York. Some day I will come back—”

A ghost of a smile touched her lips again. He moved impatiently nearer, and she looked at his troubled eyes.

“Shall I come back?” he asked awkwardly.

“Yes—come; Tip will welcome you—”

“And you?”

“I—” she said softly “—I don’t know.”

“What troubles you?” he said; but she turned her head toward the sunset. “What troubles you?” he said again; “is—is he coming?”

She dropped her head.

“When?” asked Garland in a hard voice.

“To-night.”

Something of the horror in her face as she turned it was reflected in his own. This, then, was the reward for her quiet struggle for life; this was the reward—the return of this miserable actor whom she had learned to loathe—her husband! Whew! the stench of perfume and grease paint seemed to fill his nostrils; he could see the smooth fat face shaved blue, as he had seen it behind the footlights in the metropolis, the bull neck, the professional curly head!

Then he set his teeth and dug his stick into the turf at his feet. The girl moved a step from him.

“Celia,” he said unsteadily, “have you ever thought of divorce?”

“Yes.”

They were silent again. The whistle of a distant train startled Garland from his reverie and he picked up his gloves and buttoned his coat. It was the incoming train from New York. With a frightened glance at him, she held out her hand, murmuring good-bye, and turned toward the house, but he stepped swiftly to her side and touched her arm.

Oh, the terror in the eyes that met his, and the kiss, as she clung to his breast in the twilight there—the kiss that solved all problems, that broke down barriers and made the way plain and clear, the way that they should travel together through life and the life to come.

And so they went away into the world together, and Tip went with them, one dimpled hand in Garland’s, one clasping the Maltese cat close to his breast.

THE CRIME

“How,” says he, blessing himself, “would I whip this child…. if it were my child.”

—Samuel Pepys

THE CRIME

Heark! Oh, heark! you guilty trees,

In whose gloomy galleries

Was the cruellest murder done

That e’re yet eclipst the sunne.

I

Now it happened one day in the early Springtime when the sky was china blue and filmy clouds trailed like lace across the disk of a pale sun, that I, Henry Stenhouse, nineteen years of age, well and sound in mind and body, decided to commit a crime.

The crime which I contemplated was murder. For three years past I had watched the object of my pursuit; I had peered at him at night as he lay sleeping, I had crept stealthily to his home, evening after evening, waiting for a chance to kill him. I had seen him moving about on his daily business, growing fatter and sleeker, serene, sly, self-centred, absorbed in his own affairs, yet keeping a keen, shrewd eye upon strangers. For he mistrusted strangers; those who passed by him, not even noticing him, he mistrusted less than he did others who came to him with smiles and out-stretched hands.

He never accepted anything from anybody. A strange step or the sound of a strange voice made him shy and suspicious. But he was cold and selfish, cold-blooded as a fish—in fact he—but I had better tell you a little more about him first. He was my enemy; I determined to kill him, and perhaps he read it in my drawn face and sparkling eyes, for, as I stepped toward him, the first time, he turned and fled fled straight across the Clovermead River.

And although I searched the river banks up and down and up and down again, I saw no more of him that day.

When I went home, excited, furious, I made passionate preparations to kill him. All night long I tossed feverishly in my tumbled bed, longing, aching for the morning. When the morning came I stole out of the house and bent my steps towards the river, for I had reason to believe that he lived somewhere in that neighbourhood. As I crept along, the early morning sun glittered on something that I clutched with nervous fingers. It was a weapon.

This happened three years ago; I did not find him that morning, although I searched until the shadows fell over meadow and thicket. That night too found me on his trail, but the calm Spring moon rose over Clovermead village and its pale light fell on no scene of blood.

So for three years I trailed him and stalked him, always awaiting the moment to strike, praying for an opportunity to slay; but he never gave me one. He was fierce and shifty, swift as lightning when aroused, but the battle that I offered he declined. Oh, he was deep—deep and crafty, cold-blooded as a fish—in fact, he was a fish,—Mine Enemy, the Trout.

Do you imagine that the killing of Mine Enemy was a crime? No, my friend—that, properly done, was what is known as sport; improperly done, it is murder; there,—the murder’s out! I was going to catch the trout with bait!

You, dear brethren of the angle, brave fly-fishermen, all, wet or dry, turn not from me with loathing! Hear my confession, the confession of one who was tempted, listened, fell, and fished for a trout with a worm!

Anyway, it’s your own fault if you throw down this book and beat your breasts with cruel violence. I told you that my story was to be the story of a crime, and if you don’t like to read about crimes, you had no business to begin this tale. There are worse crimes too,—some people habitually fish with bait; some net fish, and there exist a few degraded objects in human shape who snare trout with a wicked wire loop on the end of a sapling.

Now I don’t propose to tell you about these things, I am no depraved realist, so thank your stars that the crime I contemplated was no worse than it was, and listen to the story of an erring brother. Mea culpa!

I was only nineteen, a student at the State School of Engineering, and in my senior year. What I did in engineering was barely sufficient to carry me through my examination; what I did in shooting and trout fishing might have furnished material for a sporting library. I had no particular aversion to my profession; my father before me had been a mining engineer. I was not entirely ignorant either; I knew mica-chist from malachite, and I could—but that’s of no consequence now. It is true, however, that instead of applying myself to the studies of my profession I spent a great deal of time contributing to a New York sporting journal called the Trigger. I produced a couple of columns a week on such subjects as “German Trout versus Natives,” “Do Automatic Reels Pay?” and “Experiments with the Amherst Pheasant.” But my article entitled “The Enemies of the Spawning-Beds,” won me recognition, and I became a regular contributor to the Trigger.

How I ever passed my examinations is one of those mysteries that had better remain uninvestigated. I don’t remember that I studied or attended many lectures. I was too busy, shooting or fishing, or writing for the Trigger.

Also there existed a girls’ boarding-school a mile away.

This school was run by two old maids, the Misses Timmins. It was the Timmins sisters’ aim in life to prevent the members of their school from coming into contact with the engineers from Clovermead; therefore we knew them all.

The means of communication were varied and ingenious, for the little maidens at the boarding-school were quite as enthusiastic as we were. We never went through the formality of an introduction,—it was not expected; we spoke when we had the chance, and thanked fortune for the chance.

There was, however, one weird custom laid down by the boarding-school maidens, a tradition which had existed as long as the school; and this was well understood by the Clovermead Engineers. It was this: no youth could expect to spoon with any Timmins maiden unless he first declared his intentions by serenading her.

We were not all blessed with a high order of musical ability—I played a harmonica—but we were willing to try. I had tried several times. The results were very sweet,—I don’t mean in a musical way.

So between the boarding-school and the Trigger I found little leisure, and the less leisure I had the less I felt inclined to occupy it with engineering problems. Besides, there was the big trout to think of, Mine Enemy, whom I had sworn to drag from the depths of that most delicious of streams, the Clovermead River.

During these three years while I persistently fished for Mine Enemy (and goodness knows I had never before beheld so lusty a trout!) every fly known to anglers, and many flies unknown to anybody but myself, I tried on that impassive fish.

And he grew fatter and fatter.

I remember well the day of the temptation. I was sitting at the foot of the big oak tree that spreads above the pool where Mine Enemy lurked. Wearied with casting, I had sought the shadow of the oak and had lighted a cigarette to change my luck. And as I sat on the cool turf, I was aware of an angleworm, travelling along at my feet on business of its own. Scarcely conscious of what I did, I picked up a twig and tossed the little worm over the bank.

Then, in a moment, I was sorry, for I never willingly bother little things. I watched the worm sinking slowly into the crystalline depths of the pool.

When at last the little worm struck the bottom I suppose it was both astonished and indignant, for it began to twist and turn and shoot out like a telescope over the gravelly bottom.

I was sorry, as I say, and I hoped it might make its way to the bank again and bore into it.

Several inquisitive minnows, half as long as the angleworm, gathered around it staring and opening their diminutive mouths. Then, all at once, the minnows darted away, scattering in every direction, and a huge shadow fell upon the gravel,—a trout, monstrous, lazy, slowly gliding out from the dark bank to where the worm wriggled, pushing its pink head among the pebbles.

Very deliberately the great fish opened his mouth—not very wide—and the little worm was gone. For five minutes the trout lay there, and I watched him, scarcely daring to breathe. After a while I cautiously reached for my rod, freed the line and leader, bent a little forward, and cast over the fish. Lightly as snowflakes falling on window panes, the flies drifted onto the placid surface of the pool. The trout did not stir.

It was at this moment that temptation overtook me; my sinful eyes roved over the turf where the angleworm had been, and, brethren, forgive me! I lusted after bait!!

“It will be so easy,” whispered the tempter, “no one will ever know!”

“Get behind me, Satan,” said I.

“But it’s so easy,—and the big trout will never touch artificial flies!”

“Avaunt Apollyon!” I groaned while the sweat stood in beads on my eyebrows.

So I overcame the devil, and went away to avoid further contention. And Heaven rewarded me with the sight of a pretty girl playing a guitar at her window.

She was so pretty that the fact alone was reward enough, but Heaven never does things by halves, Madame, and when for an instant I paused by the brier hedge to listen, the pretty girl gave me one of those swift, provoking sidelong glances, and then, touching her guitar, looked innocently up into the sky.

And this is what she sang:

Young am I, and yet unskilled

How to make a lover yield;

How to keep and how to gain,

When to love and when to feign!

Take me, take me some of you

While I yet am young and true;

He that has me first is blest,

For I may deceive the rest.

And the guitar went strum! tum-tum! strum! tum-tum! tinkle-tinkle-tinkle-strum! tum-tum!

“The little innocent thing,” I thought, and looked at her through the hedge.

She was not so very young; she might have been my own age. She was sitting in one of the windows of the dormitory which belonged to the Misses Timmins’ Select Boarding-school for Young Ladies!

Evidently the Misses Timmins were not in the immediate neighbourhood.

“Dear little innocent thing,” I repeated to myself.

I moved slightly. She looked at me with that dreamy confiding look that stirs the pulses of some people. I am one of those people.

“She is lonely,” said I to myself, “it is the duty—nay, the precious privilege of the happy to sympathize with the lonely.”

There was a bud of sweet-brier beside my cheek. I picked it, sniffed it pensively, and looked at the girl in the window.

She looked at me, glanced down at her guitar, thrummed a little, sighed a little, and ate a bonbon.

Ah, that sigh! gentle, troubling, irresistible.

“She,” thought I to myself, “shall be my goddess, this humble dormitory shall be my temple, this window my shrine! Hither will I come to worship and bring burnt offerings, almonds and bonbons. This village will not be so dull after all,” I thought to myself.

“What time,” said I, speaking very gently, for I did not wish to disturb the Misses Timmins with my rude voice, “what time, Mademoiselle, would it be advisable for an enamoured lover to serenade the delicious object of his adoration?”

“We retire at half-past nine, fair sir,” said the maiden innocently.

I knew I was not mistaken. The poor child was lonely.

“Heavens! ” said I, “driven to retire at half past nine! Are—er—the Misses Timmins—er—fierce?”

“They are deaf,” said the maiden, with a childlike smile.

“Ah—unhappy ladies This is a fine old building, a noble façade. Are you fond of architecture?”

“My window is the one I am sitting in,” said the maid with simple confidence, “I could let down a string in case you had matters of grave import or state despatches to communicate.”

“Ahem!” said I, “have you a string there now?”

“Yes, fair sir.”

So I slid through the hedge and stood under her window holding up my creel.

“I have,” said I, “a few small brook trout here—nothing to boast of—but if you would accept—”

“Indeed you are too kind—”

“They may vary the monotony of prunes and weak tea for supper—”

“Fair sir, I see you have known other boarding-school maidens!”

“Foi de gentilhomme!” I protested.

“Which is not pronounced the way we pronounce French here,” she said, “let me see the trout.”

I opened the creel.

“I will accept,” said the girl graciously, and let down a string, to which I fastened my creel.

“You are very daring—how do you know that the whole school are not watching?”

“Because,” said I, “this is the afternoon when the whole school takes a solemn ramble into the country.”

“I am not rambling,” she said.

“All do not ramble on days of recreation,” I replied significantly.

“You know a great deal about this boarding-school, fair sir. I suppose you also know I am confined to my room as a disciplinary precaution.”

“Monstrous!” I cried, suppressing my satisfaction.

“I only made a cider cocktail,” she said.

“Monstrous!” I repeated, “cider cocktails are no good.”

By this time she had lowered the creel to me again and I slung it on my shoulders and picked up my rod from the lawn.

“I will bring offerings,” I said, “do you like bonbons, gentle maiden?”

“Yes, and pickles,” she said gravely.

“And music?”

“Sometimes—not too classical—”

“I will serenade you!” I cried enthusiastically,—“you say the Misses Timmins are deaf?”

“Shame on you! you know they are. What do you play? I am not sure that I will accept a serenade.”

“The banjo and the harmonica—not both at once. I play the harmonica best, but I can’t sing to it at the same time, you know. Shall I come?”

“Y—es. Are you fond of pickled peaches? I can let some down to you.”

I was on the point of accepting a pickled peach,—I would have accepted a pickled turnip from her,—when, out of the tail of my eye, I saw the tops of multi-coloured sunshades appearing above the crest of the hill, and I knew that the Misses Timmins were returning with their flock.

“You must go!” she whispered hurriedly, “go quickly!”

“Good-bye,—good-night,” I said, “you are the loveliest, sweetest—”

“Quick—what?”

“Angel,—divine, glorious,—er—”

“Oh, hasten! What?”

“And I love you!”

“You mustn’t say that; must you? Oh, hurry and say it again if you must—”

“Oh, I must!” I cried, heedless of all the Timminses on earth, “I really must—”

“My name is May Thorne—go quickly now.”

“Mine is Harry Stenhouse—the deuce! they’re at the gate!”

They were.

Scarcely had I slipped around the building before I heard the chatter and laughter of girls and the patter of feet on the gravel walk. I had heard it before under similar circumstances. But there was a back gate; and I went. Now see how virtue is its own reward! I had resisted the devil and he gave me another chance.

II

“Yes,” said I to myself, remembering how I had piously ascribed my reward to Heaven, “yes, I was mistaken. I should have said: The devil, Madame, never does things by halves.”

I looked back at the dormitory door. One of the Misses Timmins was snipping roses from the porch trellis.

“To eke out the meagre evening meal,” I thought; “poor little maid—poor little May! Only nanny-goats eat roses, and an empty stomach rejoiceth not in perfumes.”

This sounded to me like an Eastern proverb. It smacked well, and I repeated it to myself luxuriously.

“Some day,” thought I, “when I am famous, and people begin to write books to prove that I’m not, I’ll marry May,—if I like her as well as I do now—and she likes me—ahem!” I’d forgotten that part.

“There is something about this little maid,” I mused, “that touches my better nature; something too subtle to analyze, and anyway, I’m not good at that sort of analysis. She is fond of eating trout, I’m fond of catching them. Clearly we were designed for each other—if only for an hour or so.”

By this time I had reached my own gate, and stood pensively regarding a pair of tiny chipping birds that were absorbed in the excitement of a violent Spring courtship.

“Certainly,” said I to myself, “I am infatuated, and I’m proud of it. Any man would be—any man whose mind was not all mouse-coloured and neutral.”

In the mellow evening light the pools of rain water glimmered like sheets of gold. Two swallows sat on a telegraph wire twittering to each other of the coming summer, two migrating blue-jays stopped in the apple tree by the porch to chatter scandal. A pair of belated white butterflies fluttered sleepily about the lower branches of the lilac bushes.

“They’re probably married also,” thought I, “and now they’re going home to bed. Everything that runs or flies or hops seems to be mated—except me. True, I don’t fly—unless from the Misses Timmins.”

I opened my creel and looked moodily into it. Fishing, after all, was cold comfort compared to stealing an interview with a winsome maid who ate bonbons to guitar accompaniment.

“May,” said I to myself, softly, “May,—might, May makes might and might makes right—pshaw! I’ll not go bothering my conscience with every little incident that comes up.” I had some consideration for my conscience; I knew how tired it was.

The rain water in the long road ruts glimmered with a deeper orange light. A bat fluttered around the darkening foliage of the maples; a cricket creaked from door-sill.

“The bat,” thought I, “is looking for a little lady-bat; the cricket is serenading; I think that I’ll follow their example. I wish I could play on my harmonica and sing at the same time.”

About ten o’clock that night, the moon being well up, I went out onto the porch and looked at it until I felt sufficiently sentimental to sit on the damp grass under May’s window and make music as I understood it. So I took my banjo under my arm, dropped my harmonica into my coat pocket, and tip-toed off down the road, as many a better man had done before me, and would continue to do as long as that boarding-school existed.

O delicious night in early Spring! Inured by the balm in the soft night winds, all the little field creatures had come out of their holes in meadow and pasture, in orchard and thicket, and were scraping away on monotonous shrill melodies, accentuated by the treble of hundreds of tree toads.

In every shadowy orchard katydids performed countless encores to the bass “bravos!” of the great bull-frogs along the mill-brook’s reedy banks. All living things did their part to celebrate the coming Summer, even a distant skunk added his mite to the spicy night. Personally I preferred the roadside lilacs, but it’s all a matter of taste, and George the Fourth liked his oysters over-ripe.

“If these bull-frogs,” thought I, “keep up their sonorous tom-toms, it will ruin my serenade—I know it, from experience.”

By this time I had reached the dormitory hedge.

“A brassy cornet would be lost in this hubbub,” I mused bitterly, looking up at the third window on the second floor.

I thumbed the bass string of my banjo doubtfully, paused, cleared my throat, included frogs, toads, katydids, and crickets in one general and comprehensive anathema, and sang this rehashed song:

Ye little loves that round her wait

To bring me tidings of my fate,

As May upon her pillow lies,

Ah! gently whisper Harry dies.

If this will not her pity move,

And the proud fair disdains to love,

Smile and say’t is all a lie,

And haughty Henry scorns to die!

“Bother take it,” I muttered, “I shouldn’t have sung that last verse—it may offend her. That’s the trouble about those old songs; you never can tell what you’re singing until you’ve put your foot in it.”

This mixed metaphor was probably due to the confusion in my mind, for what with the frogs and a lurking fear of the Misses Timmins, I was not as cool as I might have been.

While I was singing, two or three windows were softly raised, and now more were being raised, and I caught glimpses of shadowy white-draped figures leaning from sills or dodging be hind curtains.

And now her window opened softly; I saw a shape between the curtains and the sweet notes of a guitar came throbbing out into the night.

“Miss Thorne,” I whispered, “ask those young ladies to go in, please. They always come and bother.”

Some of them took the hint. I did not care for the rest, for time was precious, and I feared the Timmins! So I told Miss Thorne in a hollow, passionate whisper that it was out of the question for me to try to live without her, and a few other facts calculated to melt solid rocks into tears. But when I desired to be informed concerning her constancy, she interrupted me.

“What was that last verse you sang?” she asked.

“Oh, that was only one of those old songs, you know; I didn’t intend—”

“One of those old songs? Very well. Listen to this one then, and be assured of my constancy.”

The time that is to come, is not;

How then can it be mine?

The present moment’s all my lot,

And that, as fast as it is got,

Harry, is only thine!

Then talk not of inconstancy,

False hearts and broken vows;

If I, by miracle, can be

This live-long minute true to thee,

’Tis all that Heaven allows.

It was a pretty revenge for my parrot-like repetition of a verse that was out of place, but when, from a neighbouring window, another voice cried “Brava May! serves him right!” I was annoyed and protested in hoarse whispers.

Then all those little maids began to make fun of me. I thought I could distinguish May’s silvery mocking laughter, and, hurt and angry, I shook the dew of the lawn from my shoes, and went away, nursing my wrath and my hurt pride.

“That’s what one gets,” I mused, “that’s what a man gets by meddling with things that don’t concern him! I was an ass to make eyes at her. I was doubly an ass to think that she would care for good music—I was a triple ass to sing that idiotic old song. It was a too-cock-sure-independent—well don’t-if-you-don’t-want-to! sort of song, and women don’t like that. Women are all alike—it is only circumstances that change them. I wish I had sense enough to let ’em alone! The confounded song hurt her vanity—that’s what’s the matter!”

I sat down on a flat rock by the roadside and blew a dismal strain from my harmonica. It comforted me a little, so I played “Sir Daniel O’Donnel” and “Casey’s Lament.”

The weird strains of the latter wrung howls from a dog in a stable near by, so I changed to a pleasanter air to save his feelings. But my heart was heavy; I eyed the moon furtively and moped.

“Those feather-headed girls always come and listen every time a fellow tries to do a little wooing on his own account,” I muttered; “Barclay had the same experience, so did Kendall and Gordon. I’ll be hanged if I repeat this fiasco—it’s cursedly silly, anyway, and I don’t care whether it’s customary and traditional. I’ll not play circus for any woman on earth!”

I wiped my harmonica on my handkerchief and played “Bannigan’s Barracks” in a minor key. The dog in the stable howled intermittently.

I could see the dark mass of the dormitory out of the corner of my eye. A candle flickered behind one of the windows, I could not tell which, from where I was sitting.

And, as I eyed it askance, tooting resignedly the while, I saw somebody appear at the great gate, open it, and move swiftly out and up the moonlit road toward me.

“Some of those girls have told a Timmins, and she’s coming to do me!” I thought. “I don’t care. Miss Thorne made me ridiculous, and I’ll not see her again, and I’m on the public highway! Let the Misses Timmins advance!”

So I struck up a lively quickstep on my harmonica, and blinked innocently at the moon. The figure was close to me now, I saw it, but I tootled away, regardless.

“Mr. Stenhouse!”

I turned slowly.

“Oh, I know it is terribly imprudent, and if I’m caught I’ll be sent home, but I heard your harmonica—oh, such dismal strains!—and I thought if only I could see you for a second to tell you that it was not I that laughed, for I think your serenade was—was perfectly charming—there!”

We were standing face to face in the moonlight.

At last I said: “I was a fool to sing that song; I’m sorry, Miss Thorne.”

“Oh, it was not the song as much as it was that you said—you gave me to understand quite frankly that you had—had been to the school before. You said the girls always bothered—”

“Did I say that?.”

“Yes,—it was most humiliating for—for me.”

“Oh, I’m a perfect idiot,” I admitted.

She looked down at her slippers—they had been hurriedly and carelessly tied and I noticed it and knelt to repair the oversight.

“I was in such haste,” she said. “Is it true that you have serenaded the dormitory before?”

“Not the dormitory—”

“You know what I mean; have you?”

“All the fellows do,” I said, vaguely.

She tapped her foot on the gravel.

“Those strings are sufficiently tied,” she said, “tell me whom you serenaded?”

“I can’t do that, Miss Thorne.”

“Why? Then tell me when it was.”

When? Oh, last year, before I ever imagined such a girl as you existed. It’s a silly custom, anyway—”

“It isn’t, it’s charming when the man has any tact. It’s the tradition of the school that no girl shall spoon with a man who hasn’t serenaded her, and I do not expect to break the traditions of my school—”

“Only the rules, Miss Thorne?”

“Only the rules—and a heart or two!”

“Or two!”

Faith, sir, she said maliciously, did you think you were the only one?

“Yes,” said I, “I did.”

“And you tell me deliberately that you had serenaded other girls there before I came—I don’t know how many, perhaps a dozen, twenty, fifty, the whole school!”

“What!” I cried, bewildered.

“Oh, I don’t care,” she said, “I only wished to show you what men are and what their selfishness requires of women,—to sacrifice everything while they sacrifice nothing.”

“And you don’t care?” I asked.

“No, Mr. Stenhouse.”

“Then why did you risk everything to come and tell me?”

“W—what?” she stammered.

“Miss Thorne,” said I, very gravely, “your school is noted for its escapades. It is known in the village, not as the Misses Timmins’s Select Boarding-School for Young Ladies, but as The Devil’s Own. We engineer students are a reckless lot, also. We are, to put it plainly, a godless crew, but this—this is somehow different. I am beginning to believe that our thoughtless folly—yours and mine, may leave one of us miserable for life.”

“Me?”

“Who knows? I can only speak for myself,—I—I have changed already,—yes, in these few moments that we stood here face to face—”

“What do you mean?” she said mockingly.

“I mean that in another minute I shall love you—in another second!”

“Are you serious?” she demanded incredulously. Then, “Oh, I thought you jolly and clever, and you prove to be soft and silly! Master Harry, you bore me!”

“Do I?” I answered angrily. “Well, I’ll never do it again, and I was a fool to believe you would understand anything but chocolate-creams and dormitory flirting!”

“Not only soft and silly, but a boor,” she said. “Good-night. No, you need not walk to the gate with me—I never wish to set eyes on you again.”

III

On the first day of June I passed my final examinations at the great Engineering School at Clovermead, and was then ready to let myself loose on the mining regions of a deluded world.

The commencement exercises bored me; I went fishing most of the time, or else stayed in my rooms writing “Dry Fly Casting as a Fine Art” for the Trigger. In the long fragrant evenings I took lonely walks by the river or sat under the oak playing minor airs on my harmonica.

At the end of the first week in June the commencement exercises were over, the visiting hordes from New York and Boston had flitted away to Newport or Bar Harbor, the Government officers went back to Washington and West Point, and the little village of Clovermead lay in the sunshine, white, sweet-scented, deserted.

The Misses Timmins’s Select Boarding-School for Young Indies had its commencement—a rainbow affair—and dissolved, leaving, as residue, an empty school-house and a dormitory dedicated to silence.

I didn’t go to their commencement, not because I was not invited, for most of the fellows went anyway. No, since my last serenade, I had shunned the school and all its works.

It was true that I lingered in the village of Clovermead after my fellow-students had departed, not, as I frequently explained to myself, to catch a last glimpse of Miss Thorne, but to catch that veteran trout in the Clovermead River. “I shall never see Miss Thorne again,” I said to myself, “and I’m glad of it.”

So on the day of her commencement I went fishing, very far off and I passed a miserable day. It rained, among other things.

The next morning the sun shone in at my window and I looked out into the village with a strange weight at my heart. I did not feel hungry, but went to breakfast, determined to let nothing disturb me or my appetite. As I touched the sugar-tongs to the sugar, a faint whistle came on the June wind from the distant railroad station.

“There go the young ladies from the boarding-school,” said my landlady; “do take one of these shirred eggs, Mr. Stenhouse.”

“Thank you,” said I, with a queer sensation in my throat.

“May has gone,” I was thinking. After a while I said aloud: “what of it!”

“I beg your pardon,” said my landlady, smiling.

“I beg yours it was nothing; I was only thinking that I was alone in the village.”

“I hope you will stay,” she said, fingering the black-edged handkerchief in her lap.

“You are very good,” I replied; “I shall stay until I catch that big trout in the river.”

“Then poor luck to you!” smiled the kindly old lady, “what time will you have your dinner, Mr. Stenhouse?”

I went back to my room and sat down by the window. A flowering branch of late apple blossoms scraped across the sash as I threw it open and leaned out.

For a long while I listened to the droning of bees among the half-opened buds, thinking that the warmth had fled from the sunshine and the scent was gone from mead and sedge.

“And why?” I repeated to myself again and again, until a sullen anger seized me and I tramped up and down my room, my hands buried in the canvas pockets of my shooting coat.

“Now,” said I to myself, “this is d———d foolishness. I’ll just go and try for that trout, and I’ll catch him too,” I added, gritting my teeth to dull the pain in my heart, “I’ll catch him by fair means or foul, yes, by jingo! I’ll use a worm!” No, I felt no horror for the deed I was about to commit. All that was base and depraved in my nature had risen with my better feelings to combat a depression, a sorrow, that was so sudden, so deep, that I hardly understood it.

Under such circumstances the truly good come out strong—in novels; others do something wrong to occupy their minds. Wallowing dulls the capability of suffering, for a time. It is much practised by weak and strong, contemporary fiction to the contrary.

So it happened one day in early June, when the sky was china blue and filmy clouds trailed like lace across the disk of a pale sun, that I, Henry Stenhouse, well and sound in mind and body, decided to commit a crime.

I started down the road, swinging my creel over my shoulder and whistling, buoyed up by that false exhilaration which always took possession of me when I felt myself on good terms with the devil. In my pocket nestled my luncheon, a small flask of Bordeaux, fly-book, harmonica, reel, and a tin bait box.

Imagine what it costs me to write this!

Well it’s written,—and on I went, whistling “Sir Daniel O’Donnel,” as though I had not a care in the world and love was but an old wive’s tale.

Yet, whistle as I would, I could not close my eyes to the caustic criticism of the sunny world on my solitary condition. Robins hopped about the pastures in pairs, blue-birds flew from sapling to fence, in pairs, yellow butterflies whirled over the clover in dozens and dozens of pairs, and the very trees, the silver birches, the maples and elms, all seemed to grow in pairs. Two by two I counted oak and beach, nestling in each others shadows, two by two the twinkling silver aspens seemed to wink at me with every leaf.

I alone was alone.

“Because,” said I to myself, “I’ve got brains”; but the boast fell only on the idle unbelieving ears of the corn, too young to understand or sympathize.

A great tenderness was in my heart, but I crushed it out, and turned into the fields, treading my way through rustling corn where June breezes lingered, whispering.

When I struck the hazel patch I felt better, and I whistled “Sir Daniel O’Donnel” again.

A wood-thrush, striving to imitate me, produced an unconscious masterpiece; a cat-bird mewed unceasingly from the deeper growth. Both had mates.

I took the hidden path through the beech-woods until I came to a big pine. Here, following a trail, known to myself, I entered the denser woods, crossed the two spring brooks that feed the river, and after a few minutes rapid walking came to the oak which spreads above the limpid silvery pool, the abode of Mine Enemy.

“As long as I have sunk to the level of a pot hunter,” said I, treading softly over the moss, “I might as well do the thing thoroughly.”

Very cautiously I produced an angleworm from my box, baited my hook, cast the infernal machine into the pool, and then, placing my rod on the bank, put a flat stone on the butt and sat down to smoke. When I had finished my cigarette I lay down, stretching out on the moss under the oak tree.

And as I sprawled on my back looking skyward, I was aware of a pair of stockings—black stockings—hanging from a limb directly over my head.

Astonished and indignant I lay perfectly still, staring at the stockings. They had been wet but now were rapidly drying, swinging gently in the warm June wind.

This is pleasant!” I thought; “some credulous country wench has taken my pool for a foot bath. I’ll not put up with it, by jingo! Have fishermen no rights? Is this a picnic ground? Is that river a resort for barefooted giggling girls?”

If there were any people splashing and paddling about among the stones down the river, I knew that every trout within range would be paralyzed with fright. I sat up and tried to see through the foliage which bordered the shallow river where it curved into the woods.

“They’re down there,” I muttered, “and I bet they’ve done the business for every trout between here and the falls. Idiots!”

I looked up at the stockings. They were certainly silk, I could see that. The sun bronzed the pointed toes, now almost dry. And while I looked there came a faint sound of splashing close by, just where the river narrows to curve into the woods. Something bright was glistening down there between the branches, something white that moved slowly up stream, nearer and nearer, now plainly in view through the leaves.

It was a young woman in a light summer gown with a big straw hat on her head, and she was slowly and deliberately wading through the shallow water toward my pool.

She seemed to be enjoying it; the swift water rippled around her ankles dashing her skirts with spray, as she lifted her wet pink feet carefully over the sharp rocks and deeper channels. Her skirt, gathered naively in both hands, fluttered perhaps a trifle higher than it might have done under other circumstances. It was a pretty innocent picture, but it was out of place in my trout pool, and I stood up, determined to expostulate. After a second I sat down again, somewhat suddenly. The black stockings waved triumphantly above my head. I looked at them, bewildered, utterly upset. The young lady in the water was Miss Thorne.

Before I could decide what to do, she came in sight around the trees, stepping daintily over the sandy shallows. I dared not move. She did not look up.

“What the mischief shall I do?” I thought, keeping very still so that no movement should attract her eyes to the oak on the bank above. I could not retreat and leave my rod, I dared not creep to the pool to recover it. Besides, I didn’t want to go away.

She had sat down on a sunny rock, just below me, and was stirring the sandy bottom with her little toes. It was, as I said, a pretty picture, sweet and innocent, but utterly fatal to my peace of mind. I wondered what she’d do next, and lay silent, scarcely breathing.

“If she turns her back,” I thought, “I’ll get up and go. I’m no eavesdropper, and I’ll go,—only I hope she won’t give me the chance.”

She had drawn a book from the folds of her skirt, and, as I lay there without sound or motion, she began to read, repeating aloud to herself the passages that pleased her.

“I am the magic waterfall

Whose waters leap from fathomless and living springs,

Far in the mist-hung silence of the Past.”

She paused, turning the leaves with languid capriciousness, then:

“I fill the woods with songs; the trees,

Through whose twigs flow prophecies,

I deck with vestments green.”

And again she read:

“The shower has freshened the song of the bird

And budded the bushes

And gilded the maple and tasselled the linden and willow,

Staining with green the forest-fringed path.”

She sat silent, idly touching the fluttering pages. Then she raised her head, singing softly odd bits of songs to herself to the thrushes around her.

A great belted kingfisher flashed past, a blur of blue and white against the trees. His loud harsh rattle startled her for an instant.

And, as she turned to watch his flight along the winding stream, I rose and slipped noiselessly into the forest. Before I had taken a dozen steps, however, I remembered my rod, and halted irresolutely. Looking back through the thicket fringe, I saw that she had turned my way again, and it was out of the question to recover it without being seen.

“If she only had her stockings on,” I sighed.

Should I wait, taking discreet observations occasionally? Should I go and let the rod take care of itself? Suppose the big trout should seize hold and drag it into the river? Suppose Miss Thorne should step on the barbed hook with her bare little feet! At the thought I turned hastily back in my own tracks, halted again, started on, wavered, took one irresolute step, and stopped.

I could see her now quite plainly without being seen. She had tossed her book up on the moss, and was picking her way along the ascending bank, holding on to branch and root.

“She’s coming for her stockings, that’s what she’s doing,” I thought.

Until she had safely passed the pool where the hook lay, I kept my eyes on her. After that I waited until I saw her reach up to the oak-limb for the stockings; then I looked the other way.

I gave her ten minutes to complete her toilet, holding my watch in my hand.

Once she sang pensively that puzzling but pathetic old ballad:

“Mother, may I go out to swim?

Yes, my darling daughter,

Hang your hose on a hickory limb,

But don’t go near the water.”

The ten minutes were up at last. “Now,” said I to myself, “shall I look? No—yes—no indeed!—I don’t know,—I’ll just see whether—”

I turned around.

She had left the shelter of the oak and was hurrying down the bank toward my rod, with every appearance of excitement.

“I’ll bet there’s a fish on it,” said I to my self; “by jingo! there is!—and it’s bending and tugging as if a porpoise had the line! It’ll be into the river in a moment! There! It’s gone!”

But I was mistaken, for Miss Thorne grasped it just as it slid over the edge of the bank.

“She’ll break it! I’ll bet it’s my big fish! There! She’s pulling the fish out—she’s trying to drag the fish up! I can’t stand this! It’s no use—I’ve got to go.”

When she saw me hastening down the slope she did not cry out, neither did she drop the rod, but her blue eyes grew very large and round. And as I hurried up she gave one last convulsive tug and hauled up, over, and on to the bank an enormous trout, flapping and bouncing among the leaves.

In a second I had seized the fish—it took all the strength of my arm to hold him—and the rest was soon over. There he lay, a monarch among trout, glistening, dappled, crimson-flecked. I walked down to the water’s edge, washed my hands mechanically, and slowly climbed back again.

“I didn’t know it was your rod,” she said. “I only saw a big fish on it, and I pulled it out.”

“I—I thought you had left Clovermead,” I stammered.

“I thought you had also,” she said; “all the others have gone. To-morrow I go; my guardian is coming.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes; at eight o’clock in the morning.”

There was an awkward pause. I glanced askance at the fish, already ashamed of my work, dreading to know what she thought of a man who fished with bait.

“It is a large trout,” she said timidly; “it is a wonder that I didn’t break your rod and line. You see I never before caught a trout.”

“And—and you would not—you don’t think less of a man because he fishes with bait?” I asked, red with shame.

“I? Why, no. What else would you use?”

“Flies,” I said, desperately. “You know it.”

“Flies? Can you catch enough?”

“I mean artificial flies,” I said. “You don’t understand, you can’t conceive the depth of depravity that leads a man to catch a trout as I’ve caught this, can you? It’s simple murder.”

“But,” said Miss Thorne, with a puzzled glance at the fish, “I thought that I caught him.”

“I—I baited the hook,” I faltered.

“Then,” said she, “it’s a clear case of collusion, and we’re both responsible.”

We looked at each other for an instant. She sighed, almost imperceptibly.

“I am very sorry for what I said that night,” I began. “You can’t think how it has troubled me ever since. I have suffered a great deal—er—and I’m deucedly miserable, Miss Thorne.”

“I forgive you,” she said sweetly. “Why did you not ask me before?”

“Because,” said I, “being an idiot I didn’t dare.”

“It made me very unhappy,” she said. “I should not have spoken so—”

“Oh, you were quite right!” I cried; “it was my fault entirely.”

“No indeed!”

“It was, really.”

“And to think I should have spoken so after the trout you gave me and the serenade—”

“If the music had been as good as the trout—”

“It was,—it was charming; and you said some things that first afternoon under my window—”

“I meant them! I mean them now—a thousand-fold!”

The crimson stained her cheeks. She half turned toward the river.

“I think,” she said, “that I am late for luncheon.”

Very humbly I produced my flask of Bordeaux, my cold chicken, bread, and hot-house pears. She looked at them, her head on one side.

“It is not very much,” I ventured, “for two.”

“I think it will do,” she said reflectively; “there are some cresses by the brook. I am fond of cresses. Have you pepper and salt?”

I rummaged in my pockets, produced the harmonica, a package of tobacco, a spare reel, a knife, a steel hunting watch, a cigarette case, a box of dry flies, a match-case, a box of leaders, and finally a neat little parcel of pepper and salt.

She watched me with perfect gravity.

“If you please,” she said, “you may go and play on your harmonica under that oak tree while I arrange the table. Will you?”

“Can’t I help you?” I murmured, giddy with happiness.

“No. Go and play ‘Sir Daniel O’Donnell.’”

I watched her, tooting fitfully the while, and presently she called to me that luncheon was ready, and asked me to lend her my handkerchief to dry her hands.

We drank in turn from the flask, gravely begging pardon for the goutte sans façon.

But the luncheon! There never was such a luncheon served in the palaces of Stamboul! I ate ambrosia—some name it chicken—and I drank nectar—foolish people would have called it Bordeaux,—and I sat opposite to and looked in the blue eyes of the sweetest maid in the world.

And so we sat and chatted on, I knowing little of what was said save that it was her voice, always her voice in my ears and every word was melody. The swift droop of the long lashes on the pure curved cheeks, the gentle caress in every movement, the light glinting on tawny hair, on stray curling strands blown across her eyes—these I remember.

The shadows came and laid their long shapes on the sands of the shore, the trees darkened where the massed foliage swept in one unbroken sheet above the moss; the red west blazed.

Once a fish splashed among the weeds; a wood-duck steered fearlessly past, peering and turning, sousing its gorgeous neck in the shallow stream.

At last she sprang up, touching her hair with light swift fingers, and shaking her skirts full breadth.

“I must go.”

“So soon?”

“Yes. Shall I say good-bye now for tomorrow?”

“Say it.”

“Good-bye, then.”

“Is that all?”

“Good-bye——”

“Nothing more?”

“Oh, what—what else?” she murmured; “I can say no more.”

“I can,” said I.

“You must not—ah, do you mean it?”

“Yes. I love you.”

Then we will go back—together, she said, innocently, and came close up to me, layng her white hands in mine.

•      •      •      •      •      •

“Ah,” said I, as we entered the road by the dormitory, “the trout is a noble one, but, May, it was murder that was done on Clovermead water.”

“And theft,” she said, with a faint smile, “where is my heart, if you please?”

And we looked long, smiling into each other’s eyes.

•      •      •      •      •      •

It all happened years ago. I have never touched bait to hook since, but I confess that I do still, at times, play “Sir Daniel O’Donnell” on the harmonica. May permits it, especially when the children beg me; and, as they are teasing me now, I shall probably play it to-night.

THE MAN AT THE NEXT TABLE

Awed and afraid I cross the border-land.

Oh, who am I that I dare enter here

Where the great artists of the world have trod?

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

THE MAN AT THE NEXT TABLE

The caricaturist is a freebooter. Public tolerance grants him letters of marque….

—Marmaduke Humphrey

•        •        •        •        •        •

Ainsi rien ne se passe, rien de vraiment immortel et d’éternellement doux que dans notre âme.

I

It was high noon in the city of Antwerp. From slender steeples floated the mellow music of the Flemish bells, and in the spire of the great cathedral across the square the cracked chimes clashed discords until my ears ached.

When the fiend in the cathedral had jerked the last tuneless clang from the chimes, I removed my fingers from my ears and sat down at one of the iron tables in the court. A waiter with his face shaved blue, brought me a bottle of Rhine wine, a tumbler of cracked ice, and a siphon.

“Does Monsieur desire anything else?” he inquired.

“Yes—the head of the cathedral bell-ringer; bring it with vinegar and potatoes,” I said, bitterly. Then I began to ponder on my great-aunt and the Crimson Diamond.

The white walls of the Hotel St. Antoine rose in a rectangle around the sunny court, casting long shadows across the basin of the fountain. The strip of blue overhead was cloudless. Sparrows twittered under the eaves; the yellow awnings fluttered, the flowers swayed in the summer breeze, and the jet of the fountain splashed among the water plants. On the sunny side of the piazza the tables were vacant; on the shady side, I was lazily aware that the tables behind me were occupied, but I was indifferent as to their occupants, partly because I shunned all tourists, partly because I was thinking of my great-aunt.

Most old ladies are eccentric, but there is a limit, and my great-aunt had overstepped it. I had believed her to be wealthy;—she died bankrupt. Still, I knew there was one thing she did possess, and that was the famous “Crimson Diamond.” Now, of course, you know who my great-aunt was.

Excepting the Koh-i-noor, and the Regent, this enormous and unique stone was, as everybody knows, the most valuable gem in existence. Any ordinary person would have placed that diamond in a safe-deposit. My great-aunt did nothing of the kind. She kept it in a small velvet bag, which she carried about her neck. She never took it off, but wore it dangling openly on her heavy silk gown.

In this same bag she also carried dried catnip leaves of which she was inordinately fond. No body but myself, her only living relative, knew that the Crimson Diamond lay among the sprigs of catnip in the little velvet bag.

“Harold,” she would say, “do you think I’m a fool? If I place the Crimson Diamond in any safe-deposit vault in New York, somebody would steal it sooner or later.” Then she would nibble a sprig of catnip and peer cunningly at me. I loathed the odour of catnip and she knew it. I also loathed cats. This also she knew, and of course surrounded herself with a dozen. Poor old lady! On the first day of March, 1896, she was found dead in her bed in her apartments at the Waldorf. The doctor said she died from natural causes. The only other occupant of her sleeping room was a cat. The cat fled when we broke open the door, and I heard that she was received and cherished by some people in a neighboring apartment.

Now, although my great-aunt’s death was due to purely natural causes, there was one very startling and disagreeable feature of the case. The velvet bag, containing the Crimson Diamond, had disappeared. Every inch of the apartment was searched, the floors torn up, the walls dismantled, but the Crimson Diamond had vanished. Chief of Police Conlin detailed four of his best men on the case, and as I had nothing better to do, I enrolled myself as a volunteer. I also offered $25,000 reward for the recovery of the gem. All New York was agog.

The case seemed hopeless enough, although there were five of us after the thief. McFarlane was in London, and had been for a month, but Scotland Yard could give him no help, and the last I heard of him he was roaming through Surrey after a man with a white spot in his hair. Harrison had gone to Paris. He kept writing me that clues were plenty and the scent hot, but as Dennet, in Berlin, and Clancy, in Vienna, wrote me the same thing, I began to doubt these gentlemen’s ability.

“You say,” I answered Harrison, “that the fellow is a Frenchman, and that he is now concealed in Paris; but Dennet writes me by the same mail that the thief is undoubtedly a German, and was seen yesterday in Berlin. To-day I received a letter from Clancy, assuring me that Vienna holds the culprit, and that he is an Austrian from Trieste. Now for Heaven’s sake,” I ended, “let me alone and stop writing me letters until you have something to write about.”

The night clerk of the Waldorf had furnished us with our first clue. On the night of my aunt’s death he had seen a tall, grave-faced man, hurriedly leave the hotel. As the man passed the desk, he removed his hat and mopped his forehead, and the night clerk noticed that in the middle of his head there was a patch of hair, as white as snow.

We worked this clue for all it was worth, and, a month later, I received a cable dispatch from Paris, saying that a man, answering to the description of the Waldorf suspect, had offered an enormous crimson diamond for sale to a jeweller in the Palais Royal. Unfortunately the fellow took fright and disappeared before the jeweller could send for the police, and since that time, McFarlane in London, Harrison in Paris, Dennet in Berlin, and Clancy in Vienna, had been chasing men with white patches on their hair until no gray-headed patriarch in Europe was free from suspicion. I myself had sleuthed it through England, France, Holland and Belgium, and now I found myself in Antwerp at the Hotel St. Antoine without a clue that promised anything except another outrage on some respectable white-haired citizen. The case seemed hopeless enough, unless the thief tried again to sell the gem. Here was our only hope, for, unless he cut the stone into smaller ones, he had no more chance of selling it than he would have had if he had stolen the Venus of Milo and peddled her about the rue de Seine. Even were he to cut up the stone, no respectable gem collector or jeweller would buy a crimson diamond without first notifying me; for although a few red stones are known to collectors, the colour of the Crimson Diamond was absolutely unique, and there was little probability of an honest mistake.

Thinking of all these things I sat sipping my Rhine wine in the shadow of the yellow awnings. A large white cat came sauntering by and stopped in front of me to perform her toilet until I wished she would go away. After a while she sat up, licked her whiskers, yawned once or twice, and was about to stroll on, when, catching sight of me, she stopped short and looked me squarely in the face. I returned the attention with a scowl because I wished to discourage any advances towards social intercourse which she might contemplate; but after a while her steady gaze disconcerted me, and I turned to my Rhine wine. A few minutes later I looked up again. The cat was still eyeing me.

“Now what the devil is the matter with the animal,” I muttered, “does she recognize in me a relative?”

“Perhaps,” observed a man at the next table.

“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.

“What I say,” replied the man at the next table.

I looked him full in the face. He was old and bald and appeared weak-minded. His age protected his impudence. I turned my back on him. Then my eyes fell on the cat again. She was still gazing earnestly at me.

Disgusted that she should take such pointed public notice of me, I wondered whether other people saw it; I wondered whether there was anything peculiar in my own personal appearance. How hard the creature stared. It was most embarrassing.

“What has got into that cat?” I thought. “It’s sheer impudence. It’s an intrusion, and I won’t stand it!” The cat did not move. I tried to stare her out of countenance. It was useless. There was aggressive inquiry in her yellow eyes. A sensation of uneasiness began to steal over me—a sensation of embarrassment not unmixed with awe. All cats looked alike to me, and yet there was something about this one that bothered me—something that I could not explain to myself, but which began to occupy me.

She looked familiar—this Antwerp cat. An odd sense of having seen her before—of having been well acquainted with her in former years slowly settled in my mind, and, although I could never remember the time when I had not detested cats, I was almost convinced that my relations with this Antwerp tabby had once been intimate if not cordial. I looked more closely at the animal. Then an idea struck me,—an idea which persisted and took definite shape in spite of me. I strove to escape from it, to evade it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks,—a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless—useless to try to put it from me,—this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane,—it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct resemblance to my great-aunt!

I gazed at her in horror. What enormous eyes the creature had!

“Blood is thicker than water,” said the man at the next table.

“What does he mean by that?” I muttered, angrily swallowing a tumbler of Rhine wine and seltzer. But I did not turn. What was the use?

“Chattering old imbecile,” I added to myself, and struck a match, for my cigar was out; but as I raised the match to relight it, I encountered the cat’s eyes again. I could not enjoy my cigar with the animal staring at me, but I was justly indignant, and I did not intend to be routed. “The idea! forced to leave for a cat!” I sneered, “we will see who will be the one to go!” I tried to give her a jet of seltzer from the siphon, but the bottle was too nearly empty to carry far. Then I attempted to lure her nearer, calling her in French, German, and English, but she did not stir. I did not know the Flemish for “cat.”

“She’s got a name, and won’t come,” I thought. “Now, what under the sun can I call her?”

“Aunty,” suggested the man at the next table.

I sat perfectly still. Could that man have answered my thoughts? for I had not spoken aloud. Of course not it was a coincidence, but a very disgusting one.

“Aunty,” I repeated mechanically, “aunty, aunty—good gracious, how horribly human that cat looks!” Then somehow or other, Shakespeare’s words crept into my head and I found myself repeating: “the soul of his grandam might happily inhabit a bird; the soul of his grandam might happily inhabit a bird; the soul of—nonsense!” I growled “it isn’t printed correctly! One might possibly say, speaking in poetical metaphor, that the soul of a bird might happily inhabit one’s grandam—” I stopped short, flushing painfully. “What awful rot!” I murmured, and lighted another cigar. The cat was still staring; the cigar went out. I grew more and more nervous. “What rot!” I repeated. “Pythagoras must have been an ass, but I do believe that there are plenty of asses alive to-day who swallow that sort of thing.”

“Who knows,” sighed the man at the next table, and I sprang to my feet and wheeled about. But I only caught a glimpse of a pair of frayed coat-tails and a bald head vanishing into the dining-room. I sat down again, thoroughly indignant. A moment later the cat got up and went away.

II

Daylght was fading in the city of Antwerp. Down into the sea sank the sun, tinting the vast horizon with flakes of crimson, and touching with rich deep undertones the tossing waters of the Scheldt. Its glow fell like a rosy mantle over red-tiled roofs and meadows; and through the haze the spires of twenty churches pierced the air like sharp, gilded flames. To the west and south the green plains, over which the Spanish armies tramped so long ago, stretched away until they met the sky; the enchantment of the afterglow had turned old Antwerp into fairyland; and sea and sky and plain were beautiful and vague as the night mists floating in the moats below.

Along the sea-wall from the Rubens Gate, all Antwerp strolled, and chattered, and flirted and sipped their Flemish wines from slender Flemish glasses or gossiped over krugs of foaming beer.

From the Scheldt came the cries of sailors, the creaking of cordage, and the puff! puff! of the ferry-boats. On the bastions of the fortress opposite a bugler was standing. Twice the mellow notes of the bugle came faintly over the water, then a great gun thundered from the ramparts, and the Belgian flag fluttered along the lanyards to the ground.

I leaned listlessly on the sea-wall and looked down at the Scheldt below. A battery of artillery was embarking for the fortress. The tub-like transport lay hissing and whistling in the slip, and the stamping of horses, the rumbling of gun and caisson, and the sharp cries of the officers came plainly to the ear.

When the last caisson was aboard and stowed, and the last trooper had sprung jingling to the deck, the transport puffed out into the Scheldt, and I turned away through the throng of promenaders, and found a little table on the terrace, just outside of the pretty café. And as I sat down, I became aware of a girl at the next table a girl all in white—the most ravishingly and distractingly pretty girl that I had ever seen. In the agitation of the moment I forgot that I was a woman-hater, I forgot my name, my fortune, my aunt, and the Crimson Diamond—all these I forgot in a purely human impulse to see clearly; and to that end I removed my monocle from my left eye. Some moments later I came to myself and feebly replaced it. It was too late; the mischief was done. I was not aware at first of the exact state of my feelings, for I had never before been in love but I did know that at her request I would have been proud to stand on my head, or turn a flip-flap into the Scheldt.

I did not stare at her, but I managed to see her most of the time when her eyes were in another direction. I found myself drinking something which a waiter brought—presumably upon an order which I did not remember having given. Later I noticed that it was a loathsome drink which the Belgians call American Grog, but I swallowed it and lighted a cigarette. As the fragrant cloud rose in the air, a voice, which I recognized with a chill, broke into my dream of enchantment. Could he have been there all the while, there sitting beside that vision in white? His hat was off, and the ocean breezes whispered about his bald head. His frayed coat-tails were folded carefully over his knees, and between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he balanced a bad cigar. He looked at me in a mildly cheerful way, and said, “I know now.”

“Know what?” I asked, thinking it better to humour him, for I was convinced that he was mad.

“I know why cats bite.”

This was startling. I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to say.

“I know why,” he repeated; “can you guess why?” There was a covert tone of triumph in his voice and he smiled encouragement. “Come, try and guess,” he urged.

I was uneasy, but I told him with stiff civility that I was unequal to problems.

“listen, young man,” he continued, folding his coat-tails closely about his legs—“try to reason it out; why should cats bite? Don’t you know? I do.”

He looked at me anxiously.

“You take no interest in this problem?” he demanded.

“Oh, yes.”

“Then why do you not ask me why?” he said, looking vaguely disappointed.

“Well,” I said in desperation, “why do cats bite?—hang it all!” I thought, “it’s like a burnt-cork show, and I’m Mr. Bones and he’s Tambo!”

Then he smiled gently. “Young man,” he said, “cats bite because they feed on catnip. I have reasoned it out.”

I stared at him in blank astonishment. Was this benevolent looking old party poking fun at me? Was he paying me up for the morning’s snub? Was he a malignant and revengeful old party, or was he merely feeble-minded? Who might he be? What was he doing here in Antwerp—what was he doing now! for the bald one had turned familiarly to the beautiful girl in white.

“Elsie, he said, do you feel chilly?” The girl shook her head.

“Not in the least, papa.”

“Good Lord!” I thought—“her father!”

“I have been to the Zoo to-day,” announced the bald one, turning toward me.

“Ah, indeed,” I observed, “—er—I trust you enjoyed it.”

“I have been contemplating the apes,” he continued, dreamily. “Yes, contemplating the apes.”

I said nothing, but tried to look interested.

“Yes, the apes,” he murmured, fixing his mild eyes on me. Then he leaned toward me confidentially and whispered; “can you tell me what a monkey thinks?”

“I can not,” I replied, sharply.

“Ah,” he sighed, sinking back in his chair, and patting the slender hand of the girl beside him, “ah, who can tell what a monkey thinks?”

His gentle face lulled my suspicions, and I replied very gravely; “who can tell whether they think at all?”

“True, true! Who can tell whether they think at all; and if they do think, ah! who can tell what they think?”

“But,” I began, “if you can’t tell whether they think at all, what’s the use of trying to conjecture what they would think if they did think?”

He raised his hand in deprecation. “Ah, it is exactly that which is of such absorbing interest, exactly that! It is the abstruseness of the proposition which stimulates research which stirs profoundly the brain of the thinking world. The question is of vital and instant importance. Possibly you have already formed an opinion.”

I admitted that I had thought but little on the subject.

“I doubt,” he continued, swathing his knees in his coat-tails,—“I doubt whether you have given much attention to the subject lately discussed by the Boston Dodo Society of Pythagorean Research.”

“I am not sure,” I said politely, “that I recall that particular discussion. May I ask what was the question brought up?”

“The Felis Domesticus question.”

“Ah, that must indeed be interesting! And—er—what may be the Felis Do—do——”

“Domesticus—not Dodo. Felis Domesticus, the common or garden cat.”

“Indeed,” I murmured.

“You are not listening,” he said.

I only half heard him; I could not turn my eyes from her face.

“Cat!” shouted the bald one, and I almost leaped from my chair. “Are you deaf?” he inquired, sympathetically.

“No—oh no!” I replied, colouring with con fusion; “you were pardon me you were—er—speaking of the Dodo. Extraordinary bird that——”

“I was not discussing the Dodo,” he sighed “I was speaking of cats.”

“Of course,” I said.

“The question is,” he continued, twisting his frayed coat-tails into a sort of rope—“the question is, how are we to ameliorate the present condition and social status of our domestic cats—”

“Feed ’em,” I suggested.

He raised both hands. They were eloquent with patient expostulation. “I mean their spiritual condition,” he said.

I nodded, but my eyes reverted to that exquisite face. She sat silent, her eyes fixed on the waning flecks of colour in the western sky.

“Yes,” repeated the bald one, “the spiritual welfare of our domestic cats—”

“Toms and Tabbies?” I murmured.

“Exactly,” he said, tying a large knot in his coat-tails.

“You will ruin your coat,” I observed.

“Papa!” exclaimed the girl, turning in dismay, as that gentleman gave a guilty start, “stop it at once!”

He smiled apologetically and made a feeble attempt to conceal his coat-tails.

My dear, he said, with gentle deprecation, “I am so absent-minded—I always do it in the heat of argument.”

The girl rose, and, bending over her untidy parent, deftly untied the knot in his flapping coat. When he was disentangled, she sat down and said, with a ghost of a smile; “he is so very absent-minded.”

“Your father is evidently a great student,” I said, pleasantly. How I pitied her, tied to this lunatic!

“Yes, he is a great student,” she said, quietly.

“I am,” he murmured, “that’s what makes me so absent-minded. I often go to bed and forget to sleep.” Then looking at me, he asked me my name, adding, with a bow, that his name was P. Royal Wyeth, Professor of Pythagorean Research and Abstruse Paradox.

“My first name is Penny—named after Professor Penny of Harvard,” he said, “but I seldom use my first name in connection with my second, as the combination suggests a household remedy of penetrating odour.”

“My name is Kensett,” I said, “Harold Kensett of New York.”

“Student?”

“Er—a little——”

“Student of diamonds?”

I smiled. “Oh, I see you know who my great-aunt was,” I said.

“I know her,” he said.

“Ah—perhaps you are unaware that my great-aunt is not now living—”

“I know her,” he repeated, obstinately.

I bowed. What a crank he was!

“What do you study? You don’t fiddle away all your time, do you?” he asked.

Now that was just what I did, but I was not pleased to have Miss Wyeth know it. Although my time was chiefly spent in shooting and fishing, I had once, in a fit of energy, succeeded in stuffing and mounting a woodcock, so I evaded a humiliating confession by saying that I had done a little work in ornithology.

“Good!” cried the Professor, beaming all over. “I knew you were a fellow scientist. Possibly you are a brother member of the Boston Dodo Society of Pythagorean Research. Are you a Dodo?”

I shook my head. “No, I am not a Dodo.”

“Only a jay?”

“A—what?” I said, angrily.

“A jay. We call the members of the Junior Ornithological Jay Society of New York, jays, just as we refer to ourselves as Dodos. Are you not even a jay?”

“I am not,” I said, watching him suspiciously.

“I must convert you, I see,” said the Professor, smiling.

“I’m afraid I do not approve of Pythagorean research,” I began, but the beautiful Miss Wyeth turned to me very seriously, and looking me frankly in the eyes, said:

“I trust you will be open to conviction.”

“Good Lord!” I thought, “can she be another crank?” I looked at her steadily. What a little beauty she was. She also then belonged to the Pythagoreans—a sect I despised. Everybody knows all about the Pythagorean craze, its rise in Boston, its rapid spread, and its subsequent consolidation with Theosophy, Hypnotism, the Salvation Army, the Shakers, the Dunkards, and the Mind Cure Cult, upon a business basis. I had hitherto regarded all Pythagoreans with the same scornful indifference which I accorded to the Faith Curists; being a member of the Catholic Church I was scarcely prepared to take any of them seriously. Least of all did I approve of the “business basis,” and I looked very much askance indeed at the “Scientific and Religious Trust Company,” duly incorporated and generally known as the Pythagorean Trust, which, consolidating with Mind Curists, Faith Curists, and other nourishing Salvation Syndicates, actually claimed a place among ordinary Trusts, and at the same time pretended to a control over man’s future life. No, I could never listen—I was ashamed of even entertaining the notion, and I shook my head.

“No, Miss Wyeth, I am afraid I do not care to listen to any reasoning on this subject.”

“Don’t you believe in Pythagoras?” demanded the Professor, subduing his excitement with difficulty, and adding another knot to his coat-tails.

“No,” I said, “I do not.”

“How do you know you don’t?” enquired the Professor.

“Because,” I said, firmly, “it is nonsense to say that the soul of a human being can inhabit a hen!”

“Put it in a more simplified form!” insisted the Professor; “do you believe that the soul of a hen can inhabit a human being?”

“No, I don’t!”

“Did you ever hear of a hen-pecked man?” cried the Professor, his voice ending in a shout.

I nodded, intensely annoyed.

“Will you listen to reason, then?” he continued, eagerly.

“No,” I began, but I caught Miss Wyeth’s blue eyes fixed on mine with an expression so sad, so sweetly appealing, that I faltered.

“Yes, I will listen,” I said, faintly.

“Will you become my pupil?” insisted the Professor.

I was shocked to find myself wavering, but my eyes were looking into hers, and I could not disobey what I read there. The longer I looked the greater inclination I felt to waver. I saw that I was going to give in, and, strangest of all, my conscience did not trouble me. I felt it coming—a sort of mild exhilaration took possession of me. For the first time in my life I became reckless I even gloried in my recklessness.

“Yes, yes,” I cried, leaning eagerly across the table, “I shall be glad delighted! Will you take me as your pupil?” My single eye-glass fell from its position unheeded. “Take me! Oh, will you take me?” I cried. Instead of answering, the Professor blinked rapidly at me for a moment. I imagined his eyes had grown bigger, and were assuming a greenish tinge. The corners of his mouth began to quiver, emitting queer, caressing little noises, and he rapidly added knot after knot to his twitching coat-tails. Suddenly he bent forward across the table until his nose almost touched mine. The pupils of his eyes expanded, the iris assuming a beautiful changing golden-green tinge, and his coat-tails switched violently. Then he began to mew.

I strove to rouse myself from my paralysis—I tried to shrink back, for I felt the end of his cold nose touch mine. I could not move. The cry of terror died in my straining throat, my hands tightened convulsively; I was incapable of speech or motion. At the same time my brain became wonderfully clear. I began to remember everything that had ever happened to me—everything that I had ever done or said. I even remembered things that I had neither done nor said, I recalled distinctly much that had never happened. How fresh and strong my memory! The past was like a mirror, crystal clear, and there, in glorious tints and hues, the scenes of my childhood grew and glowed and faded, and gave place to newer and more splendid scenes. For a moment the episode of the cat at the Hotel St. Antoine flashed across my mind. When it vanished, a chilly stupor slowly clouded my brain; the scenes, the memories, the brilliant colours, faded, leaving me enveloped in a grey vapour, through which the two great eyes of the Professor twinkled with a murky light. A peculiar longing stirred me—a strange yearning for something—I knew not what—but, oh! how I longed and yearned for it! Slowly this indefinite, incomprehensible longing became a living pain. Ah, how I suffered!—and how the vapours seemed to crowd around me. Then, as at a great distance, I heard her voice, sweet, imperative:

“Mew!” she said.

For a moment I seemed to see the interior of my own skull, lighted as by a flash of fire; the rolling eye-balls, veined in scarlet, the glistening muscles quivering along the jaw, the humid masses of the convoluted brain, then awful darkness a darkness almost tangible an utter blackness, through which now seemed to creep a thin silver thread, like a river crawling across a world—like a thought gliding to the brain—like a song, a thin, sharp song which some distant voice was singing—which I was singing.

And I knew that I was mewing!

I threw myself back in my chair and mewed with all my heart. Oh, that heavy load which was lifted from my breast! How good, how satisfying it was to mew! And how I did mew!

I gave myself up to it, heart and soul; my whole being thrilled with the passionate outpourings of a spirit freed. My voice trembled in the upper bars of a feline love song, quavered, descended, swelling again into an intimation that I brooked no rival, and ended with a magnificent crescendo.

I finished, somewhat abashed, and glanced askance at the Professor and his daughter, but the one sat nonchalantly disentangling his coat-tails, and the other was apparently absorbed in the distant landscape. Evidently they did not consider me ridiculous. Flushing painfully, I turned in my chair to see how my gruesome solo had affected the people on the terrace. Nobody even looked at me. This, however, gave me little comfort, for, as I began to realize what I had done, my mortification and rage knew no bounds. I was ready to die of shame. What on earth had induced me to mew? I looked wildly about for escape—I would leap up—rush home to bury my burning face in my pillows, and later in the friendly cabin of a homeward-bound steamer. I would fly—fly at once! Woe to the man who blocked my way! I started to my feet, but at that moment I caught Miss Wyeth’s eyes fixed on mine.

“Don’t go,” she said.

What in Heaven’s name lay in those blue eyes! I slowly sank back into my chair.

Then the Professor spoke. “Elsie, I have just received a dispatch.”

“Where from, Papa?”

“From India. I’m going at once.”

She nodded her head, without turning her eyes from the sea. “Is it important, papa?”

“I should say so. The cashier of the Trust has eloped with an Astral body, and has taken all our funds, including a lot of first mortgages on Nirvana. I suppose he’s been dabbling in futures, and was short in his accounts. I shan’t be gone long.”

“Then good-night,” papa, she said, kissing him, “try to be back by eleven.” I sat stupidly staring at them.

“Oh, it’s only to Bombay—I shan’t go to Thibet to-night,—good-night, my dear,” said the Professor.

Then a singular thing occurred. The Professor had at last succeeded in disentangling his coat tails, and now, jamming his hat over his ears, and waving his arms with a bat-like motion, he climbed upon the seat of his chair, and ejaculated the word “Presto!” Then I found my voice.

“Stop him!” I cried, in terror.

“Presto! Presto!” shouted the Professor, balancing himself on the edge of his chair and waving his arms majestically, as if preparing for a sudden flight across the Scheldt; and, firmly convinced that he not only meditated it but was perfectly capable of attempting it, I covered my eyes with my hands.

“Are you ill, Mr. Kensett?” said the girl, quietly.

I raised my head indignantly. “Not at all, Miss Wyeth, only I’ll bid you good-evening, for this is the 19th century, and I’m a Christian.”

“So am I,” she said. “So is my father.”

“The devil he is,” I thought.

Her next words made me jump.

“Please do not be profane, Mr. Kensett.”

How did she know I was profane? I had not spoken a word! Could it be possible she was able to read my thoughts? This was too much, and I rose and bowed stiffly.

“I have the honour to bid you good-evening,” I began, and reluctantly turned to include the Professor, expecting to see that gentleman balancing himself on his chair. The Professor’s chair was empty.

“Oh,” said the girl, faintly, “my father has gone.”

“Gone! Where?”

“To—to India, I believe.”

I sank helplessly into my own chair.

“I do not think he will stay very long—he promised to return by eleven,” she said, timidly.

I tried to realize the purport of it all. “Gone to India? Gone! How? On a broomstick? Good Heavens!” I murmured, “am I sane?”

“Perfectly,” she said, “and I am tired; you may take me back to the hotel.”

I scarcely heard her; I was feebly attempting to gather up my numbed wits. Slowly I began to comprehend the situation, to review the startling and humiliating events of the day. At noon, in the court of the Hotel St. Antoine, I had been annoyed by a man and a cat. I had retired to my own room and had slept until dinner. In the evening I met two tourists on the sea-wall promenade. I had been beguiled into conversation yes, into intimacy with these two tourists! I had had the intention of embracing the faith of Pythagoras! Then I had mewed like a cat with all the strength of my lungs. Then the male tourist vanishes—and leaves me in charge of the female tourist, alone and at night in a strange city! And now the female tourist proposes that I take her home!

With a remnant of self-possession I groped for my eye-glass, seized it, screwed it firmly into my eye, and looked long and earnestly at the girl. As I looked, my eyes softened, my monocle dropped, and I forgot everything in the beauty and purity of the face before me. My heart began to beat against my stiff white waistcoat. Had I dared—yes, dared to think of this wondrous little beauty, as a female tourist? Her pale sweet face, turned toward the sea, seemed to cast a spell upon the night. How loud my heart was beating. The yellow moon floated, half dipping in the sea, flooding land and water with enchanted lights. Wind and wave seemed to feel the spell of her eyes, for the breeze died away, the heaving Scheldt tossed noiselessly, and the dark Dutch luggers swung idly on the tide with every sail adroop.

A sudden hush fell over land and water, the voices on the promenade were stilled; little by little the shadowy throng, the terrace, the sea itself vanished, and I only saw her face, shadowed against the moon.

It seemed as if I had drifted miles above the earth, through all space and eternity, and there was nought between me and high Heaven but that white face. Ah, how I loved her! I knew it—I never doubted it. Could years of passionate adoration touch her heart—her little heart, now beating so calmly with no thought of love to startle it from its quiet and send it fluttering against the gentle breast? In her lap, her clasped hands tightened—her eyelids drooped as though some pleasant thought was passing. I saw the colour dye her temples, I saw the blue eyes turn, half-frightened to my own, I saw—and I knew she had read my thoughts. Then we both rose, side by side, and she was weeping softly, yet for my life I dared not speak. She turned away, touching her eyes with a bit of lace, and I sprang to her side and offered her my arm.

“You cannot go back alone,” I said.

She did not take my arm.

“Do you hate me, Miss Wyeth?”

“I am very tired,” she said, “I must go home.”

“You cannot go alone.”

“I do not care to accept your escort.”

“Then you send me away?”

“No,” she said, in a hard voice. “You can come if you like.” So I humbly attended her to the Hotel St. Antoine.

III

As we reached the Place Verte and turned into the court of the hotel, the sound of the midnight bells swept over the city, and a horse-car jingled slowly by on its last trip to the railroad station.

We passed the fountain, bubbling and splashing in the moonlit court, and, crossing the square, entered the southern wing of the hotel. At the foot of the stairway she leaned for an instant against the banisters.

“I am afraid we have walked too fast,” I said.

She turned to me coldly. “No, conventionalities must be observed. You were quite right in escaping as soon as possible.”

“But,” I protested, “I assure you—”

She gave a little movement of impatience. “Don’t,” she said, “you tire me—conventionalities tire me. Be satisfied,—nobody has seen you.”

“You are cruel,” I said, in a low voice—“what do you think I care for conventionalities—”

“You care everything,—you care what people think, and you try to do what they say is good form. You never did such an original thing in your life as you have just done.”

“You read my thoughts,” I exclaimed, bitterly—“it is not fair—”

“Fair or not, I know what you consider me,—ill-bred, common, pleased with any sort of attention. Oh! Why should I waste one word—one thought on you!”

“Miss Wyeth—” I began, but she interrupted me.

“Would you dare tell me what you think of me?—Would you dare tell me what you think of my father?”

I was silent. She turned and mounted two steps of the stairway, then faced me again.

“Do you think it was for my own pleasure that I permitted myself to be left alone with you? Do you imagine that I am flattered by your attention—do you venture to think I ever could be? How dared you think what you did think there on the sea-wall?”

“I cannot help my thoughts!” I replied.

“You turned on me like a tiger when you awoke from your trance. Do you really suppose that you mewed? Are you not aware that my father hypnotized you?”

“No—I did not know it,” I said. The hot blood tingled in my finger tips, and I looked angrily at her.

“Why do you imagine that I waste my time on you?” she said. “Your vanity has answered that question,—now let your intelligence answer it. I am a Pythagorean; I have been chosen to bring in a convert, and you were the convert selected for me by the Mahatmas of the Consolidated Trust Company. I have followed you from New York to Antwerp, as I was bidden, but now my courage fails, and I shrink from fulfilling my mission, knowing you to be the type of man you are. If I could give it up—if I could only go away, never, never again to see you! Ah, I fear they will not permit it!—until my mission is accomplished. Why was I chosen,—I, with a woman’s heart and a woman’s pride. I—I hate you!”

“I love you,” I said, slowly.

She paled and looked away.

“Answer me,” I said.

Her wide blue eyes turned back again, and I held them with mine. At last she slowly drew a long-stemmed rose from the bunch at her belt, turned, and mounted the shadowy staircase. For a moment I thought I saw her pause on the landing above, but the moonlight was uncertain. After waiting for a long time in vain, I moved away, and in going raised my hand to my face, but I stopped short, and my heart stopped too, for a moment. In my hand I held a long-stemmed rose.

With my brain in a whirl I crept across the court and mounted the stairs to my room. Hour after hour I walked the floor, slowly at first, then more rapidly, but it brought no calm to the fierce tumult of my thoughts, and at last I dropped into a chair before the empty fireplace, burying my head in my hands.

Uncertain, shocked, and deadly weary, I tried to think,—I strove to bring order out of the chaos in my brain, but I only sat staring at the long-stemmed rose. Slowly I began to take a vague pleasure in its heavy perfume, and once I crushed a leaf between my palms, and, bending over, drank in the fragrance.

Twice my lamp flickered and went out, and twice, treading softly, I crossed the room to re-light it. Twice I threw open the door, thinking that I heard some sound without. How close the air was, how heavy and hot! And what was that strange, subtle odour which had insensibly filled the room? It grew stronger and more penetrating, and I began to dislike it, and to escape it I buried my nose in the half-opened rose. Horror! The odour came from the rose, and the rose itself was no longer a rose—not even a flower now—it was only a bunch of catnip; and I dashed it to the floor and ground it under my heel.

“Mountebank!” I cried in a rage. My anger grew cold and I shivered, drawn perforce to the curtained window. Something was there—outside. I could not hear it, for it made no sound, but I knew it was there, watching me. What was it? The damp hair stirred on my head. I touched the heavy curtains. Whatever was outside them sprang up, tore at the window, and then rushed away.

Feeling very shaky, I crept to the window, opened it, and leaned out. The night was calm. I heard the fountain splashing in the moonlight and the sea winds soughing through the palms. Then I closed the window and turned back into the room; and as I stood there a sudden breeze, which could not have come from without, blew sharply in my face, extinguishing the candle and sending the long curtains bellying out into the room. The lamp on the table flashed and smoked and sputtered; the room was littered with flying papers and catnip leaves. Then the strange wind died away, and somewhere in the night a cat snarled.

I turned desperately to my trunk and flung it open. Into it I threw everything I owned, pell-mell, closed the lid, locked it, and seizing my mackintosh and travelling bag, ran down the stairs, crossed the court and entered the night office of the hotel. There I called up the sleepy clerk, settled my reckoning, and sent a porter for a cab.

“Now,” I said, “what time does the next train leave?”

“The next train for where?”

“Anywhere!”

The clerk locked the safe, and carefully keeping the desk between himself and me, motioned the office boy to look at the time-tables.

“Next train, 2.10. Brussels—Paris,” read the boy.

At that moment the cab rattled up by the curbstone, and I sprang in while the porter tossed my traps on top. Away we bumped over the stony pavement, past street after street lighted dimly by tall gas-lamps, and alley after alley brilliant with the glare of villainous all-night cafe-concerts, and then, turning, we rumbled past the Circus and the Eldorado, and at last stopped with a jolt before the Brussels Station.

I had not a moment to lose. “Paris!” I cried, “first-class!” and, pocketing the book of coupons, hurried across the platform to where the Brussels train lay. A guard came running up, flung open the door of a first-class carriage, slammed and locked it, after I had jumped in, and the long train glided from the arched station out into the starlit morning.

I was all alone in the compartment. The wretched lamp in the roof flickered dimly, scarcely lighting the stuffy box. I could not see to read my time-table, so I wrapped my legs in the travelling rug and lay back, staring out into the misty morning. Trees, walls, telegraph poles, flashed past, and the cinders drove in showers against the rattling windows. I slept at times, fitfully, and once, springing up, peered sharply at the opposite seat, possessed with the idea that somebody was there.

When the train reached Brussels, I was sound asleep, and the guard awoke me with difficulty.

“Breakfast, sir?” he asked.

“Anything,” I sighed, and stepped out to the platform, rubbing my legs and shivering. The other passengers were already breakfasting in the station café, and I joined them and managed to swallow a cup of coffee and a roll.

The morning broke, grey and cloudy, and I bundled myself into my mackintosh for a tramp along the platform. Up and down I stamped, puffing a cigar, and digging my hands deep in my pockets, while the other passengers huddled into the warmer compartments of the train or stood watching the luggage being lifted into the forward mail carriage. The wait was very long; the hands of the great clock pointed to six, and still the train lay motionless along the platform. I approached a guard, and asked him whether anything was wrong.

“Accident on the line,” he replied; “Monsieur had better go to his compartment and try to sleep, for we may be delayed until noon.”

I followed the guard’s advice, and crawling into my corner, wrapped myself in the rug and lay back watching the rain-drops spattering along the window-sill. At noon, the train had not moved, and I lunched in the compartment. At four o’clock in the afternoon the station-master came hurrying along the platform, crying “montez! montez! Messieurs—Dames, s’il vous plait,” and the train steamed out of the station and whirled away through the flat, treeless Belgian plains. At times I dozed, but the shaking of the car always awoke me, and I would sit blinking out at the endless stretch of plain, until a sudden flurry of rain blotted the landscape from my eyes. At last, a long, shrill whistle from the engine, a jolt, a series of bumps, and an apparition of red trousers and bayonets warned me that we had arrived at the French frontier. I turned out with the others, and opened my valise for inspection, but the customs officials merely chalked it without examination, and I hurried back to my compartment amid the shouting of guards and the clanging of station bells. Again I found that I was alone in the compartment, so I smoked a cigarette, thanked Heaven, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

How long I slept I do not know, but when I awoke, the train was roaring through a tunnel. When again it flashed out into the open country, I peered through the grimy rain-stained window and saw that the storm had ceased and stars were twinkling in the sky. I stretched my legs, yawned, pushed my travelling cap back from my forehead, and stumbling to my feet, walked up and down the compartment until my cramped muscles were relieved. Then I sat down again, and, lighting a cigar, puffed great rings and clouds of fragrant smoke across the aisle.

The train was flying; the cars lurched and shook, and the windows rattled accompaniment to the creaking panels. The smoke from my cigar dimmed the lamp in the ceiling and hid the opposite seat from view. How it curled and writhed in the corners, now eddying upward, now floating across the aisle like a veil. I lounged back in my cushioned seat watching it with inter est. What queer shapes it took. How thick it was becoming—how strangely luminous! Now it had filled the whole compartment, puff after puff crowding upward, waving, wavering, clouding the windows, and blotting the lamp from sight. It was most interesting. I had never before smoked such a cigar. What an extraordinary brand! I examined the end, flicking the ashes away. The cigar was out. Fumbling for a match to relight it, my eyes fell on the drifting smoke curtain, which swayed across the corner opposite. It seemed almost tangible. How like a real curtain it hung, grey, impenetrable. A man might hide behind it. Then an idea came into my head, and it persisted until my uneasiness amounted to a vague terror. I tried to fight it off—I strove to resist—but the conviction slowly settled upon me that something was behind that smoke veil, something which had entered the compartment while I slept.

“It can’t be,” I muttered, my eyes fixed on the misty drapery, “the train has not stopped.”

The car creaked and trembled. I sprang to my feet, and swept my arm through the veil of smoke. Then my hair slowly rose on my head. For my hand touched another hand, and my eyes had met two other eyes.

My senses reeled. I heard a voice in the gloom, low and sweet, calling me by name; I saw the eyes again, tender and blue; soft fingers touched my own.

“Are you afraid?” she said.

My heart began to beat again, and my face warmed with returning blood.

“It is only I,” she said, gently.

I seemed to hear my own voice speaking as if at a great distance; “you here—alone?”

“How cruel of you,” she faltered, “I am not alone.” At the same instant my eyes fell upon the Professor, calmly seated by the further window. His hands were thrust into the folds of a corded and tasselled dressing-gown, from beneath which peeped two enormous feet encased in carpet slippers. Upon his head towered a yellow night cap. He did not pay the slightest attention to either me or his daughter, and, except for the lighted cigar which he kept shifting between his lips, he might have been taken for a wax dummy.

Then I began to speak, feebly, hesitating like a child.

“How did you come into this compartment? You—you do not possess wings, I suppose. You could not have been here all the time. Will you explain—explain to me? See, I ask you very humbly, for I do not understand. This is the 19th century, and these things don’t fit in. I’m wearing a Dunlap hat—I’ve got a copy of the New York Herald in my bag,—President Cleveland is alive and everything is so very commonplace in the world! Is this real magic? Perhaps I’m filled with hallucinations. Perhaps I’m asleep and dreaming. Perhaps you are not really here—nor I—nor anybody, nor any thing!”

The train plunged into a tunnel, and when again it dashed out from the other end, the cold wind blew furiously in my face from the further window. It was wide open; the Professor was gone.

“Papa has changed to another compartment,” she said, quietly; “I think perhaps you were beginning to bore him.”

Her eyes met mine and she smiled faintly.

“Are you very much bewildered?”

I looked at her in silence. She sat very quietly, her white hands clasped above her knee, her curly hair glittering to her girdle. A long robe, almost silvery in the twilight, clung to her young figure; her bare feet were thrust deep into a pair of shimmering eastern slippers.

“When you fled,” she sighed, “I was asleep and there was no time to lose. I barely had a moment to go to Bombay, to find Papa, and return in time to join you. This is an East Indian costume.”

Still I was silent.

“Are you shocked?” she asked simply.

“No,” I replied in a dull voice, “I’m past that.”

“You are very rude,” she said, with the tears starting to her eyes.

“I do not mean to be. I only wish to go away—away somewhere and find out what my name is.”

“Your name is Harold Kensett.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, eagerly.

“Yes, what troubles you?”

“Is everything plain to you? Are you a sort of prophet and second sight medium? Is nothing hidden from you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she faltered. My head ached and I clasped it in my hand.

A sudden change came over her. “I am human, believe me!” she said with piteous eagerness; “indeed I do not seem strange to those who understand. You wonder, because you left me at midnight in Antwerp and you wake to find me here. If, because I find myself reincarnated, endowed with senses and capabilities which few at present possess; if I am so made, why should it seem strange? It is all so natural to me. If I appear to you—”

“Appear!!!”

“Yes—”

“Elsie!” I cried, “can you vanish?”

“Yes,” she murmured, “—does it seem to you unwomanly?”

“Great Heaven!” I groaned.

“Don’t,” she cried, with tears in her voice,—“oh, please don’t! Help me to bear it! If you only knew how awful it is to be different from other girls,—how mortifying it is to me to be able to vanish,—oh, how I hate and detest it all!”

“Don’t cry,” I said, looking at her pityingly.

“Oh dear me!” she sobbed. “You shudder at the sight of me because I can vanish.”

“I don’t!” I cried.

“Yes you do! You abhor me,—you shrink away! Oh why did I ever see you,—why did you ever come into my life,—what have I done in ages past, that now, reborn, I suffer cruelly—cruelly!”

“What do you mean!” I whispered. My voice trembled with happiness.

“I?—nothing but—you think me a fabled monster.”

“Elsie—my sweet Elsie,” I said, “I don’t think you a fabled monster; I love you,—see—see—I am at your feet, listen to me, my darling—”

She turned her blue eyes to mine. I saw tears sparkling on the curved lashes.

“Elsie, I love you,” I said again.

Slowly she raised her white hands to my head and held it a moment, looking at me strangely. Then her face grew nearer to my own, her glittering hair fell over my shoulders, her lips rested on mine.

In that long sweet kiss, the beating of her heart answered mine, and I learned a thousand truths, wonderful, mysterious, splendid, but when our lips fell apart,—the memory of what I learned departed also.

“It was so very simple and beautiful,” she sighed, “and I—I never saw it. But the Mahatmas knew—ah, they knew that my mission could only be accomplished through love.”

“And it is,” I whispered, “for you shall teach me—me—your husband.”

“And—and you will not be impatient? You will try to believe?”

“I will believe what you tell me, my sweetheart.”

“Even about—cats?”

Before I could reply the further window opened and a yellow nightcap, followed by the Professor, entered from somewhere without. Elsie sank back on her sofa, but the Professor needed not to be told, and we both knew he was already busily reading our thoughts.

For a moment there was dead silence,—long enough for the Professor to grasp the full significance of what had passed. Then he uttered a single exclamation; “Oh!”

After a while, however, he looked at me for the first time that evening, saying; “Congratulate you, Mr. Kensett, I’m sure;” tied several knots in the cord of his dressing-gown, lighted a cigar, and paid no further attention to either of us. Some moments later he opened the window again and disappeared. I looked across the aisle at Elsie.

“You may come over beside me,” she said, shyly.

IV

It was nearly ten o’clock and our train was rapidly approaching Paris. We passed village after village wrapped in mist, station after station hung with twinkling red and blue and yellow lanterns, then sped on again with the echo of the switch bells ringing in our ears.

When at length the train slowed up and stopped, I opened the window and looked out upon a long wet platform, shining under the electric lights.

A guard came running by, throwing open the doors of each compartment, and crying, “Paris next! Tickets, if you please.”

I handed him my book of coupons from which he tore several and handed it back. Then he lifted his lantern and peered into the compartment saying: “Is Monsieur alone?”

I turned to Elsie.

“He wants your ticket—give it to me.”

“What’s that?” demanded the guard.

I looked anxiously at Elsie.

“If your father has the tickets—” I began, but was interrupted by the guard who snapped, “Monsieur will give himself the trouble to remember that I do not understand English.”

“Keep quiet!” I said sharply in French, “I am not speaking to you.”

The guard stared stupidly at me, then at my luggage, and finally, entering the car, knelt down and peered under the seats. Presently he got up, very red in the face, and went out slamming the door. He had not paid the slightest attention to Elsie, but I distinctly heard him say, “only Englishmen and idiots talk to themselves!”

“Elsie,” I faltered, “do you mean to say that guard could not see you?”

She began to look so serious again that I merely added, “never mind, I don’t care whether you are invisible or not, dearest.”

“I am not invisible to you,” she said; “why should you care?”

A great noise of bells and whistles drowned our voices, and amid the whirring of switch bells, the hissing of steam, and the cries of “Paris! All out!” our train glided into the station.

It was the Professor who opened the door of our carriage. There he stood, calmly adjusting his yellow nightcap and drawing his dressing-gown closer with the corded tassels.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“On the engine.”

“In the engine I suppose you mean,” I said.

“No I don’t; I mean on the engine, on the pilot. It was very refreshing. Where are we going now?”

“Do you know Paris?” asked Elsie, turning to me.

“Yes. I think your father had better take you to the Hotel Normandie on the rue de l’Echelle.”

“But you must stay there too!”

“Of course—if you wish—”

She laughed nervously.

“Don’t you see that my father and I could not take rooms now? You must engage three rooms for yourself.”

“Why?” I asked stupidly.

“Oh dear—why because we are invisible.”

I tried to repress a shudder. The Professor gave Elsie his arm and, as I studied his ensemble, I thanked Heaven that he was invisible.

At the gate of the station I hailed a four-seated cab, and we rattled away through the stony streets, brilliant with gas jets, and in a few moments rolled smoothly across the Avenue de l’Opera, turned into the rue de l’Echelle, and stopped. A bright little page, all over buttons, came out, took my luggage, and preceded us into the hallway.

I, with Elsie on my arm and the Professor shuffling along beside me, walked over to the desk.

“Room?” said the clerk, “we have a very desirable room on the second fronting the rue St. Honore—”

“But we—that is—I want three rooms—three separate rooms!” I said.

The clerk scratched his chin. “Monsieur is expecting friends?”

“Say yes,” whispered Elsie, with a suspicion of laughter in her voice.

“Yes,” I repeated feebly.

“Gentlemen of course?” said the clerk looking at me narrowly.

“One lady.”

“Married, of course?”

“What’s that to you?” I said sharply, “what do you mean by speaking to us—”

“Us!”

“I mean to me,” I said, badly rattled; “give me the rooms and let me get to bed, will you?”

“Monsieur will remember,” said the clerk coldly, “that this is an old and respectable hotel.”

“I know it,” I said, smothering my rage.

The clerk eyed me suspiciously.

“Front!” he called with irritating deliberation, “show this gentleman to apartment ten.”

“How many rooms are there!” I demanded.

“Three sleeping rooms and a parlor.”

“I will take it,” I said with composure.

“On probation,” muttered the clerk insolently.

Swallowing the insult I followed the bell-boy up the stairs, keeping between him and Elsie, for I dreaded to see him walk through her as if she were thin air. A trim maid rose to meet us and conducted us through a hallway into a large apartment. She threw open all the bed-room doors and said, “Will Monsieur have the goodness to choose?”

“Which will you take,” I began, turning to Elsie.

“I! Monsieur!” cried the startled maid.

That completely upset me. “Here,” I muttered, slipping some silver into her hand, “now for the love of Heaven run away!”

When she had vanished with a doubtful “Merci, Monsieur,” I handed the Professor the keys and asked him to settle the thing with Elsie.

Elsie took the corner room, the Professor rambled into the next one, and I said good night and crept wearily into my own chamber. I sat down and tried to think. A great feeling of fatigue weighted my spirits.

“I can think better with my clothes off,” I said, and slipped the coat from my shoulders. How tired I was. “I can think better in bed,” I muttered, flinging my cravat on the dresser and tossing my shirt studs after it. I was certainly very tired. “Now,” I yawned, grasping the pillow and drawing it under my head, “now, I can think a bit,” but before my head fell on the pillow, sleep closed my eyes.

I began to dream at once. It seemed as though my eyes were wide open and the Professor was standing beside my bed.

“Young man,” he said, “you’ve won my daughter and you must pay the piper!”

“What piper?” I said.

“The pied piper of Hamlin, I don’t think,” replied the Professor vulgarly, and before I could realize what he was doing he had drawn a reed pipe from his dressing-gown and was playing a strangely annoying air. Then an awful thing occurred. Cats began to troop into the room, cats by the hundreds, toms and tabbys, grey, yellow, Maltese, Persian, Manx, all purring and all marching round and round, rubbing against the furniture, the Professor, and even against me. I struggled with the nightmare.

“Take them away!” I tried to gasp.

“Nonsense,” he said, “here is an old friend.”

I saw the white tabby cat of the Hotel St. Antoine.

“An old friend,” he repeated, and played a dismal melody on his reed.

I saw Elsie enter the room, lift the white tabby in her arms and bring her to my side.

“Shake hands with him,” she commanded.

To my horror the tabby deliberately extended a paw and tapped me on the knuckles.

“Oh!” I cried in agony, “this is a horrible dream! Why, oh, why can’t I wake!”

“Yes,” she said, dropping the cat, “it is partly a dream but some of it is real. Remember what I say, my darling; you are to go to-morrow morning and meet the twelve o’clock train from Antwerp at the Gare du Nord. Papa and I are coming to Paris on that train. Don’t you know that we are not really here now, you silly boy? Good night then. I shall be very glad to see you.”

I saw her glide from the room, followed by the Professor, playing a gay quick-step, to which the cats danced two and two.

“Good night sir,” said each cat, as it passed my bed; and I dreamed no more.

When I awoke, the room, the bed had vanished; I was in the street, walking rapidly; the sun shone down on the broad white pavements of Paris, and the streams of busy life flowed past me on either side. How swiftly I was walking! Where the devil was I going? Surely I had business somewhere that needed immediate attention. I tried to remember when I had awakened, but I could not. I wondered where I had dressed myself; I had apparently taken great pains with my toilet, for I was immaculate, monocle and all, even down to a long-stemmed rose nestling in my button-hole. I knew Paris and recognized the streets through which I was hurrying. Where could I be going? What was my hurry? I glanced at my watch and found I had not a moment to lose. Then as the bells of the city rang out mid-day, I hastened into the railroad station on the Rue Lafayette and walked out to the platform. And as I looked down the glittering track, around the distant curve shot a locomotive followed by a long line of cars. Nearer and nearer it came while the station gongs sounded and the switch-bells began ringing all along the track.

“Antwerp express!” cried the Sous-Chef de Gare, and as the train slipped along the tiled platform I sprang upon the steps of a first-class carriage and threw open the door.

“How do you do, Mr. Kensett,” said Elsie Wyeth, springing lightly to the platform. “Really it is very nice of you to come to the train.” At the same moment a bald, mild-eyed gentleman emerged from the depths of the same compartment carrying a large covered basket.

“How are you, Kensett?” he said. “Glad to see you again. Rather warm in that compartment—no I will not trust this basket to an expressman; give Miss Wyeth your arm and I’ll follow. We go to the ‘Normandie,’ I believe?”

All the morning I had Elsie to myself, and at dinner I sat beside her with the Professor opposite. The latter was cheerful enough, but he nearly ruined my dinner, for he smelled strongly of catnip. After dinner he became restless and fidgeted about in his chair until coffee was brought, and we went up to the parlour of our apartment. Here his restlessness increased to such an extent that I ventured to ask him if he was in good health.

“It’s that basket—the covered basket which I have in the next room,” he said.

“What’s the trouble with the basket?” I asked.

“The basket’s all right but the contents worry me.”

“May I inquire what the contents are?” I ventured.

The Professor rose.

“Yes,” he said, “you may inquire of my daughter.” He left the room but reappeared shortly, carrying a saucer of milk.

I watched him enter the next room which was mine.

“What on earth is he taking that into my room for?” I asked Elsie. “I don’t keep cats.”

“But you will,” she said.

“I? never!”

“You will if I ask you to.”

“But—but you won’t ask me.”

“But I do.”

“Elsie!”

“Harold!”

“I detest cats.”

“You must not.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You will when I ask it. Have I not given myself to you? Will you not make a little sacrifice for me?”

“I don’t understand—”

“Would you refuse my first request?”

“No,” I said miserably, “I will keep dozens of cats—”

“I do not ask that; I only wish you to keep one.”

“Was that what your father had in that basket?” I asked suspiciously.

“Yes, the basket came from Antwerp.”

“What! The white Antwerp cat!” I cried.

“Yes.”

“And you ask me to keep that cat? Oh Elsie!”

“Listen!” she said, “I have a long story to tell you; come nearer, close to me. You say you love me?”

I bent and kissed her.

“Then I shall put you to the proof,” she murmured.

“Prove me!”

“Listen. That cat is the same cat that ran out of the apartment in the Waldorf when your great-aunt ceased to exist—in human shape. My father and myself, having received word from the Mahatmas of the Trust Company, sheltered and cherished the cat. We were ordered by the Mahatmas to convert you. The task was appalling—but there is no such thing as refusing a command, and we laid our plans. That man with a white spot in his hair was my father—”

What! Your father is bald.”

“He wore a wig then. The white spot came from dropping chemicals on the wig while experimenting with a substance which you could not comprehend.”

“Then—then that clue was useless; but who could have taken the Crimson Diamond? And who was the man with the white spot on his head who tried to sell the stone in Paris?”

“That was my father.”

“He—he—st—took the Crimson Diamond?!” I cried aghast.

“Yes and no. That was only a paste stone that he had in Paris. It was to draw you over here. He had the real Crimson Diamond also.”

“Your father?”

“Yes. He has it in the next room now. Can you not see how it disappeared, Harold? Why, the cat swallowed it!”

“Do you mean to say that the white tabby swallowed the Crimson Diamond?”

“By mistake. She tried to get it out of the velvet bag, and, as the bag was also full of catnip, she could not resist a mouthful, and unfortunately just then you broke in the door and so startled the cat that she swallowed the Crimson Diamond.”

There was a painful pause. At last I said;

“Elsie, as you are able to vanish, I suppose you also are able to converse with cats.”

“I am,” she replied, trying to keep back the tears of mortification.

“And that cat told you this?”

“She did.”

“And my Crimson Diamond is inside that cat?”

“It is.”

“Then,” said I firmly, “I am going to chloroform the cat.”

“Harold!” she cried in terror, “that cat is your great-aunt!”

I don’t know to this day how I stood the shock of that announcement, or how I managed to listen, while Elsie tried to explain the transmigration theory, but it was all Chinese to me. I only knew that I was a blood relation of a cat, and the thought nearly drove me mad.

“Try, my darling, try to love her,” whispered Elsie, “she must be very precious to you—”

“Yes, with my diamond inside her,” I replied faintly.

“You must not neglect her,” said Elsie.

“Oh no, I’ll always have my eye on her—I mean I will surround her with luxury er, milk and bones and catnip and books—er—does she read?”

“Not the books that human beings read. Now go and speak to your aunt, Harold.”

“Eh! How the deuce—”

“Go, for my sake try to be cordial.”

She rose and led me unresistingly to the door of my room.

“Good Heavens!” I groaned, “this is awful.”

“Courage, my darling!” she whispered, “be brave for love of me.”

I drew her to me and kissed her. Beads of cold perspiration started in the roots of my hair, but I clenched my teeth and entered the room alone. The room was dark and I stood silent, not knowing where to turn, fearful lest I step on the cat, my aunt! Then through the dreary silence I called; “Aunty!”

A faint noise broke upon my ear, and my heart grew sick, but I strode into the darkness calling hoarsely:

“Aunt Tabby! it is your nephew!”

Again the faint sound. Something was stirring there among the shadows—a shape moving softly along the wall, a shade which glided by me, paused, wavered, and darted under the bed. Then I threw myself on the floor, profoundly moved, begging, imploring my aunt to come to me.

“Aunty! Aunty!” I murmured, “your nephew is waiting to take you to his heart!”

And at last I saw my great-aunt’s eyes, shining in the dark.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Close the door. That meeting is not for the eyes of the world! Close the door upon that sacred scene where great-aunt and nephew are united at last.

THE MYSTERY OF CHOICE

(1897)

CONTENTS:

… Dedication
… Introduction
** The Purple Emperor
** Pompe Funèbre
The Messenger
The White Shadow
Passeur
The Key To Grief
A Matter of Interest
‡‡ Envoi

** = general fiction
‡‡ = generic poetry

MAIN ToC     INDEX

DEDICATION

There is a maid, demure as she is wise,

With all of April in her winsome eyes,

And to my tales she listens pensively,

With slender fingers clasped about her knee,

Watching the sparrows on the balcony.

Shy eyes that, lifted up to me,

Free all my heart of vanity;

Clear eyes, that speak all silently,

Sweet as the silence of a nunnery—

Read, for I write my rede for you alone,

Here where the city’s mighty monotone

Deepens the silence to a symphony—

Silence of Saints, and Seers, and Sorcery.

Arms and the Man! A noble theme, I ween!

Alas! I can not sing of these, Eileen—

Only of maids and men and meadow-grass,

Of sea and fields and woodlands, where I pass;

Nothing but these I know, Eileen, alas!

Clear eyes that, lifted up to me,

Free all my soul from vanity;

Gray eyes, that speak all wistfully—

Nothing but these I know, alas!

—R. W. C.

April, 1896.

INTRODUCTION

I

Where two fair paths, deep flowered

And leaf-embowered,

Creep East and West across a World concealed,

Which shall he take who journeys far afield?

II

Canst thou then say, “I go,”

Or “I forego”?

What turns thee East or West, as thistles blow?

Is fair more fair than fair—and dost thou know?

III

Turn to the West, unblessed

And uncaressed;

Turn to the East, and, seated at the Feast

Thou shalt find Life, or Death from Life released.

IV

And thou who lovest best

A maid dark-tressed,

And passest others by with careless eye,

Canst thou tell why thou choosest? Tell, then; why?

V

So when thy kiss is given

Or half-forgiven,

Why should she tremble, with her face flame-hot,

Or laugh and whisper, “Love, I tremble not”?

VI

Or when thy hand may catch

A half-drawn latch,

What draws thee from the door, to turn and pass

Through streets unknown, dim, still, and choked with grass?

VII

What! Canst thou not foresee

The Mystery?

Heed! For a Voice commands thy every deed!

And it hath sounded. And thou needs must heed!

—R. W. C.

1896.

THE PURPLE EMPEROR

Un souvenir heureux est peut-être, sur terre,

Plus vrai que le bonheur.

[A happy memory may be, on earth,

More true than happiness.]

—Alfred de Musset

THE PURPLE EMPEROR

I

The Purple Emperor watched me in silence. I cast again, spinning out six feet more of waterproof silk, and, as the line hissed through the air far across the pool, I saw my three flies fall on the water like drifting thistledown. The Purple Emperor sneered.

“You see,” he said, “I am right. There is not a trout in Brittany that will rise to a tailed fly.”

“They do in America,” I replied.

“Zut! for America!” observed the Purple Emperor.

“And trout take a tailed fly in England,” I insisted sharply.

“Now do I care what things or people do in England?” demanded the Purple Emperor.

“You don’t care for anything except yourself and your wriggling caterpillars,” I said, more annoyed than I had yet been.

The Purple Emperor sniffed. His broad, hairless, sunburnt features bore that obstinate expression which always irritated me. Perhaps the manner in which he wore his hat intensified the irritation, for the flapping brim rested on both ears, and the two little velvet ribbons which hung from the silver buckle in front wiggled and fluttered with every trivial breeze. His cunning eyes and sharp-pointed nose were out of all keeping with his fat red face. When he met my eye, he chuckled.

“I know more about insects than any man in Morbihan—or Finistère either, for that matter,” he said.

“The Red Admiral knows as much as you do,” I retorted.

“He doesn’t,” replied the Purple Emperor angrily.

“And his collection of butterflies is twice as large as yours,” I added, moving down the stream to a spot directly opposite him.

“It is, is it?” sneered the Purple Emperor. “Well, let me tell you, Monsieur Darrel, in all his collection he hasn’t a specimen, a single specimen, of that magnificent butterfly, Apatura Iris, commonly known as the ‘Purple Emperor.’”

“Everybody in Brittany knows that,” I said, casting across the sparkling water; “but just because you happen to be the only man who ever captured a ‘Purple Emperor’ in Morbihan, it doesn’t follow that you are an authority on sea-trout flies. Why do you say that a Breton sea-trout won’t touch a tailed fly?”

“It’s so,” he replied.

“Why? There are plenty of May-flies about the stream.”

“Let ’em fly!” snarled the Purple Emperor, “you won’t see a trout touch ’em.”

My arm was aching, but I grasped my split bamboo more firmly, and, half turning, waded out into the stream and began to whip the ripples at the head of the pool. A great green dragonfly came drifting by on the summer breeze and hung a moment above the pool, glittering like an emerald.

“There’s a chance! Where is your butterfly net?” I called across the stream.

“What for? That dragonfly? I’ve got dozens—Anax Junius, Drury, characteristic, anal angle of posterior wings, in male, round; thorax marked with——”

“That will do,” I said fiercely. “Can’t I point out an insect in the air without this burst of erudition? Can you tell me, in simple everyday French, what this little fly is—this one, flitting over the eel grass here beside me? See, it has fallen on the water.”

“Huh!” sneered the Purple Emperor, “that’s a Linnobia annulus.”

“What’s that?” I demanded.

Before he could answer there came a heavy splash in the pool, and the fly disappeared.

“He! he! he!” tittered the Purple Emperor. “Didn’t I tell you the fish knew their business? That was a sea-trout. I hope you don’t get him.”

He gathered up his butterfly net, collecting box, chloroform bottle, and cyanide jar. Then he rose, swung the box over his shoulder, stuffed the poison bottles into the pockets of his silver-buttoned velvet coat, and lighted his pipe. This latter operation was a demoralizing spectacle, for the Purple Emperor, like all Breton peasants, smoked one of those microscopical Breton pipes which requires ten minutes to find, ten minutes to fill, ten minutes to light, and ten seconds to finish. With true Breton stolidity he went through this solemn rite, blew three puffs of smoke into the air, scratched his pointed nose reflectively, and waddled away, calling back an ironical “Au revoir, and bad luck to all Yankees!”

I watched him out of sight, thinking sadly of the young girl whose life he made a hell upon earth—Lys Trevec, his niece. She never admitted it, but we all knew what the black-and-blue marks meant on her soft, round arm, and it made me sick to see the look of fear come into her eyes when the Purple Emperor waddled into the café of the Groix Inn.

It was commonly said that he half-starved her. This she denied. Marie Joseph and ’Fine Lelocard had seen him strike her the day after the Pardon of the Birds because she had liberated three bullfinches which he had limed the day before. I asked Lys if this were true, and she refused to speak to me for the rest of the week. There was nothing to do about it. If the Purple Emperor had not been avaricious, I should never have seen Lys at all, but he could not resist the thirty francs a week which I offered him; and Lys posed for me all day long, happy as a linnet in a pink thorn hedge. Nevertheless, the Purple Emperor hated me, and constantly threatened to send Lys back to her dreary flax-spinning. He was suspicious, too, and when he had gulped down the single glass of cider which proves fatal to the sobriety of most Bretons, he would pound the long, discoloured oaken table and roar curses on me, on Yves Terrec, and on the Red Admiral. We were the three objects in the world which he most hated: me, because I was a foreigner, and didn’t care a rap for him and his butterflies; and the Red Admiral, because he was a rival entomologist.

He had other reasons for hating Terrec.

The Red Admiral, a little wizened wretch, with a badly adjusted glass eye and a passion for brandy, took his name from a butterfly which predominated in his collection. This butterfly, commonly known to amateurs as the “Red Admiral,” and to entomologists as Vanessa Atalanta, had been the occasion of scandal among the entomologists of France and Brittany. For the Red Admiral had taken one of these common insects, dyed it a brilliant yellow by the aid of chemicals, and palmed it off on a credulous collector as a South African species, absolutely unique. The fifty francs which he gained by this rascality were, however, absorbed in a suit for damages brought by the outraged amateur a month later; and when he had sat in the Quimperlé jail for a month, he reappeared in the little village of St. Gildas soured, thirsty, and burning for revenge. Of course we named him the Red Admiral, and he accepted the name with suppressed fury.

The Purple Emperor, on the other hand, had gained his imperial title legitimately, for it was an undisputed fact that the only specimen of that beautiful butterfly, Apatura Iris, or the Purple Emperor, as it is called by amateurs—the only specimen that had ever been taken in Finistère or in Morbihan—was captured and brought home alive by Joseph Marie Gloanec, ever afterward to be known as the Purple Emperor.

When the capture of this rare butterfly became known, the Red Admiral nearly went crazy. Every day for a week he trotted over to the Groix Inn, where the Purple Emperor lived with his niece, and brought his microscope to bear on the rare newly captured butterfly, in hopes of detecting a fraud. But this specimen was genuine, and he leered through his microscope in vain.

“No chemicals there, Admiral,” grinned the Purple Emperor; and the Red Admiral chattered with rage.

To the scientific world of Brittany and France the capture of an Apatura Iris in Morbihan was of great importance. The Museum of Quimper offered to purchase the butterfly, but the Purple Emperor, though a hoarder of gold, was a monomaniac on butterflies, and he jeered at the Curator of the Museum. From all parts of Brittany and France letters of inquiry and congratulation poured in upon him. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him a prize, and the Paris Entomological Society made him an honorary member. Being a Breton peasant, and a more than commonly pig-headed one at that, these honours did not disturb his equanimity; but when the little hamlet of St. Gildas elected him mayor, and, as is the custom in Brittany under such circumstances, he left his thatched house to take up an official life in the little Groix Inn, his head became completely turned. To be mayor in a village of nearly one hundred and fifty people! It was an empire! So he became unbearable, drinking himself viciously drunk every night of his life, maltreating his niece, Lys Trevec, like the barbarous old wretch that he was, and driving the Red Admiral nearly frantic with his eternal harping on the capture of Apatura Iris. Of course he refused to tell where he had caught the butterfly. The Red Admiral stalked his footsteps, but in vain.

“He! he! he!” nagged the Purple Emperor, cuddling his chin over a glass of cider; “I saw you sneaking about the St. Gildas spinny yesterday morning. So you think you can find another Apatura Iris by running after me? It won’t do, Admiral, it won’t do, d’ye see?”

The Red Admiral turned yellow with mortification and envy, but the next day he actually took to his bed, for the Purple Emperor had brought home not a butterfly but a live chrysalis, which, if successfully hatched, would become a perfect specimen of the invaluable Apatura Iris. This was the last straw. The Red Admiral shut himself up in his little stone cottage, and for weeks now he had been invisible to everybody except ’Fine Lelocard who carried him a loaf of bread and a mullet or langouste every morning.

The withdrawal of the Red Admiral from the society of St. Gildas excited first the derision and finally the suspicion of the Purple Emperor. What deviltry could he be hatching? Was he experimenting with chemicals again, or was he engaged in some deeper plot, the object of which was to discredit the Purple Emperor? Roux, the postman, who carried the mail on foot once a day from Bannelec, a distance of fifteen miles each way, had brought several suspicious letters, bearing English stamps, to the Red Admiral, and the next day the Admiral had been observed at his window grinning up into the sky and rubbing his hands together. A night or two after this apparition, the postman left two packages at the Groix Inn for a moment while he ran across the way to drink a glass of cider with me. The Purple Emperor, who was roaming about the café, snooping into everything that did not concern him, came upon the packages and examined the postmarks and addresses. One of the packages was square and heavy, and felt like a book. The other was also square, but very light, and felt like a pasteboard box. They were both addressed to the Red Admiral, and they bore English stamps.

When Roux, the postman, came back, the Purple Emperor tried to pump him, but the poor little postman knew nothing about the contents of the packages, and after he had taken them around the corner to the cottage of the Red Admiral, the Purple Emperor ordered a glass of cider, and deliberately fuddled himself until Lys came in and tearfully supported him to his room. Here he became so abusive and brutal that Lys called to me, and I went and settled the trouble without wasting any words. This also the Purple Emperor remembered, and waited his chance to get even with me.

That had happened a week ago, and until to-day he had not deigned to speak to me.

Lys had posed for me all the week, and to-day being Saturday, and I lazy, we had decided to take a little relaxation, she to visit and gossip with her little black-eyed friend Yvette in the neighbouring hamlet of St. Julien, and I to try the appetites of the Breton trout with the contents of my American fly book.

I had thrashed the stream very conscientiously for three hours, but not a trout had risen to my cast, and I was piqued. I had begun to believe that there were no trout in the St. Gildas stream, and would probably have given up had I not seen the sea trout snap the little fly which the Purple Emperor had named so scientifically. That set me thinking. Probably the Purple Emperor was right, for he certainly was an expert in everything that crawled and wriggled in Brittany. So I matched, from my American fly book, the fly that the sea trout had snapped up, and withdrawing the cast of three, knotted a new leader to the silk and slipped a fly on the loop. It was a queer fly. It was one of those unnameable experiments which fascinate anglers in sporting stores and which generally prove utterly useless. Moreover, it was a tailed fly, but of course I easily remedied that with a stroke of my penknife. Then I was all ready, and I stepped out into the hurrying rapids and cast straight as an arrow to the spot where the sea trout had risen. Lightly as a plume the fly settled on the bosom of the pool; then came a startling splash, a gleam of silver, and the line tightened from the vibrating rod-tip to the shrieking reel. Almost instantly I checked the fish, and as he floundered for a moment, making the water boil along his glittering sides, I sprang to the bank again, for I saw that the fish was a heavy one and I should probably be in for a long run down the stream. The five-ounce rod swept in a splendid circle, quivering under the strain. “Oh, for a gaff-hook!” I cried aloud, for I was now firmly convinced that I had a salmon to deal with, and no sea trout at all.

Then as I stood, bringing every ounce to bear on the sulking fish, a lithe, slender girl came hurriedly along the opposite bank calling out to me by name.

“Why, Lys!” I said, glancing up for a second, “I thought you were at St. Julien with Yvette.”

“Yvette has gone to Bannelec. I went home and found an awful fight going on at the Groix Inn, and I was so frightened that I came to tell you.”

The fish dashed off at that moment, carrying all the line my reel held, and I was compelled to follow him at a jump. Lys, active and graceful as a young deer, in spite of her Pont-Aven sabots, followed along the opposite bank until the fish settled in a deep pool, shook the line savagely once or twice, and then relapsed into the sulks.

“Fight at the Groix Inn?” I called across the water. “What fight?”

“Not exactly fight,” quavered Lys, “but the Red Admiral has come out of his house at last, and he and my uncle are drinking together and disputing about butterflies. I never saw my uncle so angry, and the Red Admiral is sneering and grinning. Oh, it is almost wicked to see such a face!”

“But Lys,” I said, scarcely able to repress a smile, “your uncle and the Red Admiral are always quarrelling and drinking.”

“I know—oh, dear me!—but this is different, Monsieur Darrel. The Red Admiral has grown old and fierce since he shut himself up three weeks ago, and—oh, dear! I never saw such a look in my uncle’s eyes before. He seemed insane with fury. His eyes—I can’t speak of it—and then Terrec came in.”

“Oh,” I said more gravely, “that was unfortunate. What did the Red Admiral say to his son?”

Lys sat down on a rock among the ferns, and gave me a mutinous glance from her blue eyes.

Yves Terrec, loafer, poacher, and son of Louis Jean Terrec, otherwise the Red Admiral, had been kicked out by his father, and had also been forbidden the village by the Purple Emperor, in his majestic capacity of mayor. Twice the young ruffian had returned: once to rifle the bedroom of the Purple Emperor—an unsuccessful enterprise—and another time to rob his own father. He succeeded in the latter attempt, but was never caught, although he was frequently seen roving about the forests and moors with his gun. He openly menaced the Purple Emperor; vowed that he would marry Lys in spite of all the gendarmes in Quimperlé; and these same gendarmes he led many a long chase through brier-filled swamps and over miles of yellow gorse.

What he did to the Purple Emperor—what he intended to do—disquieted me but little; but I worried over his threat concerning Lys. During the last three months this had bothered me a great deal; for when Lys came to St. Gildas from the convent, the first thing she captured was my heart. For a long time I had refused to believe that any tie of blood linked this dainty blue-eyed creature with the Purple Emperor. Although she dressed in the velvet-laced bodice and blue petticoat of Finistère, and wore the bewitching white coiffe of St. Gildas, it seemed like a pretty masquerade. To me she was as sweet and as gently bred as many a maiden of the noble Faubourg who danced with her cousins at a Louis XV fête champêtre. So when Lys said that Yves Terrec had returned openly to St. Gildas, I felt that I had better be there also.

“What did Terrec say, Lys?” I asked, watching the line vibrating above the placid pool.

The wild rose colour crept into her cheeks. “Oh,” she answered, with a little toss of her chin, “you know what he always says.”

“That he will carry you away?”

“Yes.”

“In spite of the Purple Emperor, the Red Admiral, and the gendarmes?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you say, Lys?”

“I? Oh, nothing.”

“Then let me say it for you.”

Lys looked at her delicate pointed sabots, the sabots from Pont-Aven, made to order. They fitted her little foot. They were her only luxury.

“Will you let me answer for you, Lys?” I asked.

“You, Monsieur Darrel?”

“Yes. Will you let me give him his answer?”

“Mon Dieu, why should you concern yourself, Monsieur Darrel?”

The fish lay very quiet, but the rod in my hand trembled.

“Because I love you, Lys.”

The wild rose colour in her cheeks deepened; she gave a gentle gasp, then hid her curly head in her hands.

“I love you, Lys.”

“Do you know what you say?” she stammered.

“Yes, I love you.”

She raised her sweet face and looked at me across the pool.

“I love you,” she said, while the tears stood like stars in her eyes. “Shall I come over the brook to you?”

II

That night Yves Terrec left the village of St. Gildas vowing vengeance against his father, who refused him shelter.

I can see him now, standing in the road, his bare legs rising like pillars of bronze from his straw-stuffed sabots, his short velvet jacket torn and soiled by exposure and dissipation, and his eyes, fierce, roving, bloodshot—while the Red Admiral squeaked curses on him, and hobbled away into his little stone cottage.

“I will not forget you!” cried Yves Terrec, and stretched out his hand toward his father with a terrible gesture. Then he whipped his gun to his cheek and took a short step forward, but I caught him by the throat before he could fire, and a second later we were rolling in the dust of the Bannelec road. I had to hit him a heavy blow behind the ear before he would let go, and then, rising and shaking myself, I dashed his muzzle-loading fowling piece to bits against a wall, and threw his knife into the river. The Purple Emperor was looking on with a queer light in his eyes. It was plain that he was sorry Terrec had not choked me to death.

“He would have killed his father,” I said, as I passed him, going toward the Groix Inn.

“That’s his business,” snarled the Purple Emperor. There was a deadly light in his eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to attack me; but he was merely viciously drunk, so I shoved him out of my way and went to bed, tired and disgusted.

The worst of it was I couldn’t sleep, for I feared that the Purple Emperor might begin to abuse Lys. I lay restlessly tossing among the sheets until I could stay there no longer. I did not dress entirely; I merely slipped on a pair of chaussons and sabots, a pair of knickerbockers, a jersey, and a cap. Then, loosely tying a handkerchief about my throat, I went down the worm-eaten stairs and out into the moonlit road. There was a candle flaring in the Purple Emperor’s window, but I could not see him.

“He’s probably dead drunk,” I thought, and looked up at the window where, three years before, I had first seen Lys.

“Asleep, thank Heaven!” I muttered, and wandered out along the road. Passing the small cottage of the Red Admiral, I saw that it was dark, but the door was open. I stepped inside the hedge to shut it, thinking, in case Yves Terrec should be roving about, his father would lose whatever he had left.

Then, after fastening the door with a stone, I wandered on through the dazzling Breton moonlight. A nightingale was singing in a willow swamp below, and from the edge of the mere, among the tall swamp grasses, myriads of frogs chanted a bass chorus.

When I returned, the eastern sky was beginning to lighten, and across the meadows on the cliffs, outlined against the paling horizon, I saw a seaweed gatherer going to his work among the curling breakers on the coast. His long rake was balanced on his shoulder, and the sea wind carried his song across the meadows to me:

St. Gildas!

St. Gildas!

Pray for us,

Shelter us,

Us who toil in the sea.

Passing the shrine at the entrance of the village, I took off my cap and knelt in prayer to Our Lady of Faöuet; and if I neglected myself in that prayer, surely I believed Our Lady of Faöuet would be kinder to Lys. It is said that the shrine casts white shadows. I looked, but saw only the moonlight. Then very peacefully I went to bed again, and was only awakened by the clank of sabres and the trample of horses in the road below my window.

“Good gracious!” I thought, “it must be eleven o’clock, for there are the gendarmes from Quimperlé.”

I looked at my watch; it was only half-past eight, and as the gendarmes made their rounds every Thursday at eleven, I wondered what had brought them out so early to St. Gildas.

“Of course,” I grumbled, rubbing my eyes, “they are after Terrec,” and I jumped into my limited bath.

Before I was completely dressed I heard a timid knock, and opening my door, razor in hand, stood astonished and silent. Lys, her blue eyes wide with terror, leaned on the threshold.

“My darling!” I cried, “what on earth is the matter?” But she only clung to me, panting like a wounded sea gull. At last, when I drew her into the room and raised her face to mine, she spoke in a heart-breaking voice:

“Oh, Dick! they are going to arrest you, but I will die before I believe one word of what they say. No, don’t ask me,” and she began to sob desperately.

When I found that something really serious was the matter, I flung on my coat and cap, and, slipping one arm about her waist, went down the stairs and out into the road. Four gendarmes sat on their horses in front of the café door; beyond them, the entire population of St. Gildas gaped, ten deep.

“Hello, Durand!” I said to the brigadier, “what the devil is this I hear about arresting me?”

“It’s true, mon ami,” replied Durand with sepulchral sympathy. I looked him over from the tip of his spurred boots to his sulphur-yellow sabre belt, then upward, button by button, to his disconcerted face.

“What for?” I said scornfully. “Don’t try any cheap sleuth work on me! Speak up, man, what’s the trouble?”

The Purple Emperor, who sat in the doorway staring at me, started to speak, but thought better of it and got up and went into the house. The gendarmes rolled their eyes mysteriously and looked wise.

“Come, Durand,” I said impatiently, “what’s the charge?”

“Murder,” he said in a faint voice.

“What!” I cried incredulously. “Nonsense! Do I look like a murderer? Get off your horse, you stupid, and tell me who’s murdered.”

Durand got down, looking very silly, and came up to me, offering his hand with a propitiatory grin.

“It was the Purple Emperor who denounced you! See, they found your handkerchief at his door——”

“Whose door, for Heaven’s sake?” I cried.

“Why, the Red Admiral’s!”

“The Red Admiral’s? What has he done?”

“Nothing—he’s only been murdered.”

I could scarcely believe my senses, although they took me over to the little stone cottage and pointed out the blood-spattered room. But the horror of the thing was that the corpse of the murdered man had disappeared, and there only remained a nauseating lake of blood on the stone floor, in the centre of which lay a human hand. There was no doubt as to whom the hand belonged, for everybody who had ever seen the Red Admiral knew that the shrivelled bit of flesh which lay in the thickening blood was the hand of the Red Admiral. To me it looked like the severed claw of some gigantic bird.

“Well,” I said, “there’s been murder committed. Why don’t you do something?”

“What?” asked Durand.

“I don’t know. Send for the Commissaire.”

“He’s at Quimperlé. I telegraphed.”

“Then send for a doctor, and find out how long this blood has been coagulating.”

“The chemist from Quimperlé is here; he’s a doctor.”

“What does he say?”

“He says that he doesn’t know.”

“And who are you going to arrest?” I inquired, turning away from the spectacle on the floor.

“I don’t know,” said the brigadier solemnly; “you are denounced by the Purple Emperor, because he found your handkerchief at the door when he went out this morning.”

“Just like a pig-headed Breton!” I exclaimed, thoroughly angry. “Did he not mention Yves Terrec?”

“No.”

“Of course not,” I said. “He overlooked the fact that Terrec tried to shoot his father last night, and that I took away his gun. All that counts for nothing when he finds my handkerchief at the murdered man’s door.”

“Come into the café,” said Durand, much disturbed, “we can talk it over, there. Of course, Monsieur Darrel, I have never had the faintest idea that you were the murderer!”

The four gendarmes and I walked across the road to the Groix Inn and entered the café. It was crowded with Bretons, smoking, drinking, and jabbering in half a dozen dialects, all equally unsatisfactory to a civilized ear; and I pushed through the crowd to where little Max Fortin, the chemist of Quimperlé, stood smoking a vile cigar.

“This is a bad business,” he said, shaking hands and offering me the mate to his cigar, which I politely declined.

“Now, Monsieur Fortin,” I said, “it appears that the Purple Emperor found my handkerchief near the murdered man’s door this morning, and so he concludes”—here I glared at the Purple Emperor—“that I am the assassin. I will now ask him a question,” and turning on him suddenly, I shouted, “What were you doing at the Red Admiral’s door?”

The Purple Emperor started and turned pale, and I pointed at him triumphantly.

“See what a sudden question will do. Look how embarrassed he is, and yet I do not charge him with murder; and I tell you, gentlemen, that man there knows as well as I do who was the murderer of the Red Admiral!”

“I don’t!” bawled the Purple Emperor.

“You do,” I said. “It was Yves Terrec.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said obstinately, dropping his voice.

“Of course not, being pig-headed.”

“I am not pig-headed,” he roared again, “but I am mayor of St. Gildas, and I do not believe that Yves Terrec killed his father.”

“You saw him try to kill him last night?”

The mayor grunted.

“And you saw what I did.”

He grunted again.

“And,” I went on, “you heard Yves Terrec threaten to kill his father. You heard him curse the Red Admiral and swear to kill him. Now the father is murdered and his body is gone.”

“And your handkerchief?” sneered the Purple Emperor.

“I dropped it, of course.”

“And the seaweed gatherer who saw you last night lurking about the Red Admiral’s cottage,” grinned the Purple Emperor.

I was startled at the man’s malice.

“That will do,” I said. “It is perfectly true that I was walking on the Bannelec road last night, and that I stopped to close the Red Admiral’s door, which was ajar, although his light was not burning. After that I went up the road to the Dinez Woods, and then walked over by St. Julien, whence I saw the seaweed gatherer on the cliffs. He was near enough for me to hear what he sang. What of that?”

“What did you do then?”

“Then I stopped at the shrine and said a prayer, and then I went to bed and slept until Brigadier Durand’s gendarmes awoke me with their clatter.”

“Now, Monsieur Darrel,” said the Purple Emperor, lifting a fat finger and shooting a wicked glance at me, “Now, Monsieur Darrel, which did you wear last night on your midnight stroll—sabots or shoes?”

I thought a moment. “Shoes—no, sabots. I just slipped on my chaussons and went out in my sabots.”

“Which was it, shoes or sabots?” snarled the Purple Emperor.

“Sabots, you fool.”

“Are these your sabots?” he asked, lifting up a wooden shoe with my initials cut on the instep.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Then how did this blood come on the other one?” he shouted, and held up a sabot, the mate to the first, on which a drop of blood had spattered.

“I haven’t the least idea,” I said calmly; but my heart was beating very fast and I was furiously angry.

“You blockhead!” I said, controlling my rage, “I’ll make you pay for this when they catch Yves Terrec and convict him. Brigadier Durand, do your duty if you think I am under suspicion. Arrest me, but grant me one favour. Put me in the Red Admiral’s cottage, and I’ll see whether I can’t find some clew that you have overlooked. Of course, I won’t disturb anything until the Commissaire arrives. Bah! You all make me very ill.”

“He’s hardened,” observed the Purple Emperor, wagging his head.

“What motive had I to kill the Red Admiral?” I asked them all scornfully. And they all cried:

“None! Yves Terrec is the man!”

Passing out of the door I swung around and shook my finger at the Purple Emperor.

“Oh, I’ll make you dance for this, my friend,” I said; and I followed Brigadier Durand across the street to the cottage of the murdered man.

III

They took me at my word and placed a gendarme with a bared sabre at the gateway by the hedge.

“Give me your parole,” said poor Durand, “and I will let you go where you wish.” But I refused, and began prowling about the cottage looking for clews. I found lots of things that some people would have considered most important, such as ashes from the Red Admiral’s pipe, footprints in a dusty vegetable bin, bottles smelling of Pouldu cider, and dust—oh, lots of dust!—but I was not an expert, only a stupid, everyday amateur; so I defaced the footprints with my thick shooting boots, and I declined to examine the pipe ashes through a microscope, although the Red Admiral’s microscope stood on the table close at hand.

At last I found what I had been looking for, some long wisps of straw, curiously depressed and flattened in the middle, and I was certain I had found the evidence that would settle Yves Terrec for the rest of his life. It was plain as the nose on your face. The straws were sabot straws, flattened where the foot had pressed them, and sticking straight out where they projected beyond the sabot. Now nobody in St. Gildas used straw in sabots except a fisherman who lived near St. Julien, and the straw in his sabots was ordinary yellow wheat straw! This straw, or rather these straws, were from the stalks of the red wheat which only grows inland, and which, everybody in St. Gildas knew, Yves Terrec wore in his sabots. I was perfectly satisfied; and when, three hours later, a hoarse shouting from the Bannelec Road brought me to the window, I was not surprised to see Yves Terrec, bloody, dishevelled, hatless, with his strong arms bound behind him, walking with bent head between two mounted gendarmes. The crowd around him swelled every minute, crying: “Parricide! parricide! Death to the murderer!” As he passed my window I saw great clots of mud on his dusty sabots, from the heels of which projected wisps of red wheat straw. Then I walked back into the Red Admiral’s study, determined to find what the microscope would show on the wheat straws. I examined each one very carefully, and then, my eyes aching, I rested my chin on my hand and leaned back in the chair. I had not been as fortunate as some detectives, for there was no evidence that the straws had ever been used in a sabot at all. Furthermore, directly across the hallway stood a carved Breton chest, and now I noticed for the first time that, from beneath the closed lid, dozens of similar red wheat straws projected, bent exactly as mine were—bent by the weight of the lid.

I yawned in disgust. It was apparent that I was not cut out for a detective, and I bitterly pondered over the difference between clews in real life and clews in a detective story. After a while I rose, walked over to the chest and opened the lid. The interior was wadded with the red wheat straws, and on this wadding lay two curious glass jars, two or three small vials, several empty bottles labelled chloroform, a collecting jar of cyanide of potassium, and a book. In a farther corner of the chest were some letters bearing English stamps, and also the torn coverings of two parcels, all from England, and all directed to the Red Admiral under his proper name of “Sieur Louis Jean Terrec, St. Gildas, par Moëlan, Finistère.”

All these traps I carried over to the desk, shut the lid of the chest, and sat down to read the letters. They were written in commercial French, evidently by an Englishman.

Freely translated, the contents of the first letter were as follows:

London,
June 12, 1894.

Dear Monsieur (sic): Your kind favour of the 19th inst. received and contents noted. The latest work on the Lepidoptera of England is Blowzer’s How to catch British Butterflies, with notes and tables, and an introduction by Sir Thomas Sniffer. The price of this work (in one volume, calf) is £5 or 125 francs of French money. A post-office order will receive our prompt attention. We beg to remain,

Yours, etc.,

Fradley & Toomer

470 Regent Square, London, S. W.

The next letter was even less interesting. It merely stated that the money had been received and the book would be forwarded. The third engaged my attention, and I shall quote it, the translation being a free one:

“Dear Sir: Your letter of the 1st of July was duly received, and we at once referred it to Mr. Fradley himself. Mr. Fradley being much interested in your question, sent your letter to Professor Schweineri, of the Berlin Entomological Society, whose note Blowzer refers to on page 630, in his How to catch British Butterflies. We have just received an answer from Professor Schweineri, which we translate into French—(see inclosed slip). Professor Schweineri begs to present to you two jars of cythyl, prepared under his own supervision. We forward the same to you. Trusting that you will find everything satisfactory, we remain,

Yours sincerely,

Fradley & Toomer

The inclosed slip read as follows:

Messrs. Fradley & Toomer,

“Gentlemen: Cythaline, a complex hydrocarbon, was first used by Professor Schnoot, of Antwerp, a year ago. I discovered an analogous formula about the same time and named it cythyl. I have used it with great success everywhere. It is as certain as a magnet. I beg to present you three small jars, and would be pleased to have you forward two of them to your correspondent in St. Gildas with my compliments. Blowzer’s quotation of me, on page 630 of his glorious work, How to catch British Butterflies, is correct.

Yours, etc.,

Heinrich Schweineri,

P.H.D., D.D., D.S., M.S.

When I had finished this letter I folded it up and put it into my pocket with the others. Then I opened Blowzer’s valuable work, How to catch British Butterflies, and turned to page 630.

Now, although the Red Admiral could only have acquired the book very recently, and although all the other pages were perfectly clean, this particular page was thumbed black, and heavy pencil marks inclosed a paragraph at the bottom of the page. This is the paragraph:

Professor Schweineri says: “Of the two old methods used by collectors for the capture of the swift-winged, high-flying Apatura Iris, or Purple Emperor, the first, which was using a long-handled net, proved successful once in a thousand times; and the second, the placing of bait upon the ground, such as decayed meat, dead cats, rats, etc., was not only disagreeable, even for an enthusiastic collector, but also very uncertain. Once in five hundred times would the splendid butterfly leave the tops of his favourite oak trees to circle about the fetid bait offered. I have found cythyl a perfectly sure bait to draw this beautiful butterfly to the ground, where it can be easily captured. An ounce of cythyl placed in a yellow saucer under an oak tree, will draw to it every Apatura Iris within a radius of twenty miles. So, if any collector who possesses a little cythyl, even though it be in a sealed bottle in his pocket—if such a collector does not find a single Apatura Iris fluttering close about him within an hour, let him be satisfied that the Apatura Iris does not inhabit his country.”

When I had finished reading this note I sat for a long while thinking hard. Then I examined the two jars. They were labelled “Cythyl.” One was full, the other nearly full. “The rest must be on the corpse of the Red Admiral,” I thought, “no matter if it is in a corked bottle——”

I took all the things back to the chest, laid them carefully on the straw, and closed the lid. The gendarme sentinel at the gate saluted me respectfully as I crossed over to the Groix Inn. The Inn was surrounded by an excited crowd, and the hallway was choked with gendarmes and peasants. On every side they greeted me cordially, announcing that the real murderer was caught; but I pushed by them without a word and ran upstairs to find Lys. She opened her door when I knocked and threw both arms about my neck. I took her to my breast and kissed her. After a moment I asked her if she would obey me no matter what I commanded, and she said she would, with a proud humility that touched me.

“Then go at once to Yvette in St. Julien,” I said. “Ask her to harness the dog-cart and drive you to the convent in Quimperlé. Wait for me there. Will you do this without questioning me, my darling?”

She raised her face to mine. “Kiss me,” she said innocently; the next moment she had vanished.

I walked deliberately into the Purple Emperor’s room and peered into the gauze-covered box which had held the chrysalis of Apatura Iris. It was as I expected. The chrysalis was empty and transparent, and a great crack ran down the middle of its back, but, on the netting inside the box, a magnificent butterfly slowly waved its burnished purple wings; for the chrysalis had given up its silent tenant, the butterfly symbol of immortality. Then a great fear fell upon me. I know now that it was the fear of the Black Priest, but neither then nor for years after did I know that the Black Priest had ever lived on earth. As I bent over the box I heard a confused murmur outside the house which ended in a furious shout of “Parricide!” and I heard the gendarmes ride away behind a wagon which rattled sharply on the flinty highway. I went to the window. In the wagon sat Yves Terrec, bound and wild-eyed, two gendarmes at either side of him, and all around the wagon rode mounted gendarmes whose bared sabres scarcely kept the crowd away.

“Parricide!” they howled. “Let him die!”

I stepped back and opened the gauze-covered box. Very gently but firmly I took the splendid butterfly by its closed fore wings and lifted it unharmed between my thumb and forefinger. Then, holding it concealed behind my back, I went down into the café.

Of all the crowd that had filled it, shouting for the death of Yves Terrec, only three persons remained seated in front of the huge empty fireplace. They were the Brigadier Durand, Max Fortin, the chemist of Quimperlé, and the Purple Emperor. The latter looked abashed when I entered, but I paid no attention to him and walked straight to the chemist.

“Monsieur Fortin,” I said, “do you know much about hydrocarbons?”

“They are my specialty,” he said astonished.

“Have you ever heard of such a thing as cythyl?”

“Schweineri’s cythyl? Oh, yes! We use it in perfumery.”

“Good!” I said. “Has it an odour?”

“No—and, yes. One is always aware of its presence, but really nobody can affirm it has an odour. It is curious,” he continued, looking at me, “it is very curious you should have asked me that, for all day I have been imagining I detected the presence of cythyl.”

“Do you imagine so now?” I asked.

“Yes, more than ever.”

I sprang to the front door and tossed out the butterfly. The splendid creature beat the air for a moment, flitted uncertainly hither and thither, and then, to my astonishment, sailed majestically back into the café and alighted on the hearthstone. For a moment I was nonplussed, but when my eyes rested on the Purple Emperor I comprehended in a flash.

“Lift that hearthstone!” I cried to the Brigadier Durand; “pry it up with your scabbard!”

The Purple Emperor suddenly fell forward in his chair, his face ghastly white, his jaw loose with terror.

“What is cythyl?” I shouted, seizing him by the arm; but he plunged heavily from his chair, face downward on the floor, and at the same moment a cry from the chemist made me turn. There stood the Brigadier Durand, one hand supporting the hearthstone, one hand raised in horror. There stood Max Fortin, the chemist, rigid with excitement, and below, in the hollow bed where the hearthstone had rested, lay a crushed mass of bleeding human flesh, from the midst of which stared a cheap glass eye. I seized the Purple Emperor and dragged him to his feet.

“Look!” I cried; “look at your old friend, the Red Admiral!” but he only smiled in a vacant way, and rolled his head muttering; “Bait for butterflies! Cythyl! Oh, no, no, no! You can’t do it, Admiral, d’ye see. I alone own the Purple Emperor! I alone am the Purple Emperor!”

And the same carriage that bore me to Quimperlé to claim my bride, carried him to Quimper, gagged and bound, a foaming, howling lunatic.

•      •      •      •      •      •

This, then, is the story of the Purple Emperor. I might tell you a pleasanter story if I chose; but concerning the fish that I had hold of, whether it was a salmon, a grilse, or a sea trout, I may not say, because I have promised Lys, and she has promised me, that no power on earth shall wring from our lips the mortifying confession that the fish escaped.

POMPE FUNÈBRE

A wind-swept sky,

The waste of moorland stretching to the west;

The sea, low moaning in a strange unrest—

A seagull’s cry.

Washed by the tide,

The rocks lie sullen in the waning light;

The foam breaks in long strips of hungry white,

Dissatisfied.

—Bateman

POMPE FUNÈBRE

In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble.

When I first saw the sexton he was standing motionless behind a stone. Presently he moved on again, pausing at times, and turning right and left with that nervous, jerky motion that always chills me.

His path lay across the blighted moss and withered leaves scattered in moist layers along the bank of the little brown stream, and I, wondering what his errand might be, followed, passing silently over the rotting forest mould. Once or twice he heard me, for I saw him stop short, a blot of black and orange in the sombre woods; but he always started on again, hurrying at times as though the dead might grow impatient.

For the sexton that I followed through the November forest was one of those small creatures that God has sent to bury little things that die alone in the world. Undertaker, sexton, mute, and gravedigger in one, this thing, robed in black and orange, buries all things that die unheeded by the world. And so they call it—this little beetle in black and orange—the “sexton.”

How he hurried! I looked up into the gray sky where ashen branches, interlaced, swayed in unfelt winds, and I heard the dry leaves rattle in the tree tops, and the thud of acorns on the mould. A sombre bird peered at me from a heap of brush, then ran pattering over the leaves.

The sexton had reached a bit of broken ground, and was scuffling over sticks and gulleys toward a brown tuft of withered grass above. I dared not help him; besides, I could not bring myself to touch him, he was so horribly absorbed in his errand.

I halted for a moment. The eagerness of this live creature to find his dead and handle it; the odour of death and decay in this little forest world, where I had waited for spring when Lys moved among the flowering gorse, singing like a throstle in the wind—all this troubled me, and I lagged behind.

The sexton scrambled over the dead grass, raising his seared eyes at every wave of wind. The wind brought sadness with it, the scent of lifeless trees, the vague rustle of gorse buds, yellow and dry as paper flowers.

Along the stream, rotting water plants, scorched and frost-blighted, lay massed above the mud. I saw their pallid stems swaying like worms in the listless current.

The sexton had reached a mouldering stump, and now he seemed undecided. I sat down on a fallen tree, moist and bleached, that crumbled under my touch, leaving a stale odour in the air. Overhead a crow rose heavily and flapped out into the moorland; the wind rattled the stark blackthorns; a single drop of rain touched my cheek. I looked into the stream for some sign of life; there was nothing, except a shapeless creature that might have been a blindworm, lying belly upward on the mud bottom. I touched it with a stick. It was stiff and dead.

The wind among the sham paperlike gorse buds filled the woods with a silken rustle. I put out my hand and touched a yellow blossom; it felt like an immortelle on a funeral pillow.

The sexton had moved on again; something, perhaps a musty spider’s web, had stuck to one leg, and he dragged it as he laboured on through the wood. Some little field mouse torn by weasel or kestrel, some crushed mole, some tiny dead pile of fur or feather, lay not far off, stricken by God or man or brother creature. And the sexton knew it—how, God knows! But he knew it, and hurried on to his tryst with the dead.

His path now lay along the edge of a tidal inlet from the Groix River. I looked down at the gray water through the leafless branches, and I saw a small snake, head raised, swim from a submerged clot of weeds into the shadow of a rock. There was a curlew, too, somewhere in the black swamp, whose dreary, persistent call cursed the silence.

I wondered when the sexton would fly; for he could fly if he chose; it is only when the dead are near, very near, that he creeps. The soiled mess of cobweb still stuck to him, and his progress was impeded by it. Once I saw a small brown and white spider, striped like a zebra, running swiftly in his tracks, but the sexton turned and raised his two clubbed forelegs in a horrid imploring attitude that still had something of menace under it. The spider backed away and sidled under a stone.

When anything that is dying—sick and close to death—falls upon the face of the earth, something moves in the blue above, floating like a moat; then another, then others. These specks that grow out of the fathomless azure vault are jewelled flies. They come to wait for Death.

The sexton also arranges rendezvous with Death, but never waits; Death must arrive the first.

When the heavy clover is ablaze with painted wings, when bees hum and blunder among the white-thorn, or pass by like swift singing bullets, the sexton snaps open his black and orange wings and hums across the clover with the bees. Death in a scented garden, the tokens of the plague on a fair young breast, the gray flag of fear in the face of one who reels into the arms of Destruction, the sexton scrambling in the lap of spring, folding his sleek wings, unfolding them to ape the buzz of bees, passing over sweet clover tops to the putrid flesh that summons him—these things must be and will be to the end.

The sexton was running now—running fast, trailing the cobweb over twigs and mud. The edge of the wood was near, for I could see the winter wheat, like green scenery in a theatre, stretching for miles across the cliffs, crude as painted grass. And as I crept through the brittle forest fringe, I saw a figure lying face downward in the wheat—a girl’s slender form, limp, motionless.

The sexton darted under her breast.

Then I threw myself down beside her, crying, “Lys! Lys!” And as I cried, the icy rain burst out across the moors, and the trees dashed their stark limbs together till the whole spectral forest tossed and danced, and the wind roared among the cliffs.

And through the Dance of Death Lys trembled in my arms, and sobbed and clung to me, murmuring that the Purple Emperor was dead; but the wind tore the words from her white lips, and flung them out across the sea, where the winter lightning lashed the stark heights of Groix.

Then the fear of death was stilled in my soul, and I raised her from the ground, holding her close.

And I saw the sexton, just beyond us, hurry across the ground and seek shelter under a little dead skylark, stiff-winged, muddy, lying alone in the rain.

•      •      •      •      •      •

In the storm, above us, a bird hovered singing through the rain. It passed us twice, still singing, and as it passed again we saw the shadow it cast upon the world was whiter than snow.

THE MESSENGER

Little gray messenger,

Robed like painted Death,

Your robe is dust.

Whom do you seek

Among lilies and closed buds

At dusk?

Among lilies and closed buds

At dusk,

Whom do you seek,

Little gray messenger,

Robed in the awful panoply

Of painted Death?

—R. W. C.

THE MESSENGER

All-wise,

Hast thou seen all there is to see with thy two eyes?

Dost thou know all there is to know, and so,

Omniscient,

Darest thou still to say thy brother lies?

—R. W. C.

“The bullet entered here,” said Max Fortin, and he placed his middle finger over a smooth hole exactly in the centre of the forehead.

I sat down upon a mound of dry seaweed and unslung my fowling piece.

The little chemist cautiously felt the edges of the shot-hole, first with his middle finger, then with his thumb.

“Let me see the skull again,” said I.

Max Fortin picked it up from the sod.

“It’s like all the others,” he observed. I nodded, without offering to take it from him. After a moment he thoughtfully replaced it upon the grass at my feet.

“It’s like all the others,” he repeated, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief. “I thought you might care to see one of the skulls, so I brought this over from the gravel pit. The men from Bannelec are digging yet. They ought to stop.”

“How many skulls are there altogether?” I inquired.

“They found thirty-eight skulls; there are thirty-nine noted in the list. They lie piled up in the gravel pit on the edge of Le Bihan’s wheat field. The men are at work yet. Le Bihan is going to stop them.”

“Let’s go over,” said I; and I picked up my gun and started across the cliffs, Fortin on one side, Môme on the other.

“Who has the list?” I asked, lighting my pipe. “You say there is a list?”

“The list was found rolled up in a brass cylinder,” said the little chemist. He added: “You should not smoke here. You know that if a single spark drifted into the wheat——”

“Ah, but I have a cover to my pipe,” said I, smiling.

Fortin watched me as I closed the pepper-box arrangement over the glowing bowl of the pipe. Then he continued:

“The list was made out on thick yellow paper; the brass tube has preserved it. It is as fresh to-day as it was in 1760. You shall see it.”

“Is that the date?”

“The list is dated ‘April, 1760.’ The Brigadier Durand has it. It is not written in French.”

“Not written in French!” I exclaimed.

“No,” replied Fortin solemnly, “it is written in Breton.”

“But,” I protested, “the Breton language was never written or printed in 1760.”

“Except by priests,” said the chemist.

“I have heard of but one priest who ever wrote the Breton language,” I began.

Fortin stole a glance at my face.

“You mean—the Black Priest?” he asked.

I nodded.

Fortin opened his mouth to speak again, hesitated, and finally shut his teeth obstinately over the wheat stem that he was chewing.

“And the Black Priest?” I suggested encouragingly. But I knew it was useless; for it is easier to move the stars from their courses than to make an obstinate Breton talk. We walked on for a minute or two in silence.

“Where is the Brigadier Durand?” I asked, motioning Môme to come out of the wheat, which he was trampling as though it were heather. As I spoke we came in sight of the farther edge of the wheat field and the dark, wet mass of cliffs beyond.

“Durand is down there—you can see him; he stands just behind the Mayor of St. Gildas.”

“I see,” said I; and we struck straight down, following a sun-baked cattle path across the heather.

When we reached the edge of the wheat field, Le Bihan, the Mayor of St. Gildas, called to me, and I tucked my gun under my arm and skirted the wheat to where he stood.

“Thirty-eight skulls,” he said in his thin, high-pitched voice; “there is but one more, and I am opposed to further search. I suppose Fortin told you?”

I shook hands with him, and returned the salute of the Brigadier Durand.

“I am opposed to further search,” repeated Le Bihan, nervously picking at the mass of silver buttons which covered the front of his velvet and broadcloth jacket like a breastplate of scale armour.

Durand pursed up his lips, twisted his tremendous mustache, and hooked his thumbs in his sabre belt.

“As for me,” he said, “I am in favour of further search.”

“Further search for what—for the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked.

Le Bihan nodded. Durand frowned at the sunlit sea, rocking like a bowl of molten gold from the cliffs to the horizon. I followed his eyes. On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.

“Where is that list, Durand?” I asked.

The gendarme rummaged in his despatch pouch and produced a brass cylinder about a foot long. Very gravely he unscrewed the head and dumped out a scroll of thick yellow paper closely covered with writing on both sides. At a nod from Le Bihan he handed me the scroll. But I could make nothing of the coarse writing, now faded to a dull brown.

“Come, come, Le Bihan,” I said impatiently, “translate it, won’t you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems.”

Le Bihan went to the edge of the pit where the three Bannelec men were digging, gave an order or two in Breton, and turned to me.

As I came to the edge of the pit the Bannelec men were removing a square piece of sail-cloth from what appeared to be a pile of cobblestones.

“Look!” said Le Bihan shrilly. I looked. The pile below was a heap of skulls. After a moment I clambered down the gravel sides of the pit and walked over to the men of Bannelec. They saluted me gravely, leaning on their picks and shovels, and wiping their sweating faces with sunburned hands.

“How many?” said I in Breton.

“Thirty-eight,” they replied.

I glanced around. Beyond the heap of skulls lay two piles of human bones. Beside these was a mound of broken, rusted bits of iron and steel. Looking closer, I saw that this mound was composed of rusty bayonets, sabre blades, scythe blades, with here and there a tarnished buckle attached to a bit of leather hard as iron.

I picked up a couple of buttons and a belt plate. The buttons bore the royal arms of England; the belt plate was emblazoned with the English arms, and also with the number “27.”

“I have heard my grandfather speak of the terrible English regiment, the 27th Foot, which landed and stormed the fort up there,” said one of the Bannelec men.

“Oh!” said I; “then these are the bones of English soldiers?”

“Yes,” said the men of Bannelec.

Le Bihan was calling to me from the edge of the pit above, and I handed the belt plate and buttons to the men and climbed the side of the excavation.

“Well,” said I, trying to prevent Môme from leaping up and licking my face as I emerged from the pit, “I suppose you know what these bones are. What are you going to do with them?”

“There was a man,” said Le Bihan angrily, “an Englishman, who passed here in a dog-cart on his way to Quimper about an hour ago, and what do you suppose he wished to do?”

“Buy the relics?” I asked, smiling.

“Exactly—the pig!” piped the mayor of St. Gildas. “Jean Marie Tregunc, who found the bones, was standing there where Max Fortin stands, and do you know what he answered? He spat upon the ground, and said: ‘Pig of an Englishman, do you take me for a desecrator of graves?’”

I knew Tregunc, a sober, blue-eyed Breton, who lived from one year’s end to the other without being able to afford a single bit of meat for a meal.

“How much did the Englishman offer Tregunc?” I asked.

“Two hundred francs for the skulls alone.”

I thought of the relic hunters and the relic buyers on the battlefields of our civil war.

“Seventeen hundred and sixty is long ago,” I said.

“Respect for the dead can never die,” said Fortin.

“And the English soldiers came here to kill your fathers and burn your homes,” I continued.

“They were murderers and thieves, but—they are dead,” said Tregunc, coming up from the beach below, his long sea rake balanced on his dripping jersey.

“How much do you earn every year, Jean Marie?” I asked, turning to shake hands with him.

“Two hundred and twenty francs, monsieur.”

“Forty-five dollars a year,” I said. “Bah! you are worth more, Jean. Will you take care of my garden for me? My wife wished me to ask you. I think it would be worth one hundred francs a month to you and to me. Come on, Le Bihan—come along, Fortin—and you, Durand. I want somebody to translate that list into French for me.”

Tregunc stood gazing at me, his blue eyes dilated.

“You may begin at once,” I said, smiling, “if the salary suits you?”

“It suits,” said Tregunc, fumbling for his pipe in a silly way that annoyed Le Bihan.

“Then go and begin your work,” cried the mayor impatiently; and Tregunc started across the moors toward St. Gildas, taking off his velvet-ribboned cap to me and gripping his sea rake very hard.

“You offer him more than my salary,” said the mayor, after a moment’s contemplation of his silver buttons.

“Pooh!” said I, “what do you do for your salary except play dominoes with Max Fortin at the Groix Inn?”

Le Bihan turned red, but Durand rattled his sabre and winked at Max Fortin, and I slipped my arm through the arm of the sulky magistrate, laughing.

“There’s a shady spot under the cliff,” I said; “come on, Le Bihan, and read me what is in the scroll.”

In a few moments we reached the shadow of the cliff, and I threw myself upon the turf, chin on hand, to listen.

The gendarme, Durand, also sat down, twisting his mustache into needlelike points. Fortin leaned against the cliff, polishing his glasses and examining us with vague, near-sighted eyes; and Le Bihan, the mayor, planted himself in our midst, rolling up the scroll and tucking it under his arm.

“First of all,” he began in a shrill voice, “I am going to light my pipe, and while lighting it I shall tell you what I have heard about the attack on the fort yonder. My father told me; his father told him.”

He jerked his head in the direction of the ruined fort, a small, square stone structure on the sea cliff, now nothing but crumbling walls. Then he slowly produced a tobacco pouch, a bit of flint and tinder, and a long-stemmed pipe fitted with a microscopical bowl of baked clay. To fill such a pipe requires ten minutes’ close attention. To smoke it to a finish takes but four puffs. It is very Breton, this Breton pipe. It is the crystallization of everything Breton.

“Go on,” said I, lighting a cigarette.

“The fort,” said the mayor, “was built by Louis XIV, and was dismantled twice by the English. Louis XV restored it in 1739. In 1760 it was carried by assault by the English. They came across from the island of Groix—three shiploads—and they stormed the fort and sacked St. Julien yonder, and they started to burn St. Gildas—you can see the marks of their bullets on my house yet; but the men of Bannelec and the men of Lorient fell upon them with pike and scythe and blunderbuss, and those who did not run away lie there below in the gravel pit now—thirty-eight of them.”

“And the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked, finishing my cigarette.

The mayor had succeeded in filling his pipe, and now he began to put his tobacco pouch away.

“The thirty-ninth skull,” he mumbled, holding the pipestem between his defective teeth—“the thirty-ninth skull is no business of mine. I have told the Bannelec men to cease digging.”

“But what is—whose is the missing skull?” I persisted curiously.

The mayor was busy trying to strike a spark to his tinder. Presently he set it aglow, applied it to his pipe, took the prescribed four puffs, knocked the ashes out of the bowl, and gravely replaced the pipe in his pocket.

“The missing skull?” he asked.

“Yes,” said I impatiently.

The mayor slowly unrolled the scroll and began to read, translating from the Breton into French. And this is what he read:

“On the Cliffs of St. Gildas,
“April 13, 1760

“On this day, by order of the Count of Soisic, general in chief of the Breton forces now lying in Kerselec Forest, the bodies of thirty-eight English soldiers of the 27th, 50th, and 72d regiments of Foot were buried in this spot, together with their arms and equipments.”

The mayor paused and glanced at me reflectively.

“Go on, Le Bihan,” I said.

“With them,” continued the mayor, turning the scroll and reading on the other side, “was buried the body of that vile traitor who betrayed the fort to the English. The manner of his death was as follows: By order of the most noble Count of Soisic, the traitor was first branded upon the forehead with the brand of an arrowhead. The iron burned through the flesh, and was pressed heavily so that the brand should even burn into the bone of the skull. The traitor was then led out and bidden to kneel. He admitted having guided the English from the island of Groix. Although a priest and a Frenchman, he had violated his priestly office to aid him in discovering the password to the fort. This password he extorted during confession from a young Breton girl who was in the habit of rowing across from the island of Groix to visit her husband in the fort. When the fort fell, this young girl, crazed by the death of her husband, sought the Count of Soisic and told how the priest had forced her to confess to him all she knew about the fort. The priest was arrested at St. Gildas as he was about to cross the river to Lorient. When arrested he cursed the girl, Marie Trevec——”

“What!” I exclaimed, “Marie Trevec!”

“Marie Trevec,” repeated Le Bihan; “the priest cursed Marie Trevec, and all her family and descendants. He was shot as he knelt, having a mask of leather over his face, because the Bretons who composed the squad of execution refused to fire at a priest unless his face was concealed. The priest was l’Abbé Sorgue, commonly known as the Black Priest on account of his dark face and swarthy eyebrows. He was buried with a stake through his heart.”

Le Bihan paused, hesitated, looked at me, and handed the manuscript back to Durand. The gendarme took it and slipped it into the brass cylinder.

“So,” said I, “the thirty-ninth skull is the skull of the Black Priest.”

“Yes,” said Fortin. “I hope they won’t find it.”

“I have forbidden them to proceed,” said the mayor querulously. “You heard me, Max Fortin.”

I rose and picked up my gun. Môme came and pushed his head into my hand.

“That’s a fine dog,” observed Durand, also rising.

“Why don’t you wish to find his skull?” I asked Le Bihan. “It would be curious to see whether the arrow brand really burned into the bone.”

“There is something in that scroll that I didn’t read to you,” said the mayor grimly. “Do you wish to know what it is?”

“Of course,” I replied in surprise.

“Give me the scroll again, Durand,” he said; then he read from the bottom:

“I, l’Abbé Sorgue, forced to write the above by my executioners, have written it in my own blood; and with it I leave my curse. My curse on St. Gildas, on Marie Trevec, and on her descendants. I will come back to St. Gildas when my remains are disturbed. Woe to that Englishman whom my branded skull shall touch!”

“What rot!” I said. “Do you believe it was really written in his own blood?”

“I am going to test it,” said Fortin, “at the request of Monsieur le Maire. I am not anxious for the job, however.”

“See,” said Le Bihan, holding out the scroll to me, “it is signed, ‘l’Abbé Sorgue.’”

I glanced curiously over the paper.

“It must be the Black Priest,” I said. “He was the only man who wrote in the Breton language. This is a wonderfully interesting discovery, for now, at last, the mystery of the Black Priest’s disappearance is cleared up. You will, of course, send this scroll to Paris, Le Bihan?”

“No,” said the mayor obstinately, “it shall be buried in the pit below where the rest of the Black Priest lies.”

I looked at him and recognised that argument would be useless. But still I said, “It will be a loss to history, Monsieur Le Bihan.”

“All the worse for history, then,” said the enlightened Mayor of St. Gildas.

We had sauntered back to the gravel pit while speaking. The men of Bannelec were carrying the bones of the English soldiers toward the St. Gildas cemetery, on the cliffs to the east, where already a knot of white-coiffed women stood in attitudes of prayer; and I saw the sombre robe of a priest among the crosses of the little graveyard.

“They were thieves and assassins; they are dead now,” muttered Max Fortin.

“Respect the dead,” repeated the Mayor of St. Gildas, looking after the Bannelec men.

“It was written in that scroll that Marie Trevec, of Groix Island, was cursed by the priest—she and her descendants,” I said, touching Le Bihan on the arm. “There was a Marie Trevec who married an Yves Trevec of St. Gildas——”

“It is the same,” said Le Bihan, looking at me obliquely.

“Oh!” said I; “then they were ancestors of my wife.”

“Do you fear the curse?” asked Le Bihan.

“What?” I laughed.

“There was the case of the Purple Emperor,” said Max Fortin timidly.

Startled for a moment, I faced him, then shrugged my shoulders and kicked at a smooth bit of rock which lay near the edge of the pit, almost embedded in gravel.

“Do you suppose the Purple Emperor drank himself crazy because he was descended from Marie Trevec?” I asked contemptuously.

“Of course not,” said Max Fortin hastily.

“Of course not,” piped the mayor. “I only——Hello! what’s that you’re kicking?”

“What?” said I, glancing down, at the same time involuntarily giving another kick. The smooth bit of rock dislodged itself and rolled out of the loosened gravel at my feet.

“The thirty-ninth skull!” I exclaimed. “By jingo, its the noddle of the Black Priest! See! there is the arrowhead branded on the front!”

The mayor stepped back. Max Fortin also retreated. There was a pause, during which I looked at them, and they looked anywhere but at me.

“I don’t like it,” said the mayor at last, in a husky, high voice. “I don’t like it! The scroll says he will come back to St. Gildas when his remains are disturbed. I—I don’t like it, Monsieur Darrel——”

“Bosh!” said I; “the poor wicked devil is where he can’t get out. For Heaven’s sake, Le Bihan, what is this stuff you are talking in the year of grace 1896?”

The mayor gave me a look.

“And he says ‘Englishman.’ You are an Englishman, Monsieur Darrel,” he announced.

“You know better. You know I’m an American.”

“It’s all the same,” said the Mayor of St. Gildas, obstinately.

“No, it isn’t!” I answered, much exasperated, and deliberately pushed the skull till it rolled into the bottom of the gravel pit below.

“Cover it up,” said I; “bury the scroll with it too, if you insist, but I think you ought to send it to Paris. Don’t look so gloomy, Fortin, unless you believe in werewolves and ghosts. Hey! what the—what the devil’s the matter with you, anyway? What are you staring at, Le Bihan?”

“Come, come,” muttered the mayor in a low, tremulous voice, “it’s time we got out of this. Did you see? Did you see, Fortin?”

“I saw,” whispered Max Fortin, pallid with fright.

The two men were almost running across the sunny pasture now, and I hastened after them, demanding to know what was the matter.

“Matter!” chattered the mayor, gasping with exasperation and terror. “The skull is rolling uphill again!” and he burst into a terrified gallop. Max Fortin followed close behind.

I watched them stampeding across the pasture, then turned toward the gravel pit, mystified, incredulous. The skull was lying on the edge of the pit, exactly where it had been before I pushed it over the edge. For a second I stared at it; a singular chilly feeling crept up my spinal column, and I turned and walked away, sweat starting from the root of every hair on my head. Before I had gone twenty paces the absurdity of the whole thing struck me. I halted, hot with shame and annoyance, and retraced my steps.

There lay the skull.

“I rolled a stone down instead of the skull,” I muttered to myself. Then with the butt of my gun I pushed the skull over the edge of the pit and watched it roll to the bottom; and as it struck the bottom of the pit, Môme, my dog, suddenly whipped his tail between his legs, whimpered, and made off across the moor.

“Môme!” I shouted, angry and astonished; but the dog only fled the faster, and I ceased calling from sheer surprise.

“What the mischief is the matter with that dog!” I thought. He had never before played me such a trick.

Mechanically I glanced into the pit, but I could not see the skull. I looked down. The skull lay at my feet again, touching them.

“Good heavens!” I stammered, and struck at it blindly with my gunstock. The ghastly thing flew into the air, whirling over and over, and rolled again down the sides of the pit to the bottom. Breathlessly I stared at it, then, confused and scarcely comprehending, I stepped back from the pit, still facing it, one, ten, twenty paces, my eyes almost starting from my head, as though I expected to see the thing roll up from the bottom of the pit under my very gaze. At last I turned my back to the pit and strode out across the gorse-covered moorland toward my home. As I reached the road that winds from St. Gildas to St. Julien I gave one hasty glance at the pit over my shoulder. The sun shone hot on the sod about the excavation. There was something white and bare and round on the turf at the edge of the pit. It might have been a stone; there were plenty of them lying about.

II

When I entered my garden I saw Môme sprawling on the stone doorstep. He eyed me sideways and flopped his tail.

“Are you not mortified, you idiot dog?” I said, looking about the upper windows for Lys.

Môme rolled over on his back and raised one deprecating forepaw, as though to ward off calamity.

“Don’t act as though I was in the habit of beating you to death,” I said, disgusted. I had never in my life raised whip to the brute. “But you are a fool dog,” I continued. “No, you needn’t come to be babied and wept over; Lys can do that, if she insists, but I am ashamed of you, and you can go to the devil.”

Môme slunk off into the house, and I followed, mounting directly to my wife’s boudoir. It was empty.

“Where has she gone?” I said, looking hard at Môme, who had followed me. “Oh! I see you don’t know. Don’t pretend you do. Come off that lounge! Do you think Lys wants tan-coloured hairs all over her lounge?”

I rang the bell for Catherine and ’Fine, but they didn’t know where “madame” had gone; so I went into my room, bathed, exchanged my somewhat grimy shooting clothes for a suit of warm, soft knickerbockers, and, after lingering some extra moments over my toilet—for I was particular, now that I had married Lys—I went down to the garden and took a chair out under the fig-trees.

“Where can she be?” I wondered. Môme came sneaking out to be comforted, and I forgave him for Lys’s sake, whereupon he frisked.

“You bounding cur,” said I, “now what on earth started you off across the moor? If you do it again I’ll push you along with a charge of dust shot.”

As yet I had scarcely dared think about the ghastly hallucination of which I had been a victim, but now I faced it squarely, flushing a little with mortification at the thought of my hasty retreat from the gravel pit.

“To think,” I said aloud, “that those old woman’s tales of Max Fortin and Le Bihan should have actually made me see what didn’t exist at all! I lost my nerve like a schoolboy in a dark bedroom.” For I knew now that I had mistaken a round stone for a skull each time, and had pushed a couple of big pebbles into the pit instead of the skull itself.

“By jingo!” said I, “I’m nervous; my liver must be in a devil of a condition if I see such things when I’m awake! Lys will know what to give me.”

I felt mortified and irritated and sulky, and thought disgustedly of Le Bihan and Max Fortin.

But after a while I ceased speculating, dismissed the mayor, the chemist, and the skull from my mind, and smoked pensively, watching the sun low dipping in the western ocean. As the twilight fell for a moment over ocean and moorland, a wistful, restless happiness filled my heart, the happiness that all men know—all men who have loved.

Slowly the purple mist crept out over the sea; the cliffs darkened; the forest was shrouded.

Suddenly the sky above burned with the afterglow, and the world was alight again.

Cloud after cloud caught the rose dye; the cliffs were tinted with it; moor and pasture, heather and forest burned and pulsated with the gentle flush. I saw the gulls turning and tossing above the sand bar, their snowy wings tipped with pink; I saw the sea swallows sheering the surface of the still river, stained to its placid depths with warm reflections of the clouds. The twitter of drowsy hedge birds broke out in the stillness; a salmon rolled its shining side above tide-water.

The interminable monotone of the ocean intensified the silence. I sat motionless, holding my breath as one who listens to the first low rumour of an organ. All at once the pure whistle of a nightingale cut the silence, and the first moonbeam silvered the wastes of mist-hung waters.

I raised my head.

Lys stood before me in the garden.

When we had kissed each other, we linked arms and moved up and down the gravel walks, watching the moonbeams sparkle on the sand bar as the tide ebbed and ebbed. The broad beds of white pinks about us were atremble with hovering white moths; the October roses hung all abloom, perfuming the salt wind.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “where is Yvonne? Has she promised to spend Christmas with us?”

“Yes, Dick; she drove me down from Plougat this afternoon. She sent her love to you. I am not jealous. What did you shoot?”

“A hare and four partridges. They are in the gun room. I told Catherine not to touch them until you had seen them.”

Now I suppose I knew that Lys could not be particularly enthusiastic over game or guns; but she pretended she was, and always scornfully denied that it was for my sake and not for the pure love of sport. So she dragged me off to inspect the rather meagre game bag, and she paid me pretty compliments and gave a little cry of delight and pity as I lifted the enormous hare out of the sack by his ears.

“He’ll eat no more of our lettuce,” I said, attempting to justify the assassination.

“Unhappy little bunny—and what a beauty! O Dick, you are a splendid shot, are you not?”

I evaded the question and hauled out a partridge.

“Poor little dead things!” said Lys in a whisper; “it seems a pity—doesn’t it, Dick? But then you are so clever——”

“We’ll have them broiled,” I said guardedly; “tell Catherine.”

Catherine came in to take away the game, and presently ’Fine Lelocard, Lys’s maid, announced dinner, and Lys tripped away to her boudoir.

I stood an instant contemplating her blissfully, thinking, “My boy, you’re the happiest fellow in the world—you’re in love with your wife!”

I walked into the dining room, beamed at the plates, walked out again; met Tregunc in the hallway, beamed on him; glanced into the kitchen, beamed at Catherine, and went up-stairs, still beaming.

Before I could knock at Lys’s door it opened, and Lys came hastily out. When she saw me she gave a little cry of relief, and nestled close to my breast.

“There is something peering in at my window,” she said.

“What!” I cried angrily.

“A man, I think, disguised as a priest, and he has a mask on. He must have climbed up by the bay tree.”

I was down the stairs and out of doors in no time. The moonlit garden was absolutely deserted. Tregunc came up, and together we searched the hedge and shrubbery around the house and out to the road.

“Jean Marie,” said I at length, “loose my bulldog—he knows you—and take your supper on the porch where you can watch. My wife says the fellow is disguised as a priest, and wears a mask.”

Tregunc showed his white teeth in a smile. “He will not care to venture in here again, I think, Monsieur Darrel.”

I went back and found Lys seated quietly at the table.

“The soup is ready, dear,” she said. “Don’t worry; it was only some foolish lout from Bannelec. No one in St. Gildas or St. Julien would do such a thing.”

I was too much exasperated to reply at first, but Lys treated it as a stupid joke, and after a while I began to look at it in that light.

Lys told me about Yvonne, and reminded me of my promise to have Herbert Stuart down to meet her.

“You wicked diplomat!” I protested. “Herbert is in Paris, and hard at work for the Salon.”

“Don’t you think he might spare a week to flirt with the prettiest girl in Finistère?” inquired Lys innocently.

“Prettiest girl! Not much!” I said.

“Who is, then?” urged Lys.

I laughed a trifle sheepishly.

“I suppose you mean me, Dick,” said Lys, colouring up.

“Now I bore you, don’t I?”

“Bore me? Ah, no, Dick.”

After coffee and cigarettes were served I spoke about Tregunc, and Lys approved.

“Poor Jean! he will be glad, won’t he? What a dear fellow you are!”

“Nonsense,” said I; “we need a gardener; you said so yourself, Lys.”

But Lys leaned over and kissed me, and then bent down and hugged Môme, who whistled through his nose in sentimental appreciation.

“I am a very happy woman,” said Lys.

“Môme was a very bad dog to-day,” I observed.

“Poor Môme!” said Lys, smiling.

When dinner was over and Môme lay snoring before the blaze—for the October nights are often chilly in Finistère—Lys curled up in the chimney corner with her embroidery, and gave me a swift glance from under her drooping lashes.

“You look like a schoolgirl, Lys,” I said teasingly. “I don’t believe you are sixteen yet.”

She pushed back her heavy burnished hair thoughtfully. Her wrist was as white as surf foam.

“Have we been married four years? I don’t believe it,” I said.

She gave me another swift glance and touched the embroidery on her knee, smiling faintly.

“I see,” said I, also smiling at the embroidered garment. “Do you think it will fit?”

“Fit?” repeated Lys. Then she laughed.

“And,” I persisted, “are you perfectly sure that you—er—we shall need it?”

“Perfectly,” said Lys. A delicate colour touched her cheeks and neck. She held up the little garment, all fluffy with misty lace and wrought with quaint embroidery.

“It is very gorgeous,” said I; “don’t use your eyes too much, dearest. May I smoke a pipe?”

“Of course,” she said, selecting a skein of pale blue silk.

For a while I sat and smoked in silence, watching her slender fingers among the tinted silks and thread of gold.

Presently she spoke: “What did you say your crest is, Dick?”

“My crest? Oh, something or other rampant on a something or other——”

“Dick!”

“Dearest?”

“Don’t be flippant.”

“But I really forget. It’s an ordinary crest; everybody in New York has them. No family should be without ’em.”

“You are disagreeable, Dick. Send Josephine upstairs for my album.”

“Are you going to put that crest on the—the—whatever it is?”

“I am; and my own crest, too.”

I thought of the Purple Emperor and wondered a little.

“You didn’t know I had one, did you?” she smiled.

“What is it?” I replied evasively.

“You shall see. Ring for Josephine.”

I rang, and, when ’Fine appeared, Lys gave her some orders in a low voice, and Josephine trotted away, bobbing her white-coiffed head with a “Bien, madame!”

After a few minutes she returned, bearing a tattered, musty volume, from which the gold and blue had mostly disappeared.

I took the book in my hands and examined the ancient emblazoned covers.

“Lilies!” I exclaimed.

“Fleur-de-lis,” said my wife demurely.

“Oh!” said I, astonished, and opened the book.

“You have never before seen this book?” asked Lys, with a touch of malice in her eyes.

“You know I haven’t. Hello! what’s this? Oho! So there should be a de before Trevec? Lys de Trevec? Then why in the world did the Purple Emperor——”

“Dick!” cried Lys.

“All right,” said I. “Shall I read about the Sieur de Trevec who rode to Saladin’s tent alone to seek for medicine for St. Louis? or shall I read about—what is it? Oh, here it is, all down in black and white—about the Marquis de Trevec who drowned himself before Alva’s eyes rather than surrender the banner of the fleur-de-lis to Spain? It’s all written here. But, dear, how about that soldier named Trevec who was killed in the old fort on the cliff yonder?”

“He dropped the de, and the Trevecs since then have been Republicans,” said Lys—“all except me.”

“That’s quite right,” said I; “it is time that we Republicans should agree upon some feudal system. My dear, I drink to the king!” and I raised my wine-glass and looked at Lys.

“To the king,” said Lys, flushing. She smoothed out the tiny garment on her knees; she touched the glass with her lips; her eyes were very sweet. I drained the glass to the king.

After a silence I said: “I will tell the king stories. His Majesty shall be amused.”

“His Majesty,” repeated Lys softly.

“Or hers,” I laughed. “Who knows?”

“Who knows?” murmured Lys, with a gentle sigh.

“I know some stories about Jack the Giant-Killer,” I announced. “Do you, Lys?”

“I? No, not about a giant-killer, but I know all about the werewolf, and Jeanne-la-Flamme, and the Man in Purple Tatters, and—O dear me! I know lots more.”

“You are very wise,” said I. “I shall teach his Majesty English.”

“And I Breton,” cried Lys jealously.

“I shall bring playthings to the king,” said I—“big green lizards from the gorse, little gray mullets to swim in glass globes, baby rabbits from the forest of Kerselec——”

“And I,” said Lys, “will bring the first primrose, the first branch of aubepine, the first jonquil, to the king—my king.”

“Our king,” said I; and there was peace in Finistère.

I lay back, idly turning the leaves of the curious old volume.

“I am looking,” said I, “for the crest.”

“The crest, dear? It is a priest’s head with an arrow-shaped mark on the forehead, on a field——”

I sat up and stared at my wife.

“Dick, whatever is the matter?” she smiled. “The story is there in that book. Do you care to read it? No? Shall I tell it to you? Well, then: It happened in the third crusade. There was a monk whom men called the Black Priest. He turned apostate, and sold himself to the enemies of Christ. A Sieur de Trevec burst into the Saracen camp, at the head of only one hundred lances, and carried the Black Priest away out of the very midst of their army.”

“So that is how you come by the crest,” I said quietly; but I thought of the branded skull in the gravel pit, and wondered.

“Yes,” said Lys. “The Sieur de Trevec cut the Black Priest’s head off, but first he branded him with an arrow mark on the forehead. The book says it was a pious action, and the Sieur de Trevec got great merit by it. But I think it was cruel, the branding,” she sighed.

“Did you ever hear of any other Black Priest?”

“Yes. There was one in the last century, here in St. Gildas. He cast a white shadow in the sun. He wrote in the Breton language. Chronicles, too, I believe. I never saw them. His name was the same as that of the old chronicler, and of the other priest, Jacques Sorgue. Some said he was a lineal descendant of the traitor. Of course the first Black Priest was bad enough for anything. But if he did have a child, it need not have been the ancestor of the last Jacques Sorgue. They say this one was a holy man. They say he was so good he was not allowed to die, but was caught up to heaven one day,” added Lys, with believing eyes.

I smiled.

“But he disappeared,” persisted Lys.

“I’m afraid his journey was in another direction,” I said jestingly, and thoughtlessly told her the story of the morning. I had utterly forgotten the masked man at her window, but before I finished I remembered him fast enough, and realized what I had done as I saw her face whiten.

“Lys,” I urged tenderly, “that was only some clumsy clown’s trick. You said so yourself. You are not superstitious, my dear?”

Her eyes were on mine. She slowly drew the little gold cross from her bosom and kissed it. But her lips trembled as they pressed the symbol of faith.

III

About nine o’clock the next morning I walked into the Groix Inn and sat down at the long discoloured oaken table, nodding good-day to Marianne Bruyère, who in turn bobbed her white coiffe at me.

“My clever Bannelec maid,” said I, “what is good for a stirrup-cup at the Groix Inn?”

“Schist?” she inquired in Breton.

“With a dash of red wine, then,” I replied.

She brought the delicious Quimperlé cider, and I poured a little Bordeaux into it. Marianne watched me with laughing black eyes.

“What makes your cheeks so red, Marianne?” I asked. “Has Jean Marie been here?”

“We are to be married, Monsieur Darrel,” she laughed.

“Ah! Since when has Jean Marie Tregunc lost his head?”

“His head? Oh, Monsieur Darrel—his heart, you mean!”

“So I do,” said I. “Jean Marie is a practical fellow.”

“It is all due to your kindness——” began the girl, but I raised my hand and held up the glass.

“It’s due to himself. To your happiness, Marianne;” and I took a hearty draught of the schist. “Now,” said I, “tell me where I can find Le Bihan and Max Fortin.”

“Monsieur Le Bihan and Monsieur Fortin are above in the broad room. I believe they are examining the Red Admiral’s effects.”

“To send them to Paris? Oh, I know. May I go up, Marianne?”

“And God go with you,” smiled the girl.

When I knocked at the door of the broad room above little Max Fortin opened it. Dust covered his spectacles and nose; his hat, with the tiny velvet ribbons fluttering, was all awry.

“Come in, Monsieur Darrel,” he said; “the mayor and I are packing up the effects of the Purple Emperor and of the poor Red Admiral.”

“The collections?” I asked, entering the room. “You must be very careful in packing those butterfly cases; the slightest jar might break wings and antennae, you know.”

Le Bihan shook hands with me and pointed to the great pile of boxes.

“They’re all cork lined,” he said, “but Fortin and I are putting felt around each box. The Entomological Society of Paris pays the freight.”

The combined collections of the Red Admiral and the Purple Emperor made a magnificent display.

I lifted and inspected case after case set with gorgeous butterflies and moths, each specimen carefully labelled with the name in Latin. There were cases filled with crimson tiger moths all aflame with colour; cases devoted to the common yellow butterflies; symphonies in orange and pale yellow; cases of soft gray and dun-coloured sphinx moths; and cases of garish nettle-bred butterflies of the numerous family of Vanessa.

All alone in a great case by itself was pinned the purple emperor, the Apatura Iris, that fatal specimen that had given the Purple Emperor his name and quietus.

I remembered the butterfly, and stood looking at it with bent eyebrows.

Le Bihan glanced up from the floor where he was nailing down the lid of a box full of cases.

“It is settled, then,” said he, “that madame, your wife, gives the Purple Emperor’s entire collection to the city of Paris?”

I nodded.

“Without accepting anything for it?”

“It is a gift,” I said.

“Including the purple emperor there in the case? That butterfly is worth a great deal of money,” persisted Le Bihan.

“You don’t suppose that we would wish to sell that specimen, do you?” I answered a trifle sharply.

“If I were you I should destroy it,” said the mayor in his high-pitched voice.

“That would be nonsense,” said I—“like your burying the brass cylinder and scroll yesterday.”

“It was not nonsense,” said Le Bihan doggedly, “and I should prefer not to discuss the subject of the scroll.”

I looked at Max Fortin, who immediately avoided my eyes.

“You are a pair of superstitious old women,” said I, digging my hands into my pockets; “you swallow every nursery tale that is invented.”

“What of it?” said Le Bihan sulkily; “there’s more truth than lies in most of ’em.”

“Oh!” I sneered, “does the Mayor of St. Gildas and St. Julien believe in the Loup-garou?” [werewolf]

“No, not in the Loup-garou.”

“In what, then—Jeanne-la-Flamme?”

“That,” said Le Bihan with conviction, “is history.”

“The devil it is!” said I; “and perhaps, monsieur the mayor, your faith in giants is unimpaired?”

“There were giants—everybody knows it,” growled Max Fortin.

“And you a chemist!” I observed scornfully.

“Listen, Monsieur Darrel,” squeaked Le Bihan; “you know yourself that the Purple Emperor was a scientific man. Now suppose I should tell you that he always refused to include in his collection a Death’s Messenger?”

“A what?” I exclaimed.

“You know what I mean—that moth that flies by night; some call it the Death’s Head, but in St. Gildas we call it ‘Death’s Messenger.’”

“Oh!” said I, “you mean that big sphinx moth that is commonly known as the ‘death’s-head moth.’ Why the mischief should the people here call it death’s messenger?”

“For hundreds of years it has been known as death’s messenger in St. Gildas,” said Max Fortin. “Even Froissart speaks of it in his commentaries on Jacques Sorgue’s Chronicles. The book is in your library.”

“Sorgue? And who was Jacques Sorgue? I never read his book.”

“Jacques Sorgue was the son of some unfrocked priest—I forget. It was during the crusades.”

“Good Heavens!” I burst out, “I’ve been hearing of nothing but crusades and priests and death and sorcery ever since I kicked that skull into the gravel pit, and I am tired of it, I tell you frankly. One would think we lived in the dark ages. Do you know what year of our Lord it is, Le Bihan?”

“Eighteen hundred and ninety-six,” replied the mayor.

“And yet you two hulking men are afraid of a death’s-head moth.”

“I don’t care to have one fly into the window,” said Max Fortin; “it means evil to the house and the people in it.”

“God alone knows why he marked one of his creatures with a yellow death’s head on the back,” observed Le Bihan piously, “but I take it that he meant it as a warning; and I propose to profit by it,” he added triumphantly.

“See here, Le Bihan,” I said; “by a stretch of imagination one can make out a skull on the thorax of a certain big sphinx moth. What of it?”

“It is a bad thing to touch,” said the mayor, wagging his head.

“It squeaks when handled,” added Max Fortin.

“Some creatures squeak all the time,” I observed, looking hard at Le Bihan.

“Pigs,” added the mayor.

“Yes, and asses,” I replied. “Listen, Le Bihan: do you mean to tell me that you saw that skull roll uphill yesterday?”

The mayor shut his mouth tightly and picked up his hammer.

“Don’t be obstinate,” I said; “I asked you a question.”

“And I refuse to answer,” snapped Le Bihan. “Fortin saw what I saw; let him talk about it.”

I looked searchingly at the little chemist.

“I don’t say that I saw it actually roll up out of the pit, all by itself,” said Fortin with a shiver, “but—but then, how did it come up out of the pit, if it didn’t roll up all by itself?”

“It didn’t come up at all; that was a yellow cobblestone that you mistook for the skull again,” I replied. “You were nervous, Max.”

“A—a very curious cobblestone, Monsieur Darrel,” said Fortin.

“I also was a victim to the same hallucination,” I continued, “and I regret to say that I took the trouble to roll two innocent cobblestones into the gravel pit, imagining each time that it was the skull I was rolling.”

“It was,” observed Le Bihan with a morose shrug.

“It just shows,” said I, ignoring the mayor’s remark, “how easy it is to fix up a train of coincidences so that the result seems to savour of the supernatural. Now, last night my wife imagined that she saw a priest in a mask peer in at her window——”

Fortin and Le Bihan scrambled hastily from their knees, dropping hammer and nails.

“W-h-a-t—what’s that?” demanded the mayor.

I repeated what I had said. Max Fortin turned livid.

“My God!” muttered Le Bihan, “the Black Priest is in St. Gildas!”

“D-don’t you—you know the old prophecy?” stammered Fortin; “Froissart quotes it from Jacques Sorgue:

‘When the Black Priest rises from the dead,

St. Gildas folk shall shriek in bed;

When the Black Priest rises from his grave,

May the good God St. Gildas save!’”

“Aristide Le Bihan,” I said angrily, “and you, Max Fortin, I’ve got enough of this nonsense! Some foolish lout from Bannelec has been in St. Gildas playing tricks to frighten old fools like you. If you have nothing better to talk about than nursery legends I’ll wait until you come to your senses. Good-morning.” And I walked out, more disturbed than I cared to acknowledge to myself.

The day had become misty and overcast. Heavy, wet clouds hung in the east. I heard the surf thundering against the cliffs, and the gray gulls squealed as they tossed and turned high in the sky. The tide was creeping across the river sands, higher, higher, and I saw the seaweed floating on the beach, and the lançons springing from the foam, silvery thread-like flashes in the gloom. Curlew were flying up the river in twos and threes; the timid sea swallows skimmed across the moors toward some quiet, lonely pool, safe from the coming tempest. In every hedge field birds were gathering, huddling together, twittering restlessly.

When I reached the cliffs I sat down, resting my chin on my clenched hands. Already a vast curtain of rain, sweeping across the ocean miles away, hid the island of Groix. To the east, behind the white semaphore on the hills, black clouds crowded up over the horizon. After a little the thunder boomed, dull, distant, and slender skeins of lightning unravelled across the crest of the coming storm. Under the cliff at my feet the surf rushed foaming over the shore, and the lançons jumped and skipped and quivered until they seemed to be but the reflections of the meshed lightning.

I turned to the east. It was raining over Groix, it was raining at Sainte Barbe, it was raining now at the semaphore. High in the storm whirl a few gulls pitched; a nearer cloud trailed veils of rain in its wake; the sky was spattered with lightning; the thunder boomed.

As I rose to go, a cold raindrop fell upon the back of my hand, and another, and yet another on my face. I gave a last glance at the sea, where the waves were bursting into strange white shapes that seemed to fling out menacing arms toward me. Then something moved on the cliff, something black as the black rock it clutched—a filthy cormorant, craning its hideous head at the sky.

Slowly I plodded homeward across the sombre moorland, where the gorse stems glimmered with a dull metallic green, and the heather, no longer violet and purple, hung drenched and dun-coloured among the dreary rocks. The wet turf creaked under my heavy boots, the black-thorn scraped and grated against knee and elbow. Over all lay a strange light, pallid, ghastly, where the sea spray whirled across the landscape and drove into my face until it grew numb with the cold. In broad bands, rank after rank, billow on billow, the rain burst out across the endless moors, and yet there was no wind to drive it at such a pace.

Lys stood at the door as I turned into the garden, motioning me to hasten; and then for the first time I became conscious that I was soaked to the skin.

“How ever in the world did you come to stay out when such a storm threatened?” she said. “Oh, you are dripping! Go quickly and change; I have laid your warm underwear on the bed, Dick.”

I kissed my wife, and went upstairs to change my dripping clothes for something more comfortable.

When I returned to the morning room there was a driftwood fire on the hearth, and Lys sat in the chimney corner embroidering.

“Catherine tells me that the fishing fleet from Lorient is out. Do you think they are in danger, dear?” asked Lys, raising her blue eyes to mine as I entered.

“There is no wind, and there will be no sea,” said I, looking out of the window. Far across the moor I could see the black cliffs looming in the mist.

“How it rains!” murmured Lys; “come to the fire, Dick.”

I threw myself on the fur rug, my hands in my pockets, my head on Lys’s knees.

“Tell me a story,” I said. “I feel like a boy of ten.”

Lys raised a finger to her scarlet lips. I always waited for her to do that.

“Will you be very still, then?” she said.

“Still as death.”

“Death,” echoed a voice, very softly.

“Did you speak, Lys?” I asked, turning so that I could see her face.

“No; did you, Dick?”

“Who said ‘death’?” I asked, startled.

“Death,” echoed a voice, softly.

I sprang up and looked about. Lys rose too, her needles and embroidery falling to the floor. She seemed about to faint, leaning heavily on me, and I led her to the window and opened it a little way to give her air. As I did so the chain lightning split the zenith, the thunder crashed, and a sheet of rain swept into the room, driving with it something that fluttered—something that flapped, and squeaked, and beat upon the rug with soft, moist wings.

We bent over it together, Lys clinging to me, and we saw that it was a death’s-head moth drenched with rain.

The dark day passed slowly as we sat beside the fire, hand in hand, her head against my breast, speaking of sorrow and mystery and death. For Lys believed that there were things on earth that none might understand, things that must be nameless forever and ever, until God rolls up the scroll of life and all is ended. We spoke of hope and fear and faith, and the mystery of the saints; we spoke of the beginning and the end, of the shadow of sin, of omens, and of love. The moth still lay on the floor, quivering its sombre wings in the warmth of the fire, the skull and ribs clearly etched upon its neck and body.

“If it is a messenger of death to this house,” I said, “why should we fear, Lys?”

“Death should be welcome to those who love God,” murmured Lys, and she drew the cross from her breast and kissed it.

“The moth might die if I threw it out into the storm,” I said after a silence.

“Let it remain,” sighed Lys.

Late that night my wife lay sleeping, and I sat beside her bed and read in the Chronicle of Jacques Sorgue. I shaded the candle, but Lys grew restless, and finally I took the book down into the morning room, where the ashes of the fire rustled and whitened on the hearth.

The death’s-head moth lay on the rug before the fire where I had left it. At first I thought it was dead, but, when I looked closer I saw a lambent fire in its amber eyes. The straight white shadow it cast across the floor wavered as the candle flickered.

The pages of the Chronicle of Jacques Sorgue were damp and sticky; the illuminated gold and blue initials left flakes of azure and gilt where my hand brushed them.

“It is not paper at all; it is thin parchment,” I said to myself; and I held the discoloured page close to the candle flame and read, translating laboriously:

“I, Jacques Sorgue, saw all these things. And I saw the Black Mass celebrated in the chapel of St. Gildas-on-the-Cliff. And it was said by the Abbé Sorgue, my kinsman: for which deadly sin the apostate priest was seized by the most noble Marquis of Plougastel and by him condemned to be burned with hot irons, until his seared soul quit its body and fly to its master the devil. But when the Black Priest lay in the crypt of Plougastel, his master Satan came at night and set him free, and carried him across land and sea to Mahmoud, which is Soldan or Saladin. And I, Jacques Sorgue, travelling afterward by sea, beheld with my own eyes my kinsman, the Black Priest of St. Gildas, borne along in the air upon a vast black wing, which was the wing of his master Satan. And this was seen also by two men of the crew.”

I turned the page. The wings of the moth on the floor began to quiver. I read on and on, my eyes blurring under the shifting candle flame. I read of battles and of saints, and I learned how the great Soldan made his pact with Satan, and then I came to the Sieur de Trevec, and read how he seized the Black Priest in the midst of Saladin’s tents and carried him away and cut off his head, first branding him on the forehead. “And before he suffered,” said the Chronicle, “he cursed the Sieur de Trevec and his descendants, and he said he would surely return to St. Gildas. ‘For the violence you do to me, I will do violence to you. For the evil I suffer at your hands, I will work evil on you and your descendants. Woe to your children, Sieur de Trevec!’” There was a whirr, a beating of strong wings, and my candle flashed up as in a sudden breeze. A humming filled the room; the great moth darted hither and thither, beating, buzzing, on ceiling and wall. I flung down my book and stepped forward. Now it lay fluttering upon the window sill, and for a moment I had it under my hand, but the thing squeaked and I shrank back. Then suddenly it darted across the candle flame; the light flared and went out, and at the same moment a shadow moved in the darkness outside. I raised my eyes to the window. A masked face was peering in at me.

Quick as thought I whipped out my revolver and fired every cartridge, but the face advanced beyond the window, the glass melting away before it like mist, and through the smoke of my revolver I saw something creep swiftly into the room. Then I tried to cry out, but the thing was at my throat, and I fell backward among the ashes of the hearth.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When my eyes unclosed I was lying on the hearth, my head among the cold ashes. Slowly I got on my knees, rose painfully, and groped my way to a chair. On the floor lay my revolver, shining in the pale light of early morning. My mind clearing by degrees, I looked, shuddering, at the window. The glass was unbroken. I stooped stiffly, picked up my revolver and opened the cylinder. Every cartridge had been fired. Mechanically I closed the cylinder and placed the revolver in my pocket. The book, the Chronicles of Jacques Sorgue, lay on the table beside me, and as I started to close it I glanced at the page. It was all splashed with rain, and the lettering had run, so that the page was merely a confused blur of gold and red and black. As I stumbled toward the door I cast a fearful glance over my shoulder. The death’s-head moth crawled shivering on the rug.

IV

The sun was about three hours high. I must have slept, for I was aroused by the sudden gallop of horses under our window. People were shouting and calling in the road. I sprang up and opened the sash. Le Bihan was there, an image of helplessness, and Max Fortin stood beside him, polishing his glasses. Some gendarmes had just arrived from Quimperlé, and I could hear them around the corner of the house, stamping, and rattling their sabres and carbines, as they led their horses into my stable.

Lys sat up, murmuring half-sleepy, half-anxious questions.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I am going out to see what it means.”

“It is like the day they came to arrest you,” Lys said, giving me a troubled look. But I kissed her, and laughed at her until she smiled too. Then I flung on coat and cap and hurried down the stairs.

The first person I saw standing in the road was the Brigadier Durand.

“Hello!” said I, “have you come to arrest me again? What the devil is all this fuss about, anyway?”

“We were telegraphed for an hour ago,” said Durand briskly, “and for a sufficient reason, I think. Look there, Monsieur Darrel!”

He pointed to the ground almost under my feet.

“Good heavens!” I cried, “where did that puddle of blood come from?”

“That’s what I want to know, Monsieur Darrel. Max Fortin found it at daybreak. See, it’s splashed all over the grass, too. A trail of it leads into your garden, across the flower beds to your very window, the one that opens from the morning room. There is another trail leading from this spot across the road to the cliffs, then to the gravel pit, and thence across the moor to the forest of Kerselec. We are going to mount in a minute and search the bosquets. Will you join us? Bon Dieu! but the fellow bled like an ox. Max Fortin says it’s human blood, or I should not have believed it.”

The little chemist of Quimperlé came up at that moment, rubbing his glasses with a coloured handkerchief.

“Yes, it is human blood,” he said, “but one thing puzzles me: the corpuscles are yellow. I never saw any human blood before with yellow corpuscles. But your English Doctor Thompson asserts that he has——”

“Well, it’s human blood, anyway—isn’t it?” insisted Durand, impatiently.

“Ye-es,” admitted Max Fortin.

“Then it’s my business to trail it,” said the big gendarme, and he called his men and gave the order to mount.

“Did you hear anything last night?” asked Durand of me.

“I heard the rain. I wonder the rain did not wash away these traces.”

“They must have come after the rain ceased. See this thick splash, how it lies over and weighs down the wet grass blades. Pah!”

It was a heavy, evil-looking clot, and I stepped back from it, my throat closing in disgust.

“My theory,” said the brigadier, “is this: Some of those Biribi fishermen, probably the Icelanders, got an extra glass of cognac into their hides and quarrelled on the road. Some of them were slashed, and staggered to your house. But there is only one trail, and yet—and yet, how could all that blood come from only one person? Well, the wounded man, let us say, staggered first to your house and then back here, and he wandered off, drunk and dying, God knows where. That’s my theory.”

“A very good one,” said I calmly. “And you are going to trail him?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“At once. Will you come?”

“Not now. I’ll gallop over by-and-bye. You are going to the edge of the Kerselec forest?”

“Yes; you will hear us calling. Are you coming, Max Fortin? And you, Le Bihan? Good; take the dog-cart.”

The big gendarme tramped around the corner to the stable and presently returned mounted on a strong gray horse; his sabre shone on his saddle; his pale yellow and white facings were spotless. The little crowd of white-coiffed women with their children fell back, as Durand touched spurs and clattered away followed by his two troopers. Soon after Le Bihan and Max Fortin also departed in the mayor’s dingy dog-cart.

“Are you coming?” piped Le Bihan shrilly.

“In a quarter of an hour,” I replied, and went back to the house.

When I opened the door of the morning room the death’s-head moth was beating its strong wings against the window. For a second I hesitated, then walked over and opened the sash. The creature fluttered out, whirred over the flower beds a moment, then darted across the moorland toward the sea. I called the servants together and questioned them. Josephine, Catherine, Jean Marie Tregunc, not one of them had heard the slightest disturbance during the night. Then I told Jean Marie to saddle my horse, and while I was speaking Lys came down.

“Dearest,” I began, going to her.

“You must tell me everything you know, Dick,” she interrupted, looking me earnestly in the face.

“But there is nothing to tell—only a drunken brawl, and someone wounded.”

“And you are going to ride—where, Dick?”

“Well, over to the edge of Kerselec forest. Durand and the mayor, and Max Fortin, have gone on, following a—a trail.”

“What trail?”

“Some blood.”

“Where did they find it?”

“Out in the road there.” Lys crossed herself.

“Does it come near our house?”

“Yes.”

“How near?”

“It comes up to the morning-room window,” said I, giving in.

Her hand on my arm grew heavy. “I dreamed last night——”

“So did I——” but I thought of the empty cartridges in my revolver, and stopped.

“I dreamed that you were in great danger, and I could not move hand or foot to save you; but you had your revolver, and I called out to you to fire——”

“I did fire!” I cried excitedly.

“You—you fired?”

I took her in my arms. “My darling,” I said, “something strange has happened—something that I can not understand as yet. But, of course, there is an explanation. Last night I thought I fired at the Black Priest.”

“Ah!” gasped Lys.

“Is that what you dreamed?”

“Yes, yes, that was it! I begged you to fire——”

“And I did.”

Her heart was beating against my breast. I held her close in silence.

“Dick,” she said at length, “perhaps you killed the—the thing.”

“If it was human I did not miss,” I answered grimly. “And it was human,” I went on, pulling myself together, ashamed of having so nearly gone to pieces. “Of course it was human! The whole affair is plain enough. Not a drunken brawl, as Durand thinks; it was a drunken lout’s practical joke, for which he has suffered. I suppose I must have filled him pretty full of bullets, and he has crawled away to die in Kerselec forest. It’s a terrible affair; I’m sorry I fired so hastily; but that idiot Le Bihan and Max Fortin have been working on my nerves till I am as hysterical as a schoolgirl,” I ended angrily.

“You fired—but the window glass was not shattered,” said Lys in a low voice.

“Well, the window was open, then. And as for the—the rest—I’ve got nervous indigestion, and a doctor will settle the Black Priest for me, Lys.”

I glanced out of the window at Tregunc waiting with my horse at the gate.

“Dearest, I think I had better go to join Durand and the others.”

“I will go too.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes, Dick.”

“Don’t, Lys.”

“I shall suffer every moment you are away.”

“The ride is too fatiguing, and we can’t tell what unpleasant sight you may come upon. Lys, you don’t really think there is anything supernatural in this affair?”

“Dick,” she answered gently, “I am a Bretonne.” With both arms around my neck, my wife said, “Death is the gift of God. I do not fear it when we are together. But alone—oh, my husband, I should fear a God who could take you away from me!”

We kissed each other soberly, simply, like two children. Then Lys hurried away to change her gown, and I paced up and down the garden waiting for her.

She came, drawing on her slender gauntlets. I swung her into the saddle, gave a hasty order to Jean Marie, and mounted.

Now, to quail under thoughts of terror on a morning like this, with Lys in the saddle beside me, no matter what had happened or might happen, was impossible. Moreover, Môme came sneaking after us. I asked Tregunc to catch him, for I was afraid he might be brained by our horses’ hoofs if he followed, but the wily puppy dodged and bolted after Lys, who was trotting along the high-road. “Never mind,” I thought; “if he’s hit, he’ll live, for he has no brains to lose.”

Lys was waiting for me in the road beside the Shrine of Our Lady of St. Gildas when I joined her. She crossed herself, I doffed my cap, then we shook out our bridles and galloped toward the forest of Kerselec.

We said very little as we rode. I always loved to watch Lys in the saddle. Her exquisite figure and lovely face were the incarnation of youth and grace; her curling hair glistened like threaded gold.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the spoiled puppy Môme come bounding cheerfully alongside, oblivious of our horses’ heels. Our road swung close to the cliffs. A filthy cormorant rose from the black rocks and flapped heavily across our path. Lys’s horse reared, but she pulled him down, and pointed at the bird with her riding crop.

“I see,” said I; “it seems to be going our way. Curious to see a cormorant in a forest, isn’t it?”

“It is a bad sign,” said Lys. “You know the Morbihan proverb: ‘When the cormorant turns from the sea, Death laughs in the forest, and wise woodsmen build boats.’”

“I wish,” said I sincerely, “that there were fewer proverbs in Brittany.”

We were in sight of the forest now; across the gorse I could see the sparkle of gendarmes’ trappings, and the glitter of Le Bihan’s silver-buttoned jacket. The hedge was low and we took it without difficulty, and trotted across the moor to where Le Bihan and Durand stood gesticulating.

They bowed ceremoniously to Lys as we rode up.

“The trail is horrible—it is a river,” said the mayor in his squeaky voice. “Monsieur Darrel, I think perhaps madame would scarcely care to come any nearer.”

Lys drew bridle and looked at me.

“It is horrible!” said Durand, walking up beside me; “it looks as though a bleeding regiment had passed this way. The trail winds and winds about there in the thickets; we lose it at times, but we always find it again. I can’t understand how one man—no, nor twenty—could bleed like that!”

A halloo, answered by another, sounded from the depths of the forest.

“It’s my men; they are following the trail,” muttered the brigadier. “God alone knows what is at the end!”

“Shall we gallop back, Lys?” I asked.

“No; let us ride along the western edge of the woods and dismount. The sun is so hot now, and I should like to rest for a moment,” she said.

“The western forest is clear of anything disagreeable,” said Durand.

“Very well,” I answered; “call me, Le Bihan, if you find anything.”

Lys wheeled her mare, and I followed across the springy heather, Môme trotting cheerfully in the rear.

We entered the sunny woods about a quarter of a kilometre from where we left Durand. I took Lys from her horse, flung both bridles over a limb, and, giving my wife my arm, aided her to a flat mossy rock which overhung a shallow brook gurgling among the beech trees. Lys sat down and drew off her gauntlets. Môme pushed his head into her lap, received an undeserved caress, and came doubtfully toward me. I was weak enough to condone his offence, but I made him lie down at my feet, greatly to his disgust.

I rested my head on Lys’s knees, looking up at the sky through the crossed branches of the trees.

“I suppose I have killed him,” I said. “It shocks me terribly, Lys.”

“You could not have known, dear. He may have been a robber, and—if—not——Did—have you ever fired your revolver since that day four years ago, when the Red Admiral’s son tried to kill you? But I know you have not.”

“No,” said I, wondering. “It’s a fact, I have not. Why?”

“And don’t you remember that I asked you to let me load it for you the day when Yves went off, swearing to kill you and his father?”

“Yes, I do remember. Well?”

“Well, I—I took the cartridges first to St. Gildas chapel and dipped them in holy water. You must not laugh, Dick,” said Lys gently, laying her cool hands on my lips.

“Laugh, my darling!”

Overhead the October sky was pale amethyst, and the sunlight burned like orange flame through the yellow leaves of beech and oak. Gnats and midges danced and wavered overhead; a spider dropped from a twig halfway to the ground and hung suspended on the end of his gossamer thread.

“Are you sleepy, dear?” asked Lys, bending over me.

“I am—a little; I scarcely slept two hours last night,” I answered.

“You may sleep, if you wish,” said Lys, and touched my eyes caressingly.

“Is my head heavy on your knees?”

“No, Dick.”

I was already in a half doze; still I heard the brook babbling under the beeches and the humming of forest flies overhead. Presently even these were stilled.

The next thing I knew I was sitting bolt upright, my ears ringing with a scream, and I saw Lys cowering beside me, covering her white face with both hands.

As I sprang to my feet she cried again and clung to my knees. I saw my dog rush growling into a thicket, then I heard him whimper, and he came backing out, whining, ears flat, tail down. I stooped and disengaged Lys’s hand.

“Don’t go, Dick!” she cried. “O God, it’s the Black Priest!”

In a moment I had leaped across the brook and pushed my way into the thicket. It was empty. I stared about me; I scanned every tree trunk, every bush. Suddenly I saw him. He was seated on a fallen log, his head resting in his hands, his rusty black robe gathered around him. For a moment my hair stirred under my cap; sweat started on forehead and cheek-bone; then I recovered my reason, and understood that the man was human and was probably wounded to death. Ay, to death; for there, at my feet, lay the wet trail of blood, over leaves and stones, down into the little hollow, across to the figure in black resting silently under the trees.

I saw that he could not escape even if he had the strength, for before him, almost at his very feet, lay a deep, shining swamp.

As I stepped forward my foot broke a twig. At the sound the figure started a little, then its head fell forward again. Its face was masked. Walking up to the man, I bade him tell where he was wounded. Durand and the others broke through the thicket at the same moment and hurried to my side.

“Who are you who hide a masked face in a priest’s robe?” said the gendarme loudly.

There was no answer.

“See—see the stiff blood all over his robe!” muttered Le Bihan to Fortin.

“He will not speak,” said I.

“He may be too badly wounded,” whispered Le Bihan.

“I saw him raise his head,” I said; “my wife saw him creep up here.”

Durand stepped forward and touched the figure.

“Speak!” he said.

“Speak!” quavered Fortin.

Durand waited a moment, then with a sudden upward movement he stripped off the mask and threw back the man’s head. We were looking into the eye sockets of a skull. Durand stood rigid; the mayor shrieked. The skeleton burst out from its rotting robes and collapsed on the ground before us. From between the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering the shrinking grasses; then the thing shuddered, and fell over into the black ooze of the bog. Little bubbles of iridescent air appeared from the mud; the bones were slowly engulfed, and, as the last fragments sank out of sight, up from the depths and along the bank crept a creature, shiny, shivering, quivering its wings.

It was a death’s-head moth.

•      •      •      •      •      •

I wish I had time to tell you how Lys outgrew superstitions—for she never knew the truth about the affair, and she never will know, since she has promised not to read this book. I wish I might tell you about the king and his coronation, and how the coronation robe fitted. I wish that I were able to write how Yvonne and Herbert Stuart rode to a boar hunt in Quimperlé, and how the hounds raced the quarry right through the town, overturning three gendarmes, the notary, and an old woman. But I am becoming garrulous, and Lys is calling me to come and hear the king say that he is sleepy. And his Highness shall not be kept waiting.

THE KING’S CRADLE SONG

Seal with a seal of gold

The scroll of a life unrolled;

Swathe him deep in his purple stole;

Ashes of diamonds, crystalled coal,

Drops of gold in each scented fold.

Crimson wings of the Little Death,

Stir his hair with your silken breath;

Flaming wings of sins to be,

Splendid pinions of prophecy,

Smother his eyes with hues and dyes,

While the white moon spins and the winds arise,

And the stars drip through the skies.

Wave, O wings of the Little Death!

Seal his sight and stifle his breath,

Cover his breast with the gemmed shroud pressed;

From north to north, from west to west,

Wave, O wings of the Little Death!

Till the white moon reels in the cracking skies,

And the ghosts of God arise.

THE WHITE SHADOW

We are no other than a moving row

Of magic shadow-shapes, that come and go

Round with this sun-illumined lantern, held

In midnight by the master of the show.

A moment’s halt—a momentary taste

Of being from the well amid the waste—

And lo! the phantom caravan has reached

The nothing it set out from. Oh, make haste!

Ah, Love! could you and I with him conspire

To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

—Fitzgerald

THE WHITE SHADOW

Listen, then, love, and with your white hand clear

Your forehead from its cloudy hair.

I

“Three great hulking cousins,” said she, closing her gray eyes disdainfully.

We accepted the rebuke in astonished silence. Presently she opened her eyes, and seemed surprised to see us there yet.

“O,” she said, “if you think I am going to stay here until you make up your minds——”

“I’ve made up mine,” said Donald. “We will go to the links. You may come.”

“I shall not,” she announced. “Walter, what do you propose?”

Walter looked at his cartridge belt and then at the little breech-loader standing in a corner of the arbour.

“Oh, I know,” she said, “but I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

The uncles and aunts on the piazza turned to look at us; her mother arose from a steamer-chair and came across the lawn.

“Won’t what, Sweetheart?” she asked, placing both hands on her daughter’s shoulders.

“Mamma, Walter wants me to shoot, and Don wants me to play golf, and I—won’t!”

“She doesn’t know what she wants,” said I.

“Don’t I?” she said, flushing with displeasure.

“Her mother might suggest something,” hazarded Donald. We looked at our aunt.

“Sweetheart is spoiled,” said that lady decisively. “If you children don’t go away at once and have a good time, I shall find employment for her.”

“Algebra?” I asked maliciously.

“How dare you!” cried Sweetheart, sitting up. “Oh, isn’t he mean! isn’t he ignoble!—and I’ve done my algebra; haven’t I, mamma?”

“But your French?” I began.

Donald laughed, and so did Walter. As for Sweetheart, she arose in all the dignity of sixteen years, closed her eyes with superb insolence, and, clasping her mother’s waist with one round white arm, marched out of the arbour.

“We tease her too much,” said Donald.

“She’s growing up fast; we ought not to call her ‘Sweetheart’ when she puts her hair up,” added Walter.

“She’s going to put it up in October, when she goes back to school,” said Donald. “Jack, she will hate you if you keep reminding her of her algebra and French.”

“Then I’ll stop,” said I, suddenly conscious what an awful thing it would be if she hated me.

Donald’s two pointers came frisking across the lawn from the kennels, and Donald picked up his gun.

“Here we go again,” said I. “Donny’s going to the coverts after grouse, Walter’s going up on the hill with his dust-shot and arsenic, and I’m going across the fields after butterflies. Why the deuce can’t we all go together, just for once?”

“And take Sweetheart? She would like it if we all went together,” said Walter; “she is tired of seeing Jack net butterflies.”

“Collecting birds and shooting grouse are two different things,” began Donald. “You spoil my dogs by shooting your confounded owls and humming birds.”

“Oh, your precious dogs!” I cried. “Shut up, Donny, and give Sweetheart a good day’s tramp. It’s a pity if three cousins can’t pool their pleasures for once.”

Donald nodded uncertainly.

“Come on,” said Walter, “we’ll find Sweetheart. Jack, you get your butterfly togs and come back here.”

I nodded, and watched my two cousins sauntering across the lawn—big, clean-cut fellows, resembling each other enough to be brothers instead of cousins.

We all resembled each other more or less, Donald, Walter, and I. As for Sweetheart, she looked like none of us.

It was all very well for her mother to call her Sweetheart, and for her aunts to echo it in chorus, but the time was coming when we saw we should have to stop. A girl of sixteen with such a name is ridiculous, and Sweetheart was nearly seventeen; and her hair was “going up” and her gowns were “coming down” in October.

Her own name was pretty enough. I don’t know that I ought to tell it, but I will: it was the same as her mother’s. We called her Sweetheart sometimes, sometimes “The Aspen Beauty.” Donald had given her that name from a butterfly in my collection, the Vanessa Pandora, commonly known as the Aspen beauty, from its never having been captured in America except in our village of Aspen.

Here, in the north of New York State, we four cousins spent our summers in the family house. There was not much to do in Aspen. We used the links, we galloped over the sandy roads, we also trotted our several hobbies, Donald, Walter, and I. Sweetheart had no hobby; to make up for this, however, she owned a magnificent team of bêtes-noires—Algebra and French.

As for me, my butterfly collection languished. I had specimens of nearly every butterfly in New York State, and I rather longed for new states to conquer. Anyway, there were plenty of Aspen beauties—I mean the butterflies—flying about the roads and balm-of-Gilead trees, and perhaps that is why I lingered there long enough to collect hundreds of duplicates for exchange. And perhaps it wasn’t.

I thought of these things as I sat in the sun-flecked arbour, watching the yellow elm leaves flutter down from the branches. I thought, too, of Sweetheart, and wondered how she would look with her hair up. And while I sat there smoking, watching the yellow leaves drifting across the lawn, a sharp explosion startled me and I raised my head.

Sweetheart was standing on the lawn, gazing dreamily at the smoking débris of a large firecracker.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“It proclaims my independence,” said Sweetheart—“my independence forever. Hereafter my cousins will ask to accompany me on my walks; they need no longer charitably permit me to accompany them. Are you three boys going to ride your hobbies?”

“We are,” I said.

“Then good-bye. I am going to walk.”

“Can’t we come too?” I asked, laughing.

“Oh,” she said graciously, “if you put it in that way, I could not refuse.”

“May we bring our guns?” asked Donald from the piazza.

“May I bring my net?” I added, half amused, half annoyed.

She made a gesture, indifferent, condescending.

“Dear me!” murmured the aunts in chorus from the piazza as we trooped after the Aspen beauty, “Sweetheart is growing very fast.”

I smiled vaguely at Sweetheart. I was wondering how she would look in long frocks and coiled hair.

II

In the fall of the year the meadows of Aspen glimmer in the sunlight like crumpled sheets of beaten gold; for Aspen is the land of golden-rod, of yellow earth and gilded fern.

There the crisp oaks rustle, every leaf a blot of yellow; there the burnished pines sound, sound, tremble, and resound, like gilt-stringed harps aquiver in the wind.

Sweet fern, sun-dried, bronzed, fills all the hills with incense, vague and delicate as the white down drifting from the frothy milkweed.

And where the meadow brook prattled, limpid, filtered with sunlight, Sweetheart stood knee-deep in fragrant mint, watching the aimless minnows swimming in circles. On a distant hill, dark against the blue, Donald moved with his dogs, and I saw the sun-glint on his gun, and I heard the distant “Hi—on! Hi—on!” long after he disappeared below the brown hill’s brow.

Walter, too, had gone, leaving us there by the brook together, Sweetheart and I; and I saw the crows flapping and circling far over the woods, and I heard the soft report of his dust-shot shells among the trees.

“The ruling passion, Sweetheart,” I said. “Donny chases the phantom of pleasure with his dogs. The phantom flies from Walter, and he follows with his dust-shot.”

“Then,” said Sweetheart, “follow your phantom also; there are butterflies everywhere.” She raised both arms and turned from the brook. “Everywhere flying I see butterflies—phantoms of pleasure; and, Jack, you do not follow with your net.”

“No,” said I, “the world to-day is too fair to—slay in. I even doubt that the happiness of empires hinges on the discovery of a new species of anything. Do I bore you?”

“A little,” said Sweetheart, touching the powdered gold of the blossoms about her. She laid the tip of her third finger on her lips and then on the golden-rod. “I shall not pick it; the world is too fair to-day,” she said. “What are you going to do, Jack?”

“I could doze,” I said. “Could you?”

“Yes—if you told me stories.”

I contemplated her in silence for a moment. After a while she sat down under an oak and clasped her hands.

“I am growing so old,” she sighed, “I no longer take pleasure in childish things—Donald’s dogs, Walter’s hummingbirds, your butterflies. Jack?”

“What?”

“Sit down on the grass.”

“What for?”

“Because I ask you.”

I sat down.

Presently she said: “I am as tall as mamma. Why should I study algebra?”

“Because,” I answered evasively.

“Your answer is as rude as though I were twenty, instead of sixteen,” said Sweetheart. “If you treat me as a child from this moment, I shall hate you.”

“Me—Sweetheart?”

“And that name!—it is good for children and kittens.”

I looked at her seriously. “It is good for women, too—when it is time,” I said. “I prophesy that one day you will hear it again. As for me, I shall not call you by that name if you dislike it.”

“I am a woman—now,” she said.

“Oh! at sixteen.”

“To-morrow I am to be seventeen.”

Presently, looking off at the blue hills, I said: “For a long time I have recognised that that subtle, indefinable attitude—we call it deference—due from men to women is due from us to you. Donny and Walter are slower to accept this. You know what you have been to us as a child; we can’t bear to lose you—to meet you in another way—to reckon with you as we reckon with a woman. But it is true: our little Sweetheart has vanished, and—you are here!”

The oak leaves began to rustle in the hill winds; the crows cawed from the woods.

“Oui, c’est moi,” she said at length.

“I shall never call you Sweetheart again,” I said, smiling.

“Who knows?” she laughed, and leaned over to pick a blade of wild wheat. She coloured faintly a moment later, and said: “I didn’t mean that, Jack.”

And so Sweetheart took her first step across that threshold of mystery, the Temple of Idols. And of the gilded idols within the temple, one shall turn to living flesh at the sound of a voice. And lo! where a child had entered, a woman returned with the key to the Temple of Gilded Idols.

“Jack,” said Sweetheart, “you are wrong. No day is too fair to kill in. I shall pick my arms full—full of flowers.”

Over the yellow fields, red with the stalks of the buckwheat, crowned with a glimmering cloud of the dusty gold of the golden-rod, Sweetheart passed, pensive, sedate, awed by the burden of sixteen years.

I followed.

Over the curling fern and wind-stirred grasses the silken milkweed seeds sailed, sailed, and the great red-brown butterflies drifted above, ruddy as autumn leaves aglow in the sun.

“On the sand-cliff there are marigolds,” said Sweetheart.

I looked at the mass of wild flowers in her arms; her white polished skin reflected the blaze of colour, warming like ivory under their glow.

“Marigolds,” I repeated; “we will get some.”

“The sand slides on the face of the cliff; you must be careful,” she said.

“And I may see one of those rare cliff butterflies. I haven’t any good examples.”

I fancy she was not listening; the crows were clamouring above the beech woods; the hill winds filled our ears with a sound like the sound of the sea on shoals. Her gray eyes, touched with the sky’s deep blue and the blue of the misty hills, looked out across the miles of woods and fields, and saw a world; not a world old, scarred, rock-ribbed, and salt with tears, but a new world, youthful, ripe, sunny, hazy with the splendour of wonders hidden behind the horizon—a world jewelled with gems, spanned by rose-mist rainbows—a world of sixteen years.

“We are already at the cliff’s edge,” I said.

She stepped to the edge and looked over. I drew her back. The sand started among the rocks, running, running with a sound like silver water.

“Then you shall not go either,” she said. “I do not care for marigolds.”

But I was already on the edge, stooping for a blossom. The next instant I fell.

There was a whistle of sand, a flurry and a rush of wind, a blur of rock, fern, dead grasses—a cry!

For I remember as I fell, falling I called, “Sweetheart!” and again “Sweetheart!” Then my body struck the rocks below.

III

Of all the seconds that tick the whole year through, of all the seconds that have slipped onward marking the beat of time since time was loosed, there is one, one brief moment, steeped in magic and heavy with oblivion, that sometimes lingers in the soul of man, annihilating space and time. If, at the feet of God, a year is a second passed unnoted, this magic second, afloat on the tide of time, moves on and on till, caught in the vortex of some life’s whirl, it sinks into the soul of a being near to death.

And in that soul the magic second glows and lingers, stretching into minutes, hours, days—aye, days and days, till, if the magic hold, the calm years crowd on one by one; and yet it all is but a second—that magic moment that comes on the tide of time—that came to me and was caught up in my life’s whirl as I fell, dropping there between sky and earth.

And so that magic moment grew to minutes, to hours; and when my body, whirling, pitching, struck and lay flung out on the earth, the magic second grew until the crystal days fell from my life, as beads, one by one, fall from the rosaries that saints tell kneeling.

Those days of a life that I have lived, those years that linger still aglow in the sun behind me, dim yet splendid as dust-dimmed jewels, they also have ended, not in vague night, but in the sunburst of another second—such a second as ticks from my watch as I write, quick, sharp, joyous, irrevocable! So, of that magic second, or day, or year, I shall tell—I, as I was, standing beside my body flung there across the earth.

I looked at my body, lying in a heap, then turned to the sand cliff smiling.

“Sweetheart!” I called.

But she was already at my side.

We walked on through fragrant pastures, watching the long shadows stretch from field to field, speaking of what had been and of all that was to be. It was so simple—everything was clear before us. Had there been doubts, fears, sudden alarms, startled heartbeats?

If there had been, now they were ended forever.

“Not forever,” said Sweetheart; “who knows how long the magic second may last?”

“But we—what difference can that make?” I asked.

“To us?”

“Yes.”

“None,” said Sweetheart decisively.

We looked out into the west. The sun turned to a mound of cinders; the hills loomed in opalescent steam.

“But—but—your shadow!” said Sweetheart.

I bent my head, thrilled with happiness.

“And yours,” I whispered.

The shadows we cast were whiter than snow.

I still heard the hill winds, soft in my ears as breaking surf; a bird-note came from the dusky woodland; a star broke out overhead.

“What is your pleasure, Sweetheart, now all is said?” I asked.

“The world is all so fair,” she sighed; “is it fairer beyond the hills, Jack?”

“It is fair where you pass by, north, south, and from west to west again. In France the poplars are as yellow as our oaks. In Morbihan the gorse gilds all the hills, yellow as golden-rod. Shall we go?”

“But in the spring—let us wait until spring.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Until spring?”

“It is written that Time shall pass as a shadow across the sea. What is that book there under your feet—that iron-bound book, half embedded like a stone in the grass.”

“I did not see it!”

“Bring it to me.”

I raised the book; it left a bare mark in the sod as a stone that is turned. Then, holding it on my knees, I opened it, and Sweetheart, leaning on my shoulder, read. The tall stars flared like candles, flooding the page with diamond light; the earth, perfumed with blossoms, stirred with the vague vibration of countless sounds, tiny voices swaying breathless in the hidden surge of an endless harmony.

“The white shadow is the shadow of the soul,” she read. Even the winds were hushed as her sweet lips moved.

“And what shall make thee to understand what hell is?… When the sun shall be folded up as a garment that is laid away; when the stars fall, and the seas boil, and when souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime; when books shall be laid open, when hell shall burn fiercely, and when paradise shall be brought very near:

“Every soul shall know what it hath wrought!”

I closed my eyes; the splendour of the starlight on the page was more than my eyes could bear.

But she read on; for what can dim her eyes?

“O man, verily, labouring, thou labourest to meet thy Lord.

“And thou shalt meet Him!

“When the earth shall be stretched like a skin, and shall cast forth that which is therein;

“By the heaven adorned with signs, by the witness and the witnessed;

“By that which appeareth by night; by the daybreak and the ten nights—the ten nights;

“The night of Al Kadr is better than a thousand months.

“Praise be to God, the Lord of all creatures; the Most Merciful, the King of the Day of Judgment. Thee do we worship, and of thee do we beg assistance. Direct us in the right way, in the way of those to whom thou hast been gracious; not of those against whom thou art incensed, nor of those who go astray!”

•      •      •      •      •      •

In the sudden silence that spread across earth and heaven I heard the sound of a voice under the earth, calling, calling, calling.

“It is already spring,” said Sweetheart; and she rose, placing her white hands in mine. “Shall we go?”

“But we are already there,” I stammered, turning my eyes fearfully; for the tall pines dwindled and clustered and rose again cool and gray in the morning air, all turned to stone, fretted and carved like lacework; and where the pines had faded, the twin towers of a cathedral loomed; and where the hills swept across the horizon, the roofs of a white city glimmered in the morning sun. Bridges and quays and streets and domes and the hum of traffic and rattle of arms; and over all, the veil of haze and the twin gray towers of Notre Dame!

“Sweetheart!” I faltered.

But we were already in my studio.

IV

The studio had not changed. The sun flooded it.

Sweetheart sat in the broken armchair and watched me struggle with the packing. Every now and then she made an impulsive movement toward the heap of clothes on the floor, which I checked with a “Thanks! I can fix it all alone, Sweetheart.”

Clifford seemed to extract amusement from it all, and said as much to Rowden, who was as usual ruining my zitherine by trying to play it like a banjo.

Elliott, knowing he could be of no use to us, had the decency to sit outside the studio on one of the garden benches. He appeared at intervals at the studio door, saying, “Come along, Clifford; they don’t want you messing about. Drop that banjo, Rowden, or Jack will break your head with it—won’t you, Jack?”

I said I would, but not with the zitherine.

Clifford flatly refused to move unless Sweetheart would take him out into our garden and show him the solitary goldfish which lurked in the fountain under the almond trees. But Sweetheart, apparently fascinated by the mysteries of packing, turned a deaf ear to Clifford’s blandishments and Rowden’s discords.

“I imagined,” said Clifford, somewhat hurt, “that you would delight in taking upon yourself the duties of a hostess. I should be pleased to believe that I am not an unwelcome guest.”

“So should I,” echoed Rowden; “I’d be pleased too.”

“What a shame for you to bother, Jack!” she said. “Mr. Clifford shall go and make some tea directly. Mr. Rowden, you may take a table out by the fountain—and stay there.”

Clifford, motioning Elliott to take the other end of the Japanese table, backed with it through the hallway and out to the gravel walk, expostulating.

“The sugar is there in that tin box by the model stand,” she said, when he reappeared, “and the extra spoons are lying in a long box on Jack’s big easel.”

When Rowden, reluctantly relinquishing the zitherine, followed Clifford, bearing the cups and alcohol lamp, I raised my head and wiped the dust from my forehead. I believe I swore a little in French. Sweetheart looked startled. She knew more French than I supposed she did.

“What is it, Jack?”

“Mais—rien, ça m’embête—cette espèce de malle——”

“Then why won’t you let me help you, Jack? I can at least put in my gowns.”

“But I must pack my colour box first, and the gun case, and the box of reels, and the pastel case, and our shooting boots, and the water-colour box, and the cartridge belt, and your golf shoes, and——”

“O dear!” said Sweetheart with a shudder.

I stood up and scowled at the trunk.

“To look at you, Jack,” murmured Sweetheart, “one might think you unhappy.”

Unhappy! At the thought our eyes met across the table.

“Unhappy!” I whispered.

Then Clifford came stumbling in, wearing a pair of Joseph’s sabots, and, imitating that faithful domestic in voice and manner, invited us to tea under the lilacs and almond blossoms.

“In a moment,” cried Sweetheart impatiently. “Go and pour the tea.”

Clifford looked aghast. “No, no!” he cried; “it’s impossible—I won’t believe that you two are deliberately getting rid of me so you can be alone to spoon! And your honeymoon already a year old, and——”

Sweetheart frowned, and tapped her foot.

Clifford retired indignant.

Then she raised her eyes to mine, and a delicate colour stained her cheeks and neck.

“Yes,” I said, “we have been married nearly a year, Sweetheart.”

We looked at our white shadows on the floor.

V

Sweetheart sat under the lilac blossoms pouring out tea for Clifford, Elliott, and Rowden. She was gracious to Clifford, gentle to Elliott, and she took Rowden under her wing in the sweetest way possible, to which Clifford stated his objections.

“Mr. Rowden is younger than you are,” she said gravely. “Monsieur Clifford, I do not wish you to torment him.”

“Rowden’s no baby; he’s as old as Jack is, and Jack doesn’t murder music.”

“I am glad to see you acknowledge Jack’s superiority in all matters,” said Sweetheart with a dangerous smile.

“I don’t,” cried Clifford laughing; “and I don’t see what you find to care about in a man who clips his hair like a gendarme and paints everything purple.”

“Everything is purple—if Jack paints it so,” said Sweetheart, smiling at her reflected face in the water. She stood at the rim of the little stone fountain with her hands clasped behind her back. Elliott and Clifford were poking about in the water plants to dislodge the solitary goldfish, while Rowden gathered dewy clusters of lilacs as an offering.

“There he goes!” said Elliott.

“Poor fellow, living there all alone!” said Sweetheart. “Jack must leave word with Joseph to get him a little lady fish to pay his court to.”

“Better put in another gentleman fish, then, if you’re following Nature,” said Clifford, with an attempt at cynicism which drew the merriest laugh from Sweetheart.

“Oh, how funny is Monsieur Clifford when he wants to be like Frenchmen!” she murmured.

“Jack,” said Elliott, as I came from the studio and picked up a cup of tea grown cold, “Clifford’s doing the world-worn disenchanted roué.”

“And—and I fear he will next make love to me!” cried Sweetheart.

“You’d better look out, Jack,” said Clifford darkly, and pretended to sulk until Sweetheart sent him off to buy the bonbons she would need for the train.

“They’re packed,” I said, “every trunk of them!”

Sweetheart was enchanted. “All my new gowns, and the shoes from Rix’s—O Jack, you didn’t forget the shoes—and the bathrobes—and——”

“All packed,” I said, swallowing the tea with a wry face.

“Oh,” she cried reproachfully, “don’t drink that! Here, I will have some hot tea in a moment,” and she ran over and perched on the arm of the garden bench while I lighted the alcohol lamp and then a cigarette.

Rowden came up with his offering of lilacs, and she decorated each of us with a spray.

It was growing late. The long shadows fell across the gravel walks and flecked the white walls of the sculptor’s studio opposite.

“It’s the nine-o’clock train, isn’t it?” said Elliott.

“We will meet you at the station at eight-thirty,” added Rowden.

“You don’t mind, do you, our dining alone?” said Sweetheart shyly; “it’s our last day—Jack’s and mine—in the old studio.”

“Not the last, I hope,” said Elliott sincerely.

We all sat silent for a moment.

“O Paris, Paris—how I fear it!” murmured Sweetheart to me; and in the same breath, “No, no, we must love it, you and I.”

Then Elliott said aloud, “I suppose you have no idea when you will return?”

“No,” I replied, thinking of the magic second that had become a year.

And so we dined alone, Sweetheart and I, in the old studio.

At half-past eight o’clock the cab stood at the gate with all our traps piled on top, and Joseph and his wife and the two brats were crying, “Au revoir, madame! au revoir, monsieur! We will keep the studio well dusted. Bon voyage! bon voyage!” and all of a sudden my arm was caught by Sweetheart’s little gloved hand, and she drew me back through the long ivy-covered alley to the garden where the studio stood, its doorway closed and silent, the hollow windows black and grim. Truly the light had passed away with the passing of Sweetheart. Her hand slipped from my arm, and she went and knelt down at the threshold and kissed it.

“I first knew happiness when I first crossed it,” she said; “it breaks my heart to leave it. Only that magic second! but it seems years that we have lived here.”

“It was you who brought happiness to it,” I said.

“Good-bye! good-bye, dear, dear, old studio!” she cried. “Oh, if Jack is always the same to me as he has been here—if he will be faithful and true in that new home!”

The new home was to be in a strange land. Sweetheart was a little frightened, but was dying to go there. Sweetheart had never seen the golden gorse ablaze on the moors of Morbihan.

VI

I went inside the brass railing and waited my turn to buy the tickets. When it came, I took two first class to Quimperlé, for it was to be an all-night ride, and there was no sleeping car. Clifford had taken charge of the baggage, and I went with him to have it registered, leaving Sweetheart with Elliott and Rowden. All the traps were there—the big trunks, the big valises, my sketching kit, the zitherine in a leather case, two handbags, a bundle of umbrellas and canes, and a huge package of canvases. The toilet case and the rugs and waterproofs we took with us into the compartment.

The compartment was empty. Sweetheart nestled into one corner, and when I had placed our traps in the racks overhead I sat down opposite, while Clifford handed in our sandwiches, a bottle of red wine, and Sweetheart’s box of bonbons.

We didn’t say much; most had been said before starting. Clifford was more affected than he cared to show—I know by the way he grasped my hand. They are dear fellows, every one. We did not realize that we were actually going—going, perhaps, forever. She laughed, and chatted, and made fun of Clifford, and teased Rowden, aided and abetted by Elliott, until the starting gong clanged and a warning whistle sounded along the gaslit platform.

“Jack,” cried Clifford, leaning in the window, “God bless you! God bless you both!”

Elliott touched her hand and wrung mine, and Rowden risked his neck to give us both one last cordial grasp.

“Count on me—on us,” cried Clifford, speaking in English, “if you are—troubled!”

By what, my poor Clifford? Can you, with all your gay courage, turn back the hands of the dials? Can you, with all your warm devotion, add one second to the magic second and make it two? The shadows we cast are white.

The train stole out into the night, and I saw them grouped on the platform, silhouettes in the glare of the yellow signals. I drew in my head and shut the window. Sweetheart’s face had grown very serious, but now she smiled across from her corner.

“Aren’t you coming over by me, Jack?”

VII

We must have been moving very swiftly, for the car rocked and trembled, and it was probably that which awoke me. I looked across at Sweetheart. She was lying on her side, one cheek resting on her gloved hand, her travelling cap pushed back, her eyes shut. I smoothed away the curly strands of hair which straggled across her cheeks, and tucked another rug well about her feet. Her feet were small as a child’s. I speak as if she were not a child. She was eighteen then.

The next time I awoke we lay in a long gaslit station. Some soldiers were disembarking from the forward carriages, and a gendarme stalked up and down the platform.

I looked sleepily about for the name of the station. It was painted in blue over the buffet—“Petit St. Yves.” “Is it possible we are in Brittany?” I thought. Then the voices of the station hands, who were hoisting a small boat upon the forward carriage, settled my doubts. “Allons! tire hardiment, Jean Louis! mets le cannotte deboutte.”

“Arrête toi Yves! doucement! doucement! Sacré garce!”

Somewhere in the darkness a mellow bell tolled. I settled back to slumber, my eyes on Sweetheart.

She slept.

VIII

I awoke in a flood of brightest sunshine. From our window I could look into the centre of a most enchanting little town, all built of white limestone and granite. The June sunshine slanted on thatched roof and painted gable, and fairly blazed on the little river slipping by under the stone bridge in the square.

The streets and the square were alive with rosy-faced women in white head-dresses. Everywhere the constant motion of blue skirts and spotless coiffes, the twinkle of varnished socks, the clump! clump! of sabots.

Like a black shadow a priest stole across the square. Above him the cross on the church glowed like a live cinder, flashing its reflection along the purple-slated roof from the eaves of which a cloud of ash-gray pigeons drifted into the gutter below. I turned from the window to encounter Sweetheart’s eyes. Her lips moved a little, her long lashes heavy with slumber drooped lower, then with a little sigh she sat bolt upright. When I laughed, as I always did, she smiled, a little confused, a little ashamed, murmuring: “Bonjour, mon chéri! Quelle heure est-il?” That was always the way Sweetheart awoke.

“O dear, I am so rumpled!” she said. “Jack, get me the satchel this minute, and don’t look at me until I ask you to.”

I unlocked the satchel, and then turning to the window again threw it wide open. Oh, how sweet came the morning air from the meadows! Some young fellows below on the bank of the stream were poking long cane fishing-rods under the arches of the bridge.

“Sweetheart,” I said over my shoulder, “I believe there are trout in this stream.”

“Mr. Elliott says that whenever you see a puddle you always say that,” she replied.

“What does he know about it?” I answered, for I am touchy on the subject; “he doesn’t know a catfish from a—a dogfish.”

“Neither do I, Jack dear, but I’m going to learn. Don’t be cross.”

She had finished her toilet and came over to the window, leaning out over my shoulder.

“Where are we?” she cried in startled wonder at the little white town and the acres of swaying clover. “Oh, Jack, is—is this the country?”

A man in uniform passing under our window looked up surprised.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded; then, seeing Sweetheart, he took off his gold-laced cap, and added, with a bow: “This carriage goes no farther, monsieur—madame——”

“Merci!” exclaimed Sweetheart, “we wish to go to Quimperlé!”

“And we have tickets for Quimperlé,” I insisted.

“But,” smiled the official, “this is Quimperlé.”

It was true. There was the name written over the end of the station; and, looking ahead, I saw that our car had been detached and was standing in stately seclusion under the freight shed. How long it had been standing so Heaven alone knows; but they evidently had neglected to call us, and there we were inhabiting a detached carriage in the heart of Quimperlé. I managed to get a couple of porters, and presently we found all our traps piled up on the platform, and a lumbering vehicle with a Breton driver waiting to convey us to the hotel.

“Which,” said I to the docile Breton, “is the best hotel in Quimperlé?”

“The Hôtel Lion d’Or,” he replied.

“How do you know?” I demanded.

“Because,” said he mildly, “it is the only hotel in Quimperlé.”

Sweetheart observed that this ought to be convincing, even to me, and she tormented me all the way to the square, where I got even by pretending to be horrified at her dishevelled condition incident to a night’s railway ride in a stuffy compartment.

“Don’t, Jack! people will look at us.”

“Let ’em.”

“Oh, this is cruel! Oh, I’ll pay you for this!”

And they did look at us—or rather at her; for from the time Sweetheart and I had cast our lots together, I noticed that I seemed to escape the observation of passers-by. When I lived alone in Paris I attracted a fair share of observation from the world as it wagged on its Parisian way. It was pleasant to meet a pretty girl’s eyes now and then in the throng which flowed through the park and boulevard. I really never flattered myself that it was because of my personal beauty; but in Paris, any young fellow who is dressed in the manner of Albion, hatted and gloved in the same style, is not entirely a cipher. But now it was not the same, by a long shot.

Sweetheart’s beauty simply put me in my place as an unnoticed but perhaps correct supplement to her.

She knew she was a beauty, and was delighted when she looked into her mirror. Nothing escaped her. The soft hair threaded with sunshine, which, when loosened, curled to her knees; the clear white forehead and straight brows; the nose delicate and a trifle upturned; the scarlet lips and fine-cut chin—she knew the value of each of these. She was pleased with the soft, full curve of her throat, the little ears, and the colour which came and went in her cheeks.

But her eyes were the first thing one noticed. They were the most beautiful gray eyes that ever opened under silken lashes. She approved of my telling her this, which duty I fulfilled daily. Perhaps it may be superfluous to say that we were very much in love. Did I say were?

I think that, as I am chanting the graces of Sweetheart, it might not be amiss to say that she is just an inch shorter than I am, and that no Parisienne carried a pretty gown with more perfection than she did. I have seen gowns that looked like the devil on the manikin, but when Sweetheart wore them they were the astonishment and admiration of myself. And I do know when a woman is well dressed, though I am an art critic.

Sweetheart regarded her beauty as an intimate affair between ourselves, a precious gift for our mutual benefit, to be carefully treasured and petted. Her attitude toward the world was unmistakable. The world might look—she was indifferent. With our intimate friends she was above being flattered. Clifford said to me once: “She carries her beauty as a princess would carry the Koh-i-noor—she knows she is worthy of it, and hopes it is worthy of her.”

“We ought to be so happy that I am beautiful!” she would say to me. “Just think, supposing I were not!”

I used to try to make her believe that it would have made no difference.

“Oh, not now,” she would say gravely. “I know that if I lost it it would be the same to us both, now; but you can’t make me believe that, at first, when you used to lean over the terrace of the Luxembourg and wait patiently for hours just to see me walk out of the Odeon.”

“I didn’t,” I would always explain; “I was there by accident.”

“Oh, what a funny accident to happen every day for two months!”

“Stop teasing! Of course, after the first week——”

“And what a funny accident that I should pass the same way every day for two months, when before I always went by the Rue de Seine!”

There was once such an accident, and such a girl. I never knew her; she is dead. I wondered sometimes that Sweetheart knew, and believed it was she herself. Yet the other woman’s shadow was black.

Sweetheart had a most peculiar and unworldly habit of not embellishing facts. She presently displayed it when we arrived at the Hôtel Lion d’Or.

“Jack,” said she nervously, “the cinders have made your face unpleasant. I am ashamed. They may not believe you are my husband.”

“As monsieur and madame,” I said, “we may have dirty faces and be honest.”

“Do you suppose they—they will believe it? These queer people——”

“They’d better!” I said fiercely.

“I—I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “You see, in our own little place in Paris everybody knew it, but here——”

I said, “Dearest, what nonsense!” and we marched unceremoniously up to the register, where I wrote our names. Then, with a hasty little squeeze of her gloved hand, she turned to the maid and tripped off to inspect our quarters. While I was pumping the fat-headed old proprietor about the trout fishing in the vicinity, the maid returned with the request that I mount to the room above. I followed her along the tiled passages and found Sweetheart sitting on a trunk.

“It’s charming! charming!” she said. “Just look at the roses outside, and the square, and the river! and oh, Jack, the funny little Breton cattle, and the old man with knee-breeches! It’s charming! and”—here she caught sight of the enraptured and fascinated maid—“and you are charming, with your red cheeks and white coiffe,” she said. “Oh, how pretty!”

“Oh, madame!” murmured the servant in dire confusion.

I said, “Dearest, that will do. Nobody speaks of my peculiar charms, and I wish to be noticed.”

The presence of the maid prevented Sweetheart from making amends, so we told her we were satisfied, and we would spare her life if she prepared breakfast in seventeen seconds.

She accepted the gift of existence with a dazed courtsey, and vanished.

It was refreshing to get hold of a sponge and cold water after fourteen hours in a cramped compartment. Hunger drove us to hurry—a thing we rarely did in the morning—and the way we splashed cold water about would have been fatal to any but a tiled floor.

“Dear,” I said, “you have not yet seen me in my Tyrolese knickerbockers and beautiful shooting jacket. You have never beheld my legs clothed in Tyrolese stockings, at twenty francs a pair.”

“The legs?” she inquired from the depths of a bath robe.

I ignored the question, and parted my hair with care. Then I sat down on the window and whistled.

Of course I was ready first. Sweetheart’s hair had got into a tangle and needed to be all combed out.

“Oh, I know you are impatient, because you’re whistling the Chant du Départ,” she said from the door of her toilet room.

“As usual,” I said, “I am ready first.”

“If you say that again——” she threatened.

I said it, and dodged a sponge. Presently I was requested to open the trunk and select a gown for her. Dear little Sweetheart! she loved to pretend that she had so many it needed long consultation to decide which.

“The dark blue?” I inquired.

“Don’t you think it is too warm?”

“The pale blue, then—or the pink and white?”

“Why not the white, with the cuffs à l’Anglaise, and the canoe hat?”

I hauled it out.

Then, of course, she changed her mind.

“I think the gray is better for the morning; then I can wear the big chip hat.”

I fished up the gray. It was light, almost silvery, and had white spots on it.

“Jack, dear,” she said, coming out with her hair tucked up in a knot, drawing the bath robe up to her chin with both hands, “I think that the white cloth would be better, and that I can wear the béret.”

By this time the trunk was in a pretty mess, which amused her; but at last I ferreted out the white cloth dress, and, refusing to listen to further discussion, sat down on the window seat. Sweetheart enjoyed it.

“Stop telling me to hurry,” she said; “I can’t, if you keep saying it all the time.”

After a while she called me to fasten her corsage, which hooked with about ten hundred hooks along the side and collar. I hated to do it, and my finger ends stung for hours after, but, as Sweetheart very rightly says, “When we are rich enough to have a maid you needn’t,” I submitted with an air which delighted her. Her tormenting “Thank you, Jack,” was the last straw, so I calmly picked her up and carried her out, and almost to the dining room, where I set her down just in time to avoid the proprietor and three domestics issuing from the office.

Sweetheart was half inclined to laugh, half indignant, and wholly scandalized. But she did not dare say anything, for we were at the dining-room door.

There were some people there, but except for a slight inclination we did not notice each other. We had a small table to ourselves by the rose-bowered window.

We were very hungry. Breakfast began with fresh sardines just caught, and ended with little Breton cakes and a demi-tasse. I finished first; I always do, because the wretched habit of bolting my food, contracted while studying under Bouguereau at Julian’s, clings to me yet. Oh, I shall have a merry time paying for it when I am forty! I began, as usual, to tease Sweetheart.

“If you continue to eat like this, dear, you will never be able to wear your new frocks. This one seems a trifle too tight now.”

Sweetheart, who prided herself as much on her figure as on her lovely face, repelled the insult with disdain and nibbled her Breton biscuit defiantly. When at last she condescended to rise, we strolled out under the trees in front of the hotel, and sat down on the low stone wall surrounding the garden. The noon sun hung in the zenith, flooding the town with a dazzling downpour. Sunbeams glanced and danced on the water; sunbeams filtered through the foliage; sunbeams stole under Sweetheart’s big straw hat, searching the depths of the gray eyes. Sunbeams played merry mischief with my ears and neck, which were beginning to sting in the first sunburn of the year. Through the square the white-coiffed women passed and repassed; small urchins with silver-buckled hatbands roamed about the bridge and market-place until collected and trooped off to school by a black-robed Jesuit frère; and in the shade of the trees a dozen sprawling men in Breton costume smoked their microscopical pipes and watched the water.

“They are an industrious race,” said I with fine irony, watching a happy inebriate pursuing a serpentine course toward the café opposite.

Sweetheart, who was as patriotic a little girl as ever hummed the Marseillaise, and adopted France as long as she lived in it, was up in arms in an instant.

“I have read,” she said with conviction, “that the Bretons are a brave, industrious race. They are French.”

“They speak a different language,” I said—“not a word of French in it.”

“They are French,” repeated Sweetheart, with an inflection which decided me to shun the subject until I could unpack my guide-book.

We sat a little while longer under the trees, until we both began nodding and mutually accused each other. Then Sweetheart went up to the room to take a nap, and I, scorning such weakness, lay down in a steamer chair under our window and fell fast asleep in no time.

I was aroused by a big pink rose which hit me squarely on the mouth. Sweetheart was perched in the window seat above, and as I looked up she sent a shower of blossoms down upon me.

“Jack, you lazy creature, it’s five o’clock, and I’m dressed and ready for a walk!”

“So am I,” I said, jumping up.

“But not like that. You must come up and make yourself nice for dinner.”

“Nice? What’s the matter with these tweeds? Aren’t these new stockings presentable?”

“Look at your hair!” she said evasively. “Come up this minute and brush it.”

I went, and was compelled to climb into a white collar and shirt, and trousers of an English cut. But before we had gone far along the great military road that climbed the heights above the little river, I took Sweetheart’s hand in mine and imparted to her my views and intentions upon the subject of my costume for the future.

“You see, dearest, we are here in Brittany for three reasons. The first is, that I should paint outdoors. The second is, that we should economize like the deuce. The third is, our shadows——”

“I know,” she interrupted faintly. “Never mind, Jack, dear.”

We walked silently for a while, hand clasping hand very tightly, for we were both thinking of the third reason.

I broke the silence first, speaking cheerfully, and she looked up with a quick smile while the shadow fell from her brow.

“You see, dear, in this place, where we are going, there are no people but peasants. Your frocks are all right for a place like this; we must both wear our free-and-easy togs—I for painting, and you for scrambling about after your wild flowers or fishing with me. If you get tired of seeing me in corduroys or tweeds, I’ll dress for you when you think you can’t stand it any longer.”

“Oh, Jack, I do like your knickerbockers——”

“And you shall wear your most gorgeous gown for me——”

“Indeed I won’t,” she laughed, adding impulsively, “indeed I will—every day, if you wish it!”

At the top of the hill stood an ancient Ursuline convent surrounded by a high wall, which also inclosed the broad acres of the wealthy sisterhood. We sat down by the roadside hedge and looked across the valley, where the hurrying river had ceased to hasten and now lingered in placid pools and long, deep reaches. The sun had set behind the forest, and the sky threw a purple light over woods and meadow. The grassy pools below were swept by flocks of whistling martins and swallows. One or two white gulls flapped slowly toward the tide water below, and a young curlew, speeding high overhead, uttered a lonesome cry. The grass—the brilliant green grass of Brittany—had turned a deep metallic blue in the twilight. A pale primrose light grew and died in the sky, and the forest changed from rose to ashes. Then a dull red bar shot across the parting clouds in the west, the forest smouldered an instant, and the pools glowed crimson. Slowly the red bar melted away, the light died out among the branches, the pools turned sombre. Looking up, we saw the new moon flashing in the sky above our heads. Sweetheart sighed in perfect contentment.

“It’s beautiful!” I said, with another sigh.

“Ah, yes,” she murmured, “beautiful to you, and to me—to me, Jack, who have never before seen this land of Morbihan.”

After a while she said, “And the ocean—oh, how I long to see it! Is it near us, Jack?”

“The river runs into it twenty kilometres below. We feel the tide at Quimperlé.” I did not add, “Baedeker.”

“I wonder,” I said presently, “what are the feelings of a little American who sees this country—the real country—for the first time?”

“I suppose you mean me,” she said. “I don’t know—I don’t think I understand it yet, but I know I shall love it, and never want to go back.”

“Perhaps we never shall,” I said. “The magic second may stretch into years that end at last as all ends.”

Then our hands met in that sudden nervous clasp which seemed to help and steady us when we were thinking of the real world, so long, so long forgotten.

IX

I was awakened next morning by a spongeful of cold water in the face, which I hate. I started up to wreak vengeance upon Sweetheart, but she fled to the toilet room and locked herself in. From this retreat she taunted me until further sleep was out of the question, and I bowed to the inevitable—indignantly, when I saw my watch pointed to five o’clock.

Sweetheart was perfectly possessed to row; so when I had bolted my coffee and sat watching her placidly sip hers, we decided to go down to the bank of the little stream and hire a boat. The boat was a wretched, shapeless affair, with two enormous oars and the remnants of rowlocks. It was the best boat in town, so we took it. I managed to get away from the bank, and, conscious of Sweetheart’s open admiration, pulled boldly down the stream. It was easy work, for the tide was ebbing. The river up to the bridge was tidal, but above the bridge it leaped and flowed, a regular salmon stream. Sweetheart was so impatient to take the oars that I relinquished them and picked up my rod. The boat swung down the stream and under the high stone viaduct, where I insisted on anchoring and whipping the promising-looking water. The water was likely enough, and the sudden splash of a leaping grilse added to its likelihood. I was in hopes a grilse might become entangled with one of the flies, but though a big one shot up out of the water within five feet of Sweetheart, causing her to utter a suppressed scream, neither grilse nor trout rose to the beautiful lures I trailed about, and I only hooked two or three enormous dace, which came up like logs and covered the bottom of the boat with their coarse scales.

Sweetheart had never seen a French trout uncooked, and scarcely shared my disappointment.

“They are splendid fish,” she repeated; “you are unreasonable.”

There was an ancient Breton squatting on the bank; from his sulky attitude I took him to be a poacher visiting his infernal set lines and snares; but I hailed him pleasantly with a bonjour, which he returned civilly enough.

“Are there trout in this stream?”

“About the bridge,” he replied cautiously.

“Have you caught any?”

“I ain’t fishing,” he said, much alarmed.

“What’s that?” I demanded, pointing to as plump a trout as ever I saw, floating on the end of a string under the bank.

“Where?” he asked, looking about him with affected concern.

“There!”

He looked around, everywhere except where I pointed. He examined the horizon, and the tree tops, as though he expected a fish on every twig. I poled the boat up to the bank and pointed out the fish.

“Ma doui!” he exclaimed, “there is a fish!”

“Yes, a trout,” I said.

“Trout?” He burst into a forced laugh. “Trout! Ha! ha! Why, monsieur, that is a dace—a poor little dace!” He hastily jerked it up with a long homemade gaff which lay—of course quite by accident—at his feet.

“A poor little dace!” he mumbled. “Of course, monsieur would not care to claim such a poor, coarse little fish; but I am only too glad to eat it—ah, yes, only too glad!”

“You see,” said Sweetheart impulsively, “that you are wrong. Give him our fish; that will make four dace for the poor fellow.”

I placed the three dace across the blade of my oar and held it out to the poacher. He took them as if he were really glad to get them. Then I said, “These are dace, and they don’t have red spots.”

He stood as if ready to bolt, but I laughed, and settled back on my oars, saying: “You’re a poacher; but I don’t care a continental, and you can poach all day in this confounded country, where there is about one trout to the kilometre. Don’t look scared. What do I care? Only don’t tell me I’m unable to distinguish a trout when I can see the tip of his nose.”

I then sailed majestically out into the stream.

Sweetheart wanted to know whether that was really a real poacher. She had read about them. Her ideal poacher was a young, stalwart, eagle-eyed giant, with a tangle of hair and a disposition toward assassination. The reality shocked her.

“Anyway,” she said, “you frightened the poor old thing. How rough men are!”

We returned to the landing place with difficulty, for the tide was still on the ebb, and we got aground more than once. My hands were in a fine condition when at last I drove that wretched scow into the mud and lifted Sweetheart out to the firm bank. The evil-eyed old man who rented us the boat glanced sardonically at my rod and blistered hands, and I was glad enough to pay him all he asked and break away for the hotel.

We had an hour to lunch in, pack, and be ready for the trap which was to bear us to our destination—the distant village of Faöuet, in Morbihan.

X

A long drive on a smooth white road, acres of gorse and broom, beech woods and oak thickets, and the “Heu! heu! Allo! Allons! en route!” of the Breton driver, these are my recollections of the ride to Faöuet. There are others, too—the hedges heavy with bloom, the perfume of the wild honeysuckle, the continual bird chorus from every grove and every bramble patch—and Sweetheart’s veil flying into my face.

We have spoken of it since together, but she has few recollections of that journey. She only remembers it as her first steps into our heritage.

And so we entered into our heritage, Sweetheart and I; and our heritage was very fair, for it lay everywhere about us. It was a world which we alone inhabited. Men said, “This land is Gloanec’s,” “This is Gurnalec’s,” “This is Kerdec’s”; they spoke of “my woods” and “his meadows” and “their pastures.” And how we laughed; for when we passed together through their lands, around us, far as the eye could reach, our heritage lay in the sunshine.

XI

One day, when Sweetheart had been weeping—for we were thinking of the end to the magic second—I spoke of our heritage which swept far as the eye could reach across the moors of Faöuet.

She said: “The past is ours, Jack; the present is ours; the future——”

We tried to smile, but our hearts were like lead. Yet we know that the future will also be ours. I know it as I write.

XII

The letter from St. Gildas, bringing with it a breath of salt air, lay on the table before us. Sweetheart clasped her hands and looked at me.

“I’m in favour of going at once,” I said for the third time. Over by the wall were piled my canvases, the result of three months in Faöuet.

The first was a study of Sweetheart under the trees of the ancient orchard in the convent grounds. What trouble I had had with that canvas! I remembered the morning that the old gardener came over and stood behind me as I painted; and when I had replied to his “Good-morning,” I recalled the pang his next words gave me:

“I am so sorry, monsieur, but it is forbidden to enter the convent grounds.”

My canvas was almost finished, and, as the romancers have it, “my despair was great!” A month’s work for nothing—or next to nothing!

Sweetheart rose from her pose on the low bough of the apple tree and came over to my side. “Never mind, Jack; I shall go and ask the Mother Superior about it.”

I knew that she would win over the Mother Superior; and when, that evening, she came back radiant, crying, “She is lovely!—she says you may finish the picture, and I think you ought to go and thank her,” I put on my cap, and stepping across the street, we rang at the gate.

The old gardener let us in, and in a moment I stood before the latticed windows behind which some one was moving. In a low voice the invisible nun told us that the Superior granted to us the privilege of working in the orchard, but we must be careful of the grass, because it was almost time to cut it.

“I am sure we may have confidence in you,” she said.

“We will not trample the grass, my sister, and I thank you for us both.”

The lattice trembled, was raised a little, and then fell.

“You are English,” said the hidden nun.

“I am American, my sister.”

I looked at the lattice a moment, then dropped my eyes. I may have been mistaken, but I think she sighed.

Sweetheart came closer to the lattice and murmured her thanks.

There was a pause.

Then came the voice again, sweet and gentle: “May Our Lady of Saint Gildas protect you”; and we went out by the little iron wicket.

The next picture was another study of Sweetheart in the woods; the next, another study of Sweetheart; and the others were studies of the same young lady.

The light in the room had grown dim, and I walked to the window which overlooked the convent chapel. The chapel windows were open; within, the nuns stood or knelt chanting. Three white-veiled figures were advancing to the altar, and the others, draped in black now knelt behind. I didn’t think I had any business to look at them, so I did not. After all, they were cloistered nuns, and it was only on hot nights that they opened the chapel windows. Sweetheart was speaking beside my shoulder.

“Poor things! The ones in white, they are the novices; they will never see parents or friends again. When they enter the gates they never leave—never; they are buried there.”

I said: “After all, we are much like them. We have left all; we have nothing now but each other, for the world is dead, and we are bound by vows which keep us within the narrow confines of our heritage.”

“But our heritage is everywhere—as far as we can see.”

“Ah, yes, but we can only see to the horizon. There is a world beyond.”

“I have renounced it,” said Sweetheart faintly.

XIII

The letter from St. Gildas had been lying on our table for a week before I thought of answering it, and even then it was Sweetheart who wrote:

Dear Mr. Stuart:

Jack is too lazy to answer your kind note, so, in pure shame for his discourtesy, I hasten to reply to your questions.

First: Yes; we have been working very hard, and Jack’s pictures are charming, though he growls over them all day.

Second: Yes; we intend to stay in Brittany this winter for lots of reasons—one being economy, and another, Jack’s outdoor painting.

Third: Yes; we are coming to St. Gildas.

Fourth: To-morrow.

Fifth: No; we had not heard of Mr. Clifford’s affair with the policeman; and oh, I am so sorry he was locked up and fined! Jack laughs. I suspect he, too, was as wicked as you all when he was a student, alone in Paris.

Sixth: I know you are Jack’s oldest and most intimate friend, so I allow you more liberty than I do Messieurs Clifford and Elliott; therefore I will answer your question as to whether the honeymoon is not on the wane. No! no! no! There are three answers to one question. See how generous I can be!

Sweetheart called me to see whether or not I approved. I did, and added my answer to Stuart’s last question as follows: “No, you idiot!” Then I signed the note, and Sweetheart sealed and directed it.

So we left for St. Gildas next morning before sunrise and in the rain. This leaving at such an unearthly hour was not my doing, but Sweetheart was determined, and rose by candlelight in spite of desperate opposition on my part. It was cold, and the rain beat against the windows.

It was many kilometres to St. Gildas, but before we had gone six, the rain had ceased and the eastern sky flushed to a pale rose.

“Thank goodness!” I said, “we shall have the sun.”

Then the daily repeated miracle of the coming of dawn was wrought before our eyes. The heavens glowed in rainbow tints; the shredded mist rising along the river was touched with purple and gold, and acres of meadow and pasture dripped precious stones. Shreds of the fading night-mist drifted among the tree tops, now tipped with fire, while in the forest depths faint sparkles came from some lost ray of morning light falling on wet leaves. Then of a sudden up shot the sun, and against it, black and gigantic, a peasant towered, leaning upon his spade.

XIV

We were fast nearing the end of our long journey. The sun blazed on us from the zenith, and the wheels creaked with the heat of the white road. The driver leaned back, saying, “We enter Finistère here by this granite post.” Presently he added, “The ocean!”

There it lay, a basin of silver and blue. Sweetheart had started to her feet, speechless, one hand holding to my shoulder, the other clasped to her breast. And now, as the road wound through the hills and down to the coast, long stretches of white sand skirted the distant cliffs, and over the cliffs waved miles and miles of yellow gorse. A cluster of white and gray houses lay in the hollow to the left almost at the mouth of the river, and beyond, the waves were beating in the bar—beating the same rhythm which we were to hear so long there together, day and night. There was not a boat to be seen, not a creature, nor was there any sign of life save for the smoke curling from a cottage chimney below. The ocean lay sparkling beneath, and beyond its deeper blue melted into the haze on the horizon.

Suddenly, in the road below, the figure of a man appeared, and at the same moment a pointer pup came gambolling up beside us in an ecstasy of self-abnegation and apology. I sprang out of the lumbering vehicle and lifted Sweetheart to the ground, and in an instant we were shaking hands with a stalwart young fellow in knickerbockers and jersey, who said we were a pretty pair not to have come sooner, and told Sweetheart he pitied her lot—meaning me.

Then we walked arm in arm down a fragrant lane to the river bank, where the dearest old lady toddled out of the granite house to welcome us and show us our rooms. Sweetheart went with her, while I stopped an instant to chat with Stuart.

“That is Madame Ylven,” he said. “She is the most stunning peasant woman in Finistère, and you will want for nothing.” Then, after a moment, “Good heavens! Jack, what a beauty your wife——” He stopped short, but added, “What a delicious little beauty Sweetheart has grown to be!”

A white-coiffed maid came to the door, and said, “Will monsieur have the goodness to come? Madame wishes him to see the rooms.”

The wind blew from the south, and the thunder of the sea was in my ears as I mounted the stairs to our new quarters.

Sweetheart met me at the door, saying, “It seems almost too much happiness to bear, but I feel that we are at home at last—alone together for all time.”

Alone together? The ocean at our threshold, the moors and forests at our back, and a good slate roof above us. Before me through the open door I could see the great old-fashioned room, warm in the afternoon sunlight—the room we were to live in so long, the room in which we were to pass the happiest and bitterest moments of our lives.

She hesitated an instant before the threshold. I think we knew that we stood upon the threshold of our destiny. Then I said, half in earnest: “Are you afraid to cross with me into the unknown future? See, the room is filled with sunshine. Are you afraid?”

She sprang across the threshold, and, turning to me, held out both hands.

XV

The sun slipped lower and lower into the sea, until a distant tossing wave washed it out against the sky. Light died in the room, and shadows closed around us; yet it was in the darkness and shadows that we drew nearer to each other, then and after.

XVI

Stuart stood under our window and yelled up at me, “Oh, Jack! I say, Jack!”

Sweetheart, who was fussing over the half-unpacked trunk, went to the window and threw open the panes.

“You don’t mean to say you have had your coffee?” she said. “Jack isn’t up yet.”

“Jack is up,” I explained, coming to the window in pajamas. “Hello!”

“I only wanted to say that I haven’t had my coffee,” he explained, “and I’m going to take it with you when you’re ready.”

Sweetheart picked up her béret, and, passing a hatpin through it, turned to me with a warning, “I shall eat all the breakfast, monsieur!” and vanished down the stairs. A moment later I heard her clear voice below:

“Sonnez le choeur,

Chasseur!

Sonnez la mort!”

Before I had finished dressing, Sweetheart tripped in with my coffee and toast.

“Of course I’ve finished,” she said, “and you don’t deserve this. Mr. Stuart has gone off with his canvases, and says he’ll see you at lunch.”

I swallowed the coffee and browsed on little squares of toast which she condescendingly buttered for me, and then, lighting a cigarette, I announced my intention of commanding an exploring expedition consisting of Sweetheart and myself. A scratching at the door and a patter of feet announced that I had been overheard.

Sweetheart unlatched the door, and the pointer pup of the evening before charged into the room and covered us with boisterous caresses, which we took to indicate that he not only approved of the expedition, but intended to undertake the general supervision of it himself. I resigned the leadership at once.

“His name,” said Sweetheart in the tone of one who presents a distinguished guest, “is ‘Luff.’”

I gravely acknowledged the honour by patting his head.

“I’m afraid,” I said to Sweetheart, “that there is a bar sinister upon his escutcheon, but possibly it is only the indelible mark of the conquering British foxhound.”

Sweetheart said, “Nonsense!” and the expedition moved, Luff leading with a series of ear-splitting orders in the dog language which we perfectly understood.

In ten minutes we stood on the cliffs, the salt wind whipping our faces. Saint-Gildas-des-Prés lay at our feet.

“I know,” observed Sweetheart calmly, “all about this place. Captain Ylven told me at breakfast.”

“Well,” said I, “what’s that island on the horizon?”

Then she overwhelmed me with erudition, until I longed for Baedeker and revenge.

“That is the Isle de Groix, and all about us is the Bay of Biscay. This little hamlet on the cliff is St. Julien, and if we follow the coast far enough we come to Lorient.”

“Follow the coast? Which way?”

Sweetheart had forgotten, and I triumphed in silence, until she stamped her foot and marched off to assist Luff in investigating a suspicious hole in the cliff.

I went to the edge of the plateau and looked over. The surf thundered against the rocks, tossing long strands of seaweed over the pebbly beach. A man with a wooden rake stood in the water up to his knees. He raked the seaweed from the breakers as a farmer rakes weeds from the lawn. The salt wind began to sting my lips and eyes. My throat felt dry and salty. I turned toward the hamlet of St. Gildas. I had not imagined it so small. Besides our house there were but three others clustered under the river bank. Behind it stretched woods and grain fields broken by patches of yellow gorse. Across the river stood a stone chapel almost lost in the miles of moorland. To the east and west the downs covered with gorse and heather rolled to the horizon. Here and there along the cliffs stood what appeared to be the ruins of ancient forts, and on a rock, just where the river sweeps out into the sea, rose a dirty white signal tower. The tower was low and squatty and wet. It looked like some saline excrescence which had slowly exuded from the brine-soaked rock. On the bar hundreds of white gulls rose and settled as the tide encroached; curlew were running along the foam-splashed shore under the eastern cliffs across the river.

On our side of the river the cliffs were covered with blackthorn and hawthorn, with here and there a stunted oak, probably so placed by Providence as general rendezvous for all the small twittering birds of Finistère. Birds were everywhere. From the clouds came the ceaseless carol of skylarks; from the grain fields and the flowering gorse rose an unbroken chorus, taken up and repeated by flocks of microscopical songsters among the blackthorns on the cliffs.

“This is paradise, this wilderness,” I thought.

Then, as I heard Sweetheart’s mocking voice from the cliff:

“O frère Jacques

Dormez vous!”

“I’m not asleep!” I cried in answer. “What is it?”

“Luff has unearthed a poor little mole, but I won’t allow him to hurt it.”

“Jack, dear,” she said, as I came up, “couldn’t we keep it as a pet? See, the poor little thing is blind.”

As it was blind we called it “Love,” which later was changed to “Cupid,” and finally, when we discovered it true gormandizing character, for “Cupid” we substituted “Cupidity,” by which name it flourished and fattened.

“What a change,” said Sweetheart sadly, “from Blind Love to Blind Greed!”

The mole grew very fat.

XVII

When the winds stir the leaves among the poplars, and the long shadows fall athwart the fields; when the winds rise at night, and the branches scrape and crack above the moonlit snow; when in the long hot days the earth is bathed in fragrance, and all the little creatures of the fields are silent; when in the still evenings the flowers perfume the air, and the gravel walks shine white in the moonlight; when the breezes quicken from the distant coast; when the sand shakes beneath the shock of the breakers, and every wave is plumed with white; when the calm eye of the beacon turns to mine, lingers, and turn away, and the surf is yeasty and thick; when I start at the sound of a voice from the cliffs, and my eyes are raised in vain; when the white gulls toss and drift in the storm-clouds, and the water hurries out in the black ebb tide; when I rise and look from the window; when I dress; when I work with pen and colour; when I rest; when I walk; when I sleep—there is one face before my eyes, one name on my lips. For the white shadow is turning gray, and God alone knows the end.

XVIII

And God alone knows the end, for the mists are crowding, brooding like angry-browed clouds, and I hear the whistle of unseen winds, and my life-flame wavers and sinks and flares, blown hither and thither, tossing, fading, leaping, but fading, always fading.

In a flash, like a printed picture on a screen, illuminated, keenly etched in the white glare, I see the bed, and the people around me, the black gowns, the pale eyes of the doctor, the sponge and basin, the rolls of lint.

Voices, minute but clean-cut and clear as picked harp-strings, tinkle in my ears; the voice of the doctor, other voices, but always the voice of the doctor—“The splinter of bone on the brain; the splinter pressing on the tissues; the depression.”

The doctor! That is the man! That is the man who comes to my side, who follows, follows where I go, who seeks me throughout the world! I saw him as I lay flung on the turf, limp, unconscious, below the cliffs on the Aspen hills; I felt his presence in the studio; I heard him creeping at my heels across the gorse thickets of St. Gildas. And now he has come to cut short the magic second, to turn back time—back, back, into the old worn channels, rock-ribbed and salt with tears.

As a leaf of written paper torn in two, so shall my life be torn in two; and the long tear shall mangle the chapter written in rose and gold.

Then, too, my shadow, already turned from white to gray, shall fall with a deeper stain wherever I pass; and I shall see the yellow gorse glimmer and turn to golden-rod, and the poplars turn to oaks; and the twin towers of Notre Dame, filmy, lace-carved, and gray with centuries, shall dwindle as I look—dwindle and sway and turn to pines, singing pines that murmur to the winds, blowing across the Aspen hills.

•      •      •      •      •      •

All that is fair shall pass away; all that I love, all that I fear for—these shall the doctor take away, lifting them from my memory on the point of a steel blade. What has he to give in return? A hell of vapour, distorting sight; a hell of sound, drowning the soul.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Gigantic apparitions arise across the world of water, wavering like shadows on the clouds. Steel-clad, clothed in skins, casqued in steel, their winged heads bend and nod and move against the clouds. And even they are changing as clouds change shape. I see steel limbs turn red and naked. I see winged casques trail to the earth, feathered, painted in colours of earth.

Ihó! Inâh! Etó! E-hó!

The bridge of stars spans the vast lake of air; the sun and the moon travel over it.

•      •      •      •      •      •

My shadow is turning dark; I can scarcely see the doctor, but now—God have mercy!—I can touch him.

•      •      •      •      •      •

All the high spectres are stooping from the clouds, bending above me to watch. I know them and their eyes of shadow—I know them now; Hârpen that was to Chaské what Hárpstinâ shall be to Hapéda; and Hârka shall come after all with the voice of winter winds:

“Aké u, aké u, aké u!”

But the magic second shall never return.

“Mâ cânté maséca!”

•      •      •      •      •      •

Now they leave my bed, the people who crowded there under the shadowy forms of the spectres; now the doctor bends over; I see and feel him. His hands are tangled in the threads of time; he is cutting a thread; he——

XIX

When I spoke to him first I spoke in the French language. Before he answered, the scream of a blue jay in the elms outside set my nerves aquiver, and I called for Donald and Walter.

As I lay there I could see the Aspen hills from the window, heaps of crumpled gold bathed in sunshine. Over them sailed the froth from the silken milkweed; over them drifted the big brown-red butterflies, luminous as richest autumn leaves.

Some one closed the door softly. The doctor had gone.

The sunlight poured into the window, etching my shadow on the wall behind. Lying very still there I saw it motionless beside me. The shadow was black.

Somebody said in the next room, “Will he die?”

“Die?” I said aloud.

A bird twittered outside my window.

The door opened again, noiselessly.

“Sweetheart?” I whispered.

“Yes, Jack.”

After a moment I said, “When do you go back to school?”

“I? I finished school a year ago.”

“Come nearer.”

“I am here, Jack.”

“Time stopped a year ago.”

“A year ago to-day.”

The same gray eyes, the same face, paler, perhaps.

“We have journeyed far,” I sighed, “always together, but in those days our shadows were white as snow. Am I going to die? There are tears in your eyes.”

They fell on my cheek; her arms fell too, closer, closer, around my neck.

“Life has begun,” she said.

“Life? What was the year that ends to-day? The magic second of life?”

“A year of death, to me!”

Ah, but her soul knows of a life in death! And she shall know it, too, when her shadow turns whiter than snow. For the Temple of Idols has closed its doors at the sound of a voice, and an idol of gilt has turned to flesh and blood.

I-hó!

So shall she know of the life in death when her soul and her body are one.

PASSEUR

O friends, I’ve served ye food and bed;

O friends, the mist is rising wet;

Then bide a moment, O my dead,

Where, lonely, I must linger yet!

PASSEUR

Because man goeth to his long home,

And the mourners go about the streets.

When he had finished his pipe he tapped the brier bowl against the chimney until the ashes powdered the charred log smouldering across the andirons. Then he sank back in his chair, absently touching the hot pipe-bowl with the tip of each finger until it grew cool enough to be dropped into his coat pocket.

Twice he raised his eyes to the little American clock ticking upon the mantel. He had half an hour to wait.

The three candles that lighted the room might be trimmed to advantage; this would give him something to do. A pair of scissors lay open upon the bureau, and he rose and picked them up. For a while he stood dreamily shutting and opening the scissors, his eyes roaming about the room. There was an easel in the corner, and a pile of dusty canvases behind it; behind the canvases there was a shadow—that gray, menacing shadow that never moved.

When he had trimmed each candle he wiped the smoky scissors on a paint rag and flung them on the bureau again. The clock pointed to ten; he had been occupied exactly three minutes.

The bureau was littered with neckties, pipes, combs and brushes, matches, reels and fly-books, collars, shirt studs, a new pair of Scotch shooting stockings, and a woman’s workbasket.

He picked out all the neckties, folded them once, and hung them over a bit of twine that stretched across the looking-glass; the shirt studs he shovelled into the top drawer along with brushes, combs, and stockings; the reels and fly-books he dusted with his handkerchief and placed methodically along the mantel shelf. Twice he stretched out his hand toward the woman’s workbasket, but his hand fell to his side again, and he turned away into the room staring at the dying fire.

Outside the snow-sealed window a shutter broke loose and banged monotonously, until he flung open the panes and fastened it. The soft, wet snow, that had choked the window-panes all day, was frozen hard now, and he had to break the polished crust before he could find the rusty shutter hinge.

He leaned out for a moment, his numbed hands resting on the snow, the roar of a rising snow-squall in his ears; and out across the desolate garden and stark hedgerow he saw the flat black river spreading through the gloom.

A candle sputtered and snapped behind him; a sheet of drawing-paper fluttered across the floor, and he closed the panes and turned back into the room, both hands in his worn pockets.

The little American clock on the mantel ticked and ticked, but the hands lagged, for he had not been occupied five minutes in all. He went up to the mantel and watched the hands of the clock. A minute—longer than a year to him—crept by.

Around the room the furniture stood ranged—a chair or two of yellow pine, a table, the easel, and in one corner the broad curtained bed; and behind each lay shadows, menacing shadows that never moved.

A little pale flame started up from the smoking log on the andirons; the room sang with the sudden hiss of escaping wood gases. After a little the back of the log caught fire; jets of blue flared up here and there with mellow sounds like the lighting of gas-burners in a row, and in a moment a thin sheet of yellow flame wrapped the whole charred log.

Then the shadows moved; not the shadows behind the furniture—they never moved—but other shadows, thin, gray, confusing, that came and spread their slim patterns all around him, and trembled and trembled.

He dared not step or tread upon them, they were too real; they meshed the floor around his feet, they ensnared his knees, they fell across his breast like ropes. Some night, in the silence of the moors, when wind and river were still, he feared these strands of shadow might tighten—creep higher around his throat and tighten. But even then he knew that those other shadows would never move, those gray shapes that knelt crouching in every corner.

When he looked up at the clock again ten minutes had straggled past. Time was disturbed in the room; the strands of shadow seemed entangled among the hands of the clock, dragging them back from their rotation. He wondered if the shadows would strangle Time, some still night when the wind and the flat river were silent.

There grew a sudden chill across the floor; the cracks of the boards let it in. He leaned down and drew his sabots toward him from their place near the andirons, and slipped them over his chaussons; and as he straightened up, his eyes mechanically sought the mantel above, where in the dusk another pair of sabots stood, little, slender, delicate sabots, carved from red beech. A year’s dust grayed their surface; a year’s rust dulled the silver band across the instep. He said this to himself aloud, knowing that it was within a few minutes of the year.

His own sabots came from Mort-Dieu; they were shaved square and banded with steel. But in days past he had thought that no sabot in Mort-Dieu was delicate enough to touch the instep of the Mort-Dieu passeur. So he sent to the shore lighthouse, and they sent to Lorient, where the women are coquettish and show their hair under the coiffe, and wear dainty sabots; and in this town, where vanity corrupts and there is much lace on coiffe and collarette, a pair of delicate sabots was found, banded with silver and chiselled in red beech. The sabots stood on the mantel above the fire now, dusty and tarnished.

There was a sound from the window, the soft murmur of snow blotting glass panes. The wind, too, muttered under the roof eaves. Presently it would begin to whisper to him from the chimney—he knew it—and he held his hands over his ears and stared at the clock.

In the hamlet of Mort-Dieu the pines sing all day of the sea secrets, but in the night the ghosts of little gray birds fill the branches, singing of the sunshine of past years. He heard the song as he sat, and he crushed his hands over his ears; but the gray birds joined with the wind in the chimney, and he heard all that he dared not hear, and he thought all that he dared not hope or think, and the swift tears scalded his eyes.

In Mort-Dieu the nights are longer than anywhere on earth; he knew it—why should he not know? This had been so for a year; it was different before. There were so many things different before; days and nights vanished like minutes then; the pines told no secrets of the sea, and the gray birds had not yet come to Mort-Dieu. Also, there was Jeanne, passeur at the Carmes.

When he first saw her she was poling the square, flat-bottomed ferry skiff from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu, a red handkerchief bound across her silky black hair, a red skirt fluttering just below her knees. The next time he saw her he had to call to her across the placid river, “Ohé! Ohé, passeur!” She came, poling the flat skiff, her deep blue eyes fixed pensively on him, the scarlet skirt and kerchief idly flapping in the April wind. Then day followed day when the far call “Passeur!” grew clearer and more joyous, and the faint answering cry, “I come!” rippled across the water like music tinged with laughter. Then spring came, and with spring came love—love, carried free across the ferry from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu.

The flame above the charred log whistled, flickered, and went out in a jet of wood vapour, only to play like lightning above the gas and relight again. The clock ticked more loudly, and the song from the pines filled the room. But in his straining eyes a summer landscape was reflected, where white clouds sailed and white foam curled under the square bow of a little skiff. And he pressed his numbed hands tighter to his ears to drown the cry, “Passeur! Passeur!”

And now for a moment the clock ceased ticking. It was time to go—who but he should know it, he who went out into the night swinging his lantern? And he went. He had gone each night from the first—from that first strange winter evening when a strange voice had answered him across the river, the voice of the new passeur. He had never heard her voice again.

So he passed down the windy wooden stairs, lantern hanging lighted in his hand, and stepped out into the storm. Through sheets of drifting snow, over heaps of frozen seaweed and icy drift he moved, shifting his lantern right and left, until its glimmer on the water warned him. Then he called out into the night, “Passeur!” The frozen spray spattered his face and crusted the lantern; he heard the distant boom of breakers beyond the bar, and the noise of mighty winds among the seaward cliffs.

“Passeur!”

Across the broad flat river, black as a sea of pitch, a tiny light sparkled a moment. Again he cried, “Passeur!”

“I come!”

He turned ghastly white, for it was her voice—or was he crazy?—and he sprang waist deep into the icy current and cried out again, but his voice ended in a sob.

Slowly through the snow the flat skiff took shape, creeping nearer and nearer. But she was not at the pole—he saw that; there was only a tall, thin man, shrouded to the eyes in oilskin; and he leaped into the boat and bade the ferryman hasten.

Halfway across he rose in the skiff, and called, “Jeanne!” But the roar of the storm and the thrashing of icy waves drowned his voice. Yet he heard her again, and she called to him by name.

When at last the boat grated upon the invisible shore, he lifted his lantern, trembling, stumbling among the rocks, and calling to her, as though his voice could silence the voice that had spoken a year ago that night. And it could not. He sank shivering upon his knees, and looked out into the darkness, where an ocean rolled across a world. Then his stiff lips moved, and he repeated her name; but the hand of the ferryman fell gently upon his head.

And when he raised his eyes he saw that the ferryman was Death.

THE KEY TO GRIEF

The moving finger writes, and, having writ,

Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

—Fitzgerald

THE KEY TO GRIEF

The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky

The deer to the wholesome wold,

And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid,

As it was in the days of old.

—Kipling

I

They were doing their work very badly. They got the rope around his neck, and tied his wrists with moose-bush withes, but again he fell, sprawling, turning, twisting over the leaves, tearing up everything around him like a trapped panther.

He got the rope away from them; he clung to it with bleeding fists; he set his white teeth in it, until the jute strands relaxed, unravelled, and snapped, gnawed through by his white teeth.

Twice Tully struck him with a gum hook. The dull blows fell on flesh rigid as stone.

Panting, foul with forest mould and rotten leaves, hands and face smeared with blood, he sat up on the ground, glaring at the circle of men around him.

“Shoot him!” gasped Tully, dashing the sweat from his bronzed brow; and Bates, breathing heavily, sat down on a log and dragged a revolver from his rear pocket. The man on the ground watched him; there was froth in the corners of his mouth.

“Git back!” whispered Bates, but his voice and hand trembled. “Kent,” he stammered, “won’t ye hang?”

The man on the ground glared.

“Ye’ve got to die, Kent,” he urged; “they all say so. Ask Lefty Sawyer; ask Dyce; ask Carrots.—He’s got to swing fur it—ain’t he, Tully?—Kent, fur God’s sake, swing fur these here gents!”

The man on the ground panted; his bright eyes never moved.

After a moment Tully sprang on him again. There was a flurry of leaves, a crackle, a gasp and a grunt, then the thumping and thrashing of two bodies writhing in the brush. Dyce and Carrots jumped on the prostrate men. Lefty Sawyer caught the rope again, but the jute strands gave way and he stumbled. Tully began to scream, “He’s chokin’ me!” Dyce staggered out into the open, moaning over a broken wrist.

“Shoot!” shouted Lefty Sawyer, and dragged Tully aside. “Shoot, Jim Bates! Shoot straight, b’ God!”

“Git back!” gasped Bates, rising from the fallen log.

The crowd parted right and left; a quick report rang out—another—another. Then from the whirl of smoke a tall form staggered, dealing blows—blows that sounded sharp as the crack of a whip.

“He’s off! Shoot straight!” they cried.

There was a gallop of heavy boots in the woods. Bates, faint and dazed, turned his head.

“Shoot!” shrieked Tully.

But Bates was sick; his smoking revolver fell to the ground; his white face and pale eyes contracted. It lasted only a moment; he started after the others, plunging, wallowing through thickets of osier and hemlock underbrush.

Far ahead he heard Kent crashing on like a young moose in November, and he knew he was making for the shore. The others knew too. Already the gray gleam of the sea cut a straight line along the forest edge; already the soft clash of the surf on the rocks broke faintly through the forest silence.

“He’s got a canoe there!” bawled Tully. “He’ll be into it!”

And he was into it, kneeling in the bow, driving his paddle to the handle. The rising sun gleamed like red lightning on the flashing blade; the canoe shot to the crest of a wave, hung, bows dripping in the wind, dropped into the depths, glided, tipped, rolled, shot up again, staggered, and plunged on.

Tully ran straight out into the cove surf; the water broke against his chest, bare and wet with sweat. Bates sat down on a worn black rock and watched the canoe listlessly.

The canoe dwindled to a speck of gray and silver; and when Carrots, who had run back to the gum camp for a rifle, returned, the speck on the water might have been easier to hit than a loon’s head at twilight. So Carrots, being thrifty by nature, fired once, and was satisfied to save the other cartridges. The canoe was still visible, making for the open sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon lay the keys, a string of rocks bare as skulls, black and slimy where the sea cut their base, white on the crests with the excrement of sea birds.

“He’s makin’ fur the Key to Grief!” whispered Bates to Dyce.

Dyce, moaning, and nursing his broken wrist, turned a sick face out to sea.

The last rock seaward was the Key to Grief, a splintered pinnacle polished by the sea. From the Key to Grief, seaward a day’s paddle, if a man dared, lay the long wooded island in the ocean known as Grief on the charts of the bleak coast.

In the history of the coast, two men had made the voyage to the Key to Grief, and from there to the island. One of these was a rum-crazed pelt hunter, who lived to come back; the other was a college youth; they found his battered canoe at sea, and a day later his battered body was flung up in the cove.

So, when Bates whispered to Dyce, and when Dyce called to the others, they knew that the end was not far off for Kent and his canoe; and they turned away into the forest, sullen, but satisfied that Kent would get his dues when the devil got his.

Lefty spoke vaguely of the wages of sin. Carrots, with an eye to thrift, suggested a plan for an equitable division of Kent’s property.

When they reached the gum camp they piled Kent’s personal effects on a blanket.

Carrots took the inventory: a revolver, two gum hooks, a fur cap, a nickel-plated watch, a pipe, a pack of new cards, a gum sack, forty pounds of spruce gum, and a frying pan.

Carrots shuffled the cards, picked out the joker, and flipped it pensively into the fire. Then he dealt cold decks all around.

When the goods and chattels of their late companion had been divided by chance—for there was no chance to cheat—somebody remembered Tully.

“He’s down there on the coast, starin’ after the canoe,” said Bates huskily.

He rose and walked toward a heap on the ground covered by a blanket. He started to lift the blanket, hesitated, and finally turned away. Under the blanket lay Tully’s brother, shot the night before by Kent.

“Guess we’d better wait till Tully comes,” said Carrots uneasily. Bates and Kent had been campmates. An hour later Tully walked into camp.

He spoke to no one that day. In the morning Bates found him down on the coast digging, and said: “Hello, Tully! Guess we ain’t much hell on lynchin’!”

“Naw,” said Tully. “Git a spade.”

“Goin’ to plant him there?”

“Yep.”

“Where he kin hear them waves?”

“Yep.”

“Purty spot.”

“Yep.”

“Which way will he face?”

“Where he kin watch fur that damned canoe!” cried Tully fiercely.

“He—he can’t see,” ventured Bates uneasily. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

“He’ll heave up that there sand when the canoe comes back! An’ it’s a-comin’! An’ Bud Kent’ll be in it, dead or alive! Git a spade!”

The pale light of superstition flickered in Bates’s eyes. He hesitated.

“The—the dead can’t see,” he began; “kin they?”

Tully turned a distorted face toward him.

“Yer lie!” he roared. “My brother kin see, dead or livin’! An’ he’ll see the hangin’ of Bud Kent! An’ he’ll git up outer the grave fur to see it, Bill Bates! I’m tellin’ ye! I’m tellin’ ye! Deep as I’ll plant him, he’ll heave that there sand and call to me, when the canoe comes in! I’ll hear him; I’ll be here! An’ we’ll live to see the hangin’ of Bud Kent!”

About sundown they planted Tully’s brother, face to the sea.

II

On the Key to Grief the green waves rub all day. White at the summit, black at the base, the shafted rocks rear splintered pinnacles, slanting like channel buoys. On the polished pillars sea birds brood—white-winged, bright-eyed sea birds, that nestle and preen and flap and clatter their orange-coloured beaks when the sifted spray drives and drifts across the reef.

As the sun rose, painting crimson streaks criss-cross over the waters, the sea birds sidled together, huddling row on row, steeped in downy drowse.

Where the sun of noon burnished the sea, an opal wave washed, listless, noiseless; a sea bird stretched one listless wing.

And into the silence of the waters a canoe glided, bronzed by the sunlight, jewelled by the salt drops stringing from prow to thwart, seaweed a-trail in the diamond-flashing wake, and in the bow a man dripping with sweat.

Up rose the gulls, sweeping in circles, turning, turning over rock and sea, and their clamour filled the sky, starting little rippling echoes among the rocks.

The canoe grated on a shelf of ebony; the seaweed rocked and washed; the little sea crabs sheered sideways, down, down into limpid depths of greenest shadows. Such was the coming of Bud Kent to the Key to Grief.

He drew the canoe halfway up the shelf of rock and sat down, breathing heavily, one brown arm across the bow. For an hour he sat there. The sweat dried under his eyes. The sea birds came back, filling the air with soft querulous notes.

There was a livid mark around his neck, a red, raw circle. The salt wind stung it; the sun burned it into his flesh like a collar of red-hot steel. He touched it at times; once he washed it with cold salt water.

Far in the north a curtain of mist hung on the sea, dense, motionless as the fog on the Grand Banks. He never moved his eyes from it; he knew what it was. Behind it lay the Island of Grief.

All the year round the Island of Grief is hidden by the banks of mist, ramparts of dead white fog encircling it on every side. Ships give it wide berth. Some speak of warm springs on the island whose waters flow far out to sea, rising in steam eternally.

The pelt hunter had come back with tales of forests and deer and flowers everywhere; but he had been drinking much, and much was forgiven him.

The body of the college youth tossed up in the cove on the mainland was battered out of recognition, but some said, when found, one hand clutched a crimson blossom half wilted, but broad as a sap pan.

So Kent lay motionless beside his canoe, burned with thirst, every nerve vibrating, thinking of all these things. It was not fear that whitened the firm flesh under the tan; it was the fear of fear. He must not think—he must throttle dread; his eyes must never falter, his head never turn from that wall of mist across the sea. With set teeth he crushed back terror; with glittering eyes he looked into the hollow eyes of fright. And so he conquered fear.

He rose. The sea birds whirled up into the sky, pitching, tossing, screaming, till the sharp flapping of their pinions set the snapping echoes flying among the rocks.

Under the canoe’s sharp prow the kelp bobbed and dipped and parted; the sunlit waves ran out ahead, glittering, dancing. Splash! splash! bow and stern! And now he knelt again, and the polished paddle swung and dipped, and swept and swung and dipped again.

Far behind, the clamour of the sea birds lingered in his ears, till the mellow dip of the paddle drowned all sound and the sea was a sea of silence.

No wind came to cool the hot sweat on cheek and breast. The sun blazed a path of flame before him, and he followed out into the waste of waters. The still ocean divided under the bows and rippled innocently away on either side, tinkling, foaming, sparkling like the current in a woodland brook. He looked around at the world of flattened water, and the fear of fear rose up and gripped his throat again. Then he lowered his head, like a tortured bull, and shook the fear of fear from his throat, and drove the paddle into the sea as a butcher stabs, to the hilt.

So at last he came to the wall of mist. It was thin at first, thin and cool, but it thickened and grew warmer, and the fear of fear dragged at his head, but he would not look behind.

Into the fog the canoe shot; the gray water ran by, high as the gunwales, oily, silent. Shapes flickered across the bows, pillars of mist that rode the waters, robed in films of tattered shadows. Gigantic forms towered to dizzy heights above him, shaking out shredded shrouds of cloud. The vast draperies of the fog swayed and hung and trembled as he brushed them; the white twilight deepened to a sombre gloom. And now it grew thinner; the fog became a mist, and the mist a haze, and the haze floated away and vanished into the blue of the heavens.

All around lay a sea of pearl and sapphire, lapping, lapping on a silver shoal.

So he came to the Island of Grief.

III

On the silver shoal the waves washed and washed, breaking like crushed opals where the sands sang with the humming froth.

Troops of little shore birds, wading on the shoal, tossed their sun-tipped wings and scuttled inland, where, dappled with shadow from the fringing forest, the white beach of the island stretched.

The water all around was shallow, limpid as crystal, and he saw the ribbed sand shining on the bottom, where purple seaweed floated, and delicate sea creatures darted and swarmed and scattered again at the dip of his paddle.

Like velvet rubbed on velvet the canoe brushed across the sand. He staggered to his feet, stumbled out, dragged the canoe high up under the trees, turned it bottom upward, and sank beside it, face downward in the sand. Sleep came to drive away the fear of fear, but hunger, thirst, and fever fought with sleep, and he dreamed—dreamed of a rope that sawed his neck, of the fight in the woods, and the shots. He dreamed, too, of the camp, of his forty pounds of spruce gum, of Tully, and of Bates. He dreamed of the fire and the smoke-scorched kettle, of the foul odour of musty bedding, of the greasy cards, and of his own new pack, hoarded for weeks to please the others. All this he dreamed, lying there face downward in the sand; but he did not dream of the face of the dead.

The shadows of the leaves moved on his blonde head, crisp with clipped curls. A butterfly flitted around him, alighting now on his legs, now on the back of his bronzed hands. All the afternoon the bees hung droning among the wildwood blossoms; the leaves above scarcely rustled; the shore birds brooded along the water’s edge; the thin tide, sleeping on the sand, mirrored the sky.

Twilight paled the zenith; a breeze moved in the deeper woods; a star glimmered, went out, glimmered again, faded, and glimmered.

Night came. A moth darted to and fro under the trees; a beetle hummed around a heap of seaweed and fell scrambling in the sand. Somewhere among the trees a sound had become distinct, the song of a little brook, melodious, interminable. He heard it in his dream; it threaded all his dreams like a needle of silver, and like a needle it pricked him—pricked his dry throat and cracked lips. It could not awake him; the cool night swathed him head and foot.

Toward dawn a bird woke up and piped. Other birds stirred, restless, half awakened; a gull spread a cramped wing on the shore, preened its feathers, scratched its tufted neck, and took two drowsy steps toward the sea.

The sea breeze stirred out behind the mist bank; it raised the feathers on the sleeping gulls; it set the leaves whispering. A twig snapped, broke off, and fell. Kent stirred, sighed, trembled, and awoke.

The first thing he heard was the song of the brook, and he stumbled straight into the woods. There it lay, a thin, deep stream in the gray morning light, and he stretched himself beside it and laid his cheek in it. A bird drank in the pool, too—a little fluffy bird, bright-eyed and fearless.

His knees were firmer when at last he rose, heedless of the drops that beaded lips and chin. With his knife he dug and scraped at some white roots that hung half meshed in the bank of the brook, and when he had cleaned them in the pool he ate them.

The sun stained the sky when he went down to the canoe, but the eternal curtain of fog, far out at sea, hid it as yet from sight.

He lifted the canoe, bottom upwards, to his head, and, paddle and pole in either hand, carried it into the forest.

After he had set it down he stood a moment, opening and shutting his knife. Then he looked up into the trees. There were birds there, if he could get at them. He looked at the brook. There were the prints of his fingers in the sand; there, too, was the print of something else—a deer’s pointed hoof.

He had nothing but his knife. He opened it again and looked at it.

That day he dug for clams and ate them raw. He waded out into the shallows, too, and jabbed at fish with his setting pole, but hit nothing except a yellow crab.

Fire was what he wanted. He hacked and chipped at flinty-looking pebbles, and scraped tinder from a stick of sun-dried driftwood. His knuckles bled, but no fire came.

That night he heard deer in the woods, and could not sleep for thinking, until the dawn came up behind the wall of mist, and he rose with it to drink his fill at the brook and tear raw clams with his white teeth. Again he fought for fire, craving it as he had never craved water, but his knuckles bled, and the knife scraped on the flint in vain.

His mind, perhaps, had suffered somewhat. The white beach seemed to rise and fall like a white carpet on a gusty hearth. The birds, too, that ran along the sand, seemed big and juicy, like partridges; and he chased them, hurling shells and bits of driftwood at them till he could scarcely keep his feet for the rising, plunging beach—or carpet, whichever it was. That night the deer aroused him at intervals. He heard them splashing and grunting and crackling along the brook. Once he arose and stole after them, knife in hand, till a false step into the brook awoke him to his folly, and he felt his way back to the canoe, trembling.

Morning came, and again he drank at the brook, lying on the sand where countless heart-shaped hoofs had passed leaving clean imprints; and again he ripped the raw clams from their shells and swallowed them, whimpering.

All day long the white beach rose and fell and heaved and flattened under his bright dry eyes. He chased the shore birds at times, till the unsteady beach tripped him up and he fell full length in the sand. Then he would rise moaning, and creep into the shadow of the wood, and watch the little song-birds in the branches, moaning, always moaning.

His hands, sticky with blood, hacked steel and flint together, but so feebly that now even the cold sparks no longer came.

He began to fear the advancing night; he dreaded to hear the big warm deer among the thickets. Fear clutched him suddenly, and he lowered his head and set his teeth and shook fear from his throat again.

Then he started aimlessly into the woods, crowding past bushes, scraping trees, treading on moss and twig and mouldy stump, his bruised hands swinging, always swinging.

The sun set in the mist as he came out of the woods on to another beach—a warm, soft beach, crimsoned by the glow in the evening clouds.

And on the sand at his feet lay a young girl asleep, swathed in the silken garment of her own black hair, round limbed, brown, smooth as the bloom on the tawny beach.

A gull flapped overhead, screaming. Her eyes, deeper than night, unclosed. Then her lips parted in a cry, soft with sleep, “Ihó!”

She rose, rubbing her velvet eyes. “Ihó!” she cried in wonder; “Inâh!”

The gilded sand settled around her little feet. Her cheeks crimsoned.

“E-hó! E-hó!” she whispered, and hid her face in her hair.

IV

The bridge of the stars spans the sky seas; the sun and the moon are the travellers who pass over it. This was also known in the lodges of the Isantee, hundreds of years ago. Chaské told it to Hârpam, and when Hârpam knew he told it to Hapéda; and so the knowledge spread to Hârka, and from Winona to Wehârka, up and down, across and ever across, woof and web, until it came to the Island of Grief. And how? God knows!

Wehârka, prattling in the tules, may have told Ne-kâ; and Ne-kâ, high in the November clouds, may have told Kay-óshk, who told it to Shinge-bis, who told it to Skeé-skah, who told it to Sé-só-Kah.

Ihó! Inâh! Behold the wonder of it! And this is the fate of all knowledge that comes to the Island of Grief.

•      •      •      •      •      •

As the red glow died in the sky, and the sand swam in shadows, the girl parted the silken curtains of her hair and looked at him.

“Ehó!” she whispered again in soft delight.

For now it was plain to her that he was the sun! He had crossed the bridge of stars in the blue twilight; he had come!

“E-tó!”

She stepped nearer, shivering, faint with the ecstasy of this holy miracle wrought before her.

He was the Sun! His blood streaked the sky at dawn; his blood stained the clouds at even. In his eyes the blue of the sky still lingered, smothering two blue stars; and his body was as white as the breast of the Moon.

She opened both arms, hands timidly stretched, palm upward. Her face was raised to his, her eyes slowly closed; the deep-fringed lids trembled.

Like a young priestess she stood, motionless save for the sudden quiver of a limb, a quick pulse-flutter in the rounded throat. And so she worshipped, naked and unashamed, even after he, reeling, fell heavily forward on his face; even when the evening breeze stealing over the sands stirred the hair on his head, as winds stir the fur of a dead animal in the dust.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When the morning sun peered over the wall of mist, and she saw it was the sun, and she saw him, flung on the sand at her feet, then she knew that he was a man, only a man, pallid as death and smeared with blood.

And yet—miracle of miracles!—the divine wonder in her eyes deepened, and her body seemed to swoon, and fall a-trembling, and swoon again.

For, although it was but a man who lay at her feet, it had been easier for her to look upon a god.

He dreamed that he breathed fire—fire, that he craved as he had never craved water. Mad with delirium, he knelt before the flames, rubbing his torn hands, washing them in the crimson-scented flames. He had water, too, cool scented water, that sprayed his burning flesh, that washed in his eyes, his hair, his throat. After that came hunger, a fierce rending agony, that scorched and clutched and tore at his entrails; but that, too, died away, and he dreamed that he had eaten and all his flesh was warm. Then he dreamed that he slept; and when he slept he dreamed no more.

One day he awoke and found her stretched beside him, soft palms tightly closed, smiling, asleep.

V

Now the days began to run more swiftly than the tide along the tawny beach; and the nights, star-dusted and blue, came and vanished and returned, only to exhale at dawn like perfume from a violet.

They counted hours as they counted the golden bubbles, winking with a million eyes along the foam-flecked shore; and the hours ended, and began, and glimmered, iridescent, and ended as bubbles end in a tiny rainbow haze.

There was still fire in the world; it flashed up at her touch and where she chose. A bow strung with the silk of her own hair, an arrow winged like a sea bird and tipped with shell, a line from the silver tendon of a deer, a hook of polished bone—these were the mysteries he learned, and learned them laughing, her silken head bent close to his.

The first night that the bow was wrought and the glossy string attuned, she stole into the moonlit forest to the brook; and there they stood, whispering, listening, and whispering, though neither understood the voice they loved.

In the deeper woods, Kaug, the porcupine, scraped and snuffed. They heard Wabóse, the rabbit, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, loping across dead leaves in the moonlight. Skeé-skah, the wood-duck, sailed past, noiseless, gorgeous as a floating blossom.

Out on the ocean’s placid silver, Shinge-bis, the diver, shook the scented silence with his idle laughter, till Kay-óshk, the gray gull, stirred in his slumber. There came a sudden ripple in the stream, a mellow splash, a soft sound on the sand.

“Ihó! Behold!”

“I see nothing.”

The beloved voice was only a wordless melody to her.

“Ihó! Ta-hinca, the red deer! E-hó! The buck will follow!”

“Ta-hinca,” he repeated, notching the arrow.

“E-tó! Ta-mdóka!”

So he drew the arrow to the head, and the gray gull feathers brushed his ear, and the darkness hummed with the harmony of the singing string.

Thus died Ta-mdóka, the buck deer of seven prongs.

VI

As an apple tossed spinning into the air, so spun the world above the hand that tossed it into space.

And one day in early spring, Sé-só-Kah, the robin, awoke at dawn, and saw a girl at the foot of the blossoming tree holding a babe cradled in the silken sheets of her hair.

At its feeble cry, Kaug, the porcupine, raised his quilled head. Wabóse, the rabbit, sat still with palpitating sides. Kay-óshk, the gray gull, tiptoed along the beach.

Kent knelt with one bronzed arm around them both.

“Ihó! Inâh!” whispered the girl, and held the babe up in the rosy flames of dawn.

But Kent trembled as he looked, and his eyes filled. On the pale green moss their shadows lay—three shadows. But the shadow of the babe was white as froth.

Because it was the firstborn son, they named it Chaské; and the girl sang as she cradled it there in the silken vestments of her hair; all day long in the sunshine she sang:

“Wâ-wa, wâ-wa, wâ-we—yeá;

Kah-wéen, nee-zhéka Ke-diaus-âi,

Ke-gâh nau-wâi, ne-mé-go S’weén,

Ne-bâun, ne-bâun, ne-dâun-is âis.

E-we wâ-wa, wâ-we—yeá;

E-we wâ-wa, wâ-we—yeá.”

Out in the calm ocean, Shinge-bis, the diver, listened, preening his satin breast in silence. In the forest, Ta-hinca, the red deer, turned her delicate head to the wind.

That night Kent thought of the dead, for the first time since he had come to the Key of Grief.

“Aké-u! aké-u!” chirped Sé-só-Kah, the robin. But the dead never come again.

“Beloved, sit close to us,” whispered the girl, watching his troubled eyes. “Ma-cânte maséca.”

But he looked at the babe and its white shadow on the moss, and he only sighed: “Ma-cânte maséca, beloved! Death sits watching us across the sea.”

Now for the first time he knew more than the fear of fear; he knew fear. And with fear came grief.

He never before knew that grief lay hidden there in the forest. Now he knew it. Still, that happiness, eternally reborn when two small hands reached up around his neck, when feeble fingers clutched his hand—that happiness that Sé-só-Kah understood, chirping to his brooding mate—that Ta-mdóka knew, licking his dappled fawns—that happiness gave him heart to meet grief calmly, in dreams or in the forest depths, and it helped him to look into the hollow eyes of fear.

He often thought of the camp now; of Bates, his blanket mate; of Dyce, whose wrist he had broken with a blow; of Tully, whose brother he had shot. He even seemed to hear the shot, the sudden report among the hemlocks; again he saw the haze of smoke, he caught a glimpse of a tall form falling through the bushes.

He remembered every minute incident of the trial: Bates’s hand laid on his shoulder; Tully, red-bearded and wild-eyed, demanding his death; while Dyce spat and spat and smoked and kicked at the blackened log-ends projecting from the fire. He remembered, too, the verdict, and Tully’s terrible laugh; and the new jute rope that they stripped off the market-sealed gum packs.

He thought of these things, sometimes wading out on the shoals, shell-tipped fish spear poised: at such times he would miss his fish. He thought of it sometimes when he knelt by the forest stream listening for Ta-hinca’s splash among the cresses: at such moments the feathered shaft whistled far from the mark, and Ta-mdóka stamped and snorted till even the white fisher, stretched on a rotting log, flattened his whiskers and stole away into the forest’s blackest depths.

When the child was a year old, hour for hour notched at sunset and sunrise, it prattled with the birds, and called to Ne-Kâ, the wild goose, who called again to the child from the sky: “Northward! northward, beloved!”

When winter came—there is no frost on the Island of Grief—Ne-Kâ, the wild goose, passing high in the clouds, called: “Southward! southward, beloved!” And the child answered in a soft whisper of an unknown tongue, till the mother shivered, and covered it with her silken hair.

“O beloved!” said the girl, “Chaské calls to all things living—to Kaug, the porcupine, to Wabóse, to Kay-óshk, the gray gull—he calls, and they understand.”

Kent bent and looked into her eyes.

“Hush, beloved; it is not that I fear.”

“Then what, beloved?”

“His shadow. It is white as surf foam. And at night—I—I have seen——”

“Oh, what?”

“The air about him aglow like a pale rose.”

“Ma cânté maséca. The earth alone lasts. I speak as one dying—I know, O beloved!”

Her voice died away like a summer wind.

“Beloved!” he cried.

But there before him she was changing; the air grew misty, and her hair wavered like shreds of fog, and her slender form swayed, and faded, and swerved, like the mist above a pond.

In her arms the babe was a figure of mist, rosy, vague as a breath on a mirror.

“The earth alone lasts. Inâh! It is the end, O beloved!”

The words came from the mist—a mist as formless as the ether—a mist that drove in and crowded him, that came from the sea, from the clouds, from the earth at his feet. Faint with terror, he staggered forward calling, “Beloved! And thou, Chaské, O beloved! Aké u! Aké u!”

Far out at sea a rosy star glimmered an instant in the mist and went out.

A sea bird screamed, soaring over the waste of fog-smothered waters. Again he saw the rosy star; it came nearer; its reflection glimmered in the water.

“Chaské!” he cried.

He heard a voice, dull in the choking mist.

“O beloved, I am here!” he called again.

There was a sound on the shoal, a flicker in the fog, the flare of a torch, a face white, livid, terrible—the face of the dead.

He fell upon his knees; he closed his eyes and opened them. Tully stood beside him with a coil of rope.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Ihó! Behold the end! The earth alone lasts. The sand, the opal wave on the golden beach, the sea of sapphire, the dusted starlight, the wind, and love, shall die. Death also shall die, and lie on the shores of the skies like the bleached skull there on the Key to Grief, polished, empty, with its teeth embedded in the sand.

A MATTER OF INTEREST

He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him.

He that knows not, and knows that he knows not, is simple. Teach him.

He that knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Wake him.

He that knows, and knows that he knows, is wise. Follow him.

—Arabian Proverb

A MATTER OF INTEREST

I

Much as I dislike it, I am obliged to include this story in a volume devoted to fiction: I have attempted to tell it as an absolutely true story, but until three months ago, when the indisputable proofs were placed before the British Association by Professor James Holroyd, I was regarded as an impostor. Now that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Philadelphia Zoölogical Society, and the Natural History Museum of New York city, are convinced that the story is truthful and accurate in every particular, I prefer to tell it my own way. Professor Holroyd urges me to do this, although Professor Bruce Stoddard, of Columbia College, is now at work upon a pamphlet, to be published the latter part of next month, describing scientifically the extraordinary discovery which, to the shame of the United States, was first accepted and recognised in England.

Now, having no technical ability concerning the affair in question, and having no knowledge of either comparative anatomy or zoölogy, I am perhaps unfitted to tell this story. But the story is true; the episode occurred under my own eyes—here, within a few hours’ sail of the Battery. And as I was one of the first persons to verify what has long been a theory among scientists, and, moreover, as the result of Professor Holroyd’s discovery is to be placed on exhibition in Madison Square Garden on the twentieth of next month, I have decided to tell, as simply as I am able, exactly what occurred.

I first wrote out the story on April 1, 1896. The North American Review, the Popular Science Monthly, the Scientific American, Nature, Forest and Stream, and the Fossiliferous Magazine in turn rejected it; some curtly informing me that fiction had no place in their columns. When I attempted to explain that it was not fiction, the editors of these periodicals either maintained a contemptuous silence, or bluntly notified me that my literary services and opinions were not desired. But finally, when several publishers offered to take the story as fiction, I cut short all negotiations and decided to publish it myself. Where I am known at all, it is my misfortune to be known as a writer of fiction. This makes it impossible for me to receive a hearing from a scientific audience. I regret it bitterly, because now, when it is too late, I am prepared to prove certain scientific matters of interest, and to produce the proofs. In this case, however, I am fortunate, for nobody can dispute the existence of a thing when the bodily proof is exhibited as evidence.

This is the story; and if I write it as I write fiction, it is because I do not know how to write it otherwise.

I was walking along the beach below Pine Inlet, on the south shore of Long Island. The railroad and telegraph station is at West Oyster Bay. Everybody who has travelled on the Long Island Railroad knows the station, but few, perhaps, know Pine Inlet. Duck shooters, of course, are familiar with it; but as there are no hotels there, and nothing to see except salt meadow, salt creek, and a strip of dune and sand, the summer-squatting public may probably be unaware of its existence. The local name for the place is Pine Inlet; the maps give its name as Sand Point, I believe, but anybody at West Oyster Bay can direct you to it. Captain McPeek, who keeps the West Oyster Bay House, drives duck shooters there in winter. It lies five miles southeast from West Oyster Bay.

I had walked over that afternoon from Captain McPeek’s. There was a reason for my going to Pine Inlet—it embarrasses me to explain it, but the truth is I meditated writing an ode to the ocean. It was out of the question to write it in West Oyster Bay, with the whistle of locomotives in my ears. I knew that Pine Inlet was one of the loneliest places on the Atlantic coast; it is out of sight of everything except leagues of gray ocean. Rarely one might make out fishing smacks drifting across the horizon. Summer squatters never visited it; sportsmen shunned it, except in winter. Therefore, as I was about to do a bit of poetry, I thought that Pine Inlet was the spot for the deed. So I went there.

As I was strolling along the beach, biting my pencil reflectively, tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the surf, a thought occurred to me: how unpleasant it would be if I suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility flitted across my mind, I rounded a bleak sand dune.

A summer girl stood directly in my path.

If I jumped, I think the young lady has pardoned me by this time. She ought to, because she also started, and said something in a very faint voice. What she said was “Oh!”

She stared at me as though I had just crawled up out of the sea to bite her. I don’t know what my own expression resembled, but I have been given to understand it was idiotic.

Now I perceived, after a few moments, that the young lady was frightened, and I knew I ought to say something civil. So I said, “Are there any mosquitoes here?”

“No,” she replied, with a slight quiver in her voice; “I have only seen one, and it was biting somebody else.”

I looked foolish; the conversation seemed so futile, and the young lady appeared to be more nervous than before. I had an impulse to say, “Do not run; I have breakfasted,” for she seemed to be meditating a plunge into the breakers. What I did say was: “I did not know anybody was here. I do not intend to intrude. I come from Captain McPeek’s, and I am writing an ode to the ocean.” After I had said this it seemed to ring in my ears like, “I come from Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James.”

I glanced timidly at her.

“She’s thinking of the same thing,” said I to myself. “What an ass I must appear!”

However, the young lady seemed to be a trifle reassured. I noticed she drew a sigh of relief and looked at my shoes. She looked so long that it made me suspicious, and I also examined my shoes. They seemed to be fairly respectable.

“I—I am sorry,” she said, “but would you mind not walking on the beach?”

This was sudden. I had intended to retire and leave the beach to her, but I did not fancy being driven away so abruptly.

“I was about to withdraw, madam,” said I, bowing stiffly; “I beg you will pardon any inconvenience——”

“Dear me!” she cried, “you don’t understand. I do not—I would not think for a moment of asking you to leave Pine Inlet. I merely ventured to request you to walk on the dunes. I am so afraid that your footprints may obliterate the impressions that my father is studying.”

“Oh!” said I, looking about me as though I had been caught in the middle of a flower-bed; “really I did not notice any impressions. Impressions of what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling a little at my awkward pose. “If you step this way in a straight line you can do no damage.”

I did as she bade me. I suppose my movements resembled the gait of a wet peacock. Possibly they recalled the delicate manoeuvres of the kangaroo. Anyway, she laughed.

This seriously annoyed me. I had been at a disadvantage; I walk well enough when let alone.

“You can scarcely expect,” said I, “that a man absorbed in his own ideas could notice impressions on the sand. I trust I have obliterated nothing.”

As I said this I looked back at the long line of footprints stretching away in prospective across the sand. They were my own. How large they looked! Was that what she was laughing at?

“I wish to explain,” she said gravely, looking at the point of her parasol. “I am very sorry to be obliged to warn you—to ask you to forego the pleasure of strolling on a beach that does not belong to me. Perhaps,” she continued, in sudden alarm, “perhaps this beach belongs to you?”

“The beach? Oh, no,” I said.

“But—but you were going to write poems about it?”

“Only one—and that does not necessitate owning the beach. I have observed,” said I frankly, “that the people who own nothing write many poems about it.”

She looked at me seriously.

“I write many poems,” I added.

She laughed doubtfully.

“Would you rather I went away?” I asked politely.

“I? Why, no—I mean that you may do as you please—except please do not walk on the beach.”

“Then I do not alarm you by my presence?” I inquired. My clothes were a bit ancient. I wore them shooting, sometimes. “My family is respectable,” I added; and I told her my name.

“Oh! Then you wrote ‘Culled Cowslips’ and ‘Faded Fig-Leaves,’ and you imitate Maeterlinck, and you——Oh, I know lots of people that you know;” she cried with every symptom of relief; “and you know my brother.”

“I am the author,” said I coldly, “of ‘Culled Cowslips,’ but ‘Faded Fig-Leaves’ was an earlier work, which I no longer recognise, and I should be grateful to you if you would be kind enough to deny that I ever imitated Maeterlinck. Possibly,” I added, “he imitates me.”

“Now, do you know,” she said, “I was afraid of you at first? Papa is digging in the salt meadows nearly a mile away.”

It was hard to bear.

“Can you not see,” said I, “that I am wearing a shooting coat?”

“I do see—now; but it is so—so old,” she pleaded.

“It is a shooting coat all the same,” I said bitterly.

She was very quiet, and I saw she was sorry.

“Never mind,” I said magnanimously, “you probably are not familiar with sporting goods. If I knew your name I should ask permission to present myself.”

“Why, I am Daisy Holroyd,” she said.

“What! Jack Holroyd’s little sister?”

“Little!” she cried.

“I didn’t mean that,” said I. “You know that your brother and I were great friends in Paris——”

“I know,” she said significantly.

“Ahem! Of course,” I said, “Jack and I were inseparable——”

“Except when shut in separate cells,” said Miss Holroyd coldly.

This unfeeling allusion to the unfortunate termination of a Latin-Quarter celebration hurt me.

“The police,” said I, “were too officious.”

“So Jack says,” replied Miss Holroyd demurely.

We had unconsciously moved on along the sand hills, side by side, as we spoke.

“To think,” I repeated, “that I should meet Jack’s little——”

“Please,” she said, “you are only three years my senior.”

She opened the sunshade and tipped it over one shoulder. It was white, and had spots and posies on it.

“Jack sends us every new book you write,” she observed. “I do not approve of some things you write.”

“Modern school,” I mumbled.

“That is no excuse,” she said severely; “Anthony Trollope didn’t do it.”

The foam spume from the breakers was drifting across the dunes, and the little tip-up snipe ran along the beach and teetered and whistled and spread their white-barred wings for a low, straight flight across the shingle, only to tip and skeep and sail on again. The salt sea wind whistled and curled through the crested waves, blowing in perfumed puffs across thickets of sweet bay and cedar. As we passed through the crackling juicy-stemmed marsh weed myriads of fiddler crabs raised their fore-claws in warning and backed away, rustling, through the reeds, aggressive, protesting.

“Like millions of pigmy Ajaxes defying the lightning,” I said.

Miss Holroyd laughed.

“Now I never imagined that authors were clever except in print,” she said.

She was a most extraordinary girl.

“I suppose,” she observed after a moment’s silence—“I suppose I am taking you to my father.”

“Delighted!” I mumbled. “H’m! I had the honour of meeting Professor Holroyd in Paris.”

“Yes; he bailed you and Jack out,” said Miss Holroyd serenely.

The silence was too painful to last.

“Captain McPeek is an interesting man,” I said. I spoke more loudly than I intended; I may have been nervous.

“Yes,” said Daisy Holroyd, “but he has a most singular hotel clerk.”

“You mean Mr. Frisby?”

“I do.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “Mr. Frisby is queer. He was once a bill-poster.”

“I know it!” exclaimed Daisy Holroyd, with some heat. “He ruins landscapes whenever he has an opportunity. Do you know that he has a passion for bill-posting? He has; he posts bills for the pure pleasure of it, just as you play golf, or tennis, or squash.”

“But he’s a hotel clerk now,” I said; “nobody employs him to post bills.”

“I know it! He does it all by himself for the pure pleasure of it. Papa has engaged him to come down here for two weeks, and I dread it,” said the girl.

What Professor Holroyd might want of Frisby I had not the faintest notion. I suppose Miss Holroyd noticed the bewilderment in my face, for she laughed, and nodded her head twice.

“Not only Mr. Frisby, but Captain McPeek also,” she said.

“You don’t mean to say that Captain McPeek is going to close his hotel!” I exclaimed.

My trunk was there. It contained guarantees of my respectability.

“Oh, no; his wife will keep it open,” replied the girl. “Look! you can see papa now. He’s digging.”

“Where?” I blurted out.

I remembered Professor Holroyd as a prim, spectacled gentleman, with close-cut, snowy beard and a clerical allure. The man I saw digging wore green goggles, a jersey, a battered sou’wester, and hip-boots of rubber. He was delving in the muck of the salt meadow, his face streaming with perspiration, his boots and jersey splashed with unpleasant-looking mud. He glanced up as we approached, shading his eyes with a sunburned hand.

“Papa, dear,” said Miss Holroyd, “here is Jack’s friend, whom you bailed out of Mazas.”

The introduction was startling. I turned crimson with mortification. The professor was very decent about it; he called me by name at once.

When he said this he looked at his spade. It was clear that he considered me a nuisance and wished to go on with his digging.

“I suppose,” he said, “you are still writing?”

“A little,” I replied, trying not to speak sarcastically. My output had rivaled that of “The Duchess”—in quantity, I mean.

“I seldom read—fiction,” he said, looking restlessly at the hole in the ground.

Miss Holroyd came to my rescue.

“That was a charming story you wrote last,” she said. “Papa should read it—you should, papa; it’s all about a fossil.”

We both looked narrowly at Miss Holroyd. Her smile was guileless.

“Fossils!” repeated the professor. “Do you care for fossils?”

“Very much,” said I

Now I am not perfectly sure what my object was in lying. I looked at Daisy Holroyd’s dark-fringed eyes. They were very grave.

“Fossils,” said I, “are my hobby.”

I think Miss Holroyd winced a little at this. I did not care. I went on:

“I have seldom had the opportunity to study the subject, but, as a boy, I collected flint arrow-heads——”

“Flint arrow-heads!” said the professor coldly.

“Yes; they were the nearest things to fossils obtainable,” I replied, marvelling at my own mendacity.

The professor looked into the hole. I also looked. I could see nothing in it. “He’s digging for fossils,” thought I to myself.

“Perhaps,” said the professor cautiously, “you might wish to aid me in a little research—that is to say, if you have an inclination for fossils.” The double-entendre was not lost upon me.

“I have read all your books so eagerly,” said I, “that to join you, to be of service to you in any research, however difficult and trying, would be an honour and a privilege that I never dared to hope for.”

“That,” thought I to myself, “will do its own work.”

But the professor was still suspicious. How could he help it, when he remembered Jack’s escapades, in which my name was always blended! Doubtless he was satisfied that my influence on Jack was evil. The contrary was the case, too.

“Fossils,” he said, worrying the edges of the excavation with his spade, “fossils are not things to be lightly considered.”

“No, indeed!” I protested.

“Fossils are the most interesting as well as puzzling things in the world,” said he.

“They are!” I cried enthusiastically.

“But I am not looking for fossils,” observed the professor mildly.

This was a facer. I looked at Daisy Holroyd. She bit her lip and fixed her eyes on the sea. Her eyes were wonderful eyes.

“Did you think I was digging for fossils in a salt meadow?” queried the professor. “You can have read very little about the subject. I am digging for something quite different.”

I was silent. I knew that my face was a trifle flushed. I longed to say, “Well, what the devil are you digging for?” but I only stared into the hole as though hypnotized.

“Captain McPeek and Frisby ought to be here,” he said, looking first at Daisy and then across the meadows.

I ached to ask him why he had subpoenaed Captain McPeek and Frisby.

“They are coming,” said Daisy, shading her eyes. “Do you see the speck on the meadows?”

“It may be a mud hen,” said the professor.

“Miss Holroyd is right,” I said. “A wagon and team and two men are coming from the north. There is a dog beside the wagon—it’s that miserable yellow dog of Frisby’s.”

“Good gracious!” cried the professor, “you don’t mean to tell me that you see all that at such a distance?”

“Why not?” I said.

“I see nothing,” he insisted.

“You will see that I’m right, presently,” I laughed.

The professor removed his blue goggles and rubbed them, glancing obliquely at me.

“Haven’t you heard what extraordinary eyesight duck shooters have?” said his daughter, looking back at her father. “Jack says that they can tell exactly what kind of a duck is flying before most people could see anything at all in the sky.”

“It’s true,” I said; “it comes to anybody, I fancy, who has had practice.”

The professor regarded me with a new interest. There was inspiration in his eyes. He turned toward the ocean. For a long time he stared at the tossing waves on the beach, then he looked far out to where the horizon met the sea.

“Are there any ducks out there?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” said I, scanning the sea, “there are.”

He produced a pair of binoculars from his coat-tail pocket, adjusted them, and raised them to his eyes.

“H’m! What sort of ducks?”

I looked more carefully, holding both hands over my forehead.

“Surf ducks—scoters and widgeon. There is one bufflehead among them—no, two; the rest are coots,” I replied.

“This,” cried the professor, “is most astonishing. I have good eyes, but I can’t see a blessed thing without these binoculars!”

“It’s not extraordinary,” said I; “the surf ducks and coots any novice might recognise; the widgeon and buffleheads I should not have been able to name unless they had risen from the water. It is easy to tell any duck when it is flying, even though it looks no bigger than a black pin-point.”

But the professor insisted that it was marvellous, and he said that I might render him invaluable service if I would consent to come and camp at Pine Inlet for a few weeks.

I looked at his daughter, but she turned her back—not exactly in disdain either. Her back was beautifully moulded. Her gown fitted also.

“Camp out here?” I repeated, pretending to be unpleasantly surprised.

“I do not think he would care to,” said Miss Holroyd, without turning.

I had not expected that.

“Above all things,” said I, in a clear, pleasant voice, “I like to camp out.”

She said nothing.

“It is not exactly camping,” said the professor. “Come, you shall see our conservatory. Daisy, come, dear! you must put on a heavier frock; it is getting toward sundown.”

At that moment, over a near dune, two horses’ heads appeared, followed by two human heads, then a wagon, then a yellow dog.

I turned triumphantly to the professor.

“You are the very man I want,” he muttered; “the very man—the very man.”

I looked at Daisy Holroyd. She returned my glance with a defiant little smile.

“Waal,” said Captain McPeek, driving up, “here we be! Git out, Frisby.”

Frisby, fat, nervous, and sentimental, hopped out of the cart.

“Come!” said the professor, impatiently moving across the dunes. I walked with Daisy Holroyd. McPeek and Frisby followed. The yellow dog walked by himself.

II

The sun was dipping into the sea as we trudged across the meadows toward a high dome-shaped dune covered with cedars and thickets of sweet bay. I saw no sign of habitation among the sand hills. Far as the eye could reach, nothing broke the gray line of sea and sky save the squat dunes crowned with stunted cedars.

Then, as we rounded the base of the dune, we almost walked into the door of a house. My amazement amused Miss Holroyd, and I noticed also a touch of malice in her pretty eyes. But she said nothing, following her father into the house, with the slightest possible gesture to me. Was it invitation, or was it menace?

The house was merely a light wooden frame, covered with some waterproof stuff that looked like a mixture of rubber and tar. Over this—in fact, over the whole roof—was pitched an awning of heavy sail-cloth. I noticed that the house was anchored to the sand by chains, already rusted red. But this one-storied house was not the only building nestling in the south shelter of the big dune. A hundred feet away stood another structure—long, low, also built of wood. It had rows on rows of round portholes on every side. The ports were fitted with heavy glass, hinged to swing open if necessary. A single big double door occupied the front.

Behind this long, low building was still another, a mere shed. Smoke rose from the sheet-iron chimney. There was somebody moving about inside the open door.

As I stood gaping at this mushroom hamlet the professor appeared at the door and asked me to enter. I stepped in at once.

The house was much larger than I had imagined. A straight hallway ran through the centre from east to west. On either side of this hallway were rooms, the doors swinging wide open. I counted three doors on each side; the three on the south appeared to be bedrooms.

The professor ushered me into a room on the north side, where I found Captain McPeek and Frisby sitting at a table, upon which were drawings and sketches of articulated animals and fishes.

“You see, McPeek,” said the professor, “we only wanted one more man, and I think I’ve got him.—Haven’t I?” turning eagerly to me.

“Why, yes,” I said, laughing; “this is delightful. Am I invited to stay here?”

“Your bedroom is the third on the south side; everything is ready. McPeek, you can bring his trunk to-morrow, can’t you?” demanded the professor.

The red-faced captain nodded, and shifted a quid.

“Then it’s all settled,” said the professor, and he drew a sigh of satisfaction. “You see,” he said, turning to me, “I was at my wit’s end to know whom to trust. I never thought of you. Jack’s out in China, and I didn’t dare trust anybody in my own profession. All you care about is writing verses and stories, isn’t it?”

“I like to shoot,” I replied mildly.

“Just the thing!” he cried, beaming at us all in turn. “Now I can see no reason why we should not progress rapidly. McPeek, you and Frisby must get those boxes up here before dark. Dinner will be ready before you have finished unloading. Dick, you will wish to go to your room first.”

My name isn’t Dick, but he spoke so kindly, and beamed upon me in such a fatherly manner, that I let it go. I had occasion to correct him afterward, several times, but he always forgot the next minute. He calls me Dick to this day.

It was dark when Professor Holroyd, his daughter, and I sat down to dinner. The room was the same in which I had noticed the drawings of beast and bird, but the round table had been extended into an oval, and neatly spread with dainty linen and silver.

A fresh-cheeked Swedish girl appeared from a further room, bearing the soup. The professor ladled it out, still beaming.

“Now, this is very delightful!—isn’t it, Daisy?” he said.

“Very,” said Miss Holroyd, with the faintest tinge of irony.

“Very,” I repeated heartily; but I looked at my soup when I said it.

“I suppose,” said the professor, nodding mysteriously at his daughter, “that Dick knows nothing of what we’re about down here?”

“I suppose,” said Miss Holroyd, “that he thinks we are digging for fossils.”

I looked at my plate. She might have spared me that.

“Well, well,” said her father, smiling to himself, “he shall know everything by morning. You’ll be astonished, Dick, my boy.”

“His name isn’t Dick,” corrected Daisy.

The professor said, “Isn’t it?” in an absent-minded way, and relapsed into contemplation of my necktie.

I asked Miss Holroyd a few questions about Jack, and was informed that he had given up law and entered the diplomatic service—as what, I did not dare ask, for I know what our diplomatic service is.

“In China,” said Daisy.

“Choo Choo is the name of the city,” added her father proudly; “it’s the terminus of the new trans-Siberian railway.”

“It’s on the Yellow River,” said Daisy.

“He’s vice-consul,” added the professor triumphantly.

“He’ll make a good one,” I observed. I knew Jack. I pitied his consul.

So we chatted on about my old playmate, until Freda, the red-cheeked maid, brought coffee, and the professor lighted a cigar, with a little bow to his daughter.

“Of course, you don’t smoke,” she said to me, with a glimmer of malice in her eyes.

“He mustn’t,” interposed the professor hastily; “it will make his hand tremble.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said I, laughing; “but my hand will shake if I don’t smoke. Are you going to employ me as a draughtsman?”

“You’ll know to-morrow,” he chuckled, with a mysterious smile at his daughter.—“Daisy, give him my best cigars; put the box here on the table. We can’t afford to have his hand tremble.”

Miss Holroyd rose, and crossed the hallway to her father’s room, returning presently with a box of promising-looking cigars.

“I don’t think he knows what is good for him,” she said. “He should smoke only one every day.”

It was hard to bear. I am not vindictive, but I decided to treasure up a few of Miss Holroyd’s gentle taunts. My intimacy with her brother was certainly a disadvantage to me now. Jack had apparently been talking too much, and his sister appeared to be thoroughly acquainted with my past. It was a disadvantage. I remembered her vaguely as a girl with long braids, who used to come on Sundays with her father and take tea with us in our rooms. Then she went to Germany to school, and Jack and I employed our Sunday evenings otherwise. It is true that I regarded her weekly visits as a species of infliction, but I did not think I ever showed it.

“It is strange,” said I, “that you did not recognise me at once, Miss Holroyd. Have I changed so greatly in five years?”

“You wore a pointed French beard in Paris,” she said—“a very downy one. And you never stayed to tea but twice, and then you only spoke once.”

“Oh!” said I blankly. “What did I say?”

“You asked me if I liked plums,” said Daisy, bursting into an irresistible ripple of laughter.

I saw that I must have made the same sort of an ass of myself that most boys of eighteen do.

It was too bad. I never thought about the future in those days. Who could have imagined that little Daisy Holroyd would have grown up into this bewildering young lady? It was really too bad. Presently the professor retired to his room, carrying with him an armful of drawings, and bidding us not to sit up late. When he closed his door Miss Holroyd turned to me.

“Papa will work over those drawings until midnight,” she said, with a despairing smile.

“It isn’t good for him,” I said. “What are the drawings?”

“You may know to-morrow,” she answered, leaning forward on the table and shading her face with one hand. “Tell me about yourself and Jack in Paris.”

I looked at her suspiciously.

“What! There isn’t much to tell. We studied. Jack went to the law school, and I attended—er—oh, all sorts of schools.”

“Did you? Surely you gave yourself a little recreation occasionally?”

“Occasionally,” I nodded.

“I am afraid you and Jack studied too hard.”

“That may be,” said I, looking meek.

“Especially about fossils.”

I couldn’t stand that.

“Miss Holroyd,” I said, “I do care for fossils. You may think that I am a humbug, but I have a perfect mania for fossils—now.”

“Since when?”

“About an hour ago,” I said airily. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that she had flushed up. It pleased me.

“You will soon tire of the experiment,” she said with a dangerous smile.

“Oh, I may,” I replied indifferently.

She drew back. The movement was scarcely perceptible, but I noticed it, and she knew I did.

The atmosphere was vaguely hostile. One feels such mental conditions and changes instantly. I picked up a chessboard, opened it, set up the pieces with elaborate care, and began to move, first the white, then the black. Miss Holroyd watched me coldly at first, but after a dozen moves she became interested and leaned a shade nearer. I moved a black pawn forward.

“Why do you do that?” said Daisy.

“Because,” said I, “the white queen threatens the pawn.”

“It was an aggressive move,” she insisted.

“Purely defensive,” I said. “If her white highness will let the pawn alone, the pawn will let the queen alone.”

Miss Holroyd rested her chin on her wrist and gazed steadily at the board. She was flushing furiously, but she held her ground.

“If the white queen doesn’t block that pawn, the pawn may become dangerous,” she said coldly.

I laughed, and closed up the board with a snap.

“True,” I said, “it might even take the queen.” After a moment’s silence I asked, “What would you do in that case, Miss Holroyd?”

“I should resign,” she said serenely; then realizing what she had said, she lost her self-possession for a second, and cried: “No, indeed! I should fight to the bitter end! I mean——”

“What?” I asked, lingering over my revenge.

“I mean,” she said slowly, “that your black pawn would never have the chance—never! I should take it immediately.”

“I believe you would,” said I, smiling; “so we’ll call the game yours, and—the pawn captured.”

“I don’t want it,” she exclaimed. “A pawn is worthless.”

“Except when it’s in the king row.”

“Chess is most interesting,” she observed sedately. She had completely recovered her self-control. Still I saw that she now had a certain respect for my defensive powers. It was very soothing to me.

“You know,” said I gravely, “that I am fonder of Jack than of anybody. That’s the reason we never write each other, except to borrow things. I am afraid that when I was a young cub in France I was not an attractive personality.”

“On the contrary,” said Daisy, smiling, “I thought you were very big and very perfect. I had illusions. I wept often when I went home and remembered that you never took the trouble to speak to me but once.”

“I was a cub,” I said; “not selfish and brutal, but I didn’t understand schoolgirls. I never had any sisters, and I didn’t know what to say to very young girls. If I had imagined that you felt hurt——”

“Oh, I did—five years ago. Afterward I laughed at the whole thing.”

“Laughed?” I repeated, vaguely disappointed.

“Why, of course. I was very easily hurt when I was a child. I think I have outgrown it.”

The soft curve of her sensitive mouth contradicted her.

“Will you forgive me now?” I asked.

“Yes. I had forgotten the whole thing until I met you an hour or so ago.”

There was something that had a ring not entirely genuine in this speech. I noticed it, but forgot it the next moment.

“Tiger cubs have stripes,” said I. “Selfishness blossoms in the cradle, and prophecy is not difficult. I hope I am not more selfish than my brothers.”

“I hope not,” she said, smiling.

Presently she rose, touched her hair with the tip of one finger, and walked to the door.

“Good-night,” she said, courtesying very low.

“Good-night,” said I, opening the door for her to pass.

III

The sea was a sheet of silver, tinged with pink. The tremendous arch of the sky was all shimmering and glimmering with the promise of the sun. Already the mist above, flecked with clustered clouds, flushed with rose colour and dull gold. I heard the low splash of the waves breaking and curling across the beach. A wandering breeze, fresh and fragrant, blew the curtains of my window. There was the scent of sweet bay in the room, and everywhere the subtile, nameless perfume of the sea.

When at last I stood upon the shore, the air and sea were all aglimmer in a rosy light, deepening to crimson in the zenith. Along the beach I saw a little cove, shelving and all ashine, where shallow waves washed with a mellow sound. Fine as dusted gold the shingle glowed, and the thin film of water rose, receded, crept up again a little higher, and again flowed back, with the low hiss of snowy foam and gilded bubbles breaking.

I stood a little while quiet, my eyes upon the water, the invitation of the ocean in my ears, vague and sweet as the murmur of a shell. Then I looked at my bathing suit and towels.

“In we go!” said I aloud. A second later the prophecy was fulfilled.

I swam far out to sea, and as I swam the waters all around me turned to gold. The sun had risen.

There is a fragrance in the sea at dawn that none can name. Whitethorn a-bloom in May, sedges a-sway, and scented rushes rustling in an inland wind recall the sea to me—I can’t say why.

Far out at sea I raised myself, swung around, dived, and set out again for shore, striking strong strokes until the flecked foam flew. And when at last I shot through the breakers, I laughed aloud and sprang upon the beach, breathless and happy. Then from the ocean came another cry, clear, joyous, and a white arm rose in the air.

She came drifting in with the waves like a white sea-sprite, laughing at me from her tangled hair, and I plunged into the breakers again to join her.

Side by side we swam along the coast, just outside the breakers, until in the next cove we saw the flutter of her maid’s cap strings.

“I will beat you to breakfast!” she cried, as I rested, watching her glide up along the beach.

“Done!” said I—“for a sea-shell!”

“Done!” she called across the water.

I made good speed along the shore, and I was not long in dressing, but when I entered the dining-room she was there, demure, smiling, exquisite in her cool, white frock.

“The sea-shell is yours,” said I. “I hope I can find one with a pearl in it.”

The professor hurried in before she could reply. He greeted me very cordially, but there was an abstracted air about him, and he called me Dick until I recognised that remonstrance was useless. He was not long over his coffee and rolls.

“McPeek and Frisby will return with the last load, including your trunk, by early afternoon,” he said, rising and picking up his bundle of drawings. “I haven’t time to explain to you what we are doing, Dick, but Daisy will take you about and instruct you. She will give you the rifle standing in my room—it’s a good Winchester. I have sent for an ‘Express’ for you, big enough to knock over any elephant in India.—Daisy, take him through the sheds and tell him everything. Luncheon is at noon.—Do you usually take luncheon, Dick?”

“When I am permitted,” I smiled.

“Well,” said the professor doubtfully, “you mustn’t come back here for it. Freda can take you what you want. Is your hand unsteady after eating?”

“Why, papa!” said Daisy. “Do you intend to starve him?”

We all laughed.

The professor tucked his drawings into a capacious pocket, pulled his sea boots up to his hips, seized a spade, and left, nodding to us as though he were thinking of something else.

We went to the door and watched him across the salt meadows until a distant sand dune hid him.

“Come,” said Daisy Holroyd, “I am going to take you to the shop.”

She put on a broad-brimmed straw hat, a distractingly pretty combination of filmy cool stuffs, and led the way to the long low structure that I had noticed the evening before.

The interior was lighted by the numberless little portholes, and I could see everything plainly. I acknowledge I was nonplussed by what I did see.

In the centre of the shed, which must have been at least a hundred feet long, stood what I thought at first was the skeleton of an enormous whale. After a moment’s silent contemplation of the thing I saw that it could not be a whale, for the frames of two gigantic bat-like wings rose from each shoulder. Also I noticed that the animal possessed legs—four of them—with most unpleasant-looking webbed claws fully eight feet long. The bony framework of the head, too, resembled something between a crocodile and a monstrous snapping turtle. The walls of the shanty were hung with drawings and blue prints. A man dressed in white linen was tinkering with the vertebrae of the lizardlike tail.

“Where on earth did such a reptile come from?” I asked at length.

“Oh, it’s not real!” said Daisy scornfully; “it’s papier-maché.”

“I see,” said I—“a stage prop.”

“A what?” asked Daisy, in hurt astonishment.

“Why, a—a sort of Siegfried dragon—a what’s-his-name—er, Pfafner, or Peffer, or——”

“If my father heard you say such things he would dislike you,” said Daisy. She looked grieved, and moved toward the door. I apologized—for what, I knew not—and we became reconciled. She ran into her father’s room and brought me the rifle, a very good Winchester. She also gave me a cartridge belt, full.

“Now,” she smiled, “I shall take you to your observatory, and when we arrive you are to begin your duty at once.”

“And that duty?” I ventured, shouldering the rifle.

“That duty is, to watch the ocean. I shall then explain the whole affair—but you mustn’t look at me while I speak; you must watch the sea.”

“This,” said I, “is hardship. I had rather go without the luncheon.”

I do not think she was offended at my speech; still she frowned for almost three seconds.

We passed through acres of sweet bay and spear grass, sometimes skirting thickets of twisted cedars, sometimes walking in the full glare of the morning sun, sinking into shifting sand where sun-scorched shells crackled under our feet, and sun-browned seaweed glistened, bronzed and iridescent. Then, as we climbed a little hill, the sea wind freshened in our faces, and lo! the ocean lay below us, far-stretching as the eye could reach, glittering, magnificent.

Daisy sat down flat on the sand. It takes a clever girl to do that and retain the respectful deference due her from men. It takes a graceful girl to accomplish it triumphantly when a man is looking.

“You must sit beside me,” she said—as though it would prove irksome to me.

“Now,” she continued, “you must watch the water while I am talking.”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you do it, then?” she asked.

I succeeded in wrenching my head toward the ocean, although I felt sure it would swing gradually round again in spite of me.

“To begin with,” said Daisy Holroyd, “there’s a thing in that ocean that would astonish you if you saw it. Turn your head!”

“I am,” I said meekly.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes—er—a thing in the ocean that’s going to astonish me.” Visions of mermaids rose before me.

“The thing,” said Daisy, “is a Thermosaurus!”

I nodded vaguely, as though anticipating a delightful introduction to a nautical friend.

“You don’t seem astonished,” she said reproachfully.

“Why should I be?” I asked.

“Please turn your eyes toward the water. Suppose a Thermosaurus should look out of the waves!”

“Well,” said I, “in that case the pleasure would be mutual.”

She frowned, and bit her upper lip.

“Do you know what a Thermosaurus is?” she asked.

“If I am to guess,” said I, “I guess it’s a jellyfish.”

“It’s that big, ugly, horrible creature that I showed you in the shed!” cried Daisy impatiently.

“Eh!” I stammered.

“Not papier-maché either,” she continued excitedly; “it’s a real one.”

This was pleasant news. I glanced instinctively at my rifle and then at the ocean.

“Well,” said I at last, “it strikes me that you and I resemble a pair of Andromedas waiting to be swallowed. This rifle won’t stop a beast, a live beast, like that Nibelungen dragon of yours.”

“Yes, it will,” she said; “it’s not an ordinary rifle.”

Then, for the first time, I noticed, just below the magazine, a cylindrical attachment that was strange to me.

“Now, if you will watch the sea very carefully, and will promise not to look at me,” said Daisy, “I will try to explain.”

She did not wait for me to promise, but went on eagerly, a sparkle of excitement in her blue eyes:

“You know, of all the fossil remains of the great bat-like and lizard-like creatures that inhabited the earth ages and ages ago, the bones of the gigantic saurians are the most interesting. I think they used to splash about the water and fly over the land during the Carboniferous period; anyway, it doesn’t matter. Of course, you have seen pictures of reconstructed creatures such as the Ichthyosaurus, the Plesiosaurus, the Anthracosaurus, and the Thermosaurus?”

I nodded, trying to keep my eyes from hers.

“And you know that the remains of the Thermosaurus were first discovered and reconstructed by papa?”

“Yes,” said I. There was no use in saying no.

“I am glad you do. Now, papa has proved that this creature lived entirely in the Gulf Stream, emerging for occasional flights across an ocean or two. Can you imagine how he proved it?”

“No,” said I, resolutely pointing my nose at the ocean.

“He proved it by a minute examination of the microscopical shells found among the ribs of the Thermosaurus. These shells contained little creatures that live only in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. They were the food of the Thermosaurus.”

“It was rather slender rations for a thing like that, wasn’t it? Did he ever swallow bigger food—er—men?”

“Oh, yes. Tons of fossil bones from prehistoric men are also found in the interior of the Thermosaurus.”

“Then,” said I, “you, at least, had better go back to Captain McPeek’s——”

“Please turn around; don’t be so foolish. I didn’t say there was a live Thermosaurus in the water, did I?”

“Isn’t there?”

“Why, no!”

My relief was genuine, but I thought of the rifle and looked suspiciously out to sea.

“What’s the Winchester for?” I asked.

“Listen, and I will explain. Papa has found out—how, I do not exactly understand—that there is in the waters of the Gulf Stream the body of a Thermosaurus. The creature must have been alive within a year or so. The impenetrable scale armour that covers its body has, as far as papa knows, prevented its disintegration. We know that it is there still, or was there within a few months. Papa has reports and sworn depositions from steamer captains and seamen from a dozen different vessels, all corroborating each other in essential details. These stories, of course, get into the newspapers—sea-serpent stories—but papa knows that they confirm his theory that the huge body of this reptile is swinging along somewhere on the Gulf Stream.”

She opened her sunshade and held it over her. I noticed that she deigned to give me the benefit of about one eighth of it.

“Your duty with that rifle is this: If we are fortunate enough to see the body of the Thermosaurus come floating by, you are to take good aim and fire—fire rapidly every bullet in the magazine; then reload and fire again, and reload and fire as long as you have any cartridges left.”

“A self-feeding Maxim is what I should have,” I said with gentle sarcasm. “Well, and suppose I make a sieve of this big lizard?”

“Do you see these rings in the sand?” she asked.

Sure enough, somebody had driven heavy piles deep into the sand all around us, and to the tops of these piles were attached steel rings, half buried under the spear grass. We sat almost exactly in the centre of a circle of these rings.

“The reason is this,” said Daisy: “every bullet in your cartridges is steel-tipped and armour-piercing. To the base of each bullet is attached a thin wire of pallium. Pallium is that new metal, a thread of which, drawn out into finest wire, will hold a ton of iron suspended. Every bullet is fitted with minute coils of miles of this wire. When the bullet leaves the rifle it spins out this wire as a shot from a life-saver’s mortar spins out and carries the life line to a wrecked ship. The end of each coil of wire is attached to that cylinder under the magazine of your rifle. As soon as the shell is automatically ejected this wire flies out also. A bit of scarlet tape is fixed to the end, so that it will be easy to pick up. There is also a snap clasp on the end, and this clasp fits those rings that you see in the sand. Now, when you begin firing, it is my duty to run and pick up the wire ends and attach them to the rings. Then, you see, we have the body of the Thermosaurus full of bullets, every bullet anchored to the shore by tiny wires, each of which could easily hold a ton’s strain.”

I looked at her in amazement.

“Then,” she added calmly, “we have captured the Thermosaurus.”

“Your father,” said I at length, “must have spent years of labour over this preparation.”

“It is the work of a lifetime,” she said simply.

My face, I suppose, showed my misgivings.

“It must not fail,” she added.

“But—but we are nowhere near the Gulf Stream,” I ventured.

Her face brightened, and she frankly held the sunshade over us both.

“Ah, you don’t know,” she said, “what else papa has discovered. Would you believe that he has found a loop in the Gulf Stream—a genuine loop—that swings in here just outside of the breakers below? It is true! Everybody on Long Island knows that there is a warm current off the coast, but nobody imagined it was merely a sort of backwater from the Gulf Stream that formed a great circular mill-race around the cone of a subterranean volcano, and rejoined the Gulf Stream off Cape Albatross. But it is! That is why papa bought a yacht three years ago and sailed about for two years so mysteriously. Oh, I did want to go with him so much!”

“This,” said I, “is most astonishing.”

She leaned enthusiastically toward me, her lovely face aglow.

“Isn’t it?” she said; “and to think that you and papa and I are the only people in the whole world who know this!”

To be included in such a triology was very delightful.

“Papa is writing the whole thing—I mean about the currents. He also has in preparation sixteen volumes on the Thermosaurus. He said this morning that he was going to ask you to write the story first for some scientific magazine. He is certain that Professor Bruce Stoddard, of Columbia, will write the pamphlets necessary. This will give papa time to attend to the sixteen-volume work, which he expects to finish in three years.”

“Let us first,” said I, laughing, “catch our Thermosaurus.”

“We must not fail,” she said wistfully.

“We shall not fail,” I said, “for I promise to sit on this sand hill as long as I live—until a Thermosaurus appears—if that is your wish, Miss Holroyd.”

Our eyes met for an instant. She did not chide me, either, for not looking at the ocean. Her eyes were bluer, anyway.

“I suppose,” she said, bending her head and absently pouring sand between her fingers—“I suppose you think me a blue-stocking, or something odious?”

“Not exactly,” I said. There was an emphasis in my voice that made her colour. After a moment she laid the sunshade down, still open.

“May I hold it?” I asked.

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

The ocean had turned a deep marine blue, verging on purple, that heralded a scorching afternoon. The wind died away; the odour of cedar and sweet bay hung heavy in the air.

In the sand at our feet an iridescent flower beetle crawled, its metallic green and blue wings burning like a spark. Great gnats, with filmy, glittering wings, danced aimlessly above the young golden-rod; burnished crickets, inquisitive, timid, ran from under chips of driftwood, waved their antennae at us, and ran back again. One by one the marbled tiger beetles tumbled at our feet, dazed from the exertion of an aërial flight, then scrambled and ran a little way, or darted into the wire grass, where great brilliant spiders eyed them askance from their gossamer hammocks.

Far out at sea the white gulls floated and drifted on the water, or sailed up into the air to flap lazily for a moment and settle back among the waves. Strings of black surf ducks passed, their strong wings tipping the surface of the water; single wandering coots whirled from the breakers into lonely flight toward the horizon.

We lay and watched the little ring-necks running along the water’s edge, now backing away from the incoming tide, now boldly wading after the undertow. The harmony of silence, the deep perfume, the mystery of waiting for that something that all await—what is it? love? death? or only the miracle of another morrow?—troubled me with vague restfulness. As sunlight casts shadows, happiness, too, throws a shadow, and the shadow is sadness.

And so the morning wore away until Freda came with a cool-looking hamper. Then delicious cold fowl and lettuce sandwiches and champagne cup set our tongues wagging as only very young tongues can wag. Daisy went back with Freda after luncheon, leaving me a case of cigars, with a bantering smile. I dozed, half awake, keeping a partly closed eye on the ocean, where a faint gray streak showed plainly amid the azure water all around. That was the Gulf Stream loop.

About four o’clock Frisby appeared with a bamboo shelter tent, for which I was unaffectedly grateful.

After he had erected it over me he stopped to chat a bit, but the conversation bored me, for he could talk of nothing but bill-posting.

“You wouldn’t ruin the landscape here, would you?” I asked.

“Ruin it!” repeated Frisby nervously. “It’s ruined now; there ain’t a place to stick a bill.”

“The snipe stick bills—in the sand,” I said flippantly.

There was no humour about Frisby. “Do they?” he asked.

I moved with a certain impatience.

“Bills,” said Frisby, “give spice an’ variety to Nature. They break the monotony of the everlastin’ green and what-you-may-call-its.”

I glared at him.

“Bills,” he continued, “are not easy to stick, lemme tell you, sir. Sign paintin’s a soft snap when it comes to bill-stickin’. Now, I guess I’ve stuck more bills in New York State than ennybody.”

“Have you?” I said angrily.

“Yes, siree! I always pick out the purtiest spots—kinder filled chuck full of woods and brooks and things; then I h’ist my paste-pot onto a rock, and I slather that rock with gum, and whoop she goes!”

“Whoop what goes?”

“The bill. I paste her onto the rock, with one swipe of the brush for the edges and a back-handed swipe for the finish—except when a bill is folded in two halves.”

“And what do you do then?” I asked, disgusted.

“Swipe twice,” said Frisby with enthusiasm.

“And you don’t think it injures the landscape?”

“Injures it!” he exclaimed, convinced that I was attempting to joke.

I looked wearily out to sea. He also looked at the water and sighed sentimentally.

“Floatin’ buoys with bills onto ’em is a idea of mine,” he observed. “That damn ocean is monotonous, ain’t it?”

I don’t know what I might have done to Frisby—the rifle was so convenient—if his mean yellow dog had not waddled up at this juncture.

“Hi, Davy, sic ’em!” said Frisby, expectorating upon a clamshell and hurling it seaward. The cur watched the flight of the shell apathetically, then squatted in the sand and looked at his master.

“Kinder lost his spirit,” said Frisby, “ain’t he? I once stuck a bill onto Davy, an’ it come off, an’ the paste sorter sickened him. He was hell on rats—once!”

After a moment or two Frisby took himself off, whistling cheerfully to Davy, who followed him when he was ready. The rifle burned in my fingers.

It was nearly six o’clock when the professor appeared, spade on shoulder, boots smeared with mud.

“Well,” he said, “nothing to report, Dick, my boy?”

“Nothing, professor.”

He wiped his shining face with his handkerchief and stared at the water.

“My calculations lead me to believe,” he said, “that our prize may be due any day now. This theory I base upon the result of the report from the last sea captain I saw. I can not understand why some of these captains did not take the carcass in tow. They all say that they tried, but that the body sank before they could come within half a mile. The truth is, probably, that they did not stir a foot from their course to examine the thing.”

“Have you ever cruised about for it?” I ventured.

“For two years,” he said grimly. “It’s no use; it’s accident when a ship falls in with it. One captain reports it a thousand miles from where the last skipper spoke it, and always in the Gulf Stream. They think it is a different specimen every time, and the papers are teeming with sea-serpent fol-de-rol.”

“Are you sure,” I asked, “that it will swing in to the coast on this Gulf Stream loop?”

“I think I may say that it is certain to do so. I experimented with a dead right whale. You may have heard of its coming ashore here last summer.”

“I think I did,” said I with a faint smile. The thing had poisoned the air for miles around.

“But,” I continued, “suppose it comes in the night?”

He laughed.

“There I am lucky. Every night this month, and every day, too, the current of the loop runs inland so far that even a porpoise would strand for at least twelve hours. Longer than that I have not experimented with, but I know that the shore trend of the loop runs across a long spur of the submerged volcanic mountain, and that anything heavier than a porpoise would scrape the bottom and be carried so slowly that at least twelve hours must elapse before the carcass could float again into deep water. There are chances of its stranding indefinitely, too, but I don’t care to take those chances. That is why I have stationed you here, Dick, my boy.”

He glanced again at the water, smiling to himself.

“There is another question I want to ask,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not!” he said warmly.

“What are you digging for?”

“Why, simply for exercise. The doctor told me I was killing myself with my sedentary habits, so I decided to dig. I don’t know a better exercise. Do you?”

“I suppose not,” I murmured, rather red in the face. I wondered whether he’d mention fossils.

“Did Daisy tell you why we are making our papier-maché Thermosaurus?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“We constructed that from measurements I took from the fossil remains of the Thermosaurus in the Metropolitan Museum. Professor Bruce Stoddard made the drawings. We set it up here, all ready to receive the skin of the carcass that I am expecting.”

We had started toward home, walking slowly across the darkening dunes, shoulder to shoulder. The sand was deep, and walking was not easy.

“I wish,” said I at last, “that I knew why Miss Holroyd asked me not to walk on the beach. It’s much less fatiguing.”

“That,” said the professor, “is a matter that I intend to discuss with you to-night.” He spoke gravely, almost sadly. I felt that something of unparalleled importance was soon to be revealed. So I kept very quiet, watching the ocean out of the corners of my eyes.

IV

Dinner was ended. Daisy Holroyd lighted her father’s pipe for him, and insisted on my smoking as much as I pleased. Then she sat down, and folded her hands like a good little girl, waiting for her father to make the revelation which I felt in my bones must be something out of the ordinary.

The professor smoked for a while, gazing meditatively at his daughter; then, fixing his gray eyes on me, he said:

“Have you ever heard of the kree—that Australian bird, half parrot, half hawk, that destroys so many sheep in New South Wales?”

I nodded.

“The kree kills a sheep by alighting on its back and tearing away the flesh with its hooked beak until a vital part is reached. You know that? Well, it has been discovered that the kree had prehistoric prototypes. These birds were enormous creatures, who preyed upon mammoths and mastodons, and even upon the great saurians. It has been conclusively proved that a few saurians have been killed by the ancestors of the kree, but the favourite food of these birds was undoubtedly the Thermosaurus. It is believed that the birds attacked the eyes of the Thermosaurus, and when, as was its habit, the mammoth creature turned on its back to claw them, they fell upon the thinner scales of its stomach armour and finally killed it. This, of course, is a theory, but we have almost absolute proofs of its correctness. Now, these two birds are known among scientists as the ekaf-bird and the ool-yllik. The names are Australian, in which country most of their remains have been unearthed. They lived during the Carboniferous period. Now it is not generally known, but the fact is, that in 1801 Captain Ransom, of the British exploring vessel Gull, purchased from the natives of Tasmania the skin of an ekaf-bird that could not have been killed more than twenty-four hours previous to its sale. I saw this skin in the British Museum. It was labelled ‘unknown bird, probably extinct.’ It took me exactly a week to satisfy myself that it was actually the skin of an ekaf-bird. But that is not all, Dick, my boy,” continued the professor excitedly. “In 1854, Admiral Stuart, of our own navy, saw the carcass of a strange gigantic bird floating along the southern coast of Australia. Sharks were after it, and, before a boat could be lowered, these miserable fish got it. But the good old admiral secured a few feathers and sent them to the Smithsonian. I saw them. They were not even labelled, but I knew that they were feathers from the ekaf-bird or its near relative, the ool-yllik.”

I had grown so interested that I had leaned far across the table. Daisy, too, bent forward. It was only when the professor paused for a moment that I noticed how close together our heads were—Daisy’s and mine. I don’t think she realized it. She did not move.

“Now comes the important part of this long discourse,” said the professor, smiling at our eagerness. “Ever since the carcass of our derelict Thermosaurus was first noticed, every captain who has seen it has also reported the presence of one or more gigantic birds in the neighbourhood. These birds, at a great distance, appeared to be hovering over the carcass, but on the approach of a vessel they disappeared. Even in midocean they were observed. When I heard about it I was puzzled. A month later I was satisfied that neither the ekaf-bird nor the ool-yllik was extinct. Last Monday I knew that I was right. I found forty-eight distinct impressions of the huge seven-toed claw of the ekaf-bird on the beach here at Pine Inlet. You may imagine my excitement. I succeeded in digging up enough wet sand around one of these impressions to preserve its form. I managed to get it into a soap box, and now it is there in my shop. The tide rose too rapidly for me to save the other footprints.”

I shuddered at the possibility of a clumsy misstep on my part obliterating the impression of an ool-yllik.

“That is the reason that my daughter warned you off the beach,” he said mildly.

“Hanging would have been too good for the vandal who destroyed such priceless prizes!” I cried out in self-reproach.

Daisy Holroyd turned a flushed face to mine, and impulsively laid her hand on my sleeve.

“How could you know?” she said.

“It’s all right now,” said her father, emphasizing each word with a gentle tap of his pipe-bowl on the table edge; “don’t be hard on yourself, Dick, my boy. You’ll do yeoman’s service yet.”

It was nearly midnight, and still we chatted on about the Thermosaurus, the ekaf-bird, and the ool-yllik, eagerly discussing the probability of the great reptile’s carcass being in the vicinity. That alone seemed to explain the presence of these prehistoric birds at Pine Inlet.

“Do they ever attack human beings?” I asked.

The professor looked startled.

“Gracious!” he exclaimed, “I never thought of that. And Daisy running about out of doors! Dear me! it takes a scientist to be an unnatural parent!”

His alarm was half real, half assumed; but all the same, he glanced gravely at us both, shaking his handsome head, absorbed in thought. Daisy herself looked a little doubtful. As for me, my sensations were distinctly queer.

“It is true,” said the professor, frowning at the wall, “that human remains have been found associated with the bones of the ekaf-bird—I don’t know how intimately. It is a matter to be taken into most serious consideration.”

“The problem can be solved,” said I, “in several ways. One is, to keep Miss Holroyd in the house——”

“I shall not stay in!” cried Daisy indignantly.

We all laughed, and her father assured her that she should not be abused.

“Even if I did stay in,” she said, “one of these birds might alight on Master Dick.”

She looked saucily at me as she spoke, but turned crimson when her father observed quietly, “You don’t seem to think of me, Daisy.”

“Of course I do,” she said, getting up and putting both arms around her father’s neck; “but Dick—as—as you call him—is so helpless and timid.”

My blissful smile froze on my lips.

“Timid!” I repeated.

She came back to the table, making me a mocking reverence.

“Do you think I am to be laughed at with impunity?” she said.

“What are your other plans, Dick, my boy?” asked the professor.—“Daisy, let him alone, you little tease!”

“One is, to haul a lot of cast-iron boilers along the dunes,” I said. “If these birds come when the carcass floats in, and if they seem disposed to trouble us, we could crawl into the boilers and be safe.”

“Why, that is really brilliant!” cried Daisy.

“Be quiet, my child! Dick, the plan is sound and sensible and perfectly practical. McPeek and Frisby shall go for a dozen loads of boilers to-morrow.”

“It will spoil the beauty of the landscape,” said Daisy, with a taunting nod to me.

“And Frisby will probably attempt to cover them with bill-posters,” I added, laughing.

“That,” said Daisy, “I shall prevent, even at the cost of my life.” And she stood up, looking very determined.

“Children, children,” protested the professor, “go to bed—you bother me.”

Then I turned deliberately to Miss Holroyd.

“Good-night, Daisy,” I said.

“Good-night, Dick,” she said, very gently.

V

The week passed quickly for me, leaving but few definite impressions. As I look back to it now I can see the long stretch of beach burning in the fierce sunlight, the endless meadows, with the glimmer of water in the distance, the dunes, the twisted cedars, the leagues of scintillating ocean, rocking, rocking, always rocking. In the starlit nights the curlew came in from the sand-bars by twos and threes; I could hear their faint call as I lay in bed thinking. All day long the little ring-necks whistled from the shore. The plover answered them from distant lonely inland pools. The great white gulls drifted like feathers upon the sea.

One morning, toward the end of the week, I, strolling along the dunes, came upon Frisby. He was bill-posting. I caught him red-handed.

“This,” said I, “must stop. Do you understand, Mr. Frisby?”

He stepped back from his work, laying his head on one side, considering first me, then the bill that he had pasted on one of our big boilers.

“Don’t like the colour?” he asked. “It goes well on them boilers.”

“Colour! No, I don’t like the colour either. Can’t you understand that there are some people in the world who object to seeing patent-medicine advertisements scattered over a landscape?”

“Hey?” he said perplexed.

“Will you kindly remove that advertisement?” I persisted.

“Too late,” said Frisby; “it’s sot.”

I was too disgusted to speak, but my disgust turned to anger when I perceived that, as far as the eye could reach, our boilers, lying from three to four hundred feet apart, were ablaze with yellow and red posters, extolling the “Eureka Liver Pill Company.”

“It don’t cost ’em nothin’,” said Frisby cheerfully; “I done it fur the fun of it. Purty, ain’t it?”

“They are Professor Holroyd’s boilers,” I said, subduing a desire to beat Frisby with my telescope. “Wait until Miss Holroyd sees this work.”

“Don’t she like yeller and red?” he demanded anxiously.

“You’ll find out,” said I.

Frisby gaped at his handiwork and then at his yellow dog. After a moment he mechanically spat on a clamshell and requested Davy to “sic” it.

“Can’t you comprehend that you have ruined our pleasure in the landscape?” I asked more mildly.

“I’ve got some green bills,” said Frisby; “I kin stick ’em over the yeller ones——”

“Confound it!” said I, “it isn’t the colour!”

“Then,” observed Frisby, “you don’t like them pills. I’ve got some bills of the ‘Cropper Bicycle,’ and a few of ‘Bagley, the Gents’ Tailor——’”

“Frisby,” said I, “use them all—paste the whole collection over your dog and yourself—then walk off the cliff.”

He sullenly unfolded a green poster, swabbed the boiler with paste, laid the upper section of the bill upon it, and plastered the whole bill down with a thwack of his brush. As I walked away I heard him muttering.

Next day Daisy was so horrified that I promised to give Frisby an ultimatum. I found him with Freda, gazing sentimentally at his work, and I sent him back to the shop in a hurry, telling Freda at the same time that she could spend her leisure in providing Mr. Frisby with sand, soap, and a scrubbing brush. Then I walked on to my post of observation.

I watched until sunset. Daisy came with her father to hear my report, but there was nothing to tell, and we three walked slowly back to the house.

In the evenings the professor worked on his volumes, the click of his type-writer sounding faintly behind his closed door. Daisy and I played chess sometimes; sometimes we played hearts. I don’t remember that we ever finished a game of either—we talked too much.

Our discussions covered every topic of interest: we argued upon politics; we skimmed over literature and music; we settled international differences; we spoke vaguely of human brotherhood. I say we slighted no subject of interest—I am wrong; we never spoke of love.

Now, love is a matter of interest to ten people out of ten. Why it was that it did not appear to interest us is as interesting a question as love itself. We were young, alert, enthusiastic, inquiring. We eagerly absorbed theories concerning any curious phenomena in Nature, as intellectual cocktails to stimulate discussion. And yet we did not discuss love. I do not say that we avoided it. No; the subject was too completely ignored for even that. And yet we found it very difficult to pass an hour separated. The professor noticed this, and laughed at us. We were not even embarrassed.

Sunday passed in pious contemplation of the ocean. Daisy read a little in her prayer-book, and the professor threw a cloth over his typewriter and strolled up and down the sands. He may have been lost in devout abstraction; he may have been looking for footprints. As for me, my mind was very serene, and I was more than happy. Daisy read to me a little for my soul’s sake, and the professor came up and said something cheerful. He also examined the magazine of my Winchester.

That night, too, Daisy took her guitar to the sands and sang one or two Armenian hymns. Unlike us, the Armenians do not take their pleasures sadly. One of their pleasures is evidently religion.

The big moon came up over the dunes and stared at the sea until the surface of every wave trembled with radiance. A sudden stillness fell across the world; the wind died out; the foam ran noiselessly across the beach; the cricket’s rune was stilled.

I leaned back, dropping one hand upon the sand. It touched another hand, soft and cool.

After a while the other hand moved slightly, and I found that my own had closed above it. Presently one finger stirred a little—only a little—for our fingers were interlocked.

On the shore the foam-froth bubbled and winked and glimmered in the moonlight. A star fell from the zenith, showering the night with incandescent dust.

If our fingers lay interlaced beside us, her eyes were calm and serene as always, wide open, fixed upon the depths of a dark sky. And when her father rose and spoke to us, she did not withdraw her hand.

“Is it late?” she asked dreamily.

“It is midnight, little daughter.”

I stood up, still holding her hand, and aided her to rise. And when, at the door, I said good-night, she turned and looked at me for a little while in silence, then passed into her room slowly, with head still turned toward me.

All night long I dreamed of her; and when the east whitened, I sprang up, the thunder of the ocean in my ears, the strong sea wind blowing into the open window.

“She is asleep,” I thought, and I leaned from the window and peered out into the east.

The sea called to me, tossing its thousand arms; the soaring gulls, dipping, rising, wheeling above the sand-bar, screamed and clamoured for a playmate. I slipped into my bathing suit, dropped from the window upon the soft sand, and in a moment had plunged head foremost into the surf, swimming beneath the waves toward the open sea.

Under the tossing ocean the voice of the waters was in my ears—a low, sweet voice, intimate, mysterious. Through singing foam and broad, green, glassy depths, by whispering sandy channels a-trail with seaweed, and on, on, out into the vague, cool sea, I sped, rising to the top, sinking, gliding. Then at last I flung myself out of water, hands raised, and the clamour of the gulls filled my ears.

As I lay, breathing fast, drifting on the sea, far out beyond the gulls I saw a flash of white, and an arm was lifted, signalling me.

“Daisy!” I called.

A clear hail came across the water, distinct on the sea wind, and at the same instant we raised our hands and moved toward each other.

How we laughed as we met in the sea! The white dawn came up out of the depths, the zenith turned to rose and ashes.

And with the dawn came the wind—a great sea wind, fresh, aromatic, that hurled our voices back into our throats and lifted the sheeted spray above our heads. Every wave, crowned with mist, caught us in a cool embrace, cradled us, and slipped away, only to leave us to another wave, higher, stronger, crested with opalescent glory, breathing incense.

We turned together up the coast, swimming lightly side by side, but our words were caught up by the winds and whirled into the sky.

We looked up at the driving clouds; we looked out upon the pallid waste of waters; but it was into each other’s eyes we looked, wondering, wistful, questioning the reason of sky and sea. And there in each other’s eyes we read the mystery, and we knew that earth and sky and sea were created for us alone.

Drifting on by distant sands and dunes, her white fingers touching mine, we spoke, keying our tones to the wind’s vast harmony. And we spoke of love.

Gray and wide as the limitless span of the sky and the sea, the winds gathered from the world’s ends to bear us on; but they were not familiar winds; for now, along the coast, the breakers curled and showed a million fangs, and the ocean stirred to its depths, uneasy, ominous, and the menace of its murmur drew us closer as we moved.

Where the dull thunder and the tossing spray warned us from sunken reefs, we heard the harsh challenges of gulls; where the pallid surf twisted in yellow coils of spume above the bar, the singing sands murmured of treachery and secrets of lost souls agasp in the throes of silent undertows.

But there was a little stretch of beach glimmering through the mountains of water, and toward this we turned, side by side. Around us the water grew warmer; the breath of the following waves moistened our cheeks; the water itself grew gray and strange about us.

“We have come too far,” I said; but she only answered: “Faster, faster! I am afraid!” The water was almost hot now; its aromatic odour filled our lungs.

“The Gulf loop!” I muttered. “Daisy, shall I help you?”

“No. Swim—close by me! Oh-h! Dick——”

Her startled cry was echoed by another—a shrill scream, unutterably horrible—and a great bird flapped from the beach, splashing and beating its pinions across the water with a thundering noise.

Out across the waves it blundered, rising little by little from the water, and now, to my horror, I saw another monstrous bird swinging in the air above it, squealing as it turned on its vast wings. Before I could speak we touched the beach, and I half lifted her to the shore.

“Quick!” I repeated. “We must not wait.”

Her eyes were dark with fear, but she rested a hand on my shoulder, and we crept up among the dune grasses and sank down by the point of sand where the rough shelter stood, surrounded by the iron-ringed piles.

She lay there, breathing fast and deep, dripping with spray. I had no power of speech left, but when I rose wearily to my knees and looked out upon the water my blood ran cold. Above the ocean, on the breast of the roaring wind, three enormous birds sailed, turning and wheeling among each other; and below, drifting with the gray stream of the Gulf loop, a colossal bulk lay half submerged—a gigantic lizard, floating belly upward.

Then Daisy crept kneeling to my side and touched me, trembling from head to foot.

“I know,” I muttered. “I must run back for the rifle.”

“And—and leave me?”

I took her by the hand, and we dragged ourselves through the wire grass to the open end of a boiler lying in the sand.

She crept in on her hands and knees, and called to me to follow.

“You are safe now,” I cried. “I must go back for the rifle.”

“The birds may—may attack you.”

“If they do I can get into one of the other boilers,” I said. “Daisy, you must not venture out until I come back. You won’t, will you?”

“No-o,” she whispered doubtfully.

“Then—good-by.”

“Good-by,” she answered, but her voice was very small and still.

“Good-by,” I said again. I was kneeling at the mouth of the big iron tunnel; it was dark inside and I could not see her, but, before I was conscious of it, her arms were around my neck and we had kissed each other.

I don’t remember how I went away. When I came to my proper senses I was swimming along the coast at full speed, and over my head wheeled one of the birds, screaming at every turn.

The intoxication of that innocent embrace, the close impress of her arms around my neck, gave me a strength and recklessness that neither fear nor fatigue could subdue. The bird above me did not even frighten me; I watched it over my shoulder, swimming strongly, with the tide now aiding me, now stemming my course; but I saw the shore passing quickly and my strength increased, and I shouted when I came in sight of the house, and scrambled up on the sand, dripping and excited. There was nobody in sight, and I gave a last glance up into the air where the bird wheeled, still screeching, and hastened into the house. Freda stared at me in amazement as I seized the rifle and shouted for the professor.

“He has just gone to town, with Captain McPeek in his wagon,” stammered Freda.

“What!” I cried. “Does he know where his daughter is?”

“Miss Holroyd is asleep—not?” gasped Freda.

“Where’s Frisby?” I cried impatiently.

“Yimmie?” quavered Freda.

“Yes, Jimmie; isn’t there anybody here? Good heavens! where’s that man in the shop?”

“He also iss gone,” said Freda, shedding tears, “to buy papier-maché. Yimmie, he iss gone to post bills.”

I waited to hear no more, but swung my rifle over my shoulder, and, hanging the cartridge belt across my chest, hurried out and up the beach. The bird was not in sight.

I had been running for perhaps a minute when, far up on the dunes, I saw a yellow dog rush madly through a clump of sweet bay, and at the same moment a bird soared past, rose, and hung hovering just above the thicket. Suddenly the bird swooped; there was a shriek and a yelp from the cur, but the bird gripped it in one claw and beat its wings upon the sand, striving to rise. Then I saw Frisby—paste, bucket, and brush raised—fall upon the bird, yelling lustily. The fierce creature relaxed its talons, and the dog rushed on, squeaking with terror. The bird turned on Frisby and sent him sprawling on his face, a sticky mass of paste and sand. But this did not end the struggle. The bird, croaking wildly, flew at the prostrate billposter, and the sand whirled into a pillar above its terrible wings. Scarcely knowing what I was about, I raised my rifle and fired twice. A horrid scream echoed each shot, and the bird rose heavily in a shower of sand; but two bullets were embedded in that mass of foul feathers, and I saw the wires and scarlet tape uncoiling on the sand at my feet. In an instant I seized them and passed the ends around a cedar tree, hooking the clasps tight. Then I cast one swift glance upward, where the bird wheeled screeching, anchored like a kite to the pallium wires; and I hurried on across the dunes, the shells cutting my feet, and the bushes tearing my wet swimming suit, until I dripped with blood from shoulder to ankle. Out in the ocean the carcass of the Thermosaurus floated, claws outspread, belly glistening in the gray light, and over him circled two birds. As I reached the shelter I knelt and fired into the mass of scales, and at my first shot a horrible thing occurred: the lizardlike head writhed, the slitted yellow eyes sliding open from the film that covered them. A shudder passed across the undulating body, the great scaled belly heaved, and one leg feebly clawed at the air.

The thing was still alive!

Crushing back the horror that almost paralyzed my hands, I planted shot after shot into the quivering reptile, while it writhed and clawed, striving to turn over and dive; and at each shot the black blood spurted in long, slim jets across the water. And now Daisy was at my side, pale and determined, swiftly clasping each tape-marked wire to the iron rings in the circle around us. Twice I filled the magazine from my belt, and twice I poured streams of steel-tipped bullets into the scaled mass, twisting and shuddering on the sea. Suddenly the birds steered toward us. I felt the wind from their vast wings. I saw the feathers erect, vibrating. I saw the spread claws outstretched, and I struck furiously at them, crying to Daisy to run into the iron shelter. Backing, swinging my clubbed rifle, I retreated, but I tripped across one of the taut pallium wires, and in an instant the hideous birds were on me, and the bone in my forearm snapped like a pipestem at a blow from their wings. Twice I struggled to my knees, blinded with blood, confused, almost fainting; then I fell again, rolling into the mouth of the iron boiler.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When I struggled back to consciousness Daisy knelt silently beside me, while Captain McPeek and Professor Holroyd bound up my shattered arm, talking excitedly. The pain made me faint and dizzy. I tried to speak and could not. At last they got me to my feet and into the wagon, and Daisy came, too, and crouched beside me, wrapped in oilskins to her eyes. Fatigue, lack of food, and excitement had combined with wounds and broken bones to extinguish the last atom of strength in my body; but my mind was clear enough to understand that the trouble was over and the Thermosaurus safe.

I heard McPeek say that one of the birds that I had anchored to a cedar tree had torn loose from the bullets and winged its way heavily out to sea. The professor answered: “Yes, the ekaf-bird; the others were ool-ylliks. I’d have given my right arm to have secured them.” Then for a time I heard no more; but the jolting of the wagon over the dunes roused me to keenest pain, and I held out my right hand to Daisy. She clasped it in both of hers, and kissed it again and again.

•      •      •      •      •      •

There is little more to add, I think. Professor Bruce Stoddard has edited this story carefully. His own scientific pamphlet will be published soon, to be followed by Professor Holroyd’s sixteen volumes. In a few days the stuffed and mounted Thermosaurus will be placed on free public exhibition in the arena of Madison Square Garden, the only building in the city large enough to contain the body of this immense winged reptile.

When my arm came out of splints, Daisy and I——But really that has nothing to do with a detailed scientific description of the Thermosaurus, which, I think, I shall add as an appendix to the book. If you do not find it there it will be because Daisy and I have very little time to write about Thermosaurians.

But what I really want to tell you about is the extraordinary adventures of Captain McPeek and Frisby—how they produced a specimen of Samia Cynthia that dwarfed a hundred of Attacus Atlas, and how the American line steamer St. Louis fouled the thing with her screw.

The more I think of it the more determined I am to tell it to you. It will be difficult to prevent me. And that is not fiction either.

ENVOI

I

When shadows pass across the grass

And April breezes stir the sedge,

Along the brimming river’s edge

I trail my line for silver trout,

And smoke, and dream of you, my lass,

And wonder why we two fell out,

And how the deuce it came about.

II

When swallows sheer the meadow-mere

And thickets thrill with thrushes’ hymns,

Along the mill-pond’s reedy rims

I trail my line for shining dace;

But how can finny fishes cheer

A fellow, if he find no grace

In your sweet eyes and your dear face?

III

Let thrushes wing their way and sing

Where cresses freshen pebbled nooks;

By silent rills and singing brooks

I pass my way alone, alas!

With your dear name the woodlands ring—

Your name is murmured by the grass,

By earth, by air, all—where I pass.

IV

The painted bream may swim the stream—

I’ll cast no line to-day, pardi!

In vain the river-ripples gleam,

In vain the thrushes’ minstrelsy.

Vain is the wind that whispers, “Lo!

Thy fish are waiting—Angler, go!”

V

Will you forgive if I forgive?

Life is too sad, I think, to live

Alone, and dream and smoke and fish;

I’ll say “Forgive” first—if you wish?

VI

For at that word, the Sorcery

Of Love shall change the earth and sky

To Paradise, with cherubim

Instead of birds on every limb.

VII

Rivers shall sing our rhapsody;

The vaulted forest, tree by tree,

High hung with tapestry, shall glow

With golden pillars all a-row.

VIII

And down the gilded forest aisle

Shy throngs of violets shall smile

And kiss your feet from tree to tree

While blue-bells droop in courtesy.

IX

And if the sun incarnadine

The clouds—green leaves shall be your screen;

And if the clouds with jealousy

Should weep—we’ll beg of some kind tree

A moment’s hospitality.

X

Good cheer is here, if you incline;

Moss-hidden springs shall bubble wine

While squirrels chuckle, rank on rank,

And strawberries from every bank

Shall blush to see how deep we drank.

XI

Winds of the West shall cool our eyes

While every woodland creature tries

His voice a little, so that he

May know his notes more perfectly

When crickets start the symphony.

XII

Through hazel glade and scented dell

Where brooklets ring a tinkling bell,

The forest orchestra shall swell,

Until the sun-soaked grasses ring

With crickets strumming string on string.

XIII

Then, with your white hand daintily

Scarce touching mine, we’ll leave our tree

And ramble slowly toward the West

Where our high castle’s flaming crest,

Towering behind the setting sun,

Flings out its banners, one by one,

Signals of fire, that day is done.

XIV

Deep in that palace we shall find

How blind we are, how blind! how blind!

And how he’ll laugh, who holds the key

To the great portal’s mystery!

And how his joyous laugh will ring

When you and I shall bid him fling

The gates ajar for you and me!

XV

Let shadows flee athwart the lea

When dark December strips the hedge

Along the icy river’s edge;

Yet, if you will forgive me, lass,

The world shall bloom like spring to me,

Snow turn to dew upon the grass

And fagots blossom where you pass.

XVI

Swallows shall sheer the frozen mere,

Dead reeds along the mill-pond’s rims

Shall thrill with summer-thrushes’ hymns,

While summer breezes blow apace,

If you will but forgive me, dear,

And let me find a moment’s grace,

In your sweet eyes and your dear face.

—R. W. C.

THE TREE OF HEAVEN

(1907)

TO MY FRIEND
AUSTIN CORBIN

CONTENTS:

The Carpet of Belshazzar
The Sign of Venus
The Case of Mr. Helmer
The Bridal Pair
Out of the Depths
The Swastika
** The Tree of Dreams
** Ex Curia
** The Golden Pool
** The Ghost of Chance

** = general fiction

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THE CARPET OF BELSHAZZAR

We all were glad to see him; on his return he had found us all his friends. Nobody had spoken to him about his abrupt departure from New York; nobody had mentioned Westover; nothing connected with that episode was even hinted at by any of us, I believe, during his short sojourn among us. It was he himself who spoke of it first.

Of course during his absence we had followed his career; many among us had read and tried to understand what he had written in his three world-famous volumes, “Occult Philosophy,” “The Weight of Human Souls,” and “The Interstellar Laws of Psychic Phenomena.”

It seemed, at times, here to us in America, that it was impossible that the man we had known so well could have become the great Psychic Scientist who had written these three astounding works—who now occupied the Chair of Psychical Philosophy in the great University of Trebizond—the man who was the confidential adviser of the Shah of Persia, the mentor of the Ameer of Afghanistan, the inspirer of the greatest diplomat of all the East—the late Akhound of Swat.

As he sat there in his immaculate evening dress, bronzed, youthful looking, presiding so quietly at the little dinner which he had given to us as a half-formal, half-intimate leave-taking before he sailed, it seemed to us incredible that this man, now on his return journey to Trebizond via Lhassa, could be the beloved and dreaded arbiter of Asiatic politics—the one white man in all the Orient who had ever been wholly respected, and absolutely feared by the temporal and spiritual heads of nations, religions, clans, and sects.

That, of course, he was what is popularly known as an adept, we supposed. What his wisdom, his insight, his amazing knowledge of the occult might include, we preferred, rather uncomfortably, not to conjecture.

There is, naturally, in all of us a childlike desire to hear of marvels; there is also a stronger and more childish desire to see miracles performed.

I am quite sure that we all hoped he might perhaps care to do something for us—merely to convince us. And at first, I know that many among us, seated there in the private room at the Lenox Club, felt a trifle ill at ease and a little in awe of this man with whom we were at such close quarters.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the dinner; it was the usual excellent affair one might expect at the Lenox; the wines perfect, the service flawless.

And now, smoking our cigars, lounging in groups over the flower-laden table, we fell into the old, intimate, easy channels of conversation, chatting of past days, of our hopes and ambitions.

And our host, quiet, self-contained, pushed back his chair, looking somewhat curiously, I thought, from one to the other. And I thought, too, as his pleasant bronzed features changed from a faint smile to a graver expression, and then reverted to the smile for a moment, that he seemed to see something in each of us that was perhaps hidden from ourselves—that, as his eyes swept us, he was not only capable of reading much of what was not understood by us, but also something in the hidden future which awaited each of us.

So strongly did this idea begin to take hold of me that it began to make me uneasy. I felt, too, that others among us harbored that same idea—for the conversation was less accented now, and intermittent; voices had fallen to a lower, quieter pitch; and after a little nobody spoke.

Then I saw that we all were looking straight at our host, as though under some subtle and fascinated compulsion.

He sat very still; his composure appeared a trifle forced, as though he had voicelessly summoned us to concentrate upon him our attention, and was now searching for the exact words for some statement which he had meant to make to us all.

After a moment a slight flush crept over his handsome face. He said:

“You fellows are very good to come here and let me take leave of you so pleasantly. You have been very kind to me since I have come again among you. The sort of friendship that asks nothing but takes a man for granted is a good sort. Helmer,”—he looked at the sculptor Helmer—“I shall see you soon again.” We all turned in surprise to Helmer, who seemed as surprised as we were. “I shall see you sooner than you expect…. Smith!”—he smiled at J. Abingdon Smith, 3d—“some day you will uproot a Tree of Dreams, but not the dream, Smith; that will become very real when you awake—as true”—and he turned to the man on his left—“as true as a dream which you shall dream under the Sign of Venus.”

We sat there breathless, expectant. He was doing something after all; he was prophesying, in a curious sort of manner, probably speaking in symbols. And though we could not understand, we listened while the little shivers fluttered our pulses.

Then he looked at Edgerton, smiling; and Edgerton flushed up and looked back at him, almost defiantly.

“Edgerton,” he said, ‘don’t worry too much. What is not to be settled in court can sometimes be settled—ex curia.” And to the young man on his right: “Doctor, don’t overwork. If you do you will learn a stranger truth than is locked up among the molecules and atoms in your laboratory!”

Then he leaned across the table and laid one hand on Leeds’s shoulder. “I congratulate you,” he said, smiling; “you’ve got a good-natured ghost following you about. But he’ll leave you if you turn idle. And don’t be afraid, my boy.”

“I’m not afraid,” said young Leeds, rather pallid, but straightening up in his chair.

Our host laughed; then his face changed, and he raised his eyes to Shannon:

“Where is Harrod?” he asked slowly.

“At Bar Harbor,” replied Shannon, “I believe.”

“I thought so. And—remember one thing—there is a certain law which governs the validity of a check drawn to a man’s order when that check has been signed by a man no longer living. But, Shannon, the intention is the important thing in such a matter.”

“What, exactly, do you mean?” asked Shannon, astonished.

But our host had already turned to Escourt:

“Captain,” he said, “you sail—when?”

“I have no sailing orders,” laughed Escourt.

“Not yet?” Our host looked quietly at the young officer. “Well, it isn’t the length of a voyage that counts, Escourt—nor the size of the troopship. No; you will anchor, some day, in a smaller craft than you started in, in the Port of the Golden Pool.”

Escourt, still smiling, waited; but our host sat silent, head bent, one hand on the edge of the tablecloth.

“Not one of you,” he said, without raising his eyes, ‘not one among you but who shall come face to face with what you still consider miracles. Even Hildreth, yonder”—Hildreth jumped—“even Hildreth shall learn from the Swastika.”

“Swa—swat? What—what?” stammered Hildreth.

“Nothing to alarm you,” smiled the other; then again the swift shadow fell across his face.

“Not one man among you who has not proven his friendship for me,” he said, looking up and around. And to me he added: “You must prove it still further by telling fearlessly to the world what there will be to tell after I have gone, and after my words have been proven—the words I have spoken here to-night—and which no one among you understands…. But you all will understand them. And when the last man among you has understood”—turning again to me—“you must bear witness to the world, bear witness in printed page and over your own signature. Do you promise?”

“Yes,” I said.

Then very quietly he looked around the table, and leaned forward, regarding each man in turn.

“I think,” he said, “that it is time you understood exactly the facts about which you have forborne to question me. And I mean to tell you before we part; I mean to tell you the truth concerning Westover and—all that happened.. .And when you know these facts, then you may begin to surmise why I went to Trebizond, why I remain, and—and—what miracle of happiness I have found there—for the third time reincarnated.”

He leaned back in his chair; his clear eyes became fixed and dreamy. Then he began to speak, in a low voice, as though to himself:

Time, and the funeral of Time, alas!—and the Old Year’s passing-bell! Whistles from city and river, deep horns sounding from the foggy docks; and under my window a voice and a song—ah! that young voice in the street below calling me through the falling snow!

If it be true that Time makes all hurts well, I do not know; and “a thousand years in Thy sight is but as yesterday when it is passed, and as a watch in the night”; a thousand years! And this also is true; the flames of love make hot the furnace of Abaddon.

•      •      •      •      •      •

We were in the gallery as usual, Geraldine and I—the gallery where the carpets of the East were hung along the shadowy walls. For lately it was my pleasure to acquire rare rugs, and it was my profession to furnish expert opinion upon the age and origin of Oriental carpets, and to read and interpret the histories of forgotten emperors and the mysteries of long-forgotten gods from the colors and intricate flowery labyrinths tied in silk or wool to the warps of some dead sultan’s lustrous tapestry.

Here in the long sky gallery hung my own rugs against the arabesque incrusted-ivory panels—Tabriz, Shiraz, Sehna, and Saruk—a somber blaze of color shot with fire—all rare, some priceless; Turkish Kulah, softly silky as a golden lion’s hide, Persian Sehna, shimmering with rose and violet lights, fiercely brilliant rugs from Samarkand, superbly flowered, secreting deep in every floral thicket traceries of the ancient Mongol conqueror; Feraghans glowing like jewel-sewn velvets set with the Herati and the lotus—symbols of Egypt or of China, as you please to interpret the oldest pattern in the world.

Far in the gallery’s amber-tinted gloom the red of Ispahan dominated, subduing fiery vistas to smoldering harmony through which, like a vast sapphire set in opals, glimmered the superb lost Persian blue.

There was one other rug, an Eighur, the famous so-called “Babilu” or “Carpet of Belshazzar”; but it hung alone in imperial magnificence behind the locked doors of a marble room, which it seemed to fill with a soft luster of its own, radiating from the mystic “Tree of Heaven” woven in its center.

We were, as I say, in this gallery; Geraldine poring over an illuminated volume on cuneiform inscriptions, I, with pad and pencil, idly shifting and reshifting the Kufic key to the ancient cipher, which always left me stranded where I had begun with the stately repetition:

“King of Kings—

King of Kings—

King of Kings—”

As for Westover, my cousin, he was, as usual, in the laboratory fussing with his venomous extracts—an occupation which, to my dismay, he had taken up within the year, working, as he explained, on the theory that every poison has its antidote. Yet it seemed to me that he was more anxious to invent some new and subtle toxic than to devise the remedy.

From where I sat I could not see him, but the crystalline tinkle of his glass retorts and bottles distracted my attention from the penciled calculations. Without moving my head, I glanced across the room at Geraldine. She looked up immediately, raising her level eyebrows in mute inquiry as though I had moved or spoken; then, realizing that I had not, she bent above the book once more, the warm color stealing to her cheeks.

Within the year a wordless intimacy had grown up between us; we never understood it, never acknowledged it, and at times it disconcerted us.

I sat silent, tracing with my pencil series after series of futile Kufic combinations with the cuneiforms, but ever the first turn of the ancient key creaked in my ears,

“King of Kings—

King of Kings—”

until the triverbal reiteration wore on my nerves.

Geraldine leaned back abruptly, closing her book.

“I’m tired and nervous,” she said. “You may wear out your eyes and temper if you choose—and you’re doing the latter, for I’m as restless as an eel. Besides, I’m lonely, and I’m going back to the East—if you’ll come, too.”

I laughed, understanding what she meant by the “East.”

“Will you come with me?” she insisted.

“Yes,” I said, “whenever you are ready.”

She sprang to her feet, scattering the illuminated pages over the floor, and stood an instant facing me, tall, dark-eyed, smiling, brushing back the lustrous hair from her cheeks.

“Where is Jim?” she asked—although we both knew.

“In the laboratory,” I replied mechanically.

Still busy with her hair, she regarded me dreamily out of those dark, sweet eyes of hers.

“It would be wonderful,” she mused, “if Jim should find an antidote to death; but I wish it were not necessary to kill so many little helpless creatures. Did you hear that pitiful sound in there yesterday? Was it something he was killing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And after a silence: “What are you going to do?”

She shook her head vaguely and leaned against the window, looking out into the rain.

“Shall we go back to our inscriptions?” I suggested.

She shook her head again. After a while she turned away from the window, stifling a dainty yawn, and stretched out, languidly straightening up to the full height of her young body.

“I feel stupid,” she said; “I’m tired of cryptograms and the pages of dusty books. I’m tired of the rain, too. The languor of April is in me. I’m homesick for lands I never knew. So come back to the East with me, Dick.”

She held out her hand to me with a confident little smile; and knowing what she meant, I acquiesced in her caprice, and conducted her solemnly to the piano, leaving her before it.

She stood there for a space, musing, her lovely head bent; then, still standing, she struck a sequence of chords—chords pulsating with color; and through them flashed strange little trills like threads of tinsel.

“This is an Eighur carpet I am dreaming of,” she murmured, as the music swelled, glowing as tints and hues glow in the old dyes of the East.

Wave on wave of color seemed to spread from the keys under her fingers; she looked back at me over her shoulder with a warning nod.

“I shall begin to weave very soon. Khiounnou horsemen may appear and frighten me for a moment—but I shall finish. Listen! I am at the loom.” Seating herself, she developed out of the flowing, somber harmony a monotonous minor theme, suddenly checked by a distant rattle like the clatter of nomad lances on painted stirrups; then she picked up the thread of the melody again, dropped it, breathless for a moment’s quivering silence, resumed it, twisting it into delicate arabesques, threading it across the dull, rich harmonies, at first slowly, then faster, faster, swift as the flying fingers of a nomad maid tying fretted silver in a Ghiordes knot. The whirring tempo was the cadence of the loom; soft feathery notes flew like carded wool; thicker, duller, softer grew the fabric, dense, silky, heavily lustrous.

Suddenly she broke the thread off short, the whole fabric falling with a muffled shock.

“Why did you do that?” I demanded wrathfully.

“The rug is woven; the weaver is dead,” she said.

“Oh, go on, Geraldine,” I insisted; “don’t stop half way in a thing like that. It’s the East—it’s the real East, I tell you. How you do it—you who have never seen the East—Heaven only knows!”

“U Allah Aalem,” she murmured; “it’s in me.” Then she looked back at me, laughing. “Centuries ago you and I heard that music along the Arax—or I sang it among the Tcherkess roses for you, perhaps—perhaps in the gardens of Trebizond.”

“That might explain it,” I said gravely. Lately she had found pleasure in a fancy that she and I had lived together in the East, centuries since, and that we were soon to return forever.

“You and I,” she mused, touching the keys lightly—“and Jim, of course,” she added.

“Of course,” I said.

She dropped her head, striking chord on chord with nervous precision; and hanging in the wake of every ringing harmony a frail melody floated like the Chinese cloud band in a Kirman tapestry.

“What’s that air?” I asked, fascinated.

“I don’t know; it sounds pagan, doesn’t it?—like the wicked beauty of Babylon. Do you hear how it beats on and on like the rhythm of naked feet—little, delicate, naked feet ablaze with gems—the feet of Herodiade perhaps—thud—thud—tching!—don’t you hear them, Dick? And now listen to those silky, flowery trills! They’re Asiatic; ancient Cathay is awaking—camel bells in the bazar of the Golden Emperor! Hark!—now you hear trumpets, don’t you? Well, of course that must be the Mongols marching with the Prince of the Vanguard. Hark! How savagely the brutal Afghan theme breaks in with its fierce trampling and the staccato echo of Tekke drums! It’s frightening me out of the East. I think we had better come home, Dick,” she added, mischievously running into the latest popular street song.

“How on earth could you do that!” I exclaimed wrathfully. “You’re a futile mixture of feather brain and genius!”

But where was the genius hidden under that laughing and exquisite mask confronting me? Suddenly the delicate mask became grave.

“Let me laugh when I can, Dick,” she said. “It is not often I laugh.”

I was silent.

“Of course you may be horrid if you choose,” she observed with a shrug, running a brilliantly inane series of trills from end to end of the keyboard. “But it’s no use scolding, for I won’t study, I won’t compose, I won’t try to do something,’ and I won’t be serious. I’m shallow, I’m frivolous, I’ve the soul of a Trebizond dancing girl, and I like it. Now what are you going to do?”

“I’m going out,” I said ungraciously.

“Oh—alone?”

“Not if you’ll come. It’s stopped raining. Will you come? Oh, get your hat, Geraldine, and stop that torment of idiotic trills!”

“If Jim doesn’t mind, I think I’ll go and sit in the laboratory with him,” she observed carelessly.

I looked at her without comment.

“I have a curious idea,” she continued, “that he might like to have me around to-day while he is working.”

I stared at her, but there was no bitterness in her tranquil smile as she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the polished rosewood case.

“So I won’t go with you, Dick,” she said slowly.

One of those intervals of restless silence, which within the year we had learned to dread, menaced us now. Mute, motionless, I watched the soft color deepening in her face, then, impatient, roused myself and walked over to the laboratory. Westover looked up as I pushed aside the screen.

“Will you drive with us?” I asked. “The sun’s out.”

He declined, peering at me through his glass mask.

“Come on, Jim,” I urged. “You’ve inhaled enough poison for one day. Take off your mask and wash your hands and drive us out to High Bridge. I’ll telephone to the stable if you say the word, and they’ll hook up the new four. Is it a go?”

“No,” he said coldly, and turned on his heel, lifting a test tube to the light.

He was more taciturn and a trifle uglier than usual. I watched him for a moment warming the test tube over a burner, then without further parley replaced the screen, closed the double glass doors, and walked back to Geraldine.

“Doesn’t Jim care to come?” she asked.

I said that her husband appeared to be absorbed in his work.

“Very well,” she said, with airy composure; “trot along, Dicky—and if you see a bunch of jonquils growing on Fifth Avenue, you may pick them for me—or for that pretty girl you met at Lakewood—”

“I’ll send you a bunch as big as a bushel.”

“A bushel of flowers is as compromising as a declaration,” she said. “Send them to her.”

“There’s only one way to settle it,” I said; “I’ll send them to the loveliest girl in the world—shall I?”

She assented, laughing uncertainly.

“I think I’ll pay Jim a little call,” she said, rising from the piano and walking slowly toward the laboratory.

A few moments later as I passed down the broad stairway I heard Westover’s penetrating voice: “Let that glass tube alone, Geraldine! Why the devil can’t you keep your hands off things when you come in here?”

I lingered for a while in the hallway, thinking that she might change her mind and come down, for she had left the laboratory to her husband, and I heard her moving about in her own apartment. She did not come, and after a little while I left the house, a sense of apprehension depressing me.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The asphalt of Fifth Avenue was still wet with the first warm rain of April, but the sun glittered on window and pavement and flashed along the polished panels of carriages crowding the avenue from curb to curb. A breath of spring had set the sparrows chattering and chirping; the movement of the throng, the bright gowns, the fresh faces of young girls, and the endless façades of glass reflecting it—all were pleasant to me, a man sensitive to impressions.

And so in the pale sunshine I sauntered on through the throng, now idling curiously by some shop window whither a display of jewels or curios attracted me, now strolling on again content with the soft color in sky and sunlight.

I found a florist whose shop windows were filled with thickets of fragrant, fragile spring flowers; and every little scented blossom that I touched, choosing the freshest, nodded to the voiceless cadence of a name repeated—and: “Geraldine! Geraldine!” they nodded, so confidently, so sweetly, that what was I to do but send them to her?

And so I sauntered on again, threading the throng, half-minded to turn back, yet ever tempted on by idleness, until above me the twin spires of the cathedral glimmered, all silvered in the shimmering blue.

Halting, undecided, I presently became aware of an old man, his withered hands crossed before him, standing quite patiently under the cathedral terrace. Before him on the sidewalk rested a basket draped with a brilliant rug or two and heaped with tawdry rubbish—scarlet fezzes, slippers of spangled leather, tasseled charms of gilt, flimsy striped fabrics—all the worthless flummery known as “Oriental” to the good peoples of the West.

Few stopped to look; no one bought. As I passed him his dimmed gaze met mine; all the wistfulness of the very poor, all the mystery of the very, very old, was in his eyes. Moved by impulse, perhaps, I spoke to him in a low voice, using the Turkish language.

A dull animation came into his misty eyes.

“Allahou Ekber,” he muttered, in a trembling voice; “it is sweet to hear your words, my son.”

“Mussulman,” I said, “who are you who recite the Tekbir here under the spires of a Roman church?”

“Is there harm in bearing witness to the glory of God here under the minarets of your cathedral?” he asked humbly.

“Spire and minaret are one to Him,” I said. “Who are you, Mussulman?”

“My name is Khassar,” he said; “my nation Eighur; my Iort is the IssigKul; Baïon-Aoul my clan. I am an Eighur Turk, a Khodja; and I am able to write the Turkish language in Arabic and in Eighur-Mongol characters.”

“Reverend father,” I said, full of astonishment and pity, “how should a Khodja of the Baïon-Aoul come to this? Even the Tekrin horseman halts at the sea.”

“It is written,” he said feebly, “that we belong to God and we return to Him.”

Troubled, I stood there on the sidewalk, oblivious to the knot of idlers around us, curious to hear two men so different conversing in a common tongue.

I wished to give him something, yet did not venture to humiliate him without pretense of buying.

“Here is my card,” I said, “on which is written my name and where I live. Bring me these rugs to-night, ata. I wish to buy.”

“You do not desire them,” he said, shaking his head. “You know the East; you understand these rugs; you know they are worthless, acid-washed, singed, rubbed with pumice, smoked—every vile Armenian practice used! You know the dyes are aniline; that they are loosely tied, hastily and flimsily woven by Armenian dogs and sons of dogs. You mean kindness; you have done me enough by speaking to me.”

He passed his trembling hand over his ragged beard.

“You who know carpets and love them,” he quavered; “listen attentively. I have a strip to show—not here—but I could bring it.”

“Bring it,” I said gently.

He fumbled in the pocket of his tattered coat and presently brought to light a scrap of paper on which was scrawled some Persian characters.

“It is such a carpet as I have never seen,” he said; “there is nothing in our history or our traditions to teach us the meaning of this carpet—nothing save that it is an Eighur rug inscribed in Persian and in an unknown script. I have traced the characters in a single cartouche. Read, my son.”

And I read, translating freely:

“Ten thousand thousand stars shine down on Babylon. The desert well reflects but one.”

“I will bring the carpet,” he said, after a silence. “I do not know its value; it has no beauty any longer; only the ghost of ancient splendor remains in the thin knots clinging to warp and weft. And it is old, my son, older than tradition. Upon it there is not one sign to teach us the mystery of its meaning.”

He peered at me with his old, sad eyes, earnestly.

“I will bring it,” he said. “Go with Ali, thou fair comrade of Hassan.”

“May the Blessed Companions intervene for you,” I said.

And so we parted, gravely and with circumstance, I to stroll homeward, touched, musing curiously upon this carpet of which a nomad Mussulman could make nothing. The Persian verse from the cartouche interested me, too, the refrain lingering persistently in my memory:

Ten thousand thousand stars shine down on Babylon. The desert well reflects but one.

Never before, save on the imperial carpet known as Belshazzar’s Rug, had I encountered any inscription mentioning Babylon. So, at the first glance, the nomad’s rug should have some value. But speculation was futile—surely I ought to have learned that if unnumbered disappointments could teach me anything.

Thinking of these things, I passed along the noble avenue, retracing my steps to the big dusky house standing alone, with two old trees to guard it—relics, like the mansion, of the great city’s infancy—the last old dwelling left marooned amid the arid wastes of commerce. Here my cousin and his wife lived with me in winter; I with them at their Lenox home in summer.

A brougham or two at the curb before the house warned me of clients waiting or of visitors for Geraldine—doubtless the latter, for it was now past five.

Under the circumstances I went in to second Geraldine—for Westover never troubled himself to be civil to her friends.

There were people there, and tea—and a pretty, wordless welcome from Geraldine.

The violet-tinted April dusk brought candlelight; people went away and others came; then, one by one, they left, and we were alone, Geraldine and I—and the new moon shining through the frail curtains. For a long time we talked together, aimlessly, of this and that which mattered nothing to anybody. A maid entered to draw the curtains. When she left, Geraldine laughed and picked up a cluster of yellow jonquils.

“Your courage failed you, after all,” she said; “the loveliest woman in the world must go without my flowers to-night.”

“She has them,” I retorted.

“Do you mean me, Dick?” she said under her breath.

“Did you doubt it?”

She bowed her head. Silence, ever waiting to ensnare us, crept like a shadow in between us. And I would not have it.

“An old man is to bring a rug to-night,” I said abruptly.

Geraldine stirred in her armchair, repeating in a low voice:

“Ten thousand thousand stars shine down on Babylon. The desert well reflects but one.”

Bolt upright in my chair I listened, incredulous of my own ears.

“Where on earth did you hear that?” I demanded.

“I read it on Belshazzar’s Rug in cuneiform with the Kufic key,” she answered, watching me.

“You—all alone—interpreted that?” I asked, astounded.

“Yes. It is the cuneiform inscription in the gold cartouche.”

Profound astonishment left me silent. She lay back in her chair with a little laugh of pure excitement.

“After you went out,” she said, “I was horribly lonely, and I thought of you, and then I thought about the work you loved—the cuneiforms—and—as Jim did not seem to need me in the laboratory—I thought to myself: ‘Suppose—suppose by luck I could unravel the inscription on the gold cartouche! Dick would be the happiest man in the world.’ And then—your—your flowers came, and I sat for a while alone with them. Then, on impulse, I jumped up and took the Kufic tables and all the combinations that you and I had tried together, and I slipped upstairs to the marble room and knelt down before Belshazzar’s Rug. O Dick! the Tree of Heaven seemed to quiver in every jeweled branch and leaf—it was only the draught from the closing door that moved the rug, but the mystic tree swayed there as the folds of the carpet moved, and I seemed to feel the mystery of the Prophet’s Paradise stealing into me, penetrating me like the incense of forbidden wine—and I—I felt very Eastern and very pagan, kneeling there.

“It was strange, too; the intricate Kufic key seemed to be falling into place of its own impulse, symbol after symbol promising a linked symmetry of sense, until, almost before I was conscious of the miracle, it had been wrought there in the marble room; and my eyes were opened; and I, kneeling before the Tree of Heaven, read quite clearly what is written in the gold cartouche on the great carpet of Belshazzar. Dick! I prayed so hard that I might read it. And I have read it—for you! ”

In the eloquence of her emotion she had risen, holding out both hands to me; I caught them, crushing them to my lips.

Ominous pulsating silence grew between us; her fingers relaxed and her hands fell from my lips. The stillness, intense, absolute, became a tension, a growing resistless force pressing us apart, slowly, inexorably driving me back step by step against the silk-hung wall, which I reached for, groping, steadying myself.

Never before had we been so swayed, so thrilled; never before had we been so reckless of the peril. Over us a magic snare had fallen, and we had evaded it—an unseen and delicate web, enmeshing us, drawing us together limb to limb, body to body, soul to soul, there on the kindling edges of destruction.

•      •      •      •      •      •

She sank back into the deep seat by the window, her white hands tightening on the gilded foliation of the chair’s carved arms. And I saw how pale her face was and how her dark eyes were fixed steadily upon the floor as though destruction was a pit whose edge lay at her feet.

Presently I became aware that the world outside the curtained windows was moving still—had perhaps never halted on its way to wait upon our fate. And, crossing the room, I raised the shade and saw the new moon, low in the sky, kneeling amid the watching stars. Yellow rays from a street lamp illuminated the old trees’ foliage, edging with palest fire the tracery of newborn leaves, tufting each stem and twig, exquisite, delicately formal as the leafy labyrinths of the Tree of Heaven spreading above the flowery field of Belshazzar’s Rug.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Khassar the nomad had come and gone, and his rug hung in the marble room, pale as the tinted shadow cast by the great carpet of Belshazzar.

The nomad’s rug was clean but very ancient, and so worn, so time-eaten to the very warp, that the Kherdeh was all but obliterated in the met-nih. But outside of that, between the outside band and the ara, or central line, there were traces of ancient glory and dimmed outlines of design; and I saw the twelve cartouches inscribed alternately in Persian and in cuneiform characters. There, too, were the worn remains of floral thickets haunted of beast and bird, intricate allegories, chronicles in color and symbol, every leaf, every blossom, every creature fraught with mystic meaning; and there also, still faintly to be made out, the shadowy foliage of the Tree of Heaven.

“How much did you pay for that ghost of a rug?” demanded Westover, who had followed me upstairs after dressing for dinner.

When I told him he shrugged his shoulders, but made no comment. A moment later Geraldine entered, and his small eyes, no longer furtive, became fixed and dull.

“They say in the East,” I remarked, “that when all color is gone from an Eighur rug a lost soul takes it for its abode. Eighur women are supposed to have souls occasionally, and to lose them now and then.”

“There are plenty of lost souls in town,” observed Westover; “no doubt you’ll have your choice of tenants for your carpet—or,” he added, staring at space, “if you like I’ll provide you.”

I did not understand his remark, but it left a vaguely sinister impression. Geraldine, standing between us, her white fingers linked behind her, looked up at me very gravely.

“Do you know,” she said, “that I am convinced that I wove that rug some centuries ago?”

“I have no doubt of it,” I replied, smiling.

“Do you doubt it, Jim?” she asked gayly.

He did not reply.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “it was always believed that a young girl who dared to weave the Tree of Heaven into an Eighur carpet died when her task was ended—her entire physical and spiritual vitality entering into the sacred tree and infusing it with mystic splendor.”

“Oh, I died as you say,” observed Geraldine gravely.

“I don’t see that you infused much physical or spiritual splendor into that rug,” observed Westover.

“I must die again, you know, Jim, and bring all its vanished beauty back,” she said gayly. “Shall I, Dick?—and leave you a priceless carpet as my bequest and monument?”

Westover turned on his heel, fidgeting with his collar. Recently his neck had grown fat behind the ears.

A few moments later dinner was announced.

We lingered late over dinner, I remember. Jim drank heavily—a habit which both Geraldine and I had long since left unnoticed, she shrinking from the sullen rebuff certain to follow even a playful protest, I understanding the utter hopelessness of interference. His mind, already shaken, would one day shatter, and the dreadful price be paid.

As he sat there sousing walnuts in port, in his altered features and swollen hands I seemed to divine something malicious and patient and powerful—that indescribable physical menace one feels in the inert brooding eye of the mentally and spiritually crippled.

When Geraldine rose, he stood up unsteadily. After she had gone he lighted a cigar and turned his bloodshot eyes on me.

“Is that wine expensive?” he demanded, pointing to Geraldine’s half-empty glass.

“Rather,” I said.

He picked up the glass, examined it, sniffing at the contents.

“It’s poor claret,” he said. “Taste it. It’s pure poison, I tell you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said indifferently.

Again he sniffed it. “Faugh!” he sneered, and threw it into the fireplace behind him. Then he got on his feet, heavily, muttering to himself and stumbled off through the drawing-room.

For a while I sat there amid the shaded candles, staring at space. But I could not read the future pictured there amid the empty chairs and the flowers, already drooping in each crystal vase.

When at length I roused myself and went upstairs, passing her apartment I heard her singing to herself, and I wondered that she could.

I paused on the gallery stairway to listen; and she could not have heard my footsteps on the thick deep carpeting, yet she came to the door and opened it, looking up at me where I stood.

“You are going to the marble room. May I come and help you?” she asked sweetly. And as I was silent, she said again: “Let me be happy, won’t you, Dick? Let me be where you are.”

“Have I ever avoided you, Geraldine?”

I descended the steps, she laid her hand lightly on my arm, and together we mounted the stairway toward the gallery.

“I was singing a Hillah tent song when you passed,” she said, “partly because I was lonely, and partly”—she hesitated, looking around at me—“partly because I’ve come to the conclusion, Dick, that I was once at Belshazzar’s feast in Cadimirra—for there’s a great deal of wickedness in me—you’d never believe it, would you?” She smiled at me so innocently, so adorably, that I laughed outright.

“I’ve heard that the maids of Babilu-Ki had a bowing acquaintance with the devil,” I said.

“Even an Eighur girl nodded pleasantly to Erlik now and then—according to the chronicles of the Tekrins.”

“Oh, they surely did,” she said. And, “Thank you, Dick,” she added, as we reached the gallery; “when I am an old woman you must help me up the steep places.”

“It is you who help me,” I said lightly.

She stood, resting her arm on the table while I gathered up the mass of papers containing our cuneiform combinations and the Kufic key.

“All that is useless,” she said suddenly. Her manner and smile had altered.

I looked up in surprise, and at the same instant she pushed the papers from beneath my hands.

“The memory of things forgotten centuries ago has returned to me,” she said feverishly. “I am a pagan again. It was Istar who first taught my hands to weave and my fingers to tie the Sehna knot. I wove that carpet; what I have woven there I can read. Why do you laugh? Will you believe me if I translate the mystery of each inscription as easily as I read the gold cartouche? Come; we shall never need those papers again.”

What new caprice was this? She was smiling, almost fixedly, and I thought that there was something in her overflushed face and in the starlike brilliancy of her eyes not quite normal. At the same moment the electric lights in the laboratory went out. Westover was evidently in there. I waited, expecting him to appear, but he did not. Again I reached for the papers, but Geraldine scattered them with a quick sweep of her hand.

“Won’t you believe me? Won’t you let me try?” she repeated almost impatiently.

With a quick movement she bent forward past me and shut off the lights in the gallery where we stood. Another second, and the lights in the marble room broke out fiercely; and there, full in the dazzling glory, I saw the great carpet of Belshazzar hanging, and beside it the Eighur rug—a pallid shadow on the wall.

Geraldine, hands clasped to her scarlet mouth, dark eyes fixed, moved forward slowly, opalescent tints flashing on her smooth bare arms and shoulders, her head a delicate silhouette against the glare.

I followed, pausing at her side, and we stood silently before the miracle, the great folds gently stirring in some unfelt current; and I saw the upper branches of the Tree of Heaven sway, and a thousand leaves, all glistening, quiver and subside.

“One can almost hear the rustling of the leaves,” I whispered.

“I hear more than that,” she murmured. “I hear my soul bidding me good-by.”

She smiled dreamily, turning to the faded Eighur carpet, and stepping back one pace, dropped her left arm, clasping my hand in hers.

“It was I who wove that carpet—I, maid of the IssigKul—and it was you, beloved of Hassan, who inspired it.”

“What are you saying, Geraldine?” I began uneasily; “where did you ever hear my name linked with the name of Hassan?”

Her palm was burning hot, her eyes too bright. The fever of caprice possessed her, and her imagination was running riot.

There was a silence, through which a distant sound penetrated—the faint ring of glass somewhere in the laboratory. Westover was tying on his crystal mask.

She heard it, too, and she turned, looking me full in the eyes.

“Dick,” she said, “he has slain my body. My soul is bidding me good-by.”

“It is my own that he is dragging to destruction, not yours,” I muttered.

But she only clasped my hand tighter, the fixed smile stamped on her lips.

“Listen,” she whispered, raising her arm. “This is what is written in the rose cartouche on the Eighur carpet that I made:

‘Roses of Babylon: Ashes of roses in Abaddon.’

Love and its awful penalty, Dick—and the warning I wove, coffined in cryptogram! Listen again. The cartouche below was once topaz—for I wove it—I!

‘All Paradise the cost:

Warp and weft for souls so lost.’

—Mine, Dick, mine!—lost in loving as I loved, centuries since. I have no soul; I have never had any since I lost it then. It is there, tenanting the phantom of an Eighur carpet. Do you not understand? There is my faded monument and refuge—that magic-woven sanctuary—that hiding-place from hell!”

Her little feverish fingers tightened convulsively in mine; the color flamed in her cheeks.

Suddenly she crushed our clasped hands to her heart, and I felt it leaping madly.

“Geraldine,” I stammered, “what is all this ghastly nonsense? Are you ill?”

“Listen! Listen!” she whispered; “the next cartouche was blue—the lost Persian blue! I know; why should I not know—I who wove it centuries ago? And thus it reads, O thou whom I loved to my destruction-thou whom I love!

‘Time and the Guest

Shall meet me twice—once East, once West.’

“Ah, prophetess was I by Istar’s favor—seeing I died for love. Do you not understand, Dick? Time and the Guest!—the Guest is Death—the Guest we all must entertain one day—and I twice—once in the East, once here in the West—here, now!”

“Geraldine, are you mad?” I whispered; “look at me!—turn and look at me, I say!”

But she shivered in my arms, whispering that she was ransoming her soul and mine. A distant sound broke from the laboratory, and we listened.

“Hush, beloved,” she said breathlessly; “the last cartouche is black! And this is written there:

‘Soul, lotus-sealed,

Receive—thy—Paradise—’”

Her voice died out; a terrible pallor struck her face; she swayed where she stood, the smile frozen on her bloodless lips.

As I caught her to me, her head fell straight back and her body sank a dead weight in my arms.

Then a dreadful thing occurred: the faded ancient tapestry glowed out like a live ember, kindling from end to end, brighter, fiercer, flaming into living fire; and the phantom Tree of Heaven, flashing, superbly jeweled, burst into magnificent florescence.

Blinded, almost stupefied, I staggered back, but the straining cry died in my throat as a voice is strangled in dreadful dreams. Again I strove to shout. The rug, glowing like a living ember, slowly faded before my eyes. Suddenly the last spark went out in a shower of whitening ashes.

Again I strove to cry out: “Jim! Jim!” but my lips stiffened with horror as I listened. For he was somewhere there in the darkness, laughing.

“It was in her wine,” he chuckled—“and I saw her kiss the glass and look at you!—and you, there, staring at nothing! Stare at it now!”

And again: “Do you think I have never watched her?—and you? Now she’s in hell, and we’ll race for her on even terms once more.”

Silence: a low, insane laugh, cut by a report and the crash of glass as he fell, shattering his masked face upon the floor.

After a long while I spoke, listening intently. Then I took up my burden.

And there was no sound save the soft stirring of her silken gown as I bore her through the darkness, my cold lips pressed to hers.

He has never returned to America, but now that the time has come for me to fulfill my part, I do so, setting down what I know and what occult information I have received in letters from him, of the strange fate which overtook, separately, each and every man present at that farewell dinner at the Lenox Club.

My own fate is stranger still—to record these facts and take my position as his historian and his disciple.

THE SIGN OF VENUS

In the card room the game, which had started from a chance suggestion, bid fair to develop into an all-night séance: the young foreign diplomat had shed his coat and lighted a fresh cigar; somebody threw a handkerchief over the face of the clock, and a sleepy club servant took reserve orders for two dozen siphons and other details.

“That lets me out,” said Hetherford, rising from his chair with a nod at the dealer. He tossed his cards on the table, settled side obligations with the man on his left, yawned, and put on his hat.

Somebody remonstrated: “It’s only two o’clock, Hetherford; you have no white man’s burden sitting up for you at home.”

But Hetherford shook his head, smiling.

So a servant removed his chair, another man cut in, the dealer dealt cards all around. Presently from somewhere in the smoke haze came a voice, “Hearts.” And a quiet voice retorted, “I double it.”

Hetherford lingered a moment, then turned on his heel, sauntered out across the hallway and down the stairs into the court, refusing with a sign the offered cab.

Breathing deeply, yawning once or twice, he looked up at the stars. The night air refreshed him; he stood a moment, thoughtfully contemplating his half-smoked cigar, then tossed it away and stepped out into the street.

The street was quiet and deserted; darkened brownstone mansions stared at him through somber windows as he passed; his footsteps echoed across the pavement like the sound of footsteps following.

His progress was leisurely; the dreary monotony of the house fronts soothed him. He whistled a few bars of a commonplace tune, crossed the deserted avenue under the electric lamps, and entered the dimly lighted street beyond.

Here all was silence; the doors of many houses were boarded up—sign that their tenants had migrated to the country. No shadowy cat fled along the iron railings at his approach; no night watchman prowled in deserted dooryards or peered at him from obscurity.

Strolling at ease, thoughts nowhere, he had traversed half the block, when an opening door and a glimmer of light across the sidewalk attracted his attention.

As he approached the house from whence the light came, a figure suddenly appeared on the stoop—a girl in a white ball gown—hastily descending the stone steps. Gaslight from the doorway tinted her bared arms and shoulders. She bent her graceful head and gazed earnestly at Hetherford.

“I beg your pardon,” she almost whispered; “might I ask you to help me?”

Hetherford stopped and wheeled short.

“I—I really beg your pardon,” she said, “but I am in such distress. Could I ask you to find me a cab?”

“A cab!” he repeated uncertainly; “why, yes—I will with pleasure—” He turned and looked up and down the deserted street, slowly lifting his hand to his short mustache. “If you are in a hurry,” he said, “I had better go to the nearest stables—”

“But there is something more,” she said, in a tremulous voice; “could you get me a wrap—a cloak—anything to throw over my gown?”

He looked up at her, bewildered. “Why, I don’t believe I—” he began, then fell silent before her troubled gaze. “I’ll do anything I can for you,” he said abruptly. “I have a raincoat at the club—if your need is urgent—”

“It is urgent; but there is something else—something more urgent, more difficult for me to ask you. I must go to Willow Brook—I must go now, to-night! And I—I have no money.”

“Do you mean Willow Brook in Westchester?” he asked, astonished. “There is no train at this hour of the morning!”

“Then—then what am I to do?” she faltered. “I cannot stay another moment in that house.”

After a silence he said: “Are you afraid of anybody in that house?”

“There is nobody in the house,” she said with a shudder; “my mother is in Westchester; all the household are there. I—I came back—a few moments ago—unexpectedly—” She stammered and winced under his keen scrutiny; then the pallor of utter despair came into her cheeks, and she hid her white face in her hands.

Hetherford watched her for a moment.

“I don’t exactly understand,” he said gently, “but I’ll do anything I can for you. I’ll go to the club and get my raincoat; I’ll go to the stables and get a cab; I haven’t any money with me, but it would take only a few minutes for me to drive to the club and get some…. Please don’t be distressed; I’ll do anything you desire.”

She dropped her arms with a hopeless gesture.

“But you say there is no train!”

“You could drive to the house of some of your friends—”

“No, no! Oh, my friends must never know of this!”

“I see,” he said gravely.

“No, you don’t see,” she said unsteadily. “The truth is that I am almost frightened to death.”

“Can you not tell me what has frightened you so?”

“If I tried to tell you, you would think me mad—you would indeed—”

“Try,” he said soothingly.

“Why—why, it startled me to find myself in this house,” she began. “You see, I didn’t expect to come here; I didn’t really want to come here,” she added piteously. “Oh, it is simply dreadful to come—like this!” She glanced fearfully over her shoulder at the lighted doorway above, then turned to Hetherford as though dazed.

“Tell me,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Yes—I’ll tell you. At first it was all dark—but I must have known I was in my own room, for I felt around on the dresser for the matches and lighted a candle. And when I saw that it was truly my own room, and when I caught sight of my own face in the mirror, it terrified me—” She pressed her fingers to her cheeks with a shudder. “Then I ran downstairs and lighted the gas in the hall and peered into the mirror; and I saw a face there—a face like my own—”

Pale, voiceless, she leaned on the bronze balustrade, fair head drooping, lids closed.

Presently, eyes still closed, she said: “You will not leave me alone here—will you—” Her voice died to a whisper.

“No—of course not,” he replied slowly.

There was an interval of silence; she passed her hand across her eyes and raised her head, looking up at the stars.

“You see,” she murmured, “I dare not be alone; I dare not lose touch with the living. I suppose you think me mad, but I am not: I am only stunned. Please stay with me.”

“Of course,” he said in a soothing voice. “Everything will come out all right—”

“Are you sure?”

“Perfectly. I don’t quite know what to say—how to reassure you and offer you any help—”

He fell silent, standing there on the sidewalk, worrying his short mustache. The situation was a new one to him.

“Suppose,” he suggested, “that you try to take a little rest. I’ll sit down on the steps—”

She looked at him in wide-eyed alarm. “Do you mean that I should go into that house—alone!”

“Well—you oughtn’t to stand on the steps all night. It is nearly three o’clock. You are frightened and nervous. Really you must go in and—”

“Then you must come, too,” she said desperately. “This nightmare is more than I can endure alone. I’m not a coward; none of my race is. But I need a living being near me. Will you come?”

He bowed. She turned, hastily gathering her filmy gown, and mounted the shadowy steps without a sound; and he followed leisurely, even perhaps warily, every sense alert.

He was prepared to see the end of this encounter—see it through to an explanation if it took all summer. Of the situation, however, and of her, he had so far ventured no theory. The type of woman and the situation were perfectly new to him. He was aware that anything might happen in New York, and, closing the heavy front door, he was ready for it.

The hall gas jets were burning brightly, and in the darkened drawing-room he could distinguish the heavy outlines of furniture cased in dust coverings.

She asked him to strike a match and light the sconces in the drawing-room, and he did so, curiosity now thoroughly aroused.

As the gas flared up, shrouded pictures and furniture sprang into view surrounding him, and in the dusk of the room beyond he saw a ray of light glimmering on the foliated carving of a gilded harp.

Slowly he turned to the girl beside him. A warm shadow dimmed her delicate features, yet they were the loveliest he had ever looked upon.

Suddenly he understood the mute message of her eyes: “My imprudence places me at your mercy.”

“Your helplessness places me at yours,” he said aloud, scarcely conscious that he had spoken.

At that a bright flush transfigured her. “I trusted you the moment I saw you,” she said impulsively. “Do you mind sitting there opposite me? I shall take this chair—rather near you—”

She sank into an armchair; and, touched and a trifle amused, he seated himself, at a little nod from her, awaiting her further pleasure.

She lay there for a minute or two without speaking, rounded arms resting on the gilt arms of the chair, eyes thoughtfully studying him.

“I’ve simply got to tell you everything,” she said at length.

“It can do no harm, I think,” he replied pleasantly.

“No; no harm. The harm has been done. Yet, with you sitting there so near me, I am not frightened now. It is curious,” she mused, “that I should feel no apprehension now. And yet—and yet—”

She leaned toward him, dropping her linked fingers in her lap.

“Tell me, did you ever hear of the Sign of Venus?—the Signum Veneris?” she asked.

“I’ve heard of it—yes,” he replied, surprised. And as she said nothing, he went on: “The distinguished gentleman who occupies the chair of Applied Psychics at the university lectures on the Sign of Venus, I believe.”

“Did you attend the lectures?” she asked calmly.

He said he had not, smiling a trifle.

“I did.”

“They were probably amusing,” he ventured.

“Not very. Psychic phenomena bored me; I went during Lent. Psychic phenomena—” She hesitated, embarrassed at his amusement.

“I suppose you laugh at that sort of thing.”

“No, I don’t laugh at it. Queer things occur, they say. All I know is that I myself have never seen anything happen that could not be explained by natural laws.”

“I have,” she said.

He bent his head in polite acquiescence.

“I went to the lectures,” she said. “I am not very intellectual; nothing he said interested me very much—which was, of course, suitable for a Lenten amusement.”

She leaned a little nearer, small hands tightly interlaced on her knee.

“His lecture on the Sign of Venus was the last.” She lifted a white finger, drawing the imaginary Signum Veneris in the air.

Hetherford nodded gravely.

“The lecture,” she continued, “ended with an explanation of the Sign of Venus—how, contemplating it by starlight, one might pass into that physical unconsciousness which leaves the mind free to control the soul.”

She held out her left hand toward him. On a stretched finger a ring glistened, mounted with the Sign of Venus blazing in brilliants.

“I had this made specially,” she said; “not that I had any particular desire to test it—no curiosity. It never occurred to me that here in New York one could—could—”

“What?” asked Hetherford dryly.

“—could leave one’s own body at will.”

“I don’t believe it could be accomplished in New York,” he said with great gravity. “And that’s a pretty safe conclusion to come to, is it not?”

She dropped her eyes, silent for a moment, resting her delicate chin on the palm of her hand.

Then she lifted her eyes to him calmly, and the direct beauty of her gaze disturbed him.

“No, it is not a safe conclusion to come to. Listen to me. Last night they gave a dance at the Willow Brook Hunt. It was nearly two o’clock this morning when I left the club house and started home across the lawn with my mother and the maid—”

“But how on earth could—” he began, then begged her pardon and waited.

She continued serenely: “The night was warm and lovely, and it was clear starlight. When I entered my room I sent the maid away and sat down by the open window. The scent of the flowers and the beauty of the night made me restless; I went downstairs, unbolted the door, and slipped out through the garden to the pergola. My hammock hung there, and I lay down in it, looking out at the stars.”

She drew the ring from her finger, holding it out for him to see.

“The starlight caught the gems on the Sign of Venus,” she said under her breath; “that was the beginning. And then—I don’t know why—as I lay there idly turning the ring on my finger, I found myself saying, ‘I must go to New York: I must leave my body here asleep in the hammock and go to my own room in Fifty-eighth Street.’”

A curious little chill passed over Hetherford.

“I said it again and again—I don’t know why. I remember the ring glittered; I remember it grew brighter and brighter. And then—and then! I found myself upstairs in the dark, groping over the dresser for the matches.”

Again that faint chill touched Hetherford.

“I was stupefied for a moment,” she said tremulously; “then I suspected what I had done, and it frightened me. And when I lighted the candle, and saw it was truly my own room—and when I caught sight of my own face in the mirror—terror seized me; it was like a glimpse of something taken unawares. For, do you know that although in the glass I saw my own face, the face was not looking back at me.” She dropped her head, crushing the ring in both hands. “The reflected face was far lovelier than mine; and it was mine, I think, yet it was not looking at me, and it moved when I did not move. I wonder—I wonder—”

The tension was too much. “If that be so,” he said, steadying his voice—if you saw a face in your mirror, the face was your own. He made an impatient gesture, rising to his feet at the same moment. “All that you have told me can be explained,” he said.

“How can it? At this very moment I am asleep in my hammock.”

“We will deal with that later,” he said, smiling down at her. “Where is there a looking-glass?”

“There is one in the hallway.” She rose, slipping the ring on her finger, and led the way to where an oval gilt mirror hung partly covered with dust cloths.

He cast aside the coverings. “Now look into the glass,” he said gayly.

She raised her head and faced the mirror for an instant.

“Come here,” she whispered; and he stepped behind her, looking over her shoulder.

In the glass, as though reflected, he saw her face, but the face was in profile!

A shiver passed over him from head to foot.

“Did I not tell you?” she whispered. “Look! See, the other face is moving, while I am still!”

“There’s something wrong about the glass, of course,” he muttered; “it’s defective.”

“But who is that in the glass?”

“It is you—your profile. I don’t exactly understand. Good Lord! It’s turning away from us!”

She shrank against the wall, wide-eyed, breathing rapidly.

“There is no use in our being frightened,” he said, scarcely knowing what he uttered. “This is Fifty-eighth Street, New York, 1903.” He shook his shoulders, squaring them, and forced a smile. “Don’t be frightened, there’s an explanation for all this. You are not asleep in Westchester; you are here in your own house. You mustn’t tremble so. Give me your hand a moment.”

She laid her hand in his obediently; it shook like a leaf. He held it firmly, touching the fluttering pulse.

“You are certainly no spirit,” he said, smiling; “your hand is warm and yielding. Ghosts don’t have hands like that, you know.”

Her fingers lay in his, quite passive now, but the pulse quickened.

“The explanation of it all is this,” he said: “You have had a temporary suspension of consciousness, during which time you, without being aware of what you were doing, came to town from Willow Brook. You believe you went to the dance at the Hunt Club, but probably you did not. Instead, during a lapse of consciousness, you went to the station, took a train to town, came straight to your own house—” He hesitated.

“Yes,” she said, “I have a key to the door. Here it is.” She drew it from the bosom of her gown; he took it triumphantly.

“You simply awoke to consciousness while you were groping for the matches. That is all there is to it; and you need not be frightened at all!” he announced.

“No, not frightened,” she said, shaking her head; “only—only I wonder how I can get back. I’ve tried to fix my mind on my ring—on the Sign of Venus—I cannot seem to—”

“But that’s nonsense!” he protested cheerfully. “That ring has nothing to do with the matter.”

“But it brought me here! Truly I am asleep in my hammock. Won’t you believe it?”

“No; and you mustn’t, either,” he said impatiently. “Why, just now I explained to you—”

“I know,” she said, looking down at the ring on her hand; “but you are wrong—truly you are.”

“I am not wrong,” he said, laughing. “It was only a dream—the dance, the return, the hammock—all these were parts of a dream so intensely real that you cannot shake it off at once.”

“Then—then who was that we saw in the mirror?”

“Let us try it again,” he said confidently. She suffered him to lead her again to the mirror; again they peered into its glimmering depths, heads close together.

A second’s breathless silence, then she caught his hand in both of hers with a low cry; for the strange profile was slowly turning toward them a face of amazing beauty—her own face transfigured, radiantly glorified. “My soul!” she gasped, and would have fallen at his feet had he not held her and supported her to the stairs, where she sank down, hiding her face in her arms.

As for him, he was terribly shaken; he strove to speak, to reason with her, with himself, but a stupor chained body and mind, and he only leaned there on the newel post, vaguely aware of his own helplessness.

Far away in the night the bells of a church began striking the hour—one, two, three, four. Presently the distant rattle of a wagon sounded. The city stirred in its slumbers.

He found himself bending beside her, her passive hands in his once more, and he was saying: “As a matter of fact, all this is quite capable of an explanation. Don’t be distressed—please don’t be frightened or sad. We’ve both had some sort of hallucination, that’s all—really that is all.”

“I am not frightened now,” she said dreamily. “I am quite sure that—that I am not dead. I am only asleep in my hammock. When I awake—”

Again, in spite of himself, he shivered.

“Will you do one more thing for me?” she asked.

“Yes—a million.”

“Only one. It is unreasonable, it is perhaps silly—and I have no right to ask—”

“Ask it,” he begged.

“Then—then, will you go to Willow Brook? Now?”

“Now?” he repeated blankly.

“Yes.” She looked down at him with the shadow of a smile touching lips and eyes. “I am asleep in the hammock; I sleep very, very soundly—and very, very late into the morning. They may not find me there for a long while. So would you mind going to Willow Brook to awaken me?”

“I—I—but you do not expect me to leave you here and find you in Westchester!” he stammered.

“You need not go,” she said quietly. “If you will telephone to the house and ask somebody to go out to the pergola—”

“No,” he said, “I will go; I will go anywhere on earth for you.”

He stood up, his senses in a whirl. She rose, too, leaning lightly on the balustrade.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “When you awake me, give me this.” She held out the Signum Veneris; and he took it, and bending his head slowly, raised it to his lips.

•      •      •      •      •      •

It was almost morning when he entered his own house. In a dull trance he dressed, turned again to the stairs, and crept out into the shadowy street.

People began to pass him; an early electric tram whizzed up Forty-second Street as he entered the railway station. Presently he found himself in a car, clutching his ticket in one hand, her ring in the other.

“It is I who am mad, not she,” he muttered as the train glided from the station, through the long yard, dim in morning mist, where green and crimson lanterns still sparkled faintly.

Again he pressed the Signum Veneris to his lips. “It is I who am mad—love mad!” he whispered as the far treble warning of the whistle aroused him and sent him stumbling out into the soft fresh morning air.

The rising sun smote him full in the eyes as he came in sight of the club house among the still green trees, and the dew on the lawn flashed like the gems of the Signurn Veneris on the ring he held so tightly.

Across the club house lawn stood another house, circled with gardens in full bloom; and to the left, among young trees, the white columns of a pergola glistened, tinted with rose from the early sun.

There was not a soul astir as he crossed the lawn and entered the garden, brushing the dew from overweighted blossoms as he passed.

Suddenly, at a turn in the path, he came upon the pergola, and saw a brilliant hammock hanging in the shadow.

Over the hammock’s fringe something light and fluffy fell in folds like the billowy frills of a ball gown. He stumbled forward, dazed, incredulous, and stood trembling for an instant.

Then, speechless, he sank down beside her, and dropped the ring into the palm of her half-closed and unconscious hand.

A ray of sunlight fell across her hair; slowly her blue eyes unclosed, smiling divinely.

And in her partly open palm the Sign of Venus glimmered like dew silvering a budding rose.

THE CASE OF MR. HELMER

He had really been too ill to go; the penetrating dampness of the studio, the nervous strain, the tireless application, all had told on him heavily. But the feverish discomfort in his head and lungs gave him no rest; it was impossible to lie there in bed and do nothing; besides, he did not care to disappoint his hostess. So he managed to crawl into his clothes, summon a cab, and depart. The raw night air cooled his head and throat; he opened the cab window and let the snow blow in on him.

When he arrived he did not feel much better, although Catharine was glad to see him. Somebody’s wife was allotted to him to take in to dinner, and he executed the commission with that distinction of manner peculiar to men of his temperament.

When the women had withdrawn and the men had lighted cigars and cigarettes, and the conversation wavered between municipal reform and contes drolatiques, and the Boznovian attaché had begun an interminable story, and Count Fantozzi was emphasizing his opinion of women by joining the tips of his overmanicured thumb and forefinger and wafting spectral kisses at an annoyed Englishman opposite, Helmer laid down his unlighted cigar and, leaning over, touched his host on the sleeve.

“Hello! What’s up, Philip?” said his host cordially; and Helmer, dropping his voice a tone below the sustained pitch of conversation, asked him the question that had been burning his feverish lips since dinner began.

To which his host replied, “What girl do you mean?” and bent nearer to listen.

“I mean the girl in the fluffy black gown, with shoulders and arms of ivory, and the eyes of Aphrodite.”

His host smiled. “Where did she sit, this human wonder?”

“Beside Colonel Farrar.”

“Farrar? Let’s see”—he knit his brows thoughtfully, then shook his head. “I can’t recollect; we’re going in now and you can find her and I’ll—”

His words were lost in the laughter and hum around them; he nodded an abstracted assurance at Helmer; others claimed his attention, and by the time he rose to signal departure he had forgotten the girl in black.

As the men drifted toward the drawing-rooms, Helmer moved with the throng. There were a number of people there whom he knew and spoke to, although through the increasing feverishness he could scarce hear himself speak. He was too ill to stay; he would find his hostess and ask the name of that girl in black, and go.

The white drawing-rooms were hot and over-thronged. Attempting to find his hostess, he encountered Colonel Farrar, and together they threaded their way aimlessly forward.

“Who is the girl in black, Colonel?” he asked; “I mean the one that you took in to dinner.”

“A girl in black? I don’t think I saw her.”

“She sat beside you!”

“Beside me?” The Colonel halted, and his inquiring gaze rested for a moment on the younger man, then swept the crowded rooms.

“Do you see her now?” he asked.

“No,” said Helmer, after a moment.

They stood silent for a little while, then parted to allow the Chinese minister thoroughfare—a suave gentleman, all antique silks, and a smile “thousands of years old.” The minister passed, leaning on the arm of the general commanding at Governor’s Island, who signaled Colonel Farrar to join them; and Helmer drifted again, until a voice repeated his name insistently, and his hostess leaned forward from the brilliant group surrounding her, saying: “What in the world is the matter, Philip? You look wretchedly ill.”

“It’s a trifle close here—nothing’s the matter.”

He stepped nearer, dropping his voice: “Catharine, who was that girl in black?”

“What girl?”

“She sat beside Colonel Farrar at dinner—or I thought she did—”

Do you mean Mrs. Van Siclen? She is in white, silly!”

“No—the girl in black.”

His hostess bent her pretty head in perplexed silence, frowning a trifle with the effort to remember.

“There were so many,” she murmured; “let me see—it is certainly strange that I cannot recollect. Wait a moment! Are you sure she wore black? Are you sure she sat next to Colonel Farrar?”

“A moment ago I was certain—” he said, hesitating. “Never mind, Catherine; Ill prowl about until I find her.”

His hostess, already partly occupied with the animated stir around her, nodded brightly; Helmer turned his fevered eyes and then his steps toward the cool darkness of the conservatories.

But he found there a dozen people who greeted him by name, demanding not only his company but his immediate and undivided attention.

“Mr. Helmer might be able to explain to us what his own work means,” said a young girl, laughing.

They had evidently been discussing his sculptured group, just completed for the new façade of the National Museum. Press and public had commented very freely on the work since the unveiling a week since; critics quarreled concerning the significance of the strange composition in marble. The group was at the same time repellent and singularly beautiful; but nobody denied its technical perfection. This was the sculptured group: A vaquero, evidently dying, lay in a loose heap among some desert rocks. Beside him, chin on palm, sat an exquisite winged figure, calm eyes fixed on the dying man. It was plain that death was near; it was stamped on the ravaged visage, on the collapsed frame. And yet, in the dying boy’s eyes there was nothing of agony, no fear, only an intense curiosity as the lovely winged figure gazed straight into the glazing eyes.

“It may be,” observed an attractive girl, “that Mr. Helmer will say with Mr. Gilbert,

“‘It is really very clever,

But I don’t know what it means.’”

Helmer laughed and started to move away. “I think I’d better admit that at once,” he said, passing his hand over his aching eyes; but the tumult of protest blocked his retreat, and he was forced to find a chair under the palms and tree ferns. ‘It was merely an idea of mine,” he protested, goodhumoredly, “an idea that has haunted me so persistently that, to save myself further annoyance, I locked it up in marble.”

“Demoniac obsession?” suggested a very young man, with a taste for morbid literature.

“Not at all,” protested Helmer, smiling; “the idea annoyed me until I gave it expression. It doesn’t bother me any more.”

“You said,” observed the attractive girl, ‘that you were going to tell us all about it.”

“About the idea? Oh no, I didn’t promise that—”

“Please, Mr. Helmer!”

A number of people had joined the circle; he could see others standing here and there among the palms, evidently pausing to listen.

“There is no logic in the idea,” he said, uneasily—“nothing to attract your attention. I have only laid a ghost—”

He stopped short. The girl in black stood there among the others, intently watching him. When she caught his eye, she nodded with the friendliest little smile; and as he started to rise she shook her head and stepped back with a gesture for him to continue.

They looked steadily at one another for a moment.

“The idea that has always attracted me,” he began slowly, “is purely instinctive and emotional, not logical. It is this: As long as I can remember I have taken it for granted that a person who is doomed to die, never dies utterly alone. We who die in our beds—or expect to—die surrounded by the living. So fall soldiers on the firing line; so end the great majority—never absolutely alone. Even in a murder, the murderer at least must be present. If not, something else is there.

“But how is it with those solitary souls isolated in the world—the lone herder who is found lifeless in some vast, waterless desert, the pioneer whose bones are stumbled over by the tardy pickets of civilization—and even those nearer us—here in our city—who are found in silent houses, in deserted streets, in the solitude of salt meadows, in the miserable desolation of vacant lands beyond the suburbs?”

The girl in black stood motionless, watching him intently.

“I like to believe,” he went on, “that no living creature dies absolutely and utterly alone. I have thought that, perhaps in the desert, for instance, when a man is doomed, and there is no chance that he could live to relate the miracle, some winged sentinel from the uttermost outpost of Eternity, putting off the armor of invisibility, drops through space to watch beside him so that he may not die alone.”

There was absolute quiet in the circle around him. Looking always at the girl in black, he said:

“Perhaps those doomed on dark mountains or in solitary deserts, or the last survivor at sea, drifting to certain destruction after the wreck has foundered, finds death no terror, being guided to it by those invisible to all save the surely doomed. That is really all that suggested the marble—quite illogical, you see.”

In the stillness, somebody drew a long, deep breath; the easy reaction followed; people moved, spoke together in low voices; a laugh rippled up out of the darkness. But Helmer had gone, making his way through the half light toward a figure that moved beyond through the deeper shadows of the foliage—moved slowly and more slowly. Once she looked back, and he followed, pushing forward and parting the heavy fronds of fern and palm and masses of moist blossoms. Suddenly he came upon her, standing there as though waiting for him.

“There is not a soul in this house charitable enough to present me,” he began.

“Then,” she answered laughingly, “charity should begin at home. Take pity on yourself—and on me. I have waited for you.”

“Did you really care to know me?” he stammered.

“Why am I here alone with you?” she asked, bending above a scented mass of flowers. “Indiscretion may be a part of valor, but it is the best part of—something else.”

That blue radiance which a starless sky sheds lighted her white shoulders; transparent shadow veiled the contour of neck and cheeks.

“At dinner,” he said, “I did not mean to stare so—but I simply could not keep my eyes from yours—”

“A hint that mine were on yours, too?”

She laughed a little laugh so sweet that the sound seemed part of the twilight and the floating fragrance. She turned gracefully, holding out her hand.

“Let us be friends,” she said, “after all these years.”

Her hand lay in his for an instant; then she withdrew it and dropped it caressingly upon a cluster of massed flowers.

“Forced bloom,” she said, looking down at them, where her fingers, white as the blossoms, lay half buried. Then, raising her head, “You do not know me, do you?”

Know you?” he faltered; “how could I know you? Do you think for a moment that I could have forgotten you?”

“Ah, you have not forgotten me!” she said, still with her wide smiling eyes on his; “you have not forgotten. There is a trace of me in the winged figure you cut in marble—not the features, not the massed hair, not the rounded neck and limbs—but in the eyes. Who living, save yourself, can read those eyes?”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Answer me; who alone in all the world can read the message in those sculptured eyes?”

“Can you?” he asked, curiously troubled. “Yes; I, and the dying man in marble.”

“What do you read there?”

“Pardon for guilt. You have foreshadowed it unconsciously—the resurrection of the soul. That is what you have left in marble for the mercilessly just to ponder on; that alone is the meaning of your work.”

Through the throbbing silence he stood thinking, searching his clouded mind.

“The eyes of the dying man are your own,” she said. “Is it not true?”

And still he stood there, groping, probing through dim and forgotten corridors of thought toward a faint memory scarcely perceptible in the wavering mirage of the past.

“Let us talk of your career,” she said, leaning back against the thick foliage—“your success, and all that it means to you,” she added gayly.

He stood staring at the darkness. “You have set the phantoms of forgotten things stirring and whispering together somewhere within me. Now tell me more; tell me the truth.”

“You are slowly reading it in my eyes,” she said, laughing sweetly. “Read and remember.”

The fever in him seared his sight as he stood there, his confused gaze on hers.

“Is it a threat of hell you read in the marble?” he asked.

“No, no thing of destruction, only resurrection and hope of Paradise. Look at me closely.”

“Who are you?” he whispered, closing his eyes to steady his swimming senses. “When have we met?”

“You were very young,” she said under her breath—“and I was younger—and the rains had swollen the Canadian river so that it boiled amber at the fords; and I could not cross—alas!”

A moment of stunning silence, then her voice again: “I said nothing, not a word even of thanks when you offered aid…. I—was not too heavy in your arms, and the ford was soon passed—soon passed. That was very long ago.” Watching him from shadowy sweet eyes, she said:

“For a day you knew the language of my mouth and my arms around you, there in the white sun glare of the river. For every kiss taken and retaken, given and forgiven, we must account—for every one, even to the last.

“But you have set a monument for us both, preaching the resurrection of the soul. Love is such a little thing—and ours endured a whole day long! Do you remember? Yet He who created love, designed that it should last a lifetime. Only the lost outlive it.”

She leaned nearer:

“Tell me, you who have proclaimed the resurrection of dead souls, are you afraid to die?”

Her low voice ceased; lights broke out like stars through the foliage around them; the great glass doors of the ballroom were opening; the illuminated fountain flashed, a falling shower of silver. Through the outrush of music and laughter swelling around them, a clear far voice called “Françoise!”

Again, close by, the voice rang faintly, “Françoise! Françoise!”

She slowly turned, staring into the brilliant glare beyond.

“Who called?” he asked hoarsely.

“My mother,” she said, listening intently. “Will you wait for me?”

His ashen face glowed again like a dull ember. She bent nearer, and caught his fingers in hers.

“By the memory of our last kiss, wait for me!” she pleaded, her little hand tightening on his.

“Where?” he said, with dry lips. “We cannot talk here!—we cannot say here the things that must be said.”

“In your studio,” she whispered. “Wait for me.”

“Do you know the way?”

“I tell you I will come; truly I will! Only a moment with my mother—then I will be there!”

Their hands clung together an instant, then she slipped away into the crowded rooms; and after a moment Helmer followed, head bent, blinded by the glare.

“You are ill, Philip,” said his host, as he took his leave. “Your face is as ghastly as that dying vaquero’s—by Heaven, man, you look like him!”

“Did you find your girl in black?” asked his hostess curiously.

“Yes,” he said; “good night.”

The air was bitter as he stepped out—bitter as death. Scores of carriage lamps twinkled as he descended the snowy steps, and a faint gust of music swept out of the darkness, silenced as the heavy doors closed behind him.

He turned west, shivering. A long smear of light bounded his horizon as he pressed toward it and entered the sordid avenue beneath the iron arcade which was even now trembling under the shock of an oncoming train. It passed overhead with a roar; he raised his hot eyes and saw, through the tangled girders above, the illuminated disk of the clock tower all distorted—for the fever in him was disturbing everything—even the cramped and twisted street into which he turned, fighting for breath like a man stabbed through and through.

“What folly!” he said aloud, stopping short in the darkness. “This is fever—all this. She could not know where to come—”

Where two blind alleys cut the shabby block, worming their way inward from the avenue and from Tenth Street, he stopped again, his hands working at his coat.

“It is fever, fever!” he muttered. “She was not there.”

There was no light in the street save for the red fire lamp burning on the corner, and a glimmer from the Old Grapevine Tavern across the way. Yet all around him the darkness was illuminated with pale unsteady flames, lighting him as he groped through the shadows of the street to the blind alley. Dark old silent houses peered across the paved lane at their aged counterparts, waiting for him.

And at last he found a door that yielded, and he stumbled into the black passageway, always lighted on by the unsteady pallid flames which seemed to burn in infinite depths of night.

“She was not there—she was never there,” he gasped, bolting the door and sinking down upon the floor. And, as his mind wandered, he raised his eyes and saw the great bare room growing whiter and whiter under the uneasy flames.

“It will burn as I burn,” he said aloud—for the phantom flames had crept into his body.

Suddenly he laughed, and the vast studio rang again.

“Hark!” he whispered, listening intently. “Who knocked?”

There was someone at the door; he managed to raise himself and drag back the bolt.

“You!” he breathed, as she entered hastily, her hair disordered and her black skirts powdered with snow.

“Who but I?” she whispered, breathless. “Listen! do you hear my mother calling me? It is too late; but she was with me to the end.”

Through the silence, from an infinite distance, came a desolate cry of grief—“Françoise!”

He had fallen back into his chair again, and the little busy flames enveloped him so that the room began to whiten again into a restless glare. Through it he watched her.

The hour struck, passed, struck and passed again. Other hours grew, lengthening into night. She sat beside him with never a word or sigh or whisper of breathing; and dream after dream swept him, like burning winds. Then sleep immersed him so that he lay senseless, sightless eyes still fixed on her. Hour after hour—and the white glare died out, fading to a glimmer. In densest darkness, he stirred, awoke, his mind quite clear, and spoke her name in a low voice.

“Yes, I am here,” she answered gently.

“Is it death?” he asked, closing his eyes.

“Yes. Look at me, Philip.”

His eyes unclosed; into his altered face there crept an intense curiosity. For he beheld a glimmering shape, wide-winged and deep-eyed, kneeling beside him, and looking him through and through.

THE BRIDAL PAIR

“If I were you,” said the elder man, “I should take three months’ solid rest.”

“A month is enough,” said the younger man. “Ozone will do it; the first brace of grouse I bag will do it—” He broke off abruptly, staring at the line of dimly lighted cars, where negro porters stood by the vestibuled sleepers, directing passengers to staterooms and berths.

“Dog all right, doctor?” inquired the elder man pleasantly.

“All right, doctor,” replied the younger; “I spoke to the baggage master.”

There was a silence; the elder man chewed an unlighted cigar reflectively, watching his companion with keen narrowing eyes.

The younger physician stood full in the white electric light, lean head lowered, apparently preoccupied with a study of his own shadow swimming and quivering on the asphalt at his feet.

“So you fear I may break down?” he observed, without raising his head.

“I think you’re tired out,” said the other.

“That’s a more agreeable way of expressing it,” said the young fellow. “I hear”—he hesitated, with a faint trace of irritation—“I understand that Forbes Stanly thinks me mentally unsound.”

“He probably suspects what you’re up to,” said the elder man soberly.

“Well, what will he do when I announce my germ theory? Put me in a strait-jacket?”

“He’ll say you’re mad, until you prove it; every physician will agree with him—until your radium test shows us the microbe of insanity.”

“Doctor,” said the young man abruptly, “I’m going to admit something—to you.”

“All right; go ahead and admit it.”

“Well, I am a bit worried about my own condition.”

“It’s time you were,” observed the other.

“Yes—it’s about time. Doctor, I am seriously affected.”

The elder man looked up sharply.

“Yes, I’m—in love.”

“Ah!” muttered the elder physician, amused and a trifle disgusted; “so that’s your malady, is it?”

“A malady—yes; not explainable by our germ theory—not affected by radio-activity. Doctor, I’m speaking lightly enough, but there’s no happiness in it.”

“Never is,” commented the other, striking a match and lighting his ragged cigar. After a puff or two the cigar went out. “All I have to say,” he added, “is, don’t do it just now. Show me a scale of pure radium and I’ll give you leave to marry every spinster in New York. In the mean time go and shoot a few dozen harmless, happy grouse; they can’t shoot back. But let love alone…. By the way, who is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know her name, I suppose?”

The young fellow shook his head. “I don’t even know where she lives,” he said finally.

After a pause the elder man took him gently by the arm: “Are you subject to this sort of thing? Are you susceptible?”

“No, not at all.”

“Ever before in love?”

“Yes—once.”

“When?”

“When I was about ten years old. Her name was Rosamund—aged eight. I never had the courage to speak to her. She died recently, I believe.”

The reply was so quietly serious, so destitute of any suspicion of humor, that the elder man’s smile faded; and again he cast one of his swift, keen glances at his companion.

“Won’t you stay away three months?” he asked patiently.

But the other only shook his head, tracing with the point of his walking stick the outline of his own shadow on the asphalt.

A moment later he glanced at his watch, closed it with a snap, silently shook hands with his equally silent friend, and stepped aboard the sleeping car.

Neither had noticed the name of the sleeping car.

It happened to be the Rosamund.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Loungers and passengers on Wildwood station drew back from the platform’s edge as the towering locomotive shot by them, stunning their ears with the clangor of its melancholy bell.

Slower, slower glided the dusty train, then stopped, jolting; eddying circles of humanity closed around the cars, through which descending passengers pushed.

“Wildwood! Wildwood!” cried the trainmen; trunks tumbling out of the forward car descended with a bang!—a yelping, wagging setter dog landed on the platform, hysterically grateful to be free; and at the same moment a young fellow in tweed shooting clothes, carrying gripsack and gun case, made his way forward toward the baggage master, who was being jerked all over the platform by the frantic dog.

“Much obliged; I’ll take the dog,” he said, slipping a bit of silver into the official’s hand, and receiving the dog’s chain in return.

“Hope you’ll have good sport,” replied the baggage master. “There’s a lot o’ birds in this country, they tell me. You’ve got a good dog there.”

The young man smiled and nodded, released the chain from his dog’s collar, and started off up the dusty village street, followed by an urchin carrying his luggage.

The landlord of the Wildwood Inn stood on the veranda, prepared to receive guests. When a young man, a white setter dog, and a small boy loomed up, his speculative eyes became suffused with benevolence.

“How-de-so, sir?” he said cordially. “Guess you was with us three year since—stayed to supper. Ain’t that so?”

“It certainly is,” said his guest cheerfully. “I am surprised that you remember me.”

“Be ye?” rejoined the landlord, gratified. “Say! I can tell the name of every man, woman, an child that has ever set down to eat with us. You was here with a pair o’ red bird dawgs; shot a mess o’ birds before dark, come back pegged out, an’ took the ten-thirty to Noo York. Hey? Yaas, an’ you was cussin’ round because you couldn’t stay an’ shoot for a month.”

“I had to work hard in those days,” laughed the young man. “You are right; it was three years ago this month.”

“Time’s a flyer; it’s fitted with triple screws these days,” said the landlord. “Come right in an’ make yourself to home. Ed! O Ed! Take this bag to 13! We’re all full, sir. You ain’t scared at No. 13, be ye? Say! if I ain’t a liar you had 13 three years ago! Waal, now!—ain’t that the dumbdest—But you can have what you want Monday. How long was you calkerlatin’ to stay?”

“A month—if the shooting is good.”

“It’s all right. Orrin Plummet come in last night with a mess o pa’tridges. He says the woodcock is droppin’ in to the birches south o’ Sweetbrier Hill.”

The young man nodded, and began to remove his gun from the service-worn case of sole leather.

“Ain’t startin’ right off, be ye?” inquired his host, laughing.

“I can’t begin too quickly,” said the young man, busy locking barrels to stock, while the dog looked on, thumping the veranda floor with his plumy tail.

The landlord admired the slim, polished weapon. “That’s the instrooment!” he observed. “That there’s a slick bird dawg, too. Guess I’d better fill my ice box. Your limit’s thirty of each—cock an’ pa’tridge. After that there’s ducks.”

“It’s a good, sane law,” said the young man, dropping his gun under one arm.

The landlord scratched his ear reflectively. “Lemme see,” he mused; “wasn’t you a doctor? I heard tell that you made up pieces for the papers about the idjits an’ loonyticks of Rome an’ Roosia an’ furrin climes.”

“I have written a little on European and Asiatic insanity,” replied the doctor goodhumoredly.

“Was you over to them parts?”

“For three years.” He whistled the dog in from the road, where several yellow curs were walking round and round him, every hair on end.

The landlord said: “You look a little peaked yourself. Take it easy the fust, is my advice.”

His guest nodded abstractedly, lingering on the veranda, preoccupied with the beauty of the village street, which stretched away westward under tall elms. Autumn-tinted hills closed the vista; beyond them spread the blue sky.

“The cemetery lies that way, does it not?” inquired the young man.

“Straight ahead,” said the landlord. “Take the road to the Holler.”

“Do you”—the doctor hesitated—“do you recall a funeral there three years ago?”

“Whose?” asked his host bluntly.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll ask my woman; she saves them funeral pieces an’ makes a album…. Friend o’ yours buried there?”

“No.”

The landlord sauntered toward the barroom, where two fellow taxpayers stood shuffling their feet impatiently.

“Waal, good luck, Doc,” he said, without intentional offense; “supper’s at six. We’ll try an’ make you comfortable.”

“Thank you,” replied the doctor, stepping out into the road, and motioning the white setter to heel.

“I remember now,” he muttered, as he turned northward, where the road forked; “the cemetery lies to the westward; there should be a lane at the next turning—”

He hesitated and stopped, then resumed his course, mumbling to himself: “I can pass the cemetery later; she would not be there; I don’t think I shall ever see her again…. I—I wonder whether I am—perfectly—well—”

The words were suddenly lost in a sharp indrawn breath; his heart ceased beating, fluttered, then throbbed on violently; and he shook from head to foot.

There was a glimmer of a summer gown under the trees; a figure passed from shadow to sunshine, and again into the cool dusk of a leafy lane.

The pallor of the young fellow’s face changed; a heavy flush spread from forehead to neck; he strode forward, dazed, deafened by the tumult of his drumming pulses. The dog, alert, suspicious, led the way, wheeling into the bramble-bordered lane, only to halt, turn back, and fall in behind his master again.

In the lane ahead the light summer gown fluttered under the foliage, bright in the sunlight, almost lost in the shadows. Then he saw her on the hill’s breezy crest, poised for a moment against the sky.

When at length he reached the hill, he found her seated in the shade of a pine. She looked up serenely, as though she had expected him, and they faced each other. A moment later his dog left him, sneaking away without a sound.

When he strove to speak, his voice had an unknown tone to him. Her upturned face was his only answer. The breeze in the pinetops, which had been stirring lazily and monotonously, ceased.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Her delicate face was like a blossom lifted in the still air; her upward glance chained him to silence. The first breeze broke the spell: he spoke a word, then speech died on his lips; he stood twisting his shooting cap, confused, not daring to continue.

The girl leaned back, supporting her weight on one arm, fingers almost buried in the deep green moss.

“It is three years to-day,” he said, in the dull voice of one who dreams; “three years to-day. May I not speak?”

In her lowered head and eyes he read acquiescence; in her silence, consent.

“Three years ago to-day,” he repeated; “the anniversary has given me courage to speak to you. Surely you will not take offense; we have traveled so far together!—from the end of the world to the end of it, and back again, here—to this place of all places in the world! And now to find you here on this day of all days—here within a step of our first meeting place—three years ago to-day! And all the world we have traveled over since never speaking, yet ever passing on paths parallel—paths which for thousands of miles ran almost within arm’s distance—”

She raised her head slowly, looking out from the shadows of the pines into the sunshine. Her dreamy eyes rested on acres of golden-rod and hillside brambles quivering in the September heat; on fern-choked gullies edged with alder; on brown and purple grasses; on pine thickets where slim silver birches glimmered.

“Will you speak to me?” he asked. “I have never even heard the sound of your voice.”

She turned and looked at him, touching with idle fingers the soft hair curling on her temples Then she bent her head once more, the faintest shadow of a smile in her eyes.

“Because,” he said humbly, “these long years of silent recognition count for something! And then the strangeness of it!—the fate of it—the quiet destiny that ruled our lives—that rules them now—now as I am speaking, weighting every second with its tiny burden of fate.”

She straightened up, lifting her half-buried hand from the moss; and he saw the imprint there where the palm and fingers had rested.

“Three years that end to-day—end with the new moon,” he said. “Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said.

He quivered at the sound of her voice. “You were there, just beyond those oaks,” he said eagerly; “we can see them from here. The road turns there—”

“Turns by the cemetery,” she murmured.

“Yes, yes, by the cemetery! You had been there, I think.”

“Do you remember that?” she asked.

“I have never forgotten—never!” he repeated, striving to hold her eyes to his own; “it was not twilight; there was a glimmer of day in the west, but the woods were darkening, and the new moon lay in the sky, and the evening was very clear and still.”

Impulsively he dropped on one knee beside her to see her face; and as he spoke, curbing his emotion and impatience with that subtle deference which is inbred in men or never acquired, she stole a glance at him; and his worn visage brightened as though touched with sunlight.

“The second time I saw you was in New York,” he said—“only a glimpse of your face in the crowd—but I knew you.”

“I saw you,” she mused.

“Did you?” he cried, enchanted. “I dared not believe that you recognized me.”

“Yes, I knew you…. Tell me more.”

The thrilling voice set him aflame; faint danger signals tinted her face and neck.

“In December,” he went on unsteadily, “I saw you in Paris—I saw only you amid the thousand faces in the candlelight of Notre Dame.”

“And I saw you…. And then?”

“And then two months of darkness…. And at last a light—moonlight—and you on the terrace at Amara.”

“There was only a flower bed—a few spikes of white hyacinths between us,” she said dreamily.

He strove to speak coolly. “Day and night have built many a wall between us; was that you who passed me in the starlight, so close that our shoulders, touched, in that narrow street in Samarkand? And the dark figure with you—”

“Yes, it was I and my attendant.”

“And … you, there in the fog—”

“At Archangel? Yes, it was I.”

“On the Goryn?”

“It was I…. And I am here at last—with you. It is our destiny.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

So, kneeling there beside her in the shadow of the pines, she absolved him in their dim confessional, holding him guiltless under the destiny that awaits us all.

Again that illumination touched his haggard face as though brightened by a sun ray stealing through the still foliage above. He grew younger under the level beauty of her gaze; care fell from him like a mask; the shadows that had haunted his eyes faded; youth awoke, transfiguring him and all his eyes beheld.

Made prisoner by love, adoring her, fearing her, he knelt beside her, knowing already that she had surrendered, though fearful yet by word or gesture or a glance to claim what destiny was holding for him holding securely, inexorably, for him alone.

He spoke of her kindness in understanding him, and of his gratitude; of her generosity, of his wonder that she had ever noticed him on his way through the world.

“I cannot believe that we have never before spoken to each other,” he said; “that I do not even know your name. Surely there was once a corner in the land of childhood where we sat together when the world was younger.”

She said, dreamily: “Have you forgotten?”

“Forgotten?”

“That sunny corner in the land of childhood.”

“Had you been there, I should not have forgotten,” he replied, troubled.

“Look at me,” she said. Her lovely eyes met his; under the penetrating sweetness of her gaze his heart quickened and grew restless and his uneasy soul stirred, awaking memories.

“There was a child,” she said, “years ago; a child at school. You sometimes looked at her, you never spoke. Do you remember?”

He rose to his feet, staring down at her.

“Do you remember?” she asked again.

“Rosamund! Do you mean Rosamund? How should you know that?” he faltered.

The struggle for memory focused all his groping senses; his eyes seemed to look her through and through.

“How can you know?” he repeated unsteadily. “You are not Rosamund…. Are you?… She is dead. I heard that she was dead…. Are you Rosamund?”

“Do you not know?”

“Yes; you are not Rosamund…. What do you know of her?”

“I think she loved you.”

“Is she dead?”

The girl looked up at him, smiling, following with delicate perception the sequence of his thoughts; and already his thoughts were far from the child Rosamund, a sweetheart of a day long since immortal; already he had forgotten his question, though the question was of life or death.

Sadness and unrest and the passing of souls concerned not him; she knew that all his thoughts were centered on her; that he was already living over once more the last three years, with all their mystery and charm, savoring their fragrance anew in the exquisite enchantment of her presence.

Through the autumn silence the pines began to sway in a wind unfelt below. She raised her eyes and saw their green crests shimmering and swimming in a cool current; a thrilling sound stole out, and with it floated the pine perfume, exhaling in the sunshine. He heard the dreamy harmony above, looked up; then, troubled, somber, moved by he knew not what, he knelt once more in the shadow beside her—close beside her.

She did not stir. Their destiny was close upon them. It came in the guise of love.

He bent nearer. “I love you,” he said. “I loved you from the first. And shall forever. You knew it long ago.”

She did not move.

“You knew I loved you?”

“Yes, I knew it.”

The emotion in her voice, in every delicate contour of her face, pleaded for mercy. He gave her none, and she bent her head in silence, clasped hands tightening.

And when at last he had had his say, the burning words still rang in her ears through the silence. A curious faintness stole upon her, coming stealthily like a hateful thing. She strove to put it from her, to listen, to remember and understand the words he had spoken, but the dull confusion grew with the sound of the pines.

“Will you love me? Will you try to love me?”

“I love you,” she said; “I have loved you so many, many years; I—I am Rosamund—”

She bowed her head and covered her face with both hands.

“Rosamund! Rosamund!” he breathed, enraptured.

She dropped her hands with a little cry; the frightened sweetness of her eyes held back his outstretched arms. “Do not touch me,” she whispered; “you will not touch me, will you?—not yet—not now. Wait till I understand!” She pressed her hands to her eyes, then again let them fall, staring straight at him. “I loved you so!” she whispered. “Why did you wait?”

“Rosamund! Rosamund!” he cried sorrowfully, “what are you saying? I do not understand; I can understand nothing save that I worship you. May I not touch you?—touch your hand, Rosamund? I love you so.”

“And I love you. I beg you not to touch me—not yet. There is something—some reason why—”

“Tell me, sweetheart.”

“Do you not know?”

“By Heaven, I do not!” he said, troubled and amazed.

She cast one desperate, unhappy glance at him, then rose to her full height, gazing out over the hazy valleys to where the mountains began, piled up like dim sun-tipped clouds in the north.

The hill wind stirred her hair and fluttered the white ribbons at waist and shoulder. The golden-rod swayed in the sunshine. Below, amid yellow treetops, the roofs and chimneys of the village glimmered.

“Dear, do you not understand?” she said. “How can I make you understand that I love you—too late?”

“Give yourself to me, Rosamund; let me touch you—let me take you—”

“Will you love me always?”

“In life, in death, which cannot part us. Will you marry me, Rosamund?”

She looked straight into his eyes. “Dear, do you not understand? Have you forgotten? I died three years ago to-day.”

The unearthly sweetness of her white face startled him. A terrible light broke in on him; his heart stood still.

In his dull brain words were sounding—his own words, written years ago: “When God takes the mind and leaves the body alive, there grows in it, sometimes, a beauty almost supernatural.”

He had seen it in his practice. A thrill of fright penetrated him, piercing every vein with its chill. He strove to speak; his lips seemed frozen; he stood there before her, a ghastly smile stamped on his face, and in his heart, terror.

“What do you mean, Rosamund?” he said at last.

“That I am dead, dear. Did you not understand that? I—I thought you knew it—when you first saw me at the cemetery, after all those years since childhood…. Did you not know it?” she asked wistfully. “I must wait for my bridal.”

Misery whitened his face as he raised his head and looked out across the sunlit world.

Something had smeared and marred the fair earth; the sun grew gray as he stared.

Stupefied by the crash, the ruins of life around him, he stood mute, erect, facing the west.

She whispered, “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said; “we will wed later. You have been ill, dear; but it is all right now—and will always be—God help us! Love is stronger than all—stronger than death.”

“I know it is stronger than death,” she said, looking out dreamily over the misty valley.

He followed her gaze, calmly, serenely reviewing all that he must renounce, the happiness of wedlock, children—all that a man desires.

Suddenly instinct stirred, awaking man’s only friend—hope. A lifetime for the battle!—for a cure! Hopeless? He laughed in his excitement. Despair?—when the cure lay almost within his grasp! the work he had given his life to! A month more in the laboratory—two months—three—perhaps a year. What of it? It must surely come—how could he fail when the work of his life meant all in life for her?

The light of exaltation slowly faded from his face; ominous, foreboding thoughts crept in; fear laid a shaky hand on his head which fell heavily forward on his breast.

Science and man’s cunning and the wisdom of the world!

“O God,” he groaned, “for Him who cured by laying on His hands!”

•      •      •      •      •      •

Now that he had learned her name, and that her father was alive, he stood mutely beside her, staring steadily at the chimneys and stately dormered roof almost hidden behind the crimson maple foliage across the valley—her home.

She had seated herself once more upon the moss, hands clasped upon one knee, looking out into the west with dreamy eyes.

“I shall not be long,” he said gently. “Will you wait here for me? I will bring your father with me.”

“I will wait for you. But you must come before the new moon. Will you? I must go when the new moon lies in the west.”

“Go, dearest? Where?”

“I may not tell you,” she sighed, “but you will know very soon—very soon now. And there will be no more sorrow, I think,” she added timidly.

“There will be no more sorrow,” he repeated quietly.

“For the former things are passing away,” she said.

He broke a heavy spray of golden-rod and laid it across her knees; she held out a blossom to him—a blind gentain, blue as her eyes. He kissed it.

“Be with me when the new moon comes,” she whispered. “It will be so sweet. I will teach you how divine is death, if you will come.”

“You shall reach me the sweetness of life,” he said tremulously.

“Yes—life. I did not know you called it by its truest name.”

So he went away, trudging sturdily down the lane, gun glistening on his shoulder.

Where the lane joins the shadowy village street his dog skulked up to him, sniffing at his heels.

A mill whistle was sounding; through the red rays of the setting sun people were passing.

Along the row of village shops loungers followed him with vacant eyes. He saw nothing, heard nothing, though a kindly voice called after him, and a young girl smiled at him on her short journey through the world.

The landlord of the Wildwood Inn sat sunning himself in the red evening glow.

“Well, doctor,” he said, “you look tired to death. Eh? What’s that you say?”

The young man repeated his question in a low voice. The landlord shook his head.

“No, sir. The big house on the hill is empty—been empty these three years. No, sir, there ain’t no family there now. The old gentleman moved away three years ago.”

“You are mistaken,” said the doctor; “his daughter tells me he lives there.”

“His—his daughter?” repeated the landlord. “Why, doctor, she’s dead.” He turned to his wife, who sat sewing by the open window: “Ain’t it three years, Marthy?”

“Three years to-day,” said the woman, biting off her thread. “She’s buried in the family vault over the hill. She was a right pretty little thing, too.”

“Turned nineteen,” mused the landlord, folding his newspaper reflectively.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The great gray house on the hill was closed, windows and doors boarded over, lawn, shrubbery, and hedges tangled with weeds. A few scarlet poppies glimmered above the brown grass. Save for these, and clumps of tall wild phlox, there were no blossoms among the weeds.

His dog, which had sneaked after him, cowered as he turned northward across the fields.

Swifter and swifter he strode; and as he stumbled on, the long sunset clouds faded, the golden light in the west died out, leaving a calm, clear sky tinged with the faintest green.

Pines hid the west as he crept toward the hill where she awaited him. As he climbed through dusky purple grasses, higher, higher, he saw the new moon’s crescent tipping above the hills; and he crushed back the deathly fright that clutched at him and staggered on.

“Rosamund!”

The pines answered him.

“Rosamund!”

The pines replied, answering together. Then the wind died away, and there was no answer when he called.

East and south the darkening thickets, swaying, grew still. He saw the slim silver birches glimmering like the ghosts of young trees dead; he saw on the moss at his feet a broken stalk of golden-rod.

The new moon had drawn a veil across her face; sky and earth were very still.

While the moon lasted he lay, eyes open, listening, his face pillowed on the moss. It was long after sunrise when his dog came to him; later still when men came.

And at first they thought he was asleep.

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

Dust and wind had subsided, there seemed to be a hint of rain in the starless west.

Because the August evening had become oppressive, the club windows stood wide open as though gaping for the outer air. Rugs and curtains had been removed; an incandescent light or two accentuated the emptiness of the rooms; here and there shadowy servants prowled, gilt buttons sparkling through the obscurity, their footsteps on the bare floor intensifying the heavy quiet.

Into this week’s-end void wandered young Shannon, drifting aimlessly from library to corridor, finally entering the long room where the portraits of dead governors smirked through the windows at the deserted avenue.

As his steps echoed on the rugless floor, a shadowy something detached itself from the depths of a padded armchair by the corner window, and a voice he recognized greeted him by name.

“You here, Harrod!” he exclaimed. “Thought you were at Bar Harbor.”

“I was. I had business in town.”

“Do you stay here long?”

“Not long,” said Harrod slowly.

Shannon dropped into a chair with a yawn which ended in a groan.

“Of all God-forsaken places,” he began, “a New York club in August.”

Harrod touched an electric button, but no servant answered the call; and presently Shannon, sprawling in his chair, jabbed the button with the ferrule of his walking stick, and a servant took the order, repeating as though he had not understood: “Did you say two, sir?”

“With olives, dry,” nodded Shannon irritably. They sat there in silence until the tinkle of ice aroused them, and—

“Double luck to you,” muttered Shannon; then, with a scarcely audible sigh: “Bring two more and bring a dinner card.” And, turning to the older man: “You’re dining, Harrod?”

“If you like.”

A servant came and turned on an electric jet; Shannon scanned the card under the pale radiance, scribbled on the pad, and handed it to the servant.

“Did you put down my name?” asked Harrod curiously.

“No; you’ll dine with me—if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind—for this last time.”

“Going away again?”

“Yes.”

Shannon signed the blank and glanced up at his friend. “Are you well?” he asked abruptly.

Harrod, lying deep in his leather chair, nodded.

“Oh, you’re rather white around the gills! We’ll have another.”

“I thought you had cut that out, Shannon.”

“Cut what out?”

“Drinking.”

“Well, I haven’t,” said Shannon sulkily, lifting his glass and throwing one knee over the other.

“The last time I saw you, you said you would cut it,” observed Harrod.

“Well, what of it?”

“But you haven’t?”

“No, my friend.”

“Can’t you stop?”

“I could—now. To-morrow—I don’t know; but I know well enough I couldn’t day after to-morrow. And day after to-morrow I shall not care.”

A short silence and Harrod said: “That’s why I came back here.”

“What?”

“To stop you.”

Shannon regarded him in sullen amazement.

A servant announcing dinner brought them to their feet; together they walked out into the empty dining room and seated themselves by an open window.

Presently Shannon looked up with an impatient laugh.

“For Heaven’s sake let’s be cheerful, Harrod. If you knew how the damned town had got on my nerves.”

“That’s what I came back for, too,” said Harrod with his strange white smile. “I knew the world was fighting you to the ropes.”

“It is; here I stay on, day after day, on the faint chance of something doing.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Business is worse than dead; I can’t hold on much longer. You’re right; the world has hammered me to the ropes, and it will be down and out for me unless—”

“Unless you can borrow on your own terms?”

“Yes, but I can’t.”

“You are mistaken.”

“Mistaken? Who will—”

“I will.”

“You! Why, man, do you know how much I need? Do you know for how long I shall need it? Do you know what the chances are of my making good? You! Why, Harrod, I’d swamp you! You can’t afford—”

“I can afford anything—now.”

Shannon stared. “You have struck something?”

“Something that puts me beyond want.” He fumbled in his breast pocket, drew out a portfolio, and from the flat leather case he produced a numbered check bearing his signature, but not filled out.

“Tell them to bring pen and ink,” he said.

Shannon, perplexed, signed to a waiter. When the ink was brought, Harrod motioned Shannon to take the pen. “Before I went to Bar Harbor,” he said, “I had a certain sum—” He hesitated, mentioned this sum in a low voice, and asked Shannon to fill in the check for that amount. “Now blot it, pocket it, and use it,” he added listlessly, looking out into the lamplighted street.

Shannon, whiter than his friend, stared at the bit of perforated yellow paper.

“I can’t take it,” he stammered; “my security is rotten, I tell you—”

“I want no security; I—I am beyond want,” said Harrod. “Take it; I came back here for this—partly for this.”

“Came back here to—to——help me!”

“To help you. Shannon, I had been a lonely man in life; I think you never realized how much your friendship has been to me. I had nobody—no intimacies. You never understood—you with all your friends—that I cared more for our casual companionship than for anything in the world.”

Shannon bent his head. “I did not know it,” he said.

Harrod raised his eyes and looked up at the starless sky; Shannon ate in silence; into his young face, already marred by dissipation, a strange light had come. And little by little order began to emerge from his whirling senses; he saw across an abyss a bridge glittering, and beyond that, beckoning to him through a white glory, all that his heart desired.

“I was at the ropes,” he muttered; “how could you know it, Harrod? I—I never whined—”

“I know more than I did—yesterday,” said Harrod, resting his pale face on one thin hand.

Shannon, nerves on edge, all aquiver, the blood racing through every vein, began to speak excitedly: “It’s like a dream—one of the blessed sort—Harrod! Harrod!—the dreams I’ve had this last year! And I try—I try to understand what has happened—what you have done for me. I can’t—I’m shaking all over, and I suppose I’m sitting here eating and drinking, but—”

He touched his glass blindly; it tipped and crashed to the floor, the breaking froth of the wine hissing on the cloth.

“Harrod! Harrod! What sort of a man am I to deserve this of you? What can I do—”

“Keep your nerve—for one thing.”

“I will!—you mean that! ” touching the stem of the new glass, which the waiter had brought and was filling. He struck the glass till it rang out a clear, thrilling, crystalline note, then struck it more sharply. It splintered with a soft splashing crash. “Is that all?” he laughed.

“No, not all.”

“What more will you let me do?”

“One thing more. Tell them to serve coffee below.”

So they passed out of the dining room, through the deserted corridors, and descended the stairway to the lounging room. It was unlighted and empty; Shannon stepped back and the elder man passed him and took the corner chair by the window—the same seat where Shannon had first seen him sitting ten years before, and where he always looked to find him after the ending of a business day. And continuing his thoughts, the younger man spoke aloud impulsively: “I remember perfectly well how we met. Do you? You had just come back to town from Bar Harbor, and I saw you stroll in and seat yourself in that corner, and, because I was sitting next you, you asked if you might include me in your order—do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And I told you I was a new member here, and you pointed out the portraits of all those dead governors of the club, and told me what good fellows they had been. I found out later that you yourself were a governor of the club.”

“Yes—I was.”

Harrod’s shadowy face swerved toward the window, his eyes resting on the familiar avenue, empty now save for the policeman opposite, and the ragged children of the poor. In August the high tide from the slums washes Fifth Avenue, stranding a gasping flotsam at the thresholds of the absent.

“And I remember, too, what you told me,” continued Shannon.

“What?” said Harrod, turning noiselessly to confront his friend.

“About that child. Do you remember? That beautiful child you saw? Don’t you remember that you told me how she used to leave her governess and talk to you on the rocks—”

“Yes,” said Harrod.“That, too, is why I came back here to tell you the rest. For the evil days have come to her, Shannon, and the years draw nigh. Listen to me.”

There was a silence; Shannon, mute and perplexed, set his coffee on the window sill and leaned back, flicking the ashes from his cigar; Harrod passed his hands slowly over his hollow temples: “Her parents are dead; she is not yet twenty; she is not equipped to support herself in life; and—she is beautiful. What chance has she, Shannon?”

The other was silent.

“What chance?” repeated Harrod. “And, when I tell you that she is unsuspicious, and that she reasons only with her heart, answer me—what chance has she with a man? For you know men, and so do I, Shannon, so do I.”

“Who is she, Harrod?”

“The victim of divorced parents—awarded to her mother. Let her parents answer; they are answering now, Shannon. But their plea is no concern of yours. What concerns you is the living. The child, grown to womanhood, is here, advertising for employment—here in New York, asking for a chance. What chance has she?”

“When did you learn this?” asked Shannon soberly.

“I learned it to-night——everything concerning her—to-night—an hour before I—I met you. That is why I returned. Shannon, listen to me attentively; listen to every word I say. Do you remember a passing fancy you had this spring for a blue-eyed girl you met every morning on your way downtown? Do you remember that, as the days went on, little by little she came to return your glance?—then your smile?—then, at last, your greeting? And do you remember, once, that you told me about it in a moment of depression—told me that you were close to infatuation, that you believed her to be everything sweet and innocent, that you dared not drift any farther, knowing the chances and knowing the end—bitter unhappiness either way, whether in guilt or innocence—”

“I remember,” said Shannon hoarsely. “But that is nor—cannot be—”

“That is the girl.”

“Not the child you told me of—”

“Yes.”

“How—when did you know—”

“To-night. I know more than that, Shannon. You will learn it later. Now ask me again, what it is that you may do.”

“I ask it,” said Shannon under his breath. “What am I to do?”

For a long while Harrod sat silent, staring out of the dark window; then, “It is time for us to go.”

“You wish to go out?”

“Yes; we will walk together for a little while—as we did in the old days, Shannon—only a little while, for I must be going back.”

“Where are you going, Harrod?”

But the elder man had already risen and moved toward the door; and Shannon picked up his hat and followed him out across the dusky tamp-lighted street.

Into the avenue they passed under the white, unsteady radiance of arc lights which drooped like huge lilies from stalks of bronze; here and there the front of some hotel lifted like a cliff, its window-pierced façade pulsating with yellow light, or a white marble mass, cold and burned out, spread a sea of shadow over the glimmering asphalt. At times the lighted lamps of cabs flashed in their faces; at times figures passed like spectres; but into the street where they were now turning were neither lamps nor people nor sound, nor any light, save, far in the obscure vista, a dull hint of lightning edging the west.

Twice Shannon had stopped, peering at Harrod, who neither halted nor slackened his steady, noiseless pace; and the younger man, hesitating, moved on again, quickening his steps to his friend’s side.

“Where are—are you going?”

“Do you not know?”

The color died out of Shannon’s face; he spoke again, forming his words slowly with dry lips:

“Harrod, why—why do you come into this street—to-night? What do you know? How do you know? I tell you I—I cannot endure this—this tension—”

“She is enduring it.”

“Good God!”

“Yes, God is good,” said Harrod, turning his haggard face as they halted. “Answer me, Shannon, where are we going?”

“To—her. You know it! Harrod! Harrod! How did you know? I—I did not know myself until an hour before I met you; I had not see her in weeks—I had not dared to—for all trust in self was dead. To-day, downtown, I faced the crash and saw across to-morrow the end of all. Then, in my journey hellward to-night, just at dusk, we passed each other, and before I understood what I had done we were side by side. And almost instantly—I don’t know how—she seemed to sense the ruin before us both—for mine was heavy on my soul, Harrod, as I stood, measuring damnation with smiling eyes—at the brink of it, there. And she knew I was adrift at last.”

He looked up at the house before him. “I said I would come. She neither assented nor denied me, nor asked a question. But in her eyes, Harrod, I saw what one sees in the eyes of children, and it stunned me…. What shall I do?”

“Go to her and look again,” said Harrod. “That is what I have come to ask of you. Good-by.”

He turned, his shadowy face drooping, and Shannon followed to the avenue. There, in the white outbreak of electric lamps, he saw Harrod again as he had always known him, a hint of a smile in his worn eyes, the well-shaped mouth edged with laughter, and he was saying: “It’s all in a lifetime, Shannon—and more than you suspect—much more. You have not told me her name yet?”

“I do not know it.”

“Ah, she will tell you if you ask! Say to her that I remember her there on the sea rocks. Say to her that I have searched for her always, but that it was only to-night I knew what to-morrow she shall know and you, Shannon, you, too, shall know. Good-by.”

“Harrod! wait. Don’t—don’t go—”

He turned and looked back at the younger man with that familiar gesture he knew so well.

It was final, and Shannon swung blindly on his heel and entered the street again, eyes raised to the high lighted window under which he had halted a moment before. Then he mounted the steps, groped in the vestibule for the illuminated number, and touched the electric knob. The door swung open noiselessly as he entered, closing behind him with a soft click.

Up he sped, mounting stair on stair, threading the narrow hallways, then upward again, until of a sudden she stood confronting him, bent forward, white hands tightening on the banisters.

Neither spoke. She straightened slowly, fingers relaxing from the polished rail. Over her shoulders he saw a lamplighted room, and she turned and looked backward at the threshold and covered her face with both hands.

“What is it?” he whispered, bending close to her. “Why do you tremble? You need not. There is nothing in all the world you need fear. Look into my eyes. Even a child may read them now.”

Her hands fell from her face and their eyes met, and what she read in his, and he in hers, God knows, for she swayed where she stood, lids closing; yielding hands and lips and throat and hair.

She cried, too, later, her hands on his shoulders where he knelt beside her, holding him at arm’s length from her fresh young face to search his for the menace she once had read there. But it was gone—that menace she had read and vaguely understood, and she cried a little more, one arm around his head pressed close to her side.

“From the very first—the first moment I saw you,” he said under his breath, answering the question aquiver on her lips—lips divinely merciful, repeating the lovers’ creed and the confession of faith for which, perhaps, all souls in love are shriven in the end.

“Naida! Naida!”—for he had learned her name and could not have enough of it—“all that the world holds for me of good is here, circled by my arms. Not mine the manhood to win out, alone—but there is a man who came to me to-night and stood sponsor for the falling soul within me.

“How he knew my peril and yours, God knows. But he came like Fate and held his buckler before me, and he led me here and set a flaming sword before your door—the door of the child he loved—there on the sea rocks ten years ago. Do you remember? He said you would. And he is no archangel—this man among men, this friend with whom, unknowing, I have this night wrestled face to face. His name is Harrod.”

“My name!” She stood up straight and pale, within the circle of his arms; he rose, too, speechless, uncertain—then faced her, white and appalled.

She said: “He—he followed us to Bar Harbor. I was a child, I remember. I hid from my governess and talked with him on the rocks. Then we went away. I—I lost my father.” Staring at her, his stiffening lips formed a word, but no sound came.

“Bring him to me!” she whispered. “How can he know I am here and stay away! Does he think I have forgotten? Does he think shame of me? Bring him to me!”

She caught his hands in hers and kissed them passionately; she framed his face in her small hands of a child and looked deep, deep into his eyes: “Oh, the happiness you have brought! I love you! You with whom I am to enter Paradise! Now bring him to me!”

Shaking, amazed, stunned in a whirl of happiness and doubt, he crept down the black stairway, feeling his way. The doors swung noiselessly; he was almost running when he turned into the avenue. The trail of white lights starred his path; the solitary street echoed his haste; and now he sprang into the wide doorway of the club, and as he passed, the desk clerk leaned forward, handing him a telegram. He took it, halted, breathing heavily, and asked for his friend.

“Mr. Harrod?” repeated the clerk. “Mr. Harrod has not been here in a month, sir.”

“What? I dined with Mr. Harrod here at eight o’clock!” he laughed.

“Sir? I—I beg your pardon, sir, but you dined here alone to-night—”

“Send for the steward!” broke in Shannon impatiently, slapping his open palm with the yellow envelope. The steward came, followed by the butler, and to a quick question from the desk clerk, replied: “Mr. Harrod has not been in the club for six weeks.”

“But I dined with Mr. Harrod at eight! Wilkins, did you not serve us?”

“I served you, sir; you dined alone—” The butler hesitated, coughed discreetly; and the steward added: “You ordered for two, sir—”

Something in the steward’s troubled face silenced Shannon; the butler ventured: “Beg pardon, sir, but we—the waiters thought you might be—ill, seeing how you talked to yourself and called for ink to write upon the cloth and broke two glasses, laughing like—”

Shannon staggered, turning a ghastly visage from one to another. Then his dazed gaze centered upon the telegram crushed in his hand, and shaking from head to foot, he smoothed it out and opened the envelope.

But it was purely a matter of business; he was requested to come to Bar Harbor and identify a useless check, drawn to his order, and perhaps aid to identify the body of a drowned man in the morgue.

THE SWASTIKA

This is rather a curious story—not nearly as artistic as if it were fiction. Fact seldom is artistic.

One thing is certain: Hildreth had never before heard of a swastika; he had heard of Judge Grey, one of the Mixed Tribunal, and he knew that the Sarna came from that magistrate as a wedding gift to his father; but he never for one moment connected anything that ever happened in the Orient with his stenographer and private secretary. Nor did he suspect—but this story is running away from me backward.

Reclining in his uncle’s emblazoned armchair, the tips of his fingers joined, young Hildreth gazed meditatively at the ceiling through the drifting haze of his cigar. On the ceiling several delicately tinted Cupids were attempting to asphyxiate one another with piles of roses. The room and its furniture also were gayly ornamental after the style popularly imputed to Louis XIV, that monarch being in no condition to deny the accusation. There was a view through one door into a rococo library, through another into a breakfast room, and through the windows into a snow-storm at Thirtieth Street and Fifth Avenue. However, the ensemble did not appear illogical if you turned your back to the window; besides, there was the stenographer to look at. But Hildreth was gazing fixedly at the ceiling through the stratified mist from his cigar.

The youthful stenographer, dimpled chin on hand, drummed softly with her pencil tip and watched him sidewise out of two very beautiful eyes. Her cuffs were as immaculate as her cool, white skin; her head, with its thick, bright hair, harmonized with other pretty things; and I do not think that Louis XIV would have repudiated her, at any rate.

Hildreth blew ring after ring of smoke at the ceiling, passing his hand, at intervals, through his hair, which was rather short and inclined to curl.

“Miss Grey,” he said, “can’t you think of anything else that rhymes with ‘tin’?”

“Gin, din, thin,” suggested the stenographer, referring to a rhyming dictionary.

“We’ve used ‘din’ and ‘thin’ already in the second verse; don’t you remember? And we can’t use ‘gin’ in any combination whatever; I’ve tried it. Isn’t there anything else you can think of?”

“Sin?” she inquired demurely.

“‘Sin,’” he repeated. “‘Sin’ sounds interesting. We need something to flavor the poem. Do you believe that you and I could make any proper use of ‘sin’?”

She appeared doubtful.

“Let us see, anyway. Read what you’ve taken,” he said, composing himself to listen to his own lines with the modest resignation of the true poet.

And the girl sorted her notes and read softly:

“Behold them packed so snug within

Their air-tight box of shining tin—

Hildreth’s Honey Wafers!

“Ready for breakfast, lunch or din

Ner; crisp and fresh and sweet and thin—

Hildreth’s Honey Wafers!”

She raised her blue eyes, looking at him inquiringly over the penciled sheets of manuscript.

“There ought to be another verse,” he mused. “Don’t you think so?”

“I think two verses of this kind are sufficient, Mr. Hildreth.”

“You are mistaken; the poem is still incomplete. The first verse, you see, is an impression—a sort of word-picture of the tin box—a kind of prologue to prepare people for what is inside the box in the second verse. In the second I explain that Hildreth’s Honey Wafers are all ready to eat, and I excite people’s appetites. Now, the third verse must gratify them. Don’t you see?”

“Is it not good advertising to break off abruptly and leave the public hungry?”

“No; that’s only good literature; but in advertising you must not leave your public discontented. People like to look at pictures of other people who are enjoying something to repletion—pitching into a generous trough of breakfast food, or pausing to savor the delicious after-effects of a nerve tonic. Besides,” he added moodily, puffing his cigar, “my uncle requires three verses, and that settles it. What was that rhyme you suggested?”

“I—I ventured to suggest ‘sin.’”

“‘Sin,’” he repeated thoughtfully, pinching his chin and staring at the snowy roofs across Thirtieth Street. “Well, how would this do for the third verse?

“They invigorate the hair and clear the skin,

And promote happiness in this world of sin—

Hildreth’s Honey Wa—”

“But you have the meter all wrong again,” she expostulated. “You never pay any attention to the meter.”

“Oh, you can fix that as you fixed the other verses!”

“Besides, is it really true that Hildreth’s Honey Wafers do all those things?”

He began an elaborate argument to prove that falling hair and poor complexion were caused by improper nourishment, and that the wafers were proper nourishment; but presently his voice dwindled to a grumble. He relighted his cigar, looking at her askance.

“We might say,” he resumed, “using poetic license:

“Into this world of crime and sin

Like an angel above was wafted the box of tin;

Hildreth’s Ho—”

She shook her head.

“Why not?” he asked.

“You can’t compare a tin box to an angel above—and you can’t waft a tin box, you know—”

“Yes, I can. Poets’ license—”

“That is one of the troubles with your verses, Mr. Hildreth—there is so much license and so little—”

“You are rather rough on me,” he said, coloring up.

“I don’t mean to be; I only try to help you.”

“I know it; you are very kind—very amiable. I am perfectly aware that a stenographer’s duties do not include literary criticism. I ought to be ashamed to ask your aid, but if I don’t have it I’m done for.”

“But I give it most freely, Mr. Hildreth.”

“I know you do, and I’m also aware that I am imposing on you most shamefully. After this week we’ll let my verses go as I compose them. It will probably put me out of business, but I can’t help that.”

“Mr. Hildreth, we simply cannot let your verses go unedited.”

He looked at her for a moment in silence. “Can’t you stand my verses?” he inquired. And, as she made no reply: “If you can’t—if they are really as bad as that, why, the public is going to recoil, too, and I’ll doubtless ruin the business for my uncle. He has no more idea of good poetry than I have. I’ll ruin him; and our rivals, The Bunsen’s Baby Biscuit Company, will call me blessed!”

“Your uncle writes you that he likes the advertising verses you send him,” she interrupted cheerily. “He tells you that the verses have made the wafers worth a fortune.”

“Yes, but you always have revised my verses, and he doesn’t know that. Every poem I’ve done for the Honey Wafers Company you’ve revised. It is you who have made them sell all over this continent.”

“What of it?” she answered, amused, “as long as your uncle is satisfied. I don’t mind the trouble of editing your verses—truly I don’t.” She rested her cheek on her wrist, playing the while with her pencil. “I am very happy to do what I can, Mr. Hildreth. Shall we try once more?”

She seemed to grow more disturbingly pretty every day; he permitted himself to look at her long enough to remember that he had something else to do. “Din, pin, gin, sin,” he repeated sullenly. “What the mischief am I to write, anyway?”

“I don’t think we can use ‘sin,’ do you?” she asked, lifting her blue eyes.

Perhaps he found inspiration in them; he looked at them hard; an inward struggle set his mouth in an uncompromising line. And this is what he evolved:

“Bright as blue eyes that are innocent of sin

Is the box of tin they’re packed in—

Hildreth’s Honey W—”

“You can’t compare a tin box to blue eyes, Mr. Hildreth! You surely must admit that.”

“Tin is bright, isn’t it? Blue eyes are bright, aren’t they? Well, if one’s bright and the others are——”

She shook her head slowly; her eyes had softened to a violet tint. He noticed that phenomenon, but he did not know that he had noticed it. His brows met in a frown of intense intellectual concentration; for five full minutes he remained rigid in the agony of composition, then, with a long breath, he delivered himself of another verse:

“Soft as the color of blue violets that grow in

The woods, is perfume from the box of tin!

Hil—”

“Oh, dear!” said the stenographer with a sudden little indrawing of her breath.

“If you want to laugh,” he said, flushing, “go ahead. I’m not sensitive.”

“I had no desire to laugh, Mr. Hildreth; it’s far beyond a laughing matter.”

He regarded her gloomily, relighted his cigar, and gazed out of the frosty window. After a moment a smile twitched his mouth.

“I suppose it’s not good—that last idea about ingrowing violets—”

She laughed: she could not help it; he laughed, too.

“How long have we been working together?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. He knew, but he wanted to know whether she knew.

She knew, but she pretended to think very hard before answering, laying her pencil thoughtfully across her lips, immersed in calculation.

“It must be nearly a month, Mr. Hildreth.”

“Impossible!” he exclaimed, pretending surprise.

“Almost,” she insisted. “Let me see; I came to you on the fifth—”

“The ninth,” he said quickly. He was easily beguiled.

“Was it the ninth?” she asked wonderingly—though what there was to wonder at is not clear, the date signalizing nothing in particular except the day they first laid eyes on one another. “I believe it was the ninth, after all. That would make it almost a month—”

“Exactly a month,” he said triumphantly. “This is our first anniversary—and you didn’t know it!”

He stopped; he hadn’t meant to use words of that sort. People employ such expressions for other matters, not to commemorate the date of a purely business engagement.

“What you mean to say, Mr. Hildreth, is that I have been in your employment exactly a month,” she said with amiable indifference.

“Exactly,” he repeated, opening the inlaid cover of a rococo desk and bringing forth a package.

Then he rose to his feet and made her a bow, full of the charm of good breeding: “May I venture to offer a little gift in memory of the fortunate event?”

She stood up, surprised, quiet, a trifle perplexed.

“What fortunate event, Mr. Hildreth?”

“The annivers—the—pleasant occasion—” He floundered, and she let him. It irritated him to flounder, for his intentions were above reproach.

“What I mean to say is simple enough,” he snapped. “You’ve practically written my poems for me, and you didn’t have to, but if you hadn’t I either should have ruined my uncle’s business or lost my job, and I’m grateful, and I wanted to give you something to show it—these books—”

She took them, a trifle uncertain, but guided by inherited instinct. She looked at the beautifully bound and dreadfully expensive volumes. The constraint lasted only a second; she thanked him, glanced at the title-page, where he had written the date and her name, but not his own. His good taste appealing to her, she smiled at him in a delightfully friendly fashion; and the charm of the transfiguration so occupied him that, finding himself staring, he neutralized the rudeness by closing his eyes with a wise look as though intent on pursuing elusive rhymes for commercial purposes.

She seated herself at her little flyaway gilded desk once more; he relapsed into his chair and sat there drumming with his fingers on the golden foliations of the carved arms.

She had, instinctively, picked up her pencil and pad, ready for dictation when the sacred fire should blaze up in him. The fire, however, appeared to be out. There was not a sputter.

“And in all this time,” he mused, continuing his cogitations aloud, “you have never asked me why, in the name of common decency, I insisted on trying to be a poet!”

As she made no reply:

“Have you?” he repeated.

“Of course I haven’t—”

“Is it because you are too civil to hurt a man’s feelings?”

“It is because I am employed by you, Mr. Hildreth—”

“Because you are employed by me? Nonsense! That’s no reason why I should torture a cultivated ear with unspeakable rhymes. I wonder, Miss Grey, what you really think of me?”

She could have told him that she didn’t think of him at all except in a business sense, which would have been an untruth, but the proper answer for him. She thought of several answers, all reserved, indifferent, discouraging the faintest hint of intimacy, and therefore suitable. Then she said: “Would it interest you to know what your stenographer thinks about you?”

He said it would interest him excessively, and he desired information.

“I think,” she said, not looking at him but at her pencil, with which she was tracing arabesques on the pad, “I think that you could do some things much better than—others. Oh, dear! that sounds like Tupper—but it’s true.”

“You mean I’d make a better bandit, for example, than I do a poet?”

“I don’t know what qualification you have for the career you suggest,” she replied demurely.

“I understand you,” he said; “it’s as simple as those profound lines:

“‘A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men shun a bandit;

Which is really very clever if you only understand it.’”

That’s what you intended to say, wasn’t it?”

They were both laughing, she with more reserve than he.

“If a bandit’s life is not a happy one, what must a poet’s life resemble?” he demanded. “Why, it’s a perfect—but the word is inadequate, Miss Grey. Did you ever for one mad moment suppose that I wrote rhymes for the pleasure it gave me?”

No,” she said, “I didn’t.”

“Or did you imagine I was infatuated with the notion that my rhymes gave pleasure to others?”

She laughed such a carefree laugh—so sweet, so entirely gay and innocent—that he said impulsively: “I wish you’d let me tell you how it is. I do so hate to appear a fool to you.”

Something checked her mirth, yet it scarcely could be what he said, for his speech and manner were quite free from offense.

“May I tell you?” he asked, conscious of the shadow of constraint between them.

There was something in her silent acquiescence which hinted: “My time is yours, Mr. Hildreth; but, considering the strictly business footing of our relations, hadn’t you better begin to make your third verse?” And no doubt the slight impatient movement of his shoulders meant: “No, I won’t begin my third verse; I desire to unburden to you a soul too long misunderstood.” But the interpretation of her silence and his shrug are purely speculative on my part.

“I’d quit this verse making in a moment if I could,” he said; “but it’s my livelihood. I always loathed poetry, even my own; but I’ve simply got to earn my living.”

“Surely,” she said, with an instinctive glance around the exceedingly ornate apartment, “it would be silly for you to give up making advertising verses for your uncle as long as—as—”

“As long as it permits me to live like this? Do you suppose that this is my apartment?—that anything in it belongs to me?—that my income from my wafer poetry would even pay for a single week’s rent here? There’s the ghastly mockery of it. Why, my salary is just twice what yours is: in other words, I divide with you every week.”

She regarded him with amazement.

“Apartment, servants—everything belongs to my uncle. My uncle has views,” he said, waving his hand. “Unfortunately, one of his views is how to bring up his only nephew. Just fancy a man fresh from Harvard flung neck and heels into his uncle’s wafer business on thirty dollars a week!”

“Dreadful,” she motioned with her lips.

“Neck and heels! He said I was to find no favors, no privileges; that I must begin at the lowest rung of the ladder, and, as he knew of nothing lower than poetry, he set me to work writing Honey Wafer ads. I’m to be promoted next year to be the artist that draws pictures for the ads. After that I shall advance through the baking, packing, and truck departments until I become a traveling salesman. Meanwhile, I’ve emerged from my cheap boarding house to keep his servants busy till he returns.”

She sat very still, watching him with her beautiful, serious young eyes.

“Then, some day, I’m to be taken into the concern and become a partner if—”

“If?”

“If I don’t marry.”

“Oh!” she said faintly.

“But if I do—”

There was an ominous pause; then she repeated calmly:

“If you do?”

“I’m down and out, and he leaves about five millions to the Society for Psychical Research. A nice position for me if I should ever fall in love, isn’t it?”

The pause was longer this time.

“The Society for Psychical Research,” she repeated under her breath.

“Yes. You know—they investigate spooks, and tip tables, and go into trances, and see blond gentlemen coming over the ocean to marry you, and dark ladies hiding around the corner.”

“Is he interested in such things—your uncle?”

“Mad about them. He’s up at his country place now with a bunch of Columbia professors and Sixth Avenue clairvoyants, engaged in crystal-gazing experiments. Later he’s going to lecture about ’em at Columbia University.”

“What is crystal gazing?” she asked innocently.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly. My uncle and a fat clairvoyant in a pink teagown sit at a table and squint into a big globe made of rock crystal; and he tells me that he can sit in his chair up there at Adrintha Lodge and see, in the crystal, everything that he wants to see—including how I’m behaving myself down here in town. He told me that if I ever—ever kissed anybody he’d see it and discharge me.”

“Does he say he can see you?”

“He does.”

“And everything you are doing?”

“Every blessed thing.”

“Do you believe it?” she asked anxiously.

“No, of course not. But I let him think he has me scared to death.”

She leaned forward on the table, clasping both hands under her chin.

“Is that what keeps you on your best behavior?”

It was rather a curious thing to say.

“Suppose,” she added, “that your uncle was looking into his crystal at this very minute. I think, if you please, we’d better stop talking and begin our work…. Don’t you? I think we ought at least to look as though we were busy.”

“You don’t believe that he could see us, do you?” demanded Hildreth.

“No;… But suppose he could? Don’t you think I’d better copy your verses—or be doing something—”

She hastily placed a sheet of paper in the machine, slid it into place, and struck several keys. It was quite unconscious on her part, but when, a moment later, she turned the sheet over she found that she had written his name about sixty times. The portent of this, however, did not then strike her.

Somewhere in the room little silvery chimes sounded the hour.

“Can it be two o’clock already?” she exclaimed.

He examined his watch in assumed surprise. “Why, we are just in time!” he said hazily.

“Yes, Mr. Hildreth—in time for what?”

“You—you won’t be offended—where anything but offense is meant—will you?”

She had risen to face him; he, rather red about the ears, began by making a mess of what he was saying; and when she had grasped the import of it she let him go on making a mess until his irritation straightened out matters.

“It’s only that you’ve been so kind to help me do all that advertising poetry, and I’m so tremendously grateful, and it’s our first annivers—our—er—the occasion—You know what I mean. So please stay to luncheon. Will you?”

“Please don’t ask me, Mr. Hildreth—”

“Yes, I will! You simply can’t be offended; you simply cannot mistake my attitude, my meaning—”

“I am not offended. You are very thoughtful—amiable—but I think I ought to go—”

“Our anni—the date, you know—just to celebrate a purely business arrangement which has been so delight—so profitable to me, I mean—”

“No, I could not stay, Mr. Hildreth—”

“But it’s partly for business purposes,” he explained anxiously. “Why, you must know, Miss Grey, that more business is transacted at luncheon than before or after. That’s what great financiers do; they say to the head of a department: ‘Lunch with me, Mr. So-and-so.’ And Mr. So—and—so understands at once.”

“Does that great financier ever say: ‘Lunch with me, Miss So-and-so’?”

“Yes, often and often. And she understands!”

“Are you sure she does?”

“I am. Please let me be sure.”

“Mr. Hildreth, I should—should like to—there, I admit it! But it is not convenable. I know it; you know it; it is not the thing for us to do. I have no business here except as your stenographer. I could not accept.”

“Because you are a stenographer?”

“If I were not in your employment I should not be here with you. You know that.”

“But I should perhaps be at your house if—”

“You are speculating in impossibilities.” She bent her head, smiling across the table at him, and dropping her hand on the books he had given her. “Your kindness must have some bounds; let it end in these bindings; I—I shall remember it with each leaf I turn.” And as he said nothing, but looked rather miserable, she added: “Won’t you?”

There was another interval of silence; she considered his face anew. The unhappiness in it was evident.

“Do you really want me … to talk business?”

“I want you to stay. Will you?”

She did not answer, though a little tremor touched her lips.

“That’s jolly!” he said gayly, and touched an electric button behind him. And a moment later a maid in cap and apron respectfully piloted her out of sight.

About half past two a Japanese butler served them in the colonial breakfast room, and she laughed at the little silver trifle she found beside her plate—a tiny type-machine made to hold scents in microscopic crystal vials. Her initials were engraved upon it.

“You see,” he said, “I do not regard our poetical partnership lightly, even if you do. What you have done for me is going to enable me to enter the firm one day—aided by your editing my verses.”

“I never before understood,” she admitted, “why you advertised for a stenographer who was a graduate of Barnard College. And—when I applied to you I was perfectly astonished when you asked me so anxiously whether I could rhyme and draw pictures.”

He examined his grapefruit and extracted a minted cherry with great care. Presently he swallowed it.

“I knew from the first instant I saw you that my chance in life had come,” he observed.

“You didn’t know it before you questioned me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“How?”

He looked up at her: “I don’t know how I knew it.” She was apparently interested in the aroma of her wine. “But I knew it,” he ended.

The vintage was doubtless worthy of the serious attention she gave it.

“Do you know what wine that is?” he asked, amused.

“Yes; it is Sarna,” she said simply.

“How did you know?” he exclaimed in amazement.

She lifted the glass with a pretty gesture: “Are you so astonished that your stenographer knows the rarest wine in the world—and the legend concerning it? A most inappropriate wine for such a luncheon, Mr. Hildreth—”

“You are a constant series of endless astonishments to me,” he said. “Where on earth you ever heard of Sarna—and how you should have known it when you saw it—this wine so rare that but one in ten thousand experts ever heard of it—”

“Why did you have it served?” she asked directly. “Do you know what this wine of Sarna signifies? Do you know every drop is worth ten times its weight in gold? Do you know there are not three other bottles of it known in the world?”

“I knew all that. I believed that Sarna alone was worthy of—of”—he met her level gaze—“of our first anniversary.”

“No; it is inappropriate,” she replied steadily. “Do you not know the legend?”

“It is the only wine not forbidden by the Koran. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean—” He hesitated.

“Yes, that. The last Khedive emptied the last glass of the last but three bottles remaining in all the world while his bride’s lips were still wet with the dew of Sarna. It is the custom of Emperors and Sultans—ask me for how long, and my answer is: as long as the saros; compute it, oh, Heaven-born!” She crossed her pretty hands below her throat, a smile, half gay, half tender, parting her lips.

“How did you know such things?” he asked.

“My father was a judge of the Mixed Tribunal,” she answered gravely. “My mother was married there; I was born in Cairo.”

“Fate!” he said excitedly—“sheer Fate! My father was the ex-Confederate, Hildreth Pasha, of the Khedival Court! The Sarna—that bottle cradled there—came from a judge of the Mixed Tribunal! Shall not their children touch the same glass?”

They both were excited, flushed, a little bewildered.

“Do you know the custom?” he asked recklessly.

“Y-es.” She held up one slender finger; her mother’s betrothal ring, set with the diamond scarab, sparkled on the white skin; and she drew the thin circlet from her finger and held it suspended over the glass of golden Sarna. The single brilliant flashed and flashed as though the sacred beetle were struggling to be free.

“Shall I?”

“Try it,” he laughed. “Who knows what sign of fortune the dead Sultans may send?”

“They—they only send a sign to—to brides—”

“I know it. Try!”

“But the mechanism is unknown to me; it is not possible that a bath of this scented wine could start it—”

“Try!”

There was a glimmer, a little clinking splash in the slim wineglass. They inspected the ring lying in the amber wine; they glanced at one another rather foolishly. Then, looking at him, she raised the glass, tasted, passed it to him. He tasted, his eyes on her, and set the half-empty glass before her.

“I—I believe there’s something happening to that ring,” said Hildreth suddenly, rising and passing around the table to her side.

Breathless, they bent over the glass, heads close together.

“Doesn’t it look to you as though that diamond scarab were moving?” he said in a low voice.

“Yes; but it can’t be—how can it—”

“Look!”

“Oh—h!” she whispered—“see! It—it’s alive! It is unfolding arms and legs like a crab.”

“What on earth—” he stammered, but got no further, for the girl caught him by the arm:

“Look! Look! The swastika! It means fortune! It means—it means—”

His hand shook as he lifted the glass and reversed it. A shower of perfumed wine sprinkled the lace centerpiece; the mystic swastika, glittering, magnificent, fell heavily upon the mahogany—a dull, gem-incrusted lump of purest gold.

“What is it?” he gasped. “I thought it was alive, like one of those jeweled Egyptian beetles! I thought those things were legs!”

“It is the swastika,” she whispered, laying it in her pink palm. “Who wears it shall always—”

She stopped short, hesitated, then the color in her face deepened, and she looked up over her shoulder at him. “Will you do something for me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Wear this. Will you?” She drew her tiny handkerchief from her sleeve, tore a shred of cambric from it, passed it through the swastika, and, before he knew what she meant to do, had tied it to his lapel.

“Just to see what happens,” she said, laughing almost hysterically. If there was the slightest chance of any luck in the world she wished it to be his. It was all she had to give.

“You resign your chance of fortune to me?” he asked curiously—and, as she only nodded:

“There is but one happiness Fortune can bring me. Are you willing to trust it to me?”

Before she could reply a maid appeared with a telegram; he asked her pardon, and opened it.

Twice he read it, read it again, nodded a dazed dismissal to the maid, read it again very carefully, and finally, with a smile that was somewhat sickly, handed it across the table to her.

What she read was this:

ADRINTHA LODGE,
MOHAWK COUNTY, NEW YORK.

JOHN HILDRETH: I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP TO, AND YOU HAD BETTER STOP.

PETER HILDRETH.

“Peter Hildreth,” she repeated blankly.

“My uncle.”

“But—but what does he mean?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said the young fellow uneasily.

“Is he in the habit of telegraphing you?”

“No, he isn’t; he never did such a thing.”

She turned the yellow leaf of paper over and over thoughtfully. Then he suddenly encountered her disturbed gaze.

“He says that he knows what you’re up to, and you’d better stop,” she said. “What are you up to, Mr. Hildreth?”

“Up to? Absolutely nothing! I’m fairly tingling with the consciousness of innocence, righteousness, and good intentions. I don’t know what that old crank means—any more than you know.”

“I—I am dreadfully afraid that I know what he means.”

“What?”

“I think he means me.”

“You! Why?”

“Because I’m here—here lunching with you. He might draw—dreadful conclusions.”

“What on earth do you mean, Miss Grey? He never even heard of you. How can he know you are here?”

“Suppose—suppose he is—is looking into his crystal!”

A sudden silence fell, lasting until the coffee was served.

“It is nonsense to suppose that people can do such things,” said Hildreth abruptly.

“What things?” she asked, watching him set fire to a cigarette.

“Such things as looking into crystals and seeing nephews. Anyway, what is there to see?” He waved his hands as though scattering suspicion to the four winds. “What is there to see except a future financier and his principal chief of department at a purely business luncheon—”

“With silver souvenirs and Sarna,” she murmured.

They laughed, feeling the constraint subsiding once more.

“Please let us talk a little business—for form’s sake, if nothing else,” she said.

“All right; your salary is to be increased—”

“Mr. Hildreth, you cannot afford any extravagances, and you know it.”

“I am not going to let you write my verses, and profit by it to your exclusion! Besides, this swastika is going to enable me to afford anything, I understand.”

“But you already divide your salary with me. You can’t do more!”

“Yes, I can.”

“No, no, no! Wait until you are promoted to be the advertising artist. Wait until the swastika begins to help us—you.”

“No; because then you’ll have to draw all my pictures for me, and your salary must be increased again.”

“At that rate,” she said, laughing, “I’ll be half partner when you are.”

“Full partner—if the swastika knows its business. I—I—wish he didn’t have that crystal up there at Adrintha. I’ve a mind to buy a rabbit’s foot. With a rabbit’s foot and a swastika we ought to checkmate any crystal-gazing, pink-eyed clairvoyants.”

“But—what have they to do with us?” she asked gently.

What he was about to say he only half divined—for she was bewilderingly pretty—and perhaps she dimly foresaw it, too, for they both flushed with a sudden constraint that was abruptly broken by the entrance of the maid with another telegram.

“What the deuce—” stammered Hildreth, tearing open the yellow envelope; and he read:

ADRINTHA LODGE.

JOHN HILDRETH: I’M WATCHING YOU IN MY CRYSTAL. IF YOU WANT THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH TO BECOME MY HEIRS, DO EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE DOING WITH THAT GIRL.

PETER HILDRETH.

“Is—is it anything alarming?” asked the pretty stenographer as he crumpled the paper.

“Alarming? I don’t know—no! What the mischief has got into that uncle of mine?”

“Is it from him?” she asked, turning pale.

“Yes—it is. But if he thinks he can make me believe that he sees me in his dinky little crystal—”

“Oh, don’t talk that way,” she pleaded; “there may be things that we don’t understand happening all the while—”

“There can’t be!”

For a while she was dumb, mutely refusing to be reassured, and presently, rising from the table, they passed into the gay little room where her desk stood.

The fire was glowing very brightly in the carved fireplace of golden and pearl-tinted onyx. He drew up his uncle’s great chair for her; she shook her head and looked meaningly at her pad and pencil, but after a silent struggle with indecision and inclination she seated herself by the gilt fender, pretty hands folded in acquiescence.

“Now,” he said, “let us speak of those things that have come true.”

“What has come true, Mr. Hildreth?”

“You.”

The slightest of rose tints touched her cheeks.

“Did you believe me unreal?” she asked.

He was leaning forward, looking up into her face, which reflected the pink light of the fire.

And what he started to say Heaven alone knows, for his voice was dreadfully unsteady.

However, it ceased quickly enough when the maid knocked rather loudly and presented a third telegram to her disconcerted master; and this was what he read:

ADRINTHA LODGE.

JOHN HILDRETH: IF YOU KISS THAT GIRL YOU’RE TALKING TO I’LL DISINHERIT YOU.

PETER HILDRETH.

Stunned, the young man sat for a moment, vacant eyes fixed on the writing that alternately blurred and sprang into dreadful distinctness under his gaze. Presently he heard a voice not much like his own saying: “It’s nonsense; things like this don’t happen in 1907 in the borough of Manhattan. Why, that’s Fifth Avenue out there, and there’s Thirtieth Street, too; besides, the town’s full of police; and they pinch star-readers and astrologers these days. Anyway, we have the swastika, and it will put any Sixth Avenue astrologer out of business—”

“I—I don’t think I quite understand you,” faltered the girl.

He looked at her; the scared expression died out.

“I’ll get my uncle on the long-distance ’phone in a moment,” he said irritably. “Then we’ll clear up this business. Meanwhile—” He twisted up the telegram as though to cast it on the coals.

“Let me see it,” she said calmly.

“I—it is—no—I can’t—”

“Then it concerns me?”

He was silent.

“Very well,” she said. “Don’t burn it; leave it for a moment.”

He laid the telegram on the arm of his chair. “It’s more crystal-gazing,” he said, trying to laugh easily, and failing. “It is rather extraordinary, too. But—see here, Miss Grey, it’s utter nonsense to believe that my uncle can actually see us here in this room!

“I concede that it is rather odd, even, perhaps, exceedingly remarkable,” he added slowly; “but I cannot believe that my uncle, two hundred miles north of us, can see you and me in his confounded crystal. My explanation of his telegrams is this: he has merely taken the precaution, at intervals, to try to frighten me, assuming that I am in mischief. It’s coincidence—”

“Mr. Hildreth!”

“Not that I admit for one moment that you and I are in mischief!” he explained hastily.

“But I admit it. It is all wrong, and we both know it. If I am not here officially I ought not to be here at all.”

“Can’t I talk to you except on business?”

“Why should you?”

“Because I want to—because it is pleasant—because it’s the pleasantest thing that has ever come into my life!”

“That cannot be,” she said, paling. “You know many people, you go everywhere—everywhere that I do not—”

“If I were not an advertising poet at thirty dollars a week,” he said, “I’d not care where my uncle left his millions. I’d do what I pleased—what I ought to do—what any man with a grain of sense would do.”

“What would you do, Mr. Hildreth?”

“Make love to the girl I love, and not be scared away like a rabbit!”

She was still paler when she said: “Are you—in love, then?”

“Yes; but I can’t tell her.”

She was silent, staring into the fire.

“I can’t tell her, can I? I have nothing to offer—nothing except a prospect of losing my expectations. A man can’t tell a girl that he loves her under such circumstances, can he?”

“I—don’t know.”

“Do you suppose a—a girl like that would wait for him—until he got into the firm?”

“If she loved him,” said Miss Grey in a low voice, “there is absolutely no telling what that girl might do.”

“Suppose,” he said carelessly, “for the sake of illustration, that I was, at this moment, with that girl. For example”—he waved his hand airily—“for example, suppose you were that girl. Now, suppose that I told her I loved her; do you imagine that uncle of mine could see what I was about—if I worked the swastika on him vigorously?”

“I don’t know,” she said, staring at the fire, “how to work the swastika.”

“If you—if you would consent to aid me—just a little,” he ventured, “I could soon prove whether it was safe to speak to the—the other girl.”

“How, Mr. Hildreth?”

“By just—just pretending that you were that other girl.”

“You mean that you might practice a declaration—test it—on me? Just to see how it might affect your uncle?”

“Yes,” he said eagerly, “and if my uncle doesn’t telegraph again that he disowns me, why, I’ll know that his other telegrams were merely coincidences!”

“And if he does telegraph that he has seen—everything—in his crystal?”

“Why—we’ll have to wait—”

“The other girl and you? I see. You and I can truthfully deny our apparent guilt, can’t we?… I will do what I can, Mr. Hildreth.”

She stood up, one little hand on the back of the chair. He hesitated, then picked up the last telegram, opened it, and handed it to her, reading it again over her shoulder:

“If you kiss that girl you’re talking to I’ll disinherit you.”

A bright blush stained her skin.

“It is only—only to test his power,” he managed to say, but the thumping of his heart jarred his speech and scared him into silence.

“You—is it necessary to kiss me?”

“Yes—absolutely.”

She met his gaze, standing erect, one hand on the chair. Then she drew a long breath as he lifted her hand; her eyes closed. He said: “I love you—I loved you the moment I saw you—a month ago!” This was no doubt a mistake; he was mixing the two girls. “What do I care for a crystal-squinting uncle, or for those accursed Honey Wafer verses? If he’s looking at us now let us convince him; shall we—sweetheart?”

She unclosed her eyes. “Am I to play my part when you speak to me like that? I don’t know how—”

“Do what I do,” he stammered; and he encircled her slender waist and kissed her until, cheeks aflame, she swayed a moment in his arms, freed herself, and sank breathless into the chair, covering her face. And he knelt beside her by the gilt fender, his lips to her fingers, stammering words that almost stunned her and left her faint with their passion and sweetness:

“You must have known that it was you I loved—that you were that other girl. You must have seen it a thousand times!”

She was crying silently; she could not speak, but one arm tightened around his neck in tremulous assent.

The telephone bell had been ringing for some time in their ears, deaf to all sounds except each other’s whispers; but at length he stumbled to his feet, cleared his eyes of enchantment, and made his way across the room to the receiver.

“What the deuce is the matter?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Who?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Oh, is that you, Uncle Peter?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, I did get your telegrams, but I thought—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“You mean to say you can see us now?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“No, I don’t deny it; I did kiss her.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Because I love her!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“I can’t help it; you can do as you please. And I may as well tell you that I’m not afraid of your professors, or clairvoyants, or your crystals, because I’ve got a swastika—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, a swastika!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“You don’t know what a swastika is? Well, let me tell you it’s about five thousand times more powerful than a rabbit’s foot…. What? . Yes, I’ll hold the wire till you look it up in the dictionary.”

A throbbing silence. Then:

“Yes, Uncle Peter, I’m here.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Very well; I’m sorry you’re angry, and I regret that you’re not afraid of the swastika. I am quite willing to trust to it; the swastika gave me the girl I love. And, by the way, Uncle Peter, didn’t you write me that my advertising poems made a fortune for you out of your wafers?…

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

All right; I only wanted to confess that she, not I, wrote them.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Don’t believe it? Why, I could no more write those charming verses than you could!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“You may imagine that with her talent and mine, and the swastika working away for us, we are not going to starve—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“That’s just what we intend to do. Bunsen’s Baby Biscuit Company will appreciate our talents.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Besides, she can draw—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“You can call it blackmail if you choose. But what do you offer us to refuse advances from Bunsen?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“No, I won’t consider it. My price is full partnership in the Hildreth’s Honey Wafer Company, a cordial blessing from you, use of your apartments for a year, and the same old cozy place in your testament.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, in return we will write your poetry and draw your pictures for you. And, besides, we’ll name after you our first—”

“Jack!” she exclaimed, aghast.

“Dearest, for Heaven’s sake let me deal with him!” whispered Hildreth; then he shouted through the transmitter:

“Is it all right, Uncle Peter?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“I promise you—we promise you that we will name him Peter! If you don’t, by Heaven, I’ll name him Bunsen—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“That’s all right, but we’re desperate. Peter or Bunsen; take your choice!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes; and I’ll have his photograph taken for Bunsen, and under it I’ll print: ‘A Bunsen’s Baby Biscuit Boy!’”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Don’t use such language; they’ll cut us off!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“What?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Good! All right, Uncle Peter, you’re a brick. But—just one thing more; please put that crystal away for an hour or two—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Because we’d like a little privacy!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Of course I shall. Long engagements are foolish—”

“Jack!”

“Dearest, you know they are,” he said, turning toward her. “Shall I tell him in a week?”

Her blue eyes filled; again the little tremor of acquiescence set her red mouth quivering.

“In a week, Uncle Peter!” he shouted.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“What? I’ll ask her. Hold the wire.”

And to her he said: “Sweetheart, our kind Uncle Peter desires to say something civil to you. I—I think it may be something about a check. Will you speak to him?”

She rose and came toward him; he handed her the receiver; she raised her head, and he bent his. They kissed—while his uncle waited.

Then she raised the receiver to her pretty ear, and said, very softly:

“Hello! Hello, Uncle Peter!”

THE TREE OF DREAMS

It was a slim, well-groomed, top-hatted, frock-coated Smith who entered his private office that morning; it was a very different species of Smith who left stealthily by a back corridor an hour later, a shabby-genteel Smith whose cravatless collar was fastened with a democratic bone collar button—whose clean but shapeless trousers bagged and flapped in the June breeze—who gazed out at Broadway from under the faded brim of a cheap felt hat—who, as he forced his pace from a Fifth Avenue saunter into a Third Avenue hustle, thrust both thin, clean hands into his trousers pockets and satisfied himself that every cent which he meant to spend for a week was there in the shape of ten one-dollar bills.

At Wall Street he adjusted his glasses and peered about with pleasant, nearsighted eyes to discover the policeman at the crossing in order to avoid him. Once beyond the financial zone downtown he had no fear of being recognized by anybody; his features, he was modestly persuaded, resembled the typical features of about fifty per cent of the male inhabitants of Manhattan, although those same features had been public and newspaper property for three years now—ever since his father, J. Abingdon Smith, 2d, had faded heavenward, leaving the enormous fortune in Manhattan real estate to his only son, J. Abingdon Smith, 3d.

He was still a young man, thin of hair, nearsighted, endowed with sufficient intelligence to enable him to turn over his inherited fortune, legitimately increased, to any heir he might have if he should ever marry. Had he resembled Smith the first, or Smith the second, he would have done this as a matter of family routine—married the sort of girl that generations of Smiths found inoffensive enough to marry; produced one heir, and, when the proper time arrived, would have in his turn decorously and formally faded heavenward—leaving a J. Abingdon Smith, 4th, to follow his example.

But Smith had inherited from his mother a thin but deep streak of romantic sentiment. This vein ran clean through him, and might have manifested itself in almost any form along the line of least resistance, had it not been half imbedded in a stratum of negative platitudes inherited from his emotionless father.

As he stood in his shabby clothes, near the new Hall of Records, waiting for a Fourth Avenue car, a slender, blue-eyed girl, passing, looked up at him with such a frank, sweet gaze that he missed his next breath and then made up for it by breathing twice too quickly. He had an idea that he had seen her before, but finally decided he hadn’t.

To be loved for himself alone was one of his impractical ideas, born of the maternal sentimental streak; but, for years, the famous Smith fortune, its enormous holdings in realty, the doings of the Smiths, their shrewd sales, purchases, leases, improvements, their movements, their personal affairs, their photographed features had been common property and an unfailing source of news for the press; and he knew perfectly well that, however honest and theoretically disinterested a girl might be, the courtship of a J. Abingdon Smith, of whatever vintage, could not help representing a bunch of figures that no human being in shape of a female biped could avoid seeing, no matter how tightly she closed her innocent eyes. Thinking of these things, he calmly encountered the curious eyes of the conductor as he boarded a crowded car.

The blue-eyed girl also got in, but Smith, on the back platform, did not see her.

“That fellow,” said the conductor to the grip-man, as he swung off the front platform after collecting a fare, “is a ringer for J. Abingdon Smith, the millionaire.”

And the conductor was not the only one; several passengers were amused by the resemblance this nearsighted, shabby young man bore to the features that every newspaper had made familiar to the submerged tenth, the frantically swimming twentieth, and the marooned remainder of the great unwashed.

Half an hour later Smith said to the conductor:

“Would you be kind enough to stop here?”

“Certainly, Mr. Smith,” said the conductor, meaning a joke.

Smith ambled along, intent upon his own business. The blue-eyed girl had preceded him in the same direction; but as he entered the main doorway of the Smith model tenement houses, which formed almost a complete quadrangle around the block, he was not aware that she was on the iron and concrete stairway, three stories above him, and was still climbing heavenward.

When he reached his room, which he had paid for in advance, he found that his trunk and furniture had arrived. The air in the room was close; he opened the window.

For a while he bustled busily about, arranging the meager furniture. The narrow iron bed he dragged into a corner by the window, pushed the washstand against the opposite wall and hung a ninety-eight-cent mirror over it. He laid a strip of carpet in the center of the floor, placed a pine table upon it, and then, picking up the only chair, distractedly began traveling about with it, trying the effect, first in one corner, then in another.

At this juncture Kerns, his agent, general estate manager, and boyhood friend, slipped into the room on tiptoe, carefully closing the door behind him.

“I don’t know where to put it,” Smith said, pausing to settle his refractory glasses and glance suspiciously at Kerns out of pleasant, nearsighted eyes. “When they have only one chair where do they usually put it, Tommy?”

“When they get down to one chair they usually put it in the stove,” said Kerns.

“What? They do? That’s another point, Kerns; we’ve got to give them free furniture somehow; I mean for the same rent. You figure it up; cut out something or other—” He gazed vaguely about the bare walls as though contemplating their possible economic elimination. Then, he looked at the floor; but his tenants, being wingless, required something to stand on. “Could we give them bed, tables, and chair, and cut out that gas range?” he suggested.

“Not unless you throw in a stove,” said Kerns, trying to look serious. “And if you do that, they’ll keep their coal in the bath tubs, as before.”

Smith began to remove the contents of a shabby little trunk. First, there were shaving utensils, which he placed in a row on the unpainted washstand, then a tin pitcher and wash basin, a cake of soap, and last, some cheap towels.

“I’ve a notion that I’ve too much crockery,” he said, gazing about. “Do you think I’ve overdone it? I don’t need two plates—do I? And all that tinware—do I? What the deuce are you grinning at?” he added, diving into his battered trunk again and emerging with both arms full of tinware. These utensils he hung upon nails above the sink in the corner, arranging them with care.

“That’s the place for pots and pans, isn’t it, Kerns?” he said, backing off to observe the effect.

Then, by chance, he caught sight of himself in the ninety-eight-cent mirror, and a slight flush of embarrassment rose to his cheeks.

“Do I look like a respectable man out of work?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

“Exactly,” replied Kerns; “you look like what you are-a well-meaning gentleman, permanently unemployed—and likely to remain so. In other words, dear friend, you resemble a Lulu bird of leisure.”

“Do you mean to say I look like myself?” demanded Smith innocently. “Do I seem to be made up for a part? There was an impudent conductor who called me Smith. Don’t you suppose he did it in joke? And—a—a girl—who looked at me—er—”

“Because you’re a winner. Because a Smith ill dressed is half confessed; because a Smith in any other clothes would look as neat; because a Sm——”

Smith’s brows contracted, but lifelong endurance of Kerns’s raillery had habituated him to disregard such gibes.

“John Abingdon,” continued Kerns, “I’ve inspected these barracks of yours to-day because you insisted; I’ve met you here because you told me me to; but it’s all portentous and top-heavy nonsense on your part, and it’s my business to say so whether it makes you fidgety and sulky or not.”

“We won’t start that line of discussion again,” said Smith, “because, Kerns, outside of your own harmless routine, you’re so densely ignorant that I am continually ashamed of you. What do you know about humanity?”

“I thought you weren’t going to start that thing going,” yawned Kerns.

“You started it yourself,” said Smith.

“All right, then; I’ll go on. Haven’t I told you a thousand times that, if you are anxious to know how your tenants live, I can tell you, or any of your collectors or your brokers, or even your janitors. Every time you do a thing without my advice you mess matters. You insisted on giving them bath tubs, and they used them for coal, and I had to straighten that out by taking away their cook stoves and substituting gas ranges and ovens. You insisted on inserting rotary ventilators in every window, and the noise of the wheels kept your tenants awake at night; and, when they don’t sleep, they fight. Besides, they all caught cold, and there are a dozen enraged Hibernians suing you now. If you could only know what I know and see what I’ve seen—”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, Tom, that I don’t intend to slop over and bestow charity; but I do want to know what are my just obligations to my tenants, and how I can place them in a better position.”

He was somewhat heated when he finished, and stood touching his forehead with his handkerchief.

“Toot! Toot!” said Kerns plaintively, backing toward the door. “The next stop is Chautauqua. Go it your own way, Smithy; I’m about due at the club for luncheon.”

The door slammed as the wash basin struck it; Smith glared at the dent in the woodwork, prepared to hurl the coffeepot. But Kerns did not come back; and, after a while, he replaced the coffeepot, searched his trunk for a collar, buttoned it to his flannel shirt, and, picking up his hat, went out into the hallway.

And there he encountered the slender girl with the blue eyes.

There was something very innocent in her confident, fearless gaze; as he passed her, lifting his hat, he bade her good day in his pleasant voice. Her quaintly impersonal nod in acknowledgment pleased him.

“Just what I thought,” he reflected, as he descended the stairs: “the poor are always nice to each other; they’re frank and human, unspoiled by our asinine code of conventions. If I’d worn a top hat that girl would have looked the other way; if I’d noticed her she’d have been defiant or sullen or saucy.”

And while he trudged about, purchasing groceries for his luncheon, he looked out upon the world through optimistic glasses, smiling, warm-hearted, pleased with himself and everybody he encountered.

He was hungry—it being long past his regular luncheon time-an hour from which he had not varied half a dozen times in a dozen years.

As he ascended the iron stairs of his lodging house once more he counted over the little packages of groceries piled up in his arms—butter, salt, sugar, a bottle of milk, tea, coffee, rolls, and eggs. “Probably too much,” he reflected; “I’ll have to go about among these people and find out what they eat—Good Heavens! that is awful!”

In his own hallway a khamsin gust of cabbage smote him with its answer to his question, and he shuddered. He forced his door in with the point of his knee, made his way to the table, and dropped the packages. Then, producing a match box, he advanced blithely toward the gas range.

“The first thing to do is to start that exceedingly convenient machine and get action at once,” he continued, turning on the gas and lighting a match. “Cooking coffee and eggs is nothing to any man who has ever camped out in the woods—”

Flash!—bang! went the gas range; and Smith executed what his office boys might have characterized as a “quick get-away.”

“W-what a perfectly ghastly species of range,” he stammered, “g-going off in a man’s face like a t-t-ten-inch shell!” He sat down in the only chair, breathed hard, and stared at the range; then, suddenly afraid that gas might be pouring into the room, he crept toward it, lighted another match, and extended his arm like the hero touching off a magazine in the ship’s hold.

Bang! repeated the gas range emphatically.

“W-well, this is a pleasant situation!” he breathed, wringing his slightly scorched fingers. “Am I expected to fry my eggs over a volcano?”

Hesitating, he wiped his glasses, affixed them, and gazed earnestly at the range. Very gingerly he tiptoed toward it and, with a sudden dash, turned off the gas.

For a while he alternately stood in front of it and walked all around it. He looked at his coffee and eggs—he could not eat them raw. It was now long after his usual luncheon hour, and he began to feel famished.

“The trouble is that I don’t know how to get the proper spark,” he reflected; but, driven by necessity, he turned on the gas once more, and, lighting a match, applied it. There was no explosion this time; a bluish flame played all over the machine for a few seconds, sank, rose, subsided, and went out. In vain he lighted match after match. He got no more flame.

“This is a disgracefully run house!” he exclaimed aloud. “It’s high time I heard something about it! Here I am two hours late and can’t get enough heat to cook an egg!”

Very angry, he marched out on a hunt for the janitor; but, after climbing up and down stairs and making inquiries on every landing, he had come no nearer to discovering the janitor. A gentleman named Dugan thought that the janitor might be engaged in tenpins at Bauer’s popular corner resort. Smith repaired thither, but could not discover him. Another gentleman, named Clancy, emerging from the two-room apartment adjoining Smith’s, came in at Smith’s invitation and rubbed a flat, rough thumb up and down the range. Then he departed, scratching his head and advising further search for the janitor.

“Ye cud cook a bit an’ a sup on our own range,” he said, “but th’ ould woman do be bilin’ shirrts.”

When Mr. Clancy had departed Smith spent ten more minutes tinkering with the range, growing hungrier and hungrier every second. But, hungry, angry and discouraged as he was, he obstinately refused to consider a restaurant as even a temporary solution. Once more he set off down the endless iron and concrete stairway to hunt up the janitor; and, returning unsuccessful, encountered the janitor on his own landing. The janitor was talking to the girl with the blue eyes.

“Please don’t let me interrupt you,” said Smith; “it’s only that I can’t work my range.”

“You are not interrupting,” said the girl with the blue eyes. “My ceiling is beginning to fall, that is all.”

“I’ll have that attended to at once!” exclaimed Smith, forgetting his role of tenant—“that is,” he added, in confusion, “the janitor will notify M———, the agent. You will, won’t you?” he continued, turning to the janitor, whose face had been growing redder and redder as he grew madder and madder.

“Where do you think you are?” he demanded. “In the Waldorf? An’ who do you think you are, young man? John D.? or the Dutch Emp’ror? Or do you think you’re J. Abingdon Smith, the owner of this here plant, because you look like his grandfather’s hired man?”

“Not at all,” said Smith, turning red. “I had no intention of interfering.”

“Well, you go and sit on your range and keep it warm till I get a gasfitter, see!” growled the janitor; “an’ mebbe he’ll fix it to-night,” he said, looking back malevolently over his shoulder as he descended the stairs, “an’ mebbe he’ll fix it next month. You mind your business, young man, an’ I’ll mind yours.”

Smith, tingling all over, looked after him, but his anger passed with a shrug and a short laugh as he realized that the rebuke had been in a fashion his own fault.

He had made a step across the hallway toward his own room, when he remembered the girl with the blue eyes.

“I’m sorry I caused any unpleasantness,” he said. “I hope the janitor won’t visit his petty tyranny on you.”

“I don’t think he will; I—Can’t you make your range burn properly?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “It blew up three times, and now it has retired from active business. I believe it has become permanently extinct.”

“Perhaps,” she ventured, “you are not accustomed to gas ranges. Are you?”

“No, but I’ve got to learn to manage them if I’m to do any cooking.” He thought she meant to speak again, but, as she said no more, he turned to his own door. Behind him a hesitating voice began:

“You may use my range to cook on—until your own is repaired, if you wish—”

“That’s awfully nice of you,” he said, gratefully surprised. “I’ve only a couple of eggs to fry—or boil—and a little coffee, but I didn’t like to ask you—”

“You didn’t. I asked you,” she said. “You are quite welcome.” And, as he still hesitated: “I really don’t mind,” she said. “I can take my work somewhere else while you are cooking.”

“No, no,” he protested, beginning to realize the inconvenience he was causing her; but she nodded impatiently and, stepping back into her room, began to gather up into a writing portfolio a mass of scattered papers.

A few moments later he appeared in the open doorway, his arms piled high with the paper packages containing groceries. She looked up at him, her hands full of inky papers. Unbidden laughter was sparkling in her blue eyes.

“The range is ready,” she said, schooling her voice. “You may begin at once. I shall be gone in a second.” And she began to rummage furiously among the papers.

Sidelong glances she could not help casting at his culinary preparations. She saw him ruin two eggs, and hid her face in the table drawer where she was searching for that elusive something.

“No use trying to fry those eggs,” he observed, gazing at the disintegrating yolks.

“You could scramble them,” she suggested, raising her pretty head. Her face was delicately flushed; a bright strand of hair, loosened, fell like a tendril across one pink cheek.

“To scramble an egg,” he said slowly, as though attempting to recall some intricate evolution in cookery—“To scramble an egg, you stir it round and round, I believe.”

“And to scramble two eggs,” she said almost hysterically, “you stir them both round and round.”

“But,” he added thoughtfully, “how to get them into the pan. I suppose one pours them in—”

“Don’t! Please don’t! You have put no butter in yet,” she said; but he had already poured a spoonful into the pan, where it began to char and sputter and smoke.

She laid aside her portfolio and papers, removed the smoking pan, scraped it, tinkered with it, and then, preparing it properly, poured in the remainder of the eggs.

“It’s awfully good of you. I’m ashamed of myself,” he muttered; “but, please—please don’t mind about the coffee. I can do that, I’m sure.”

“It will take only a moment,” she said. “You are not accustomed to—to—gas ranges, I see.”

Before he knew it his modest luncheon was ready. She swept the papers from the table, threw over it a white square of linen, and placed his luncheon under his mortified eyes.

“It will get cold if you attempt to carry it back to your room. You are quite welcome to eat it here, believe me. My range may fail me some day and I may have to beg a little fire at your door.”

“You shall have oceans of it!” he cried gratefully.

“Thank you; and, please, begin. I am on my way out.”

“Am I driving you away? I know I am—”

“No, really you are not. I work out of doors all I can. I was going out as soon as the janitor came to examine my ceiling.” She raised her pretty eyes; he looked aloft.

“It’s a leak,” he said. “I’ll have it fi—I mean I’ll tell the jan—What I do mean,” he said, “is that somebody ought to have it fixed.”

“I think so, too,” she said demurely, gathering up her portfolio and papers. At the doorsill she halted:

“But—but how—but who is going to lock my door?” she asked.

“Oh, I’d better take my luncheon into my own room!”

“No, no. Please sit down again. Please do so now! I can leave my key with you if you are going to be here.”

He thought to himself, charmed, what touching confidence the poor have in each other’s honesty.

She drew from her purse the door key and laid it beside his plate.

“If I don’t hear you in the hallway, will you please knock?” he asked.

“I think you had better leave the key with the janitor,” she said; then, thinking further along the same line: “or perhaps you had better hide it.”

She stepped back into the hallway and looked all around; but no plausible hiding place presented itself. Then she gazed at him.

“I might leave it with my neighbor, Mrs. Clancy,” he said with rare intelligence.

“No,” she said with her pretty, fearless smile, “I will knock at your door and ask for it.”

She was gone before he could rise again.

When he had finished he washed the dishes and did it thoroughly, restoring each to its shelf.

His remaining groceries and his own tinware he carried into his own habitation, came back and locked her door, and then, lighting his pipe, began to prowl about the corridors.

Presently he fished out a pad and pencil, and, squatting down on the stairway, made some notes concerning the use of steel for doorsills and frames, and tiles or tessellated floors to replace the already worn and dirty planks of Southern pine.

“First of all, plenty of ventilation,” he murmured. “Next, cleanliness; next, light…. I—I’ve a mind to complete the entire block—put up a big, square tower on that vacant lot—a big, clean, airy tower, ten stories—sixteen—twenty, by jingo!”

He seized his pad with enthusiasm and drew a plan of the block which he owned with the present model tenements on it and showing the vacant lot.

There were no windows giving on the vacant lot—nothing but blank brick walls.

“That’s what I’ll do,” he thought. “I’ll have my own way for once. I’ll plan and design and build an absolutely beautiful and sanitary tower with a hundred rooms and two elevators in it, and Kerns can laugh if he wants to. What these people need is light and air—cheap light and cheap air. I’ll just go down and take a look at that lot.”

He pocketed pad and pencil, seized his hat, and, locking his door on the outside, ran down the stairs.

“You can’t go into that lot,” said the janitor. “No tenants ain’t allowed in there by orders of Mr. Kerns.”

“Well, can’t I just look at it?”

“No,” said the janitor. “An’ lemme tell you something else. If you an’ me is goin’ to gee you’d better do less buttin’ in an’ less runnin’ up an’ down stairs. You butt in an’ you run around like you was the Dutch Emp’ror. Say, what are you lookin’ for, anyhow? If you’re a spotter, say so; I ain’t worryin’. If you’re just loony you’re in the wrong hotel.”

“But, my good fellow—”

“Forget it!” retorted the janitor wrathfully. “Your good fellow! Look here, Percy, I ain’t your good fellow, nor I ain’t your dear old college chum, an’ no buttin’ in goes. See?”

“I’m not attempting to offend you!” exclaimed Smith desperately.

“That’s all right, too,” said the janitor, unconvinced. “You seen me talkin’ to Miss Stevens an’ you make a play like you owned the buildin’. ‘Here, me good man,’ sez you, ‘fix this an’ fix that, an’ be d———d quick about it, too,’ sez you—”

“I didn’t,” retorted Smith indignantly; “at least I didn’t mean to say—”

“What you are,” interrupted the janitor deliberately, “God knows an’ I don’t. You may be makin’ phony stuff up there fur all I know.”

“What’s phony stuff?” demanded Smith, getting hotter.

“Look into the dictionary, Clarence,” retorted the janitor, and slammed the door of his office in Smith’s face.

“That man,” thought Smith to himself, as he started up the stairs, “is a singularly impudent man, but he’s probably faithful enough. I shall not do anything about it. But I wish I could get into my vacant lot.”

The remainder of the afternoon he spent drawing magnificently unbuildable plans for his tower.

Then he pulled his chair out into the fire escape and sat there through the sunset hour and into the smoky June twilight.

Suddenly, as he sat there, dreaming, a faint sound at his door brought him to his feet and into the room.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was out on the fire escape. Did you knock more than once?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, smiling under the shadow of her big straw hat and taking her key from him.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he repeated, “and I really am very grateful for letting me cook on your range—”

“Is yours fixed yet?” she asked diffidently.

“By George!” he said. “I’d forgotten that! But it doesn’t matter,” he added, determined to dine on the remainder of his rolls and milk, for he simply would not begin by running to a restaurant at the first mishap.

She hesitated, not knowing whether again to offer her salt and fire; then, finding it too difficult, she said “Good night” in a low voice, and crossed the hallway to her own abode. And there she sat down, fair face tense, gaze concentrated on space, her big straw hat still on her head, her portfolio and papers in her lap.

Minutes ticked away on the little nickel alarm clock. She pondered on, and, sometimes, her straight, delicate brows contracted, and, sometimes, her teeth worried the edge of her lower lip; and once she smiled and lifted her eyes as though she could see through her closed door into his room across the hall.

After that she rose, made her toilet, cooked her own supper; and when, at length, the dishes had been laid away and her pretty hands rinsed, carefully examined, and soothed with glycerine and cream of almonds—luxuries she preferred to a varied menu—she laid a pile of yellow manuscript paper on her table, and, dipping her pen into the ink, began to scribble like mad. For, at last, her chance in life had come.

Meanwhile, Smith, doggedly munching his buttered rolls, drank his milk and considered plans for doing good to his tenants without either injuring their self-respect or bankrupting himself.

“Buy up block after block, cover ’em with handsome sanitary tenements, with a big, grassy court and a fountain in the middle—that’s the decent and self-respecting way to invest one’s surplus! That’s the only way a rich man can keep his own respect and administer his stewardship. I’d be ashamed to make any more money! I won’t! I’d be ashamed to keep what I have if I didn’t use the income to help somebody. Clean, airy, sunny homes—within the means of the poorest working people! It can be done without making it a charity. It’s got to be done. I’m going to build that tower—if my janitor ever lets me into the lot—”

After he had completed his ablutions and was ready for bed he stood a moment at the open window looking out over the city.

“That girl—she was very nice to me…. I’ve the oddest notion that I’ve seen her before…. somewhere. Wonderfully—ah—decorative—her eyes—a graceful way of—er—moving.”

He lay down on his bed and pulled up the sheet. A few minutes later he murmured drowsily: “Build handsome tower—spite of Kerns…. Nobody pay rent….’Strordinary eyes that girl…. Pretty blue—very blue for—a—a girl…. ’Strordinary rot I’m talking…. G’night, Smith; night!”

•      •      •      •      •      •

The next morning a pessimistic gasfitter repaired Smith’s range. That night it blew up again.

Two days later it was again in commission, then remained quiescent for a week. After that the range worked fitfully, intimidating Smith until it had him so thoroughly cowed that he never attempted to light it except with the match inserted in the end of a broom handle. Between the range and the cookery he was almost famished.

However, it was a matter of too little importance to disturb him in his purpose; the days were full days indeed, no matter how empty he went. Hour after hour he sat cramped over the table, drawing impossible plans and elevations for the completion of his model tenements. Hour after hour he tramped the hot streets in search of likely sites for further philanthropic operations.

Almost every morning and evening he was sure to encounter his blue-eyed neighbor on the landing or stairs; and, after a while, he began to spend a few minutes of the day in looking forward to these brief meetings.

Matters were not going very well with his blue-eyed neighbor; but he didn’t know it. Her work, always precarious and dependent on the whims of several underpaid people, was not sufficient to keep her very well nourished during the hot months of midsummer. She defaulted on the July payment for her small piano, and they took it away. The little desk went later; an armchair followed.

Alone in her room, palely considering the why and wherefore of the disagreeable, she invariably almost fell a prey to temptation; but, so far, the victory had remained with her. Temptation came when somebody refused her work or when somebody removed an article of furniture for nonpayment of the installment due, and the temptation confronted her in the shape of a packet of yellow manuscript.

She was the author of the manuscript; it lay in a drawer of her table.

Sometimes, when they frightened her by giving her no work or by lugging off a chair, she would sit down, white and desperate, and take out her manuscript and read it through.

She knew where she could place it in an hour. She had been promised a permanent position on the strength of just such work. It was well done, of its sort. It fairly bristled with double-leaded headlines; it was yellow enough for the yellowest—a “beat,” a “scoop,” a story that would be copied in every newspaper of the country. The title of it was “A Millionaire in Disguise.” The subject, Smith. She had only to show it to the city editor who had promised to take her on the first time she displayed any ability. All she had to do was to tuck the yellow sheets under her arm and start downtown, and that would end all this removing of furniture and scarcity of foodstuffs—all this sleeplessness, this perplexed dismay—all these heavy-hearted journeys to the offices of the fashion papers where sometimes she was paid for her articles on domestic affairs and sometimes not.

After these experiences she usually returned to the temptation of her yellow manuscript, read it through, wept a little, cast it from her into the table drawer once more, and buried her face in her slim hands. Later, she usually dried her eyes, hurriedly gathered up her papers and portfolio, and, locking the door on the outside, descended to the cellar.

In this profound crypt a small iron door and a few stone steps ascending permitted her access to the vacant lot which the janitor had forbidden Smith to enter. And here she was accustomed to sit in the long, rank grass under a big ailantus tree, writing for the fashion papers, to which she contributed such predigested pabulum as the weak-minded might assimilate. In this manner she paid for lodging, board, and almond cream.

Meanwhile, she was growing shyer and more formal with Smith when they chanced to meet on stairs or landing. Beginning with the politely pleasant exchange of a few words concerning the initial episode which had excused their acquaintance, they had ventured on a little laughter at his expense—a shade less of the impersonal. But, little by little, the pretty, fearless gaze which he found so attractive changed to something more reserved and far less expressive. Her laughter, always edging lips and eyes, her untroubled voice, with its winningly careless sweetness, changed, too. He noticed this. Sometimes he wondered whether she was quite well. He had been aware from the first that she did not belong in her surroundings any more than did he, and at times he speculated on the subject, wondering what crumbling of her social and financial fabric had landed her here on her own resources, stranded along the outer edges of things.

One scorching day he bad been drawing an elevation for his tower, which partook impartially of the worst in Manhattan, Gothic, and Chinese architecture—a new crinkle in his theory being that the poor had a right to the best in art, and that they should have it in spite of Kerns. For an hour he had been trying to estimate the cost of such a masterpiece, and had grown cross and discouraged in the effort.

July was fast going. August already had been discounted by the monthly magazines; he had purchased one which contained an article on concrete construction, and, tired of his sweltering room, he put on his hat, pocketed the magazine, and went out to seek a bit of shade in Central Park.

As he passed his neighbor’s door he glanced at it a trifle wistfully. He had not seen her now for nearly a week. He actually missed her, even though now she seldom seemed to have the leisure or inclination to chat with him.

The last time, he reflected, that they had exchanged a dozen words, he had, lured by her receptively intelligent attitude, drifted into an almost enthusiastic dissertation upon model lodgings for the poor. He had kept her standing before her door for almost half an hour while he, forgetting everything except the subject and the acquiescence of his audience, had aired his theories with a warmth and brilliancy which, later, it slightly astonished him to remember.

Since that they had exchanged scarcely a word. And now, as he passed her door, he looked wistfully at it, thinking of his slender neighbor.

And, thinking of her, he descended the stairs, and, still immersed in this agreeable reverie, he did not notice that he had passed the ground floor and was descending the cellar stairs, until he came to in front of an iron door. This seemed unfamiliar. He took out his handkerchief to rub his glasses, looked around at the furnaces and coal bins, passed his hand over his eyes, replaced the glasses, gazed at the iron door which was partly ajar, and caught a glimpse of green grass outside.

“I’ll bet that’s my vacant lot,” he said aloud, and, opening the door, he ascended the stone steps into his own property.

There was green grass everywhere; south and west a high board fence; north and east the brick, windowless, rearward cliffs of the tenements; in the middle of the lot an ailantus tree in full foliage.

And, under it, a young girl lying in the grass, her wide straw hat hanging from a leafy branch above. Even before he stirred in his tracks, she sat up, instinctively looking across the grass at him. It was his duty to make his excuses and go. But, for almost the first time in his life, he deliberately neglected duty.

“So this is where you come every day to work out of doors!” he exclaimed, smiling, as he halted beside her where she remained, seated in the grass, looking up at him.

There was color in her face and in his, too. He had had absolutely no idea how pleasant it could be to meet his neighbor again after so many days—seven in number—but a great many all the same.

Then he told her, laughingly, how he came to discover the cellar door that led to Paradise.

“Paradise,” he repeated; “for, you see, the Tree of Ten Thousand Dreams is here. Did you know that the ailantus tree is the Chinese Tree of Paradise-the fabled Tree of Dreams? Have you never heard of the Feng-Shui? Dragons live deep in the earth among the tree roots. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t know that.”

He looked at her. Her manner was not very cordial, and he decided not to ask permission to seat himself just yet. But he had nothing in particular to say to her and he was very anxious to say it.

“The Fung-Hwang also perches in the branches of the Dream Tree,” he continued, for lack of a better topic; “it’s an imperial as well as a celestial tree. Are you interested in Chinese mythology? If you are not, it’s all right, because I am interested in anything you like.”

She looked up at the foliage above her. “It is a curious tree,” she said. “In early June these branches were full of great olive and rose-colored moths, enormous ones, flopping about at sunset like big, soft bats. In the daytime they hang to the leaves and bark, wings wide-such beautiful, such miraculous wings—set with silvery quarter-moons.!”

She raised both hands to the nape of her neck to smooth and secure her hair—a most fascinating gesture, he thought, watching her seated there in the grass, slim and graceful as the lovely lotus-bearing goddess, Kwan-Yin.

“Silvery quarter-moons,” she repeated, “and now, look! The silver has changed into metal pendants!” She pointed upward where, among the foliage, shining, white cocoons swung from silk-wound stems, each wrapped in its single green leaf.

“Wonderful fairy fruit your Tree of Dreams bears!” he said. “And how thickly it hangs! I don’t know much about such things. I was inclined to be fond of all that until I read some modern nature books. So I fell back on real myths again.”

She began to laugh and, meeting in her eyes all the old-time friendliness, he ventured to ask if he might seat himself.

“Yes,” she said gravely, “but I must be going.”

“Then I don’t care to stay here,” he said, unprepared to hear himself utter any such sentiment.

His astonishment at himself overcame even the reaction which turned his face red. She, too, surprised, looked at him unconvinced.

“What have I to do with it?” she inquired.

“The fact is,” he said impressively, as though the intelligence were well worth sharing with her, “I have been rather lonely.”

“Have you?” she asked, wide-eyed. “So have I. But I usually am.”

“I wish you had said so!”

“How could I? And to whom?”

They said nothing more for a while. The sunlight, filtering through the Tree of Dreams, glimmered on her hair. Her eyes, darker in the shadow, dwelt tranquilly upon the waste of thick, tall grass which the languid breezes furrowed now and then.

“Do you mind my offering you my friendship?” he asked at length; “for that’s what I’m doing.”

“No, I don’t mind,” she replied listlessly. “Other men have done that.”

“Will you accept—this time?”

“Shall I?” she asked, raising her clear eyes. “Shall I? I have been here two years—and I have made no friends.”

She folded her unringed hands on her knees, examined them with calm inattention, and said:

“After a while, I suppose, a girl becomes partly stupefied under the strain of it all—the tension of self-respecting silence. Two years of self-suppression! Even pickpockets receive a sentence more humane. Shall I try your remedy?”

“It would be very jolly to see each other, now and then,” he said, so pleasantly that she smiled at his simplicity.

“What about the conventions?” she inquired, amused. “Still, after all, what has a girl to do with conventions who lives as I live? Her problem is a great deal simpler than to bother with usages.” There was a defiant smile hovering about eyes and lips—a hint of recklessness in the bright color rising under his gaze: “A girl can’t live and flourish on silence.”

“You always hurry past me when we meet—”

“But surely you didn’t expect me to invite you to a seat on the stairs, did you?”

“I wish you had.”

“Then why didn’t you invite me?” she asked with a gay audacity new to him. For, in the summer sunshine of the moment, she was forgetting all except the pleasure of the moment and its pretense that the old order of things had returned. Sunshine and green grass and the sophisticated city breeze in the leaves above—youth, and ardent health, and one of her own kind to speak to after the arid silence of these sad months—what wonder that she willfully forgot? What wonder that she dared to breathe and laugh again, drifting and relaxing in the moment’s merciful relief from a tension that had benumbed her to the verge of actual stupidity?

Afterwards, in her room, the relaxed strain tightened again. She realized their acquaintance was only an episode-she knew his advent here was but a caprice. But it was an interim that gave her a chance-a brief vacation in which she might breathe for a moment before the inevitable returned again to submerge her. And she meant to enjoy it with all her heart—every moment, every atom of sunshine, every bright second of respite from what she actually dared look forward to no longer.

•      •      •      •      •      •

That first meeting under the ailantus tree was only one of a sequence.

At first, when he came sauntering across the grass, she politely laid aside her work—dissertation on flounces and napkins and old mahogany and the care of infants, and what Heppelwhite knew about table legs, and why Sheraton is usually saluted as Chippendale.

Later, she continued her work unembarrassed as long as she was able to concentrate her mind under the agreeable little shock of pleasure which his advent always brought to her.

“How did you find out all about such things?” he asked curiously, looking over her manuscripts with her shrugged permission.

“All about what things?”

“These—ah—crooked-legged tables and squatty chairs?”

“I had them—once.”

“I see,” he said gravely. Then, with embarrassed hesitation, but very nicely: “There must have been a pretty bad smash-up?”

She nodded.

“Ah—I’m awfully sorry! Hope it’s going to come out all right—some day.”

“Thank you.” But she continued to be brief and uncommunicative, never volunteering anything.

In the days when she became accustomed to his coming to find her under the tree, she ventured to continue her writing, merely greeting him with a nod of confidence and pleasure. And so he fell into the habit of bringing his own impossible plans and elevations to the vacant lot. And often, biting her pencil reflectively, she would cast side glances at him where he lay, flat in the grassy shade, drawing board under his nose, patiently constructing lines and angles and Corinthian capitals and Romanesque back doors. He was a very, very poor draughtsman; even she could see that.

“I’m doing this for a man who means to build a big tower on this lot,” he explained cheerfully. “I’ve a notion he will be delighted with this plan of mine.”

“Oh, is he going to cut down your Tree of Dreams!” she exclaimed, raising her eyes in dismay.

He looked up at the tree, then at her. “By Jove! It is a pity, isn’t it?” he said, “after the jolly hours we have spent out here.”

“Perhaps he won’t build his tower until after—after—”

“After what?”

“After we—you and I have forgotten all about this tree—” She hesitated. Then calmly—“and each other. Which, of course,” she laughed, “means no tower at all.”

He sat so long silent, preoccupied with his drawing, looking at it half dreamily, that she thought he had forgotten her rather foolish observations.

But he hadn’t; for he said in a troubled voice:

“There’s a way—a way of taking up big trees. I’ll ask him to do it. I don’t want it chopped down.”

“You’re afraid of angering the dragon!” she said, laughing. “What use could such a man have for an old ailantus tree? Besides, where could he plant it?”

“There’s a place I know of,” he said. “I’ll speak to him…. No; it wouldn’t do to have our Tree of Dreams cut down—”

“It’s not my tree,” she said, looking down at her pencil; “it’s yours.”

“It is yours,” he insisted. “You found it, and I found you under it.”

“Oh, it’s mine because I found it?” she mocked gayly, “and, I suppose, I’m yours because you found me under it.”

Her tongue had run away that time. She checked her badinage, picked up her pencil with an admirable self-possession that admitted nothing, and scribbled away in calm insouciance. Only the heightened brilliancy of her cheeks could have undeceived the adept. Smith was no adept; besides, he was thinking of other matters.

“Do you know,” he said solemnly, “that I am going away for about a week?”

She congratulated him without raising her head from her writing pad. That was pure instinct, for the emotion she had detected in Smith’s voice was perfectly apparent in his features.

Smith gazed at her for a long time, during which she grew busier and busier with her pencil, and more oblivious of him.

The intellectual processes of Smith were, at times, childlike in their circuitous simplicity.

“Do you think I’m a good draughtsman?” he asked.

“I don’t know; are you?” she asked, numbering a fresh sheet of her pad.

“Why, you’ve seen my drawing!” he reminded her, a little hurt. “I think I am a good draughtsman. I could probably earn about a hundred and twenty dollars a month.”

“You are very fortunate,” she murmured, rubbing out a sentence.

“A hundred and twenty dollars a month is enough for anybody to marry on,” he continued. “Don’t—you think so?”

“It is probably sufficient,” she said carelessly.

“Do you think it is?”

“I haven’t considered such matters very seriously,” she said. “It will be time when I am earning a hundred and twenty dollars a month. And I’m not likely to earn it if you continue to interrupt me.”

Smith turned red; presently he tucked his drawing board under his arm and stood up.

“I’m going,” he said. “Good-by.”

She nodded her adieux pleasantly, scarcely raising her head from her work.

But when Smith had disappeared she straightened up with a quick, indrawn ‘breath and stared across the grass at the blank, brick walls. After a long while she dropped her tired shoulders back against the trunk of the Tree of Dreams, reclining there inert, blue eyes brooding in vacancy.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Meanwhile, Smith had locked up his room, gone home for the first time in two months, telephoned for a stateroom on the Western Limited, and sent for Kerns, who presently arrived in an electric cab.

“I’m going to Illinois,” said Smith, “to-night.”

“The nation must know of this,” insisted Kerns; “let me telegraph for fireworks.”

“There’ll be fireworks,” observed Smith—“fireworks to burn, presently. I’m going to get married to a working girl.”

“Oh, piffle!” said Kerns faintly; “let’s go and sit on the third rail and talk it over.”

“Not with you, idiot. Did you ever hear of Stanley Stevens, who tried to corner wheat? I think it’s his daughter I’m going to marry. I’m going to Chicago to find out. Good heavens, Kerns! It’s the most pitiful case, whoever she is! It’s a case to stir the manhood in any man. I tell you it’s got to be righted. I am thoroughly stirred up, and I won’t stand any nonsense from you.”

Kerns looked at him. “Smith,” he pleaded in sepulchral tones; “Smithy! For the sake of decency and of common sense—”

“Exactly,” nodded Smith, picking up his hat and gloves; “for the sake of decency and of common sense. Good-by, Tommy. And—ah!”—indicating a parcel of papers on the desk—“just have an architect look over these sketches with a view to estimating the—ah—cost of construction. And find some good landscape gardener to figure up what it will cost to remove a big ailantus tree from New York to the Berkshires. You can tell him I’ll sue him if he injures the tree, but that I don’t care what it costs to move it.”

“Smith!” faltered Kerns, appalled, “you’re as mad as Hamlet!”

“It’s one of my ambitions to be madder,” retorted Smith, going out and running nimbly downstairs.

“Help!” observed Kerns feebly as the front door slammed. And, as nobody responded, he sat down in the bachelor quarters of J. Abingdon Smith, a prey to melancholy amazement.

When Smith had been gone a week Kerns wrote him, when he had been gone two weeks he telegraphed him, when the third week ended he telephoned him, and when the month was up he prepared to leave for darkest Chicago; in fact he was actually leaving his house, suit case in hand, when Smith drove up in a hansom and gleefully waved his hand.

Smith beckoned him to enter the cab. “I’m going home to put on my old clothes,” he said. “It’s all right, Tom. I’ve been collecting old furniture, tons of antique chairs and things. They were pretty widely scattered at the sale two years ago—”

“What sale, in the name of sanity?” shouted Kerns.

“Why, when Stanley Stevens failed to corner wheat he shot his head off before they pounced on his effects. I managed to find most of the things. I’ve sent them to my place, Abingdon, and now I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Certainly. And, Kerns, if she will have me it will be for my own sake. Do you know what she thinks? She thinks I’m a draughtsman at thirty dollars a week. Isn’t it delightful? Isn’t it perfectly splendid?”

“Dazzling,” whispered Kerns, unable to utter another word.

Smith’s progress was certainly rapid. When he arrived at the door of his tenement lodgings he fairly soared up the stairs, flight on flight, until he came to the top.

The door of his neighbor’s room stood open and he impulsively crossed the hallway, but there were only two men there moving out a table, and his slender blue-eyed neighbor was nowhere visible.

“What’s that for?” he inquired. “Is Miss Stevens moving?”

“No, but her table is,” said one of the men.

Something about the proceeding kept Smith silent. He saw one of the men drop his end of the table, close the door, lock it, and hang the key on a nail outside.

“That isn’t safe,” said Smith. “I’ll take charge of the key until Miss Stevens returns.”

He unhooked it, and, turning, let himself into his own room, but left the door ajar.

Two flights down the table drawer dropped out, dumping a pile of yellow manuscript on the stairs.

“Glory!” panted one of the movers; “that’s hers. Take it up and leave it with the guy in the glasses, Bill.”

And so it happened that Smith, standing outside on his fire escape for a breath of air, returned to find a mass of yellow manuscript littering his bed.

Wondering, he picked up the first sheet, saw his own name in her handwriting, stared, and sat down in astonishment to read. Suddenly his face burned fiery red, and, as long as he sat there, the deep color remained throbbing, scorching him anew with every page he turned.

After a long while he dropped the sheets and returned to the first page. It was dated in June, the day after his arrival.

He was slowly beginning to understand the matter now. He was beginning to realize that this manuscript had been placed in his room by mistake; that it had never been intended for him to read; that, if it had been written with a purpose, it had never been used for any purpose.

Then he remembered the moving of her table. Clearly the men had found it and, as he had assumed possession of her key, no doubt they had returned and flung the papers on his bed.

“In that case,” said Smith thoughtfully, “I think I’ll go down to the ailantus tree, and see if, by any chance, she is there.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

She was there, seated in a chair, very intent on her writing pad. He was quite near her before she noticed him, and then she seemed dazed for a moment, rising and holding out her hand mechanically, looking at him in silence as he held her fingers imprisoned.

“I did not think you would return,” she said. “It is a month—at least—”

“Are you glad to see me?”

“Of course,” she said simply, reseating herself. “Have you been well?”

“Yes; and you?”

“Perfectly, thank you.”

He looked around at the long grass withered in patches; at the leafless tree. “Do you remember our first encounter here?” he said.

“Perfectly. You told me that there was a dragon under the tree, and a Chinese bird sat in its branches. That was in August, I think. This is November. Look up at the branches. All the leaves are gone. Only the silvery cocoons are hanging in clusters everywhere.” And, bending slowly above her work again, “When are you going to turn our Tree of Dreams into a tower of bricks?”

But he only sat silent, smiling, watching her white fingers flying over the pad on her knees.

“I wonder,” she said carelessly, “how long you are going to stay here this time.”

“I wonder, too,” he said.

“Don’t you know?” she asked, raising her eyes and laughing faintly.

“No, I don’t. Besides, why should I leave this lodging house? I like it.”

“Can’t you afford to leave-after all that lucrative tower designing?”

He said, looking at her deliberately: “You know perfectly well that I can afford to.”

Something in the quiet voice and gaze of the man startled her, but only a delicate glow of rising color in her cheeks betrayed any lack of self-possession. “I don’t think I understand you,” she said.

“I think you do,” he insisted, seating himself at her feet in the grass.

She wrote a word or two on her pad, then looked down to meet his changed smile. A moment more, and she resumed her work in flushed confusion.

“You know who I am,” he said calmly. “I didn’t think you did until an hour ago. Shall I tell you what happened an hour ago?”

She managed to meet his gaze without expression, but she did not answer.

“Then I will tell you what happened,” he continued.

“Some men carried out a table from your room. A few moments later one of the men deposited a lot of loose manuscript which he had, I suppose, found in the table drawer. This all occurred while I was out on the balcony. When I returned to the room I found the papers on my bed. I could not avoid seeing my own name at the head of this breezy newspaper article. It is very cleverly written.”

Wave after wave of scarlet flooded her face.

“So you have known who I am all this time?” he nodded slowly.

“Y-yes.”

“It was a good chance—a legitimate chance for an article. You thought so, and you wrote it. The papers would have given it three columns and double leads…. Why didn’t you use it?”

The tears flashed in her eyes. “I did not use it for the same reason that I am here with you now! Some things can be done, and some cannot. Good-by.”

“Good-by?” he repeated slowly.

He stepped back; she passed before him, halted, turned, and spoke again, steadying her voice which broke deliciously in spite of her: “I did not mean to ridicule you. ‘When I wrote that article I had known you only a day or two—and I was desperate—frightened—half-starved. The chance came, and I took it—or tried to. But I couldn’t. I never could have. So—that is all.”

“I knew all that, too,” he said. “I only thought I’d speak of it. I wanted to ask you something else—”

She had halted.

“Ask it,” she said, exercising every atom of self-command.

“Won’t you turn around?”

“No. I—I cannot. What is it you wish, Mr. Smith?”

“Ah—about this tree. It’s to be taken up, I believe. They’ve a method of doing it, you know. I—ah—have considered arrangements.”

She made no movement.

“Fact is,” he ventured, “I’ve a sort of a country place in the Berkshires. Do you think that our tree would do well in the Berkshires?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Smith.”

“Oh, I thought, perhaps, you’d be likely to know!”

There was a pause of a full minute. “Is that all?” she asked, turning toward him with tear-flushed self-possession—but she had no idea that he was so close to her—no idea of what he was doing with her hands so suddenly imprisoned in his.

“Can you stand such a-a m-man as I am?” he stammered, the ancestral sentimental streak in the ascendency. “Would yo—ah—mind marrying me?”

Her face was pale enough now.

“Do you mean you love me?” she said, dazed. And the next moment she had released her hands, stepping toward the tree.

“Yes, I mean that,” he repeated; “I love you.”

“But—but I do not love you, Mr. Smith—”

“I—I know it. P-perhaps you could try. D-do you mind trying—a little—”

He had followed her to the ailantus. She retreated, facing him, and now stood backed up against the tree, her hands flat against the trunk behind her.

“Couldn’t you try?” he asked. “I love you—I love you dearly. I know you’re younger—I know you think me m-more or less of a—”

“I don’t!”

“I suppose I really haven’t many brains,” he said; “but yours are still intact.”

Her blue eyes filled and grew starry.

“Did you read that entire article?” she asked unsteadily—“did you?”

“Yes—in bits—before I knew you had not meant me to…. I guess I am the sort of a man you make fun of—”

Her eyes met his fairly for a moment, were lowered, then again raised. Something within them gave him courage, or perhaps the splendid rising color in her face, or perhaps the provocation of her mouth. And he kissed her. She did not stir; her lips were stiffly unresponsive.

But when, once more, he bent above her, she caught both his hands with a sob and met his lips with heart and soul, closing her wet eyes.

“D-darling,” said J. Abingdon Smith, bending his head over hers where it lay buried in his shoulder, “I don’t mind being an ass—really I don’t—”

Her hands crushed his, signaling silence.

“It isn’t the funny things you wrote about me,” he persisted; “but I really am that sort of a man. And likely to continue. You don’t care, do you, dear?”

“W-when I love you!” she sobbed; “how can you say such things! D-do you think I’d love an idiot?”

He was discreetly silent for a while, then:

“Anyway, I’ve found all your furniture—the bandy-legged chairs and things,” he whispered cheerfully. “They are waiting for you at—ah—Abingdon—a place I have in the country. Are you pleased?”

She lifted her face and made an effort to speak.

“Never mind,” he said, dizzy with happiness, “we’ll talk it over to-morrow. I think,” he added, “that I’ll have the men here to-morrow to remove our tree. There’s a splendid place for it on the lawn.”

She turned, her hands clasped in his, and looked up at the Tree of Dreams. Then, very gently, she bent and laid her lips against the bark.

EX CURIA

And now, at his attorney’s request, and before his report was made, they decided to run through the documents in the case once more, reviewing everything from the very beginning. So young Courtlandt, his attorney, lighted a cigar and unwrapped the pink tape from the bundle of papers.

There was enough daylight left to read by, for wall and ceiling still bore the faded imprint of the red winter sunset. Edgerton sat before the fire, his well-shaped head buried in his hands; Courtlandt, lounging on a sofa by the window, unfolded the first paper, puffed thoughtfully at his cigar, and presently began to read without inflection or apparent interest:

Paris, December 24, 1902.

John Edgerton, Esq.

Sir: My client, Michael Innis, is seriously ill, and I am writing you on his behalf and at his urgent solicitation.

It would appear that, during the panic of 1884, my client came to your father’s assistance, at a time when your father’s financial ruin, involving also, I believe, the ruin of many of his friends, was apparently only a question of hours.

It would also appear that, upon your father’s death, you wrote Mr. Innis, voluntarily assuming your father’s unpaid obligations. (Copy of your letter herewith inclosed.)

It further appears that Mr. Innis, accepting the assurance of your personal gratitude, generously offered to wait for the sums due him, permitting you to pay at your own convenience. (Copy of Mr. Innis’s letter inclosed herewith.)

In the conclusion of this last letter (No. 2 on file) Mr. Innis mentions his lifelong respect for your father and his family, humorously drawing the social distinction between the late Winthrop Edgerton, Esq., and Michael Innis, the Tammany contractor; and rather wistfully contrasting the future prospects of Mr. Edgerton’s son, yourself, and the chances of the child of Michael Innis.

To this letter you replied (copy herewith), repeating in a manly fashion your assurance of gratitude, holding yourself at the service of Mr. Innis.

Now, sir, if your assurances meant more than mere civility, you have an opportunity to erase the deep obligations that your father assumed.

Mr. Innis is a man broken in mind and body. His fortune was invested, against my advice, in Madagascar Railways. To-day he could not realize a thousand dollars from the investment.

For twenty years his one absorbing passion has been the education and fitting of his only child for a position in the world which he himself could never hope to attain. Wealth and education, linked with an agreeable personality, may go anywhere in this century. And his daughter has had the best that Europe can afford.

Within a month all is changed. Sir, it is sad to see the stricken man lying here, watching his daughter.

And now, knowing that impending dissolution is near, terror of the future for her has wrung an appeal from him to you—a strange appeal, Mr. Edgerton. Money alone is little; he asks more; he asks your protection for her—not the perfunctory protection of a guardian for a ward, but the guidance of a father, the companionship of a brother, the loyalty of a husband.

The man is blinded by worship of his own child; your father’s son represents to him all that is noblest, most honorable, most desirable in the world.

Sir, this is a strange request, an overdrawn draft upon your gratitude, I fear. Yet I write you as I am bidden. An answer should be returned by cable with as little delay as possible. He will live until he receives it. Marriage by proxy is legal. Special dispensation is certain.

I am, sir, with great respect,

Your very humble servant,

William Campbell.

Att’y and Counselor at Law,

7 rue d’Issy.

When Courtlandt finished reading he folded the letter, glancing across at Edgerton: “That was written two years ago to-day, you remember?—this foreclosure of his mortgage upon your gratitude!”

“I remember,” said Edgerton.

“From the gratitude of the conscientious, good Lord deliver us!” murmured Courtlandt, unfolding another paper. “This is a copy of the asinine cablegram you sent, without consulting me.”

And he read:

Innis,
23 rue d’Abdul Hamid,
Paris.

I assume all responsibility for your daughter’s future. Utterly impossible for me to leave New York. If you believe marriage advisable, arrange for special dispensation and ceremony by proxy.

John Edgerton.

Courtlandt rose and walked over to the fire where Edgerton was sitting. His client raised his head, eyes a trifle dazed from the pressure of his fingers on the closed lids.

“What the merry deuce did you send that cable for?” muttered Courtlandt under his breath.

“I don’t know—a debt of gratitude—and he did not want it paid in money. I—an appeal like that had to be honored, you see. I was ashamed to haggle at the day of reckoning. A man cannot appraise his own gratitude.”

“Such things cannot be asked of gratitude,” growled the attorney. “The business of the world is not run on impulse! What is gratitude?”

“It is not gratitude if it asks that question,” returned Edgerton; “and I fear that after all it was not exactly gratitude. Gratitude gives; a debt of honor exacts. There is no profit in following this line further, is there, Billy?”

“No,” assented Courtlandt, “unless it’s going to help us disentangle the unfortunate affair.” He unfolded another paper. “It’s too dark to read,” he observed, leaning forward into the firelight.

The red reflection of the coals played over his face and the black-edged notepaper he was scanning. And he read, slowly:

January 3, 1903.

Dear Mr. Edgerton: For your very gentle letter to me I beg to thank you; I deeply appreciate your delicacy at a time when kindness is most needed. Had you not written as you have, I should have found it difficult to discuss a situation which I am only just beginning to realize must be as embarrassing to you as it is to me.

In the grief and distress which overwhelmed me when I was so suddenly summoned from the convent to find my father so ill, I did not, could not realize the step I was asked to take. All I knew was that he desired it, begged for it, and it meant to me nothing—this ceremony which made you my husband—nothing except a little happiness for the father I loved.

He made the responses for you, I kneeling at his bedside, scarce able to speak in my grief. There were two brief ceremonies, the civil and religious. He died very quietly that night.

Pray believe me that I understand how impossible it is for you to leave affairs of importance to come to Paris at this time. My aunt, who is with the Ursulines, has received me. It is very quiet, very peaceful; I have opportunity for meditation, and for studies which I left uncompleted. Mr. Campbell, whom you have so considerately retained for my legal guidance, is kind and tactful. He has, I believe, communicated with you in regard to the most generous provision you have made for me. Pray believe that I require very, very little. I regret the loss of my father’s fortune only because it should have perhaps compensated you a trifle for your kindness to my father in his last hours.

I hesitate—I feel the greatest reluctance and delicacy in addressing you upon a matter that troubles me. It is this, Mr. Edgerton: if, through gratitude to my father for service done your father, you offered to become responsible for me, perhaps—I do not know—perhaps, as you have done me the honor of protecting me with your name, it is all that could be expected—and I hasten to assure you that I am content. Indeed, had I realized, had I even begun to comprehend what I was doing—Yet what could I do but obey him at such a time?

So, if you think it well that we remain apart for a while, I am content and happy to obey your wishes.

Your name, which I now bear, I honor; your wishes, monsieur, are my commands.

With gratitude, confidence, and respect, I remain,

Faithfully yours,

Kathleen Innis Edgerton.

Convent of the Ursulines,
rue Dauinont.

Courtlandt refolded the letter, and sat rubbing his eyes. “For Heaven’s sake let’s have a light!” he grumbled, leaning over and pushing the electric button.

The light broke out overhead, flooding the library, glistening among gay evergreen wreaths tied with bunches of Christmas holly which hung against the library windows.

Edgerton raised his pale face, then his head sank on his breast; he folded his arms, gazing absently into the fire. “Go on,” he said.

So Courtlandt read other letters from Mrs. Edgerton, brief notes, perfunctory, reserved, and naïve; and he read letters from Campbell, the attorney, acknowledging provisions made for his young client.

When he finished he refolded all the papers, retied them with pink tape, and laid them on the table at Edgerton’s elbow. “Now,” he said, “comes the question. You have arrived at the conclusion that Mrs. Edgerton desires and deserves her freedom. And you want to know what I think.”

“Yes,” said Edgerton.

“You gave me a month to look up the matter.”

“Yes, a month.”

“And now you want me to report, don’t you, Jack?”

Edgerton glanced up. “If you’re ready,” he said.

“I’m ready. First I want to ask you a question. Is there any woman you have met, before or since your marriage, whom you might fall in love with if you were free to do so?”

“No, I believe not—I don’t know. I am—I was not actuated by selfishness.”

“All right. Still, you are capable of loving somebody, are you not?”

“I fancy so. I should like to have a chance to marry—for love.”

“But you never met the right one?”

“There is—I have caught a glimpse—once—one woman—”

“Is that all?” laughed Courtlandt. “That’s not enough to bowl you over.”

“It was almost enough!” retorted Edgerton. Through his voice rang an undertone of impatience. His attorney looked up quickly.

“Oh, is it as serious as that? No wonder you want your freedom! Who is the woman?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” retorted the younger man sullenly. “I told you that I saw a woman once, whom I should like to have had a chance to see again. What of it? I never shall.”

“When was this, Jack?”

“Yesterday—if you want to know.”

“Where?”

“Driving in the park.”

“Who is she?”

“You could answer that question,” said Edgerton, wheeling around on his friend. “You were driving with her.”

Courtlandt stared, slowly turning redder and redder.

“You wanted to know,” observed Edgerton, eying him. “It means nothing, of course—I was riding along the bridle path and I caught a glimpse of you, and I saw her face. I thought her beautiful, that’s all. Drop the subject.”

“Certainly,” answered Courtlandt. He opened his match box and relighted his cigar; then he fell to musing, breaking the burnt match up into little pieces and tossing the morsels, one by one, into the fire.

“Jack,” he drawled, still busy with the match, “you gave me a month to report upon this matter concerning the dissolution of your marriage. It might interest you to learn the first step I took.”

“What was it?” inquired Edgerton, raising his troubled eyes.

“I went to Paris.”

“To—to see—”

“Certainly, to see Mrs. Edgerton.”

The men’s eyes met; the lawyer shrugged his shoulders.

“Mrs. Edgerton is very inexperienced, very young,” he said. “She is, of course, a Catholic. But if she desired her freedom a thousand times as fervently as you might desire yours, the law of her religion bars her way. You knew that of course.”

“I thought—sometimes—” began the other.

“You are wrong.”

Edgerton stared into the glowing coals.

“So you left it to me to see what could be done,” added the attorney dryly.

Edgerton assented.

“Well,” said Courtlandt, “I shouldn’t have accepted such a commission had I not known it was quite unselfish on your part. You told me that her letters to you were pitifully loyal and conscientious; that you felt like a jailer watching an innocent life prisoner; that if you only knew how to do it you would give her the liberty God meant her to enjoy—liberty to love and be loved. And you allowed me a month to find the way to settle this wretched affair.”

“Yes. Is there a way?”

“Only one,” replied Courtlandt gravely. He rose, offering his hand.

Edgerton also rose, tall, clean-cut, closely cropped hair just tinged with gray at the temples.

“Only one way,” repeated Courtlandt deliberately, “and that is for you to discuss the situation with Mrs. Edgerton.”

“What!” exclaimed Edgerton sharply, dropping his friend’s hand. “You know I can’t leave town to go to Paris.”

Courtlandt coolly consulted his watch. “I neglected to say that Mrs. Edgerton is in town. I believe”—he glanced at his watch again, then closed it with a snap—“I suggested that she waive ceremony and meet us here.”

“Here!” muttered Edgerton. “Wait a moment, will you? Do you mean to say that she is coming here to-night?”

“Why not?” said Courtlandt, his gray eyes narrowing. “If she chooses to accept my advice, if she is woman enough to overlook what is due her from her husband, why should she not come here as freely as you come?”

“Are you my attorney or hers?” demanded the other in astonishment.

“Yours, Jack—acting for your interest—which is hers, too—which must be hers. Where is your sense of honor? Where is your sense of justice? Has the glimpse of a woman’s face in the park seared your eyes? Is it true that an indifferent man can be just, but a man in love is a partisan? You could be coldly considerate and deal out passionless justice until yesterday. Now for the first time the fetters gall you. Is this the crisis where you flinch?”

He stood, jerking on his gloves, scanning Edgerton’s face.

“I told her that the proper place to discuss the situation was under her own roof; and I am right. Do you consider a public hotel the suitable environment for such a conference? Her pride and intelligence comprehended me. That’s all I have to say.”

“Why did you not tell me before this that she was in town? I understand the requirements of civilization, do I not?”

“I did not tell you, because we landed only yesterday morning.”

“She came over with you?”

“On my advice and at my earnest solicitation.”

Edgerton stared at him, tugging at his short mustache.

“What are we to discuss?” he demanded sullenly. “As she is Catholic we cannot discuss divorce. We could, of course, come to some conclusion concerning a modus vivendi.”

“I expect you to come to some such conclusion. Two years ago you were twenty-eight—an oversensitive young man, impulsive, illogical, and morbid concerning personal obligations. Without consulting your legal adviser you perpetrated a crime—for it is criminal to parody the highest safeguard to civilization—marriage. It was a crime; your wife is your accomplice—particeps criminis, my friend. Neither you nor she deserves mercy.”

He turned away, buttoning his gloves.

“It’s touched your temples with gray,” he observed. “You have learned something at thirty, Jack, even if it’s cost you what you think a mésalliance.”

As he stepped to the door a maid appeared with a card on a salver. Edgerton glanced at it, then looked straight into Courtlandt’s eyes.

“I’m sorry I needed this lesson in decency,” he said. “It was all right for you to administer it. You need not worry; I understand that I am at my wife’s disposal, not she at mine. I’ve kept my medicine waiting for two years, that’s all.”

“Oh, you’re getting on,” observed Courtlandt carelessly. “Good night—I’ve a word to say to Mrs. Edgerton before I go.”

“You mean to stay, don’t you?” began the other, flushing up. “It would be less trying for her—”

But Courtlandt hurried off down the stairs, muttering vaguely of engagements for Christmas Eve, leaving Edgerton staring after him through the dimly lighted hallway.

He heard Courtlandt enter the drawing-room; he could distinguish the quick, low exchange of greeting; then he went down slowly, steadying himself by the banisters.

A young girl in furs turned toward him as he entered; he caught a glimpse of blue eyes, a glint of bright hair framed in fluffy fur; he heard Courtlandt’s cool, easy voice presenting him to his wife; he took the slim gloved hand outstretched, held it stupidly until it was withdrawn; then Courtlandt’s voice again, promising to return, and exacting her promise to wait here for him if he should be detained.

“I’m sorry I can’t remain and dine with you and Mr. Edgerton on this night before Christmas,” added Courtlandt blandly, making for the door.

“Oh!” she said, surprised, “I did not understand that Mr. Edgerton invited us.”

The color stung Edgerton’s face, and he said in a low voice: “You are at home, madam; it is for you to invite us. Perhaps Mr. Courtlandt will stay if you ask him; I will if you ask me.”

She gave him a confused, brilliant little smile, a delicate tint mounting to her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said; “you—everybody is so delightful to me. Will you stay, Mr. Courtlandt? I—we beg of you! No? Then, until I—until we have the pleasure—at nine, I believe?”

From force of habit she turned to the dazed maid, who also instinctively recognized authority, and opened the door which a second later closed upon the most profoundly excited young attorney in Manhattan.

Mrs. Edgerton raised her blue eyes to her husband as a maid relieved her of her furs and little gilt-edged tricorne.

“I—I wonder if you are as embarrassed as I am?” she said, laughing and touching her golden hair with a frank side glance at the mirror.

“Dreadfully embarrassed,” admitted Edgerton, scarcely conscious of what he uttered; oblivious, too, of the usages of civilization until she sank into an armchair with a shy “May I?”

“It is for me to ask the privilege,” he said, biting his lip.

“Oh, if you please?”—she smiled, with a gesture toward the chair beside her.

Seated there with him under the crystal chandelier, she fell silent, meeting his gaze at moments with a questioning smile, partly confident, partly uncertain.

“I saw you in the park yesterday,” he said under his breath, never taking his eyes from her.

“I saw you, too,” she replied quickly. “You rode a bay. I never imagined—” she bent her head, thoughtfully studying the arabesques on the rug. “You ride very well,” she added. Then, after a moment’s silence: “And you remembered me?”

“I recognized you at once,” he said, “the instant I entered this room. It was that which startled me—made me appear stupid—”

“You did not appear stupid—”

“I was awkward, dumb—”

“I chattered sufficiently for two. Indeed, I was not at all composed.”

“Did—did you recognize me at once?”

She looked at him, she glanced at the rug, her blue eyes grew vague, lost in retrospective reverie.

He did not repeat the question, but asked her how long it was since she had been in America.

“Oh, many years—I was only three when my father went to France.” Then the warm color came into her face and she clasped her hands impulsively. “I do not believe,” she said, “that I have conveyed to you in letters my deep appreciation of your loyalty to me. I—I did not know how to express it—I do not now. Believe me, monsieur, it does exist!”

“What have you to thank me for?” he asked almost brusquely. Then, in a rush of bitterness: “Your sentiments honor yourself, not me, madam. For two years I have been responsible for your happiness. What have I done to secure it?”

She turned a trifle pale, unprepared for such a question. But she answered very sweetly: “You left me guarded by the honor of your own name. I have never wanted for anything; I have had the quiet and seclusion I desired. What more is there, Mr. Edgerton?”

And as he remained silent, she raised her head with a gay little smile: “You could not leave your affairs to come to France; you did not suggest that I come to New York. How could I know that I should—”

“What?” he urged.

But she closed her red lips, sitting mute, suddenly shy again.

After a moment she said: “Mais—he is absent a long while, Mr. Courtlandt.”

“He isn’t coming until nine o’clock,” said Edgerton. He glanced across at the clock. It was half-past seven.

“So, in the meanwhile, we are to discuss matters of importance,” she suggested seriously. “Mr. Courtlandt said so. What, monsieur, are we to discuss?”

“There is absolutely nothing that I know of to discuss,” replied Edgerton slowly.

“Nothing?” she inquired, wide-eyed and innocent.

“Nothing, except your wishes, and they admit of no discussion. You are at home now.”

“But I—but I am staying at the Holland—” Edgerton touched a button; a servant appeared.

“Mrs. Edgerton’s luggage is at the Holland,” he said quietly. “Telephone for it.”

Mrs. Edgerton half rose from her chair; then, meeting her husband’s grave eyes, she sank back, crimson to the temples.

“We are merely about to exchange quarters,” he said pleasantly. “I shall be most comfortable at the Holland.”

“Oh, you shall not!—no, it is all wrong!” she pleaded, the color fading in her face. “I cannot come into your house—into your life—”

“It is your house,” he said gently. “Still, if—if you don’t mind—there is a better way still of arranging matters. I have a whole floor on the third story; and perhaps you might not mind if I retain it. I promise,” he added, laughing, “to be a model tenant and not keep coal in my bath tub!”

She laughed, too, a little uncertainly.

“You are so generous—so kindly,” she said. “How can you endure to have a perfectly silly girl march into your house—”

“Your house!”

“Your house! Carry it by assault, capture the nicest suite, and drive you to the roof among the sparrows! No, it is shameful! More than that, it is absurd!”

“I never have occupied the rooms on the second floor,” he protested. “They have been vacant since I took this house.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. They are too pretty for a man who smokes a pipe—all rococo, and furniture with beagle legs, you know.”

“For whom were they intended?” she asked innocently.

He reddened. “I bought the house after our wedding,” he hesitated; “then, afterwards, from your letters, I fancied that you might prefer to remain abroad. So I said nothing.”

She bent her head. “I—I thought it fairer—to you,” she said in a low voice. “I would have come had you asked me. I—how was I to know, Mr. Edgerton?”

They sat silent, eyes bent on the floor. Presently he went on: “So I had that suite fixed up for you. And I moved upstairs. I am very happy that you are to occupy it.”

“Do you really desire it?”

“You have no idea how pretty it is,” he urged.

“Is it so pretty?”

“Come up and look at it!”

She sprang to her feet on the impulse, smiling, confident of his kindness. And they mounted the stairs together, sans façon, arriving on the second floor breathless.

“Oh,” she cried softly, as she entered, “it is perfectly charming!” She stood a moment, gazing around, then with a delightful gesture bade him enter.

“Is this really mine?” she repeated. “How delicious!” She passed from room to room, pausing before bits of furniture that attracted her, touching and lifting the silver on dresser and table. “My own initials!” she said under her breath. “And what is this?” laying her white fingers on a jewel case. “Am I to open it? Really! Oh, the beauty of it all! I—I am perfectly overwhelmed, mons—Mr. Edgerton!” And she sat down on the edge of the bed, pressing her hands to her eyes.

A maid came to the door; the luggage from the Holland had arrived. Presently two burly expressmen entered, staggering under the first of a series of trunks. Her maid directed the men; Mrs. Edgerton sat, hands folded, smiling, blue eyes a trifle dim, while her husband, standing beside her, watched the operations.

The silvery chime of a clock sounded, striking eight times, and on either side of the dial gilt cupids fluttered their burnished wings.

“Impossible!” exclaimed Edgerton. Then with a laugh almost boyish, he said: “We’re supposed to dine at eight.”

She looked vacantly at her husband. “Dinner already! Can it be possible time has flown like that? And I—behold me! Have I time to dress?”

“Time is yours to dispose of,” he said, smiling back into her eyes; “all here are yours to dispose of as you see fit.”

“Even you, monsieur?” She laughed in her excitement and happiness, not weighing words and their meaning until their echo returned again to appall her—while her maid aided her to dress—and the echo of his answer, too, rang persistently in her ears: “Yes, to pardon, to dispose of, to command, always, as long as I have life to serve you.”

And now she was ready, smiling nervously back at her own flushed reflection in the mirror—a young girl stirred to the soul by kindness, almost intoxicated at a glimpse of her own undreamed-of beauty, surprised there in the depths of the mirror.

The banisters were decorated with twisted ropes of evergreens; she descended slowly, cheeks burning, eyes fixed steadily on her husband, who stood motionless below to receive her. A tiny light here and there caught the thick tendrils of her heavy burnished hair and glimmered on her smooth, full neck and arms.

At the foot of the stairs she paused, made him a low reverence, then, gathering her silken train, she looked fearlessly into his face and laid her hand lightly in his.

So, moving serenely side by side, they passed under holly and mistletoe and ropes of evergreen, through the long drawing-room, through the music room, slowly, more slowly, until the great velvet hangings barred their way.

There they paused, turning face to face, her small hand scarcely touching his.

“Can you forgive me?” he asked under his breath.

“Forgive you?” she repeated tremulously; “I can do—more than that…. Ask me.”

But there was no time, for the butler, bowing, had drawn the portières to the full length of the golden cords.

THE GOLDEN POOL

So the doctor, finding his patient’s quarters untenanted for the first time in many months, hastened downstairs and out to the veranda, where he discovered a lean, soldierly looking young fellow clad in fishing coat fussing with rod and reel.

“Oho, my enterprising friend!” he said. “What mischief are you hatching now?”

“I’m going to try for your big trout in the Golden Pool,” said his patient calmly.

This unlooked-for energy appeared to embarrass the doctor. His grim mouth tightened.

“Don’t go now,” he said; “it’s too late in the morning.”

“I’m going anyhow,” retorted his patient.

“Don’t be obstinate; that fish won’t rise till evening.”

“I know it, but I’m going.”

“Against my orders!” demanded the exasperated doctor.

“With pleasure,” replied the young man gayly. “And it’s your own doing, too. Do you remember what you said last night?”

“I said I saw a big fish rising in that pool,” growled the doctor.

“Exactly; and that has done more to brace me up than all your purple pills for peculiar people.”

“Don’t go to the Golden Pool now!” said the doctor with emphasis. “I have a particular reason for making this request.”

“What reason?”

“I won’t tell you.”

“You’re after that fish yourself! No, you don’t!”

“That’s idiotic.”

“Well, anyhow, good-by.”

“You shan’t!” exclaimed the doctor wrathfully. “Give me that rod!”

But his patient clung to the rod, laughing.

“Now what the devil possesses you to make for the Golden Pool at this particular minute?” demanded the vexed doctor. “You’ve been an invalid for a year and more, and up to this moment you’ve done what I told you.”

His patient continued to laugh—that same light-hearted, infectious laugh which the doctor had not heard in many a month, and he looked at him keenly.

“All the same, you’re not well yet, and you know it,” he said.

“My aversion to women?”

“Partly.”

“You mean my memory still fails me? Well, then, what do you think happened this morning?”

“What?” inquired the doctor sulkily.

“This: I went out to the stables and recognized Phelan and Riley! How’s that for a start? Then”—he glanced across the lawn where an old gardener pottered about among the petunias—“there’s Dawson, isn’t it? And this is my own place—Gleniris! Isn’t it? Besides,” he added, “my aversion to women is disappearing; I saw a girl on the lawn from my window this morning. Who is she?”

“Was she dressed in white?” asked the doctor.

“Don’t remember.”

“You never before saw her?”

“No—I don’t know. I didn’t see her face.”

“So it seems you can’t recollect the back of a relative or a neighbor! Now what do you think of yourself?”

“Relative? Nonsense,” he laughed; “I haven’t any. As for the neighbors, give me time, for Heaven’s sake! I’m doing beautifully. There are millions of things that set me thinking and worrying now—funny flashes of memory—hints of the past, vague glimpses that excite me to effort; but nothing—absolutely nothing—yet of that blank year. Was it a year?”

“More; never mind that!”

“How long was it?” asked his patient wistfully.

“Sixteen months.”

“You said I was shot, I think.”

“No, I didn’t. You think you were, but it was done with a Malay kris. Now, what can you remember about it?”

The young man stood silent, fumbling with his rod.

“And you tell me you’re cured!” observed the doctor sarcastically, “and you can’t even recollect how you got swiped with a Malay kris!”

“I might if I could see the Malay—or the kris.”

The doctor, who had begun to pace the veranda, halted and glanced sharply at his patient.

“The best way to remember things is to see ’em? Is that your idea?”

“I think so. It’s true I’ve seen Phelan many times without remembering him, but to-day I recognized him. Isn’t that good medicine?”

The doctor thought a moment, fished out his watch from the fob pocket, regarded it absently, and came down the steps to the lawn, where his patient stood making practice casts with his light bamboo rod.

“I’ll tell you why I didn’t want you to go to the Golden Pool,” he said.

“Well, why?”

“Poachers,” replied the doctor, watching him. “They fish in the pools, and they use your canoe, and they even have the impudence to go bathing in the Golden Pool…. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I think the poacher I catch will do the worrying,” said the young man, laughing. “Is that all?”

“That is all. Go ahead if you want to. If you run across that girl invite her to dinner. She’s a friend of mine.” And the doctor walked off, shoving his hands deep into his capacious pockets.

His patient reeled in the line, smiling to himself, and started off across the meadow at a good swinging pace. He entered the forest by the meadow bridge, where a lank yokel was mowing grass.

“Mornin’!” ventured the native, with a doubtful grin of recognition.

“Look here,” said the young man, halting in the path of the scythe, “ought I to know your name? Tell me the truth.”

“I cal’late yew orter,” replied the yokel. “I’ve been chorin’ for yew close tew ten year.”

A shadow fell over the master’s lean face, and he went on through the underbrush, muttering to himself, passing his thin hand again and again across his forehead.

“Oh, well, I’ll stick to it,” he said aloud; “a man can’t dance on a broken leg nor think with a broken head; they’ve got to be mended first—well mended.”

Walking on through the fragrant forest, the shadow of care slipped from his face again, leaving it placid once more. The scent of the June woods, the far, dull throbbing of a partridge drumming in leafy depths, the happy sighing of a woodland world astir, all these were gentle stimulants to that sanity toward the shadowy borders of which he had so long been struggling from the region of dreadful night.

Spreading branches, dew-spangled, slapped his face as he passed; the moist rich odor of clean earth filled throat and lungs; a subdued, almost breathless expectancy brooded in the wake of the south wind.

When he emerged from the forest and entered the long glade, mountain and thicket were swimming in crystalline light; ferns hung weighted with dew; the outrush of bird music was incessant.

Far in the wet woods he could hear the river flowing—or was it the breeze freshening in the pines?

Listening, enraptured, boyish recollections awoke, and he instinctively took his bearings from the blue peak in the east. So the Ousel Pool lay to the west. He would fish that uncertain water later; but first the Golden Pool, where the great trout had been seen, rising as recklessly as a minnow in a meadow brook.

Now, all excitement and expectancy, he waded on, knee-deep in drenched grasses, watching the soft mothlike flutter of the bluebirds among the iris. They had always hovered over this spot in June, he remembered now. Truly summer skies were healing him of his hurt; he recognized the belt of blue-beech saplings all crossbarred with sunlight, and he heard the familiar rush of waters below.

Suddenly, beyond the sprayed undergrowth, he caught a glow of color, a glimpse of that rich sunny foliage which gave the Golden Pool its name; and now the familiar water lay glimmering before him through the trees, and he began the descent, stepping quietly as a deer entering a strange covert.

At the water’s edge he paused, cautiously; but there was no canoe lying under the alders.

Memory halted short, then began groping backward through the years.

Where was the canoe? There had always been one here—in his boyhood and ever since—up to that obscured and cloudy space of time—He dropped to his knees and parted the leafy thicket with his hands. There was no canoe there, nothing except a book lying on a luncheon basket; and—what was this?—and this?

He stared stupidly for a moment, then rose and stepped through the thicket to the edge of the water. A canoe glittered out there, pulled up on a flat, sunny rock in midstream, and upon the rock lay a girl in a dripping bathing dress drying her hair in the sun.

Instantly an odd sense of it all having happened before seized him—the sun on the water, the canoe, the slim figure lying there. And when she indolently raised her hand, stifling a dainty yawn, and stretched her arms luxuriously, it seemed to him the repetition of a forgotten scene too familiar to surprise him.

Then, as she sat up, leisurely twisting her sun-bronzed hair, a chance turn of her head brought him into direct line of vision. They stared at one another across the sunny water.

For one second the thought flashed on him that he knew her; then in the same moment all that had seemed familiar in the situation faded into strangeness and apprehension, and he was aware that he had never before looked upon her face.

Yet, curiously enough, his long and melancholy aversion to women had not returned at sight of her. She had risen in surprise, wide dark eyes on him; and he spoke immediately, saying he had not meant to disturb her, and that she was quite welcome to use the canoe.

Her first stammered words annoyed him. “Did the doctor—come with you? Are you—are you alone?”

“I suppose the entire countryside knows I have been ill,” he said; “but I’m perfectly able to be about without a doctor.” He began to laugh. “But those are not the questions. The questions are what are people doing in these woods with luncheon baskets and summer novels, and how am I to fish this pool if people swim in it; and how am I to fish at all if an attractive stranger takes possession of my canoe?”

“I—I had no idea you were coming here,” she faltered. “I bathe here every morning, and then I lunch here and read.”

He laughed outright at her innocent acknowledgment of the trespass.

“I have a clear case against you,” he said. “Haven’t you read all my notices nailed up on trees? ‘Warning! All trespassers will be dealt with to the full extent of the law’—and much more to similar effect? And do you know what a very dreadful thing it is to be dealt with to the full extent of the law?”

“But—I am not—not trespassing,” she said. “Can you not remember?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” he replied, smiling; “I’m afraid I have a clear case against you. The doctor warned me that trespassers were about.”

“Did he know you were coming here?” she asked incredulously.

“He did. And I’m afraid somebody has been caught in flagrant délit! What do you think?”

He stood there, amused, curiously noting the play of emotions over her delicate features. Consternation, dismay, had given place to quick resentment; that in turn died out, leaving something of comprehension in her perplexed face.

“So he sent you to catch a trespasser?” she said.

“I was coming to fish. Well, yes; he said I might find one.”

“A trespasser? A stranger?” She hesitated; there was hurt astonishment in her voice. Suddenly her face took a deeper flush, as though she had come to an unexpected decision; her entire manner changed to serene self-possession. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked curiously.

“I’m afraid I can’t put you in jail,” he admitted. “You see, there’s no punishment for swimming in favorite trout pools and spoiling a man’s morning sport. Now, if you had only thought of catching one of my trout I could arrange to have you imprisoned.”

“Please arrange it immediately, then,” she said, lifting an enormous trout from the canoe and holding it up by the gills with both hands.

“Good Lord,” he gasped, “it’s the big one!” And he sat down suddenly on a log.

Her smiling defiance softened a trifle. “Did you really wish to catch this fish very much?” she asked. “I—I never supposed you would come here—to-day.”

“The enormity of your crime stuns me,” he said. “First you invade my domain, then you abstract my canoe, then you swim in my favorite pool, then you catch the biggest fish that ever came out of it.”

“No,” she said, “I was not such a goose as to swim first. I caught the fish first.”

“Recount to me the battle,” he said with a groan. “Fish like that only rise once in a lifetime. Tell me how you—but that’s useless. It was the usual case of a twig and a bent pin, I suppose?”

She smiled uncertainly, and lifted a rod from the canoe.

“By Jove, that looks like one of my rods!” he exclaimed. “Where did you get it?”

Her eyes were bright with excitement; she shook her head, laughing.

“Are you in league with my doctor? Who are you?” he insisted.

“Only a poacher,” she admitted. “I creep about and lurk outside windows where doctors talk in loud voices about big trout they have seen. Then—I go and catch them.”

They were both laughing now; she standing beside the canoe, rod in hand, he balanced on a rock opposite.

Yet, even while laughing, his thin face sobered, darkening as though a gray shadow had crept across it.

“Are you a neighbor of mine?” he asked. “If you are, you will know why I ask it. If you are not, never mind,” he added wearily.

She shook her head. His face cleared.

“I thought you were not a neighbor; I was certain that I had never seen you—as certain as a man can be awakening from—from illness, with his mind—his memory—shaky—almost blank.” He bent his head, gazing into the water. Then he looked up. “You know the doctor? I think I saw you on the lawn this morning.”

“Are you sure you have never before seen me?” she asked, with a ghost of a smile.

“I thought at first—for an instant—the canoe on the rock, and the sunshine, and you—” He fell silent, groping through the darkened corridors of thought for the key to memory.

In the sunlit hush a rippling noise sounded far out across the pool; then up out of the glassy water shot a sinuous shape, dark against the sun—a fish in silhouette, curving over with a flapping splash. Widening circles spread from a center where a few bubbles floated; the pool became placid once more—a mirror for the tapestry of golden thickets set with the heavenly hue above.

The long-dormant passion which sleeps but never dies awoke in him; the flush on his lean cheeks deepened as he turned and looked across the pool where the pretty intruder stood watching him, an eager question dancing in her eyes.

“I’d like to try,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Paddle very quietly over here-very carefully and without a splash. Can you do it?”

She loosened the canoe noiselessly, a lithe figure in her wet brown skirt and stockings. The mellow glow enveloped her as she moved into the shadows; and she seemed, in the soft forest light, part of the woodland harmony, blending with it as tawny-tinted shadows blend.

The canoe slipped into the pool; she knelt in the stern; then, with one silent push, sent it like an arrow across the water. He caught and steadied the frail craft; she stepped from it and sprang without a sound into the green shadows beside him.

He was muttering to himself: “I’ve forgotten some things—but not how to throw a fly, I think. Let us see—let us see.”

She stood motionless as he embarked, watching him raise his rod and send the tiny brightly colored flies out over the water. The delicate accuracy seemed to fascinate her; her dark eyes followed the long upward loop of the back cast, the whistling flight of the silken line, the instant’s suspense as the leader curved, straightened out, and fell, dropping three flies softly on the still surface of the pool.

As the canoe drifted nearer, nearer to the spot where the trout had leaped, the sharp dry click of the reel, the windlike whistle of the line, grew fainter. Suddenly, far ahead of the floating flies, a dark lump broke the water; there came a spatter of spray, a flash of pink and silver, and that was all—all, though for two hours the silken line darted out across the water, and many feathered flies of many hues fell vainly across the glassy mirror of the Golden Pool.

•      •      •      •      •      •

She was still standing in the same place when he returned. He drew a long deep breath of disappointment as he stepped ashore, and she echoed his sigh. The tension had ended.

“Showed color, but wouldn’t fight,” he said in a low voice. “Biggest trout I ever saw.”

“Can’t you possibly do something?” she asked tremulously.

“Not now; I must rest him. You can’t force a fish like that by persistent worry. There’s a chance he may come again; he’s not serious yet. I dare not bother him for an hour or two.”

He looked into her sensitive face; then, suddenly conscious of its youthful beauty, he fell silent, reeling in his wet line inch by inch.

Through the heated stillness dragonflies darted; the mounting perfume of brake and fern, the almost imperceptible odor of earth and water, seemed to envelop him in a delicate spell, soothing, healing, while pulseless moments drifted away in the smooth flow of a summer hour.

The rod slipped from his hand; his musing eyes rested on her. She was seated on a mossy log, head bent, slender stockinged feet trailing in the pool.

“All this has happened before,” he said quietly. But there was no conviction in his voice.

She raised her dreamy eyes, the color came and went in throat and cheeks; through her half-parted lips the breath scarcely stirred.

He rose with a restless laugh, and stood a moment, his thin hand pressed across his forehead.

Her eyes fell, were lifted to his, then fell again.

“Can’t you help me?” he said wistfully.

“Can you not remember?” she breathed.

“Then we—we have known one another. Have we?”

“I once knew a friend of yours—a close friend—named Escourt.”

“Escourt,” he repeated blankly.

And after a long silence he turned away with a gesture that seemed to frighten her. But into her face came a flash of determination, reddening her cheeks again.

“It does not matter,” she said; “nothing matters on a summer day like this…. I did not mean to trouble you.”

He turned in his steps and stood looking at her. “You say my friend’s name was Escourt? Is my friend dead?”

“Please don’t let it matter.”

“It does matter. I—it is a fancy, perhaps, but the name of Escourt was once familiar—and pleasant. It is not your name, is it?”

“Yes,” she said.

At last he began fretfully: “That is the strangest thing in the world. I have never before seen you, and yet I am perfectly conscious that your name has haunted me for years. Escourt—Escourt!—for years, I tell you,” he went on in a sort of impatient astonishment; “ever since I can remember anything I can remember that name.”

“And my first name?” Flushed, voice scarcely steady, she avoided his troubled gaze.

And as he did not answer, she said: “You once knew my husband. Can you not remember?”

He shook his head, studying her intently.

“No,” he said in a dull voice, “I have forgotten; I have been very ill. The name troubles me; it is strange how the name troubles me.”

“If it troubles you, let us talk of other things, will you?” she asked, almost timidly. “I did not think to awaken the memory of anything sad.”

“It is not sad,” resting his sunken, perplexed eyes on her; “it is something intimate—almost part of my life that I seem to have forgotten—” His hand sought the same spot over his right eye.

“What were we doing when you interrupted everything?” His wandering glance fell on the canoe and the rod lying in the bottom, and his face cleared.

“I ought to be worrying that trout again,” he said. “You won’t go away, will you?”

“No; but I wish you would go,” she said, laughing; “I’d dress if you would give me half an hour.”

“You won’t go—you will wait?” he repeated almost childishly.

“Yes, I will wait.”

She shook her head, watching him embark; standing there looking out across the water where the paddle bubbles marked his course long after the canoe had vanished around the curved shore of the Golden Pool.

Suddenly her eyes filled; but she set her lips resolutely, groping with white hands for her knotted hair; the heavy shining twist, loosened, fell, veiling face and shoulders—a golden mask for sorrow and falling tears.

•      •      •      •      •      •

It was high noon when his far hail brought her to the water’s edge, and she answered with a clear, prettily modulated call.

“Do you observe?” she asked, as he climbed the bank; and she made a little gesture of invitation toward a white napkin spread upon the moss.

A jug of milk, lettuce, bread, and a great bunch of hothouse grapes—and a hostess in a summer gown, smiling an invitation; what wonder that the haggard lines in his visage softened till something of the afterglow of youth lay like a ray of sun across his face.

“This is perfectly charming,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her. “I—I am very happy that you waited for me.”

She sat silent for a moment, with lowered eyes, then raised them shyly. “Let us eat bread and salt together, will you?—that nothing break our friendship.”

“From your hands,” he said.

She leaned over, took a tiny pinch of salt between her thumb and forefinger, and offered it to him on a bit of bread. He gravely broke the bread, returned half to her, and they ate, watching one another in silence.

“By the bread and salt I have shared with you,” he said, half seriously, half smiling, “I promise to cherish this forest friendship. Let this day begin it.”

“Let it,” she said.

“Let pleasant years continue it.”

“Yes—the coming years. So be it.”

“Let nothing end it—nothing—not even—”

“Nothing—and, amen,” she said faintly.

Again, unbidden, the ghosts of the past stirred, whispering together within him; echoes of unquiet days awoke, blind consciousness of that somber year where darkness dwelt, where memory lay slain forever.

She sat watching him there on the moss, supporting her weight on one arm.

“I am striving,” he said, “to trace my thoughts.” There was dull apology in his voice. “All this is not accident—you and I here together. I am haunted by something long forgotten, something that I am almost conscious of. When your voice sounds I seem to be quivering on the verge of memory…. Do you know what it is I have forgotten?”

She trembled to her lips. “Have you forgotten?”

“Yes—a great deal. Is it you I have forgotten?”

“Try to remember,” she said under her breath.

“Remember? God knows I am trying. Begin with me, will you?”

“Yes; let us begin together. You were hurt.”

“Yes, I was hurt.”

“In a battle.”

“I was hurt in a skirmish.”

“Where?” she whispered.

“Why, on the Subig,” he answered, surprised; “I was in the Philippine scouts.”

He sat bolt upright, electrified, and struck his knee sharply with the flat of his wasted hand.

“Do you know,” he said excitedly, “that until this very instant I have not thought of the Philippine scouts. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

She strove to speak; her breast rose and fell, and she closed her lips convulsively.

He sat there, head drooping, passing his hand repeatedly across the scar over his right temple.

She waited, whitening under the tension. His face became placid; he looked up at her; and a smile touched her wet lashes in response.

The contentment of convalescence seemed to banish his restlessness; her voice broke the silence, and its low, even tones satisfied the half-aroused longing for dead echoes.

So the ghost of happiness arose and sat between them; and she lay back, resting against a tree, smiling replies to his lazy badinage. And after a long while her laughter awoke to echo his, laughter as delicate as the breeze stirring her bright hair.

And afterward, long afterward, when the sunshine painted orange patches on the westward tree trunks and a haze veiled the taller spires, she reminded him of the great trout; but he would not go without her; so together they descended to the stream’s edge.

Floating in the canoe there through the mellow light, he remembered that he had left his rod ashore, but would not go back, and she laughed outright, through the thread of the song she had been humming:

“Fate is a dragon,

Faith the slim shape that braves it:

Hope holds the stirrup-cup—

Drain it who craves it.”

She smiled, singing carelessly:

“Who art thou, young and brave?

La vie est un sommeil; l’amour en est le réve!”

[Life is but slumber; love is the awakening!]

“There is more,” he said, watching her intently.

“How do you know?”

“I know that song. I remember it, and there is more to it!”

“Is it this, then?” and she sang again:

“Life is but slumber,

Love the sad dream that haunts it,

Death is thy waking gift;

Take it who wants it!

“Who art thou, young and brave?

La vie est un sommeil; l’amour en est le réve!”

He sat for a long while, very still, head buried in his hands. A violet mist veiled water and trees; through it the setting sun sent fiery shafts through the mountain cleft. And when the last crimson shaft was sped and tree and water faded into darker harmony, the canoe had drifted far downstream, and now lay still in the shoreward sands; and they stood together on the water’s edge.

Her fingers had become interlocked with his; she half withdrew them, eyes lowered.

“It is strange that our names should be the same,” he said.

“Is your name Escourt, too?” she faltered.

“Yes; I know it now…. I have been ill—very ill. God alone knows what my hurt has done to me. There is a doctor at the house; he’s been with me for a long time—a long time. I—I wonder why? I wonder if it was because I had forgotten—even my own name…. Who are you who bear my name?”

She swayed almost imperceptibly where she stood; he lifted both her hands and laid them against his lips, looking deep into her eyes.

“Who are you, bearing my name?” he whispered. “Unclose your eyes.”

In the twilight her dark eyes opened; she was in his arms now, her head fallen a little backward, yielding to his embrace crushing her.

“Try—try to remember—before you kiss me,” she breathed. “I wish you to love me—I desire it—but not like this. Oh, try to remember before—before it is too late!”

“I do remember!—Helen! Helen!”

Her lips on his stifled the cry; a long sigh, a sob, and she lay quivering in her husband’s arms.

THE GHOST OF CHANCE

As young Leeds entered the imposing bronze and marble portico of the Algonquin Trust Building, where he had a studio on the top floor, the elevator boy handed him a telegram and he opened it with instinctive foreboding of trouble. Meanwhile, the Ghost of Chance, which had followed him into the building, looked over his shoulder at the telegram.

There was evidently trouble enough in it; he had turned rather white as he stood there, eyes riveted on the yellow paper. Minute after minute sped; the elevators whizzed up and down in their gilded cages; people passed and repassed; the ornamental marble pavement of a the rotunda echoed the clatter of footsteps. Several people he knew nodded to him as they entered or left the elevators: an architect domiciled on the top floor in the east wing, McManus, of the Belden Building and Construction Company; young Farren, private Secretary to De Peyster Thorne, president of the great Algonquin Trust Company, and director of about everything worth directing in the five boroughs.

“Mr. Farren!” called out Leeds; and, as that suave man checked his speed, wheeled, and came back, “Mr. Farren, could I see Mr. Thorne for half a second?”

Farren’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “If it’s a favor you want to ask, don’t ask it now—”

“It is, and I’ve got to—”

“Better not; he’s in a devilish humor; he’d foreclose on his own grandmother to-day.”

“But I can’t wait! I’ll use your telephone while you’re taking my card.”

Farren shrugged, turned, and led the way across the rotunda, ushered Leeds into the outer office, and took his card. Leeds went to a desk and used the telephone vigorously until Farren reappeared, nodding; and Leeds walked into the president’s private room. De Peyster Thorne, handsome, rather too elaborately groomed, and ruddier of face and neck than usual, looked up to return the young man’s greeting with an expressionless word and nod. He did not see the Ghost of Chance standing at Leeds’s elbow.

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Leeds, “but I don’t see how I can finish the key panel on time, Mr. Thorne.”

“Why not?” said Thorne, a darker flush mounting his heavy face and neck.

“I’ve a telegram this moment from my model; she’s ill. I telephoned for another, but there’s scarcely a chance I can get one I want. Something went wrong with the colors yesterday and I scraped out all I had done, expecting to finish to-day with a drier, dry to-morrow, and have Mr. McManus set the key panel in the ballroom Thursday morning. Now, I’ve probably got to spend to-day chasing up a red-haired model; and if I do, I cannot finish by Thursday. Couldn’t you give me one day more?”

“Mr. Leeds,” said Thorne, biting off his words unpleasantly, “a contract is a contract. Can you fulfill yours?”

“I’ve told you,” began Leeds, astonished—for never before had Thorne looked or spoken in that way—“I told you that my model—”

“Can you keep your contract?” repeated Thorne sharply.

“There’s a ghost of a chance if I can get a proper model,” replied Leeds, keeping his temper.

“Then you’d better take that ghost of a chance, Mr. Leeds. On reflection it will occur to you that my housewarming can scarcely be postponed to suit your rather erratic convenience. If the key panel is not in place, the room will be as attractive as a man in evening clothes without a collar. I’d rather tear out the entire frieze, and call the contract void!—and I’ll do it, too, if the contract is not fulfilled.”

“Is that the language you employ in all your commercial transactions?” asked Leeds without a trace of the passion that clutched at him.

“It is. An artist is as amenable to the commercial code of responsibility as any man I deal with—I don’t care a damn who he is or how he likes it…. Is there anything more I can do for you, Mr. Leeds?”

“No,” said Leeds thoughtfully, “unless you choose to take a kindergarten course in the elements of decency.”

Leaving the door ajar as he went out, and far too amazed and furious to notice Mr. Farren, the amused secretary, he crossed the corridor, followed by the Ghost of Chance, entered an elevator, and shot up to the top floor. Black rage and astonishment still possessed him when he met McManus in the hall, and he would have passed on with a nod and a scowl had that genial Irishman permitted.

“Phwat the divil’s up now, Misther Leeds?” inquired the big contractor and builder. “I’ll lay twinty to wan ye’ve joost come from Thorne.”

Leeds laid his hand on the door knob of his studio.

“I have; I—I’m not in very good humor, Mr. McManus—” He jerked open the door and started to enter.

“Hould on!—don’t be runnin’ away. Sure haven’t I come from him meself—an’ kept me temper, too, Irish that I am! Phwat’s wrong betchune you an’ Misther Thorne an’ the hydrant?”

“Nothing much; my model is ill and I can’t promise to give you that key panel to set. Thorne said—one or two things—oh, I can’t talk about it; he said one or two things—”

“Bedad, thin, he said a dozen things to me; an’ me as cool as a Waldorf julep, an’ he dammin’ the gildin’ whin I asked f’r the sivinth installment due this day. ‘It’s an expert I’ll have f’r to examine it,’ sez he. ‘Projooce the wad,’ sez I, ‘an’ afther that I’ll talk talks to anny expert ye name.’ An’ he had to.”

Leeds’s heart turned heavy. “I don’t know what Thorne means to do,” he said. “I’m not much on contracts; I’ve done my best. I suppose he will rip it out if he wants to. If he does, and if he cancels the contract, it will about ruin me. I never had but four other commissions; it cost me more to execute them than I was paid.”

The big Irishman studied the younger man with keen, kindly eyes. He knew what Leeds’s frieze really was—a piece of work that for sheer inspired beauty had not its equal in modern mural art. He knew—even his artisans knew. And he knew, also, that in this fifth essay, a young man, of whom the public had already heard, was stepping half-unconsciously into the highest place in the Western world of art. All this McManus was shrewdly aware of, and he was aware, too, that Leeds was more or less conscious of it, and that Thorne was utterly unconscious that, in his new house, the golden ballroom already contained the mural masterpiece of the twentieth century—an exquisite, gay riot of color and design, so lovely, so fresh, that, concealed under the miracle of its simplicity, the marvelous technical perfections of color, drawing, and composition were almost unnoticed in the blinding brilliancy of the ensemble.

“Did that red-necked madman say he’d rip it out?” inquired McManus, his fiery blue eyes aglitter.

“That’s what he said. I don’t know whether the work is good or bad; I’m two years stale on it. I could paint a better one now. But if he holds me to the letter of the contract and throws back two years’ work on my hands, what can I do? I—I never imagined he was that sort of a man; I knew he didn’t care much for painting—his architects got him to give me the work—my first commission that promised any profit—”

Something tightened in his throat, and he turned his head sharply to the window of the corridor.

“Arrah, thin,” said McManus hastily, “don’t be frettin’. G’wan, now, an’ paint like the divil. Give him anny ould thing f’r to ploog the key. Sure, ’tis his fri’nds will tell him fasht enough the bargain he’s got in a frieze—a frieze, begob! that no man ’twixt the two poles can paint like you!—an’ that’s the truth, Misther Leeds, though ye don’t know it, bein’ modestlike an’ misthrustin’ av the powers God sinds ye. Ploog him up with a key panel—anny ould daub, I tell ye!—f’r to clinch the contract come pay-day! An’ I’ll set it accordin’ to conthract Thursday comin’; an’ afther he’s opened his big gilt house to the millionaires he consorts with, an’ afther the bunch has christened their muddy wits with the j’yful juice, go to him quietlike, yer foot in yer hand an’ the tongue in the cheek o’ ye, an’ say modestlike: ‘Wisha, sorr, me mastherpiece is not quite to me likin’; an’ I’m thinkin’ to add a few millions to its value wid a stroke av a badger brush.’”

The big Irishman laughed heartily and laid an enormous paw on Leeds’s shoulder—a gesture so kindly that the familiarity seemed without offense.

“Phwat does the like o’ youse care for Mr. Thorne an’ his big red neck an’ the pants o’ him wid the creases, an’ his collar buttoned by his valley? F’r all his scarf pin an’ his shiny shoes an’ his Thrust Company an’ his millions, I seen a bit of a lass give him the frozen face an hour ago.”

Leeds looked up curiously.

“Arrah, thin, that’s what crazed him. I was there in his office discoorsin’ on conthracts, pwhen the dure opened an’ a young lady sthepped in—not seein’ me pwhere I sat behind the dure.

“‘Naida!’ sez he, joompin’ up, the Burrgundy flush on the face an’ neck av him.

“‘I came to tell you that I can’t do it,’ sez she, her purty face like a rose in blush. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sez, ‘but I thought you ought to be told, an’ I drove downtown in a hurry,’ sez she, ‘f’r to tell you,’ she sez, ‘that I was not in me right mind when you asked me to marry you,’ sez she. ‘So I’m sorry—I’m so sorry,’ she sez, ‘an’ good-by!’ an’ wid that the breath stopped in her an’ she gulped, scairtlike.

“‘Phwat!’ sez he, bitin’ the worrud in two halves. An’ she gulped an’ shook her head.

“Wid that he began in a wild way, clane forgettin’ me in the corner, me hat on me two knees; an’ the young lady was a bit wild, too, bein’ very young an’ excited; an’ there they had it like John Drew an’ his leadin’ lady—quietlike an’ soft-spoken, but turrible as a dress-shirt drama, till she said: ‘No! No! No!’ wid a little sob, an’ out o’ the dure an’ off, he afther her. Sorra the sight av her he got, with Farren hunting her, an’ himself ridin’ up an’ down in the cages when the porther tould him she’d dodged an’ gone up to the top floor.”

“So that was why he was so ugly,” said Leeds curiously.

“It was. He was smooth enough till the lass came in an’ left him her sweet little mitten. But whin he came back, red as a bottle o’ Frinch wine, an’ the two eyes o’ him like black holes burnt in a blanket—save us! All that was close an’ hard an’ mean an’ sly an’ bitter an’ miserly came out in the man, an’ the way he talked to me av honest work done wud stir the neck hair on a fightin’ pup. I was wild; but I sez to meself, lave him talk his talk; it’s all wan on pay-day. An’ so it is, Misther Leeds; it is so. G’wan into ye’re workshop, an’ shpit on ye’re hands, an’ we’ll ploog that key space by 5 p.m., come Thursday, bad cess to the bad, an’ luck to the likes of us, glory be!”

Leeds stood half inside his threshold, the edge of the open door grasped in his hand, gazing thoughtfully at the floor.

“All right, McManus,” he said quietly; “I’ll do what I can to save my bread, but”—he looked straight at the Irishman—“it’s bitter bread we learn to eat sometimes—we who are employed.”

“Troth, I’ve swallyed worse nor that; I have so, Misther Leeds. Bide the time, sorr. An’ phwin it comes!—paste him wan.”

“Oh, I’ll have forgotten him by that time,” said Leeds, laughing, as McManus, with a significant and powerful gesture, turned on his broad heel and strode off toward his own rooms, where Kenna, his partner, had been making frantic signals to him for the last five minutes.

Leeds entered his studio, the Ghost of Chance at his heels, closing the door behind him.

Through the golden gloom of the room his huge picture loomed up, somber in the subdued light; an aromatic odor of wet colors and siccatif hung in the air.

First, he laid aside his overcoat and hat, unhooked from a door peg a short painting blouse and pulled it over his head; then he moved about briskly, opening ventilators to air the place, manipulating the curtains for top and side lights, dragging the carved mahogany model stand into the position marked by the chalk crosses on the polished floor. Presently he touched a spring; the top shade rolled up with a click; a flood of pure north light fell upon the gorgeous colors of the canvas. He began to adjust the delicate machinery of the complex easel, turning a silver screw to regulate the pitch of the heavy canvas, twisting a cogwheel here, a lever there, until he had brought that part of the canvas within reach whereon he expected to work.

He was one of those modest, dissatisfied young men who can never be content with the work done, perfectly aware of possibilities not yet attained, willing to try for them, vaguely confident of attaining them; a young man who would go far—had gone far—farther than he realized. Yet, although the critics were joyously bellowing his praises as the coming man, his work so far had barely given him a living.

He required great surfaces to cover, and the beauty of the results was apparent in the new marble library, the Hotel Oneida, the Theater Regent, and the new Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Superb color, faultless taste, vigor, delicacy—all were his. The technique that sticks out like dry bones, the spineless lack of construction, fads, pitiful eccentricities to cover inability—nothing of these had ever, even in his student days, threatened him with the pitfall of common disaster.

Nor was there in his work the faintest hint of physical weakness—nothing unwholesome, smug, suggestive—nothing sugary, nothing insincerely brutal; perhaps because he was a very normal young man, inclined to normal pleasures, and worldly enough to conform to the civilized code outside the barriers of which genius is popularly supposed to pasture.

And still, with all this, he had been paid so little for his work heretofore, and to produce his work had cost him so much in materials and in model and studio hire, that he scarcely knew how to make both ends meet in the most cruelly expensive metropolis of all the world.

For the first time, when approached by Thorne, he had dared name a price for his work which might give him a decent profit when the last brush stroke was laid on; and, while Thorne’s big new house slowly rose, stone on stone, overlooking the Park, he had worked on the frieze of life-size figures—two hundred in all—which was to complete the golden ballroom with an exquisite, springlike garland of youth and loveliness.

He had accepted Thorne’s cut-throat, cast-iron contract with the deadly time clause; he had used up every second of time, shirking nothing, sparing no expense; making life-size study after study, scintillating with a cleverness that would not only have satisfied but turned the heads of ninety-nine painters in a hundred. But he was the hundredth.

He had given himself just time to complete his work and say: “I can do no better. I have done all that was in me.” But, though he had foreseen trouble and delay from models, and the dozens of vexations artists fall heir to, he could not have foreseen that a young girl he never heard of should, at a critical moment, bring out a side of Thorne’s character he did not suspect existed in him—the sharp, ugly brutality of wounded arrogance, which vents itself where opportunity offers; the fiercely sullen desire to hurt, to stamp its power upon those who have no defense.

And now, with the entire frieze all but completed, the man had suddenly snarled at him—for no reason on earth save a willingness to crush and dominate. There was not a day of grace named in the contract; there was no grace to be expected from Thorne, who cared no more for the frieze that hid part of his golden-lacquered paneling than for the gilded sconces below. If one or the other did not suit him, he’d tear them out without a word and cover the raw space with ten thousand dollars’ worth of hothouse roses for his housewarming. Leeds understood that. He was beginning to appreciate the man. He must try to beat him.

He stood there confronting his defaced picture, examining it as keenly as a physician might inspect an interesting phase of human misfortune, pondering the remedy. And, as he stood, silent, preoccupied, his telephone bell rang, and he stepped to the receiver.

“Hello! Is this the Models’ League?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, James Leeds. Yes, I wanted a model with red hair, if possible, and good limbs.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Well, that can’t be helped. Send any model as close to Miss Clancey’s type as you can. Send her now. She’s to take a cab. I’m in a desperate hurry.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, Miss Clancey is ill. I want a girl of her type, but don’t waste time hunting. Send me somebody at once.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“All right…. Good-by!”

He hung up the receiver, walked back to his canvas, and began to set a huge ivory-faced palette table, squeezing out tube after tube of color, rainbow fashion, ending in a curly mass of silver white. Then he uncorked a jar of turpentine, filled a bowl with it, and began searching among twisted tubes and scrapers for an ivory palette knife, whistling thoughtfully the while.

A slight sound behind one of the great screens attracted his attention, and he glanced up. Nothing stirred. He sorted some paint rags, and picked up a bottle of drying medium. As he held it to the light, again a sudden sound came from the screen; he turned squarely, surprised, and the same instant a girl stepped out and raised a pair of very lovely and frightened eyes to his.

“Do you want a model?” she asked sweetly, but unsteadily. “Because, if you do—”

“Good Heavens!” he said, exasperated. “Have you been behind that screen all this, time while I’ve been telephoning for a model?”

“Ye-s. I—I came in. I heard you.”

“But why didn’t you come out? Why on earth—”

“I think I was a trifle frightened.”

“Oh!… I see … you have never before posed?”

“Never. I—I really have not made up my mind to pose now. I suppose I had better do—do something. I’ve—the fact is, I’ve got to do something to earn my living.”

She was red-haired, white-skinned, blue-eyed, shod and gloved to perfection, and plainly scared. He looked at her from head to foot.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, delighted, “you are a sort of Godsent miracle. Whether you mean to pose or not for a living, I want you to pose for me to-day. Don’t be frightened; sit down here in this chair. I’m in desperate need of somebody. Won’t you help me?”

She looked at him in breathless silence.

“Won’t you please sit here-just a moment?” he said.

She bent her head a trifle, and moved forward to the offered chair with a grace that claimed his instant and serious attention. But he had no time to wonder or speculate on the reasons for such a woman with such a presence being in his studio to seek employment; he took a chair opposite, scrutinizing her fresh young beauty with frank approval. Indeed, he heartily approved of everything about her—the masses of red-gold hair, the lovely azure-tinted eyes, the wonderfully paintable white skin.

“Your coloring—your figure—your hands are beautiful,” he said slowly. “I can give you all day to-day, and I’ll take all the time you can give me to-morrow. You see, that canvas must be finished to-day, be dry by to-morrow, and be delivered Thursday. Tell me, is it only head and shoulders and costume, or will you pose without drapery for—”

A bright flush stained her face. “I—I am not a model!” she stammered.

“Not a model,” he repeated blankly. “Oh, no, of course not—I forgot.”

“Did you—do I look like—” Words failed her; she glanced appalled at the canvas, then straight at him, self-possessed again, but paler.

“I can’t help what you think of me,” she said. “I am perfectly aware of my indiscretion but your door was open and this—this is my hour of need.”

“Certainly,” he said, soothingly, “I see—”

“No, you don’t see! I came in here to—to hide! By and by I shall go out.” She sat up very straight. “I am determined,” she said, “to remain concealed here until I can leave this building without annoyance. May I?” She ended so sweetly, so piteously, that Leeds caught his breath in astonishment.

“So—may I stay here for a while?”

“Well, there’s a model coming to pose for that figure—if you refuse to pose—”

“Which figure?” demanded the girl.

“That one on the left—the one that is scraped down.”

“You mean that I couldn’t stay here while you painted?”

“I don’t believe you would care to. You wouldn’t bother me, but I don’t think you’d care to.”

“Why?” The blue eyes met his so purely, so fearlessly, that he gave her a frank and gentle answer.

“Oh! Then—then hadn’t you better dismiss your model for the day?” she said, “because I’ve got to stay.”

“But I can’t. The paint on that canvas is exactly in the right condition, neither too wet nor too dry. I’ve simply got to use a drier, and paint on it now. That picture must be dry to-morrow.”

“Must it—truly?”

“It certainly must!”

The girl rose, stood for a moment nervously twisting her veil up over her hat; then: “But I can’t go! You don’t understand. I’ve—I’ve run away.”

“Run away! From whom?”

“Somebody,” she said vaguely, looking about the room. Suddenly he remembered the story McManus told. And he spoke of it, watching her curiously.

“Exactly,” she said, nodding her pretty head, while the tint of excitement deepened on her cheeks, “I ran away from him! You know who I am, don’t you? You know my sister, anyhow.”

She hesitated, searching his face; then impulsively: “I usually decide all matters very quickly!”

She made an impatient little gesture and seated herself, looking up at him with bright eyes and heightened color: “For three months I’ve stood it—”

“Stood what?”

“Being engaged. I had not really thought much about it—we’re usually indifferent and obedient in my family—and no doubt I’d have gone on and married just as my sisters have—if something had not happened.” She dropped her head, looking thoughtfully at the floor. Then: “I simply could not stand him, Mr. Leeds; I woke up this morning, understanding that I couldn’t marry him. I was so excited—and dreadfully afraid of telling him—and I was so sorry for my mother, but I couldn’t do it; I knew that, and it was time he knew, too.

“So I told my mother, and there was trouble, and I went out and found a cab and drove here as fast as I could, and I said: ‘Mr. Thorne, I cannot do it!’ You know what I said. That Irishman told you.”

Leeds nodded.

“So that’s all; I simply ran away from him; and I won’t go home and live on my mother, because we are as poor as mice and rabbits, and if I don’t marry Mr. Thorne my mother will probably expire of mortification, and if I don’t marry at all by Monday next, I’ll lose what my grandfather left me in a horrid will, which forces me to marry before I’m twenty-one-and that’s next Monday. All my sisters did it—Mrs. Egerton, and Mrs. Clay-Dwyning, and another you don’t know. But I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! And my mother will probably starve unless I earn our living, so I’d better begin at once.”

“I think you had, too,” said Leeds gravely.

“Oh, I thought of that when I was running away from Mr. Thorne; and when he came up in one elevator, I came down; and when he came down I went up, and I turned into the first corridor I saw, and entered somebody’s office and shut the door.

“A man came to ask me what I wanted. And I asked him if he required a stenographer, and he said he did—very offensively—so I marched out and walked about the hallways trying to find my way out. Then I heard Mr. Thorne’s voice on the stairs, and I opened your door and hid. And before I had courage to leave, you came and talked and talked with that Irishman. And now what am I to do? You know who I am, and you know my sisters-or you did once, before you went abroad to study—for they’ve told me they knew you at Narragansett when you were a boy of twelve.”

“Are you their little sister, Naida?” he asked curiously, when she stopped, clean out of breath, flushed and fascinating in her consternation.

“Yes; I’m Naida. Do you really remember me? I wish I could be civil and say the same to you, but I don’t, Mr. Leeds, though since everybody says you are a very great artist, I pretend I do know you, and I say: ‘Oh, yes, James Leeds; he was such a jolly fellow when he was a boy at Narragansett!’

“But I’m careful not to tell them that I was so little that you never even looked at me, or that I was so young I couldn’t remember you. Oh, dear, what frauds we all are! And here I am, compromising myself and not caring, after I drove my mother distracted, jilted my fiancé, and beggared myself. I think I’d better pose for you.”

“Will you?”

“Why, coward that I am, I don’t want to face the consequences of my own deeds. But I won’t go back after smashing the finances so dreadfully.”

“Suppose you help me a little, then. And while you’re helping me to avert financial ruin we’ll talk of your future,” he said laughingly.

She looked up quickly. “I heard what you and that Irishman were saying. Are you truly in trouble about your picture?”

“All kinds of trouble,” he assented.

“Could I really help you?”

“Indeed you could.”

“Of course, I would compromise myself, wouldn’t I?” she asked innocently. “I’ve been doing it all day, haven’t I?”

He sat there perplexed, fascinated, watching her in silence.

She shrugged her pretty shoulders. A rather valuable fur stole slipped down to the floor, and he picked it up and sat smoothing it and watching the exquisite color wane and deepen in her cheeks.

The telephone rang. He rose and set the receiver to his ear.

“No, that model won’t do. You need not send anybody now; I have exactly the model I require. Good-by.”

Turning to her he said: “You heard me say that I needed no model. Will you help me now? This is an hour of direst need with me.”

“I—I don’t know—”

“Will you? If you will, I will promise to help you—not to become an artist’s model; that is silly. But I promise you, on my honor, that you shall have an offer which no woman need refuse; an offer suitable and honorable, where you may enjoy absolute independence and freedom from all annoyance, live your own life freely, without taxing your mother’s resources, and without care or dread of importunities from anybody attempting to marry you. Will you?”

“If—if you could do that for me I’d be grateful enough to do anything for you,” she said slowly.

The Ghost of Chance sat watching them. His job was nearly ended.

A curious exhilaration, a gayety rather foreign to Leeds’s nature, took possession of him. He lifted a beautiful garment, all stiff with turquoise and gold, and held it toward her. He laid two jeweled sandals at her feet, pulled a table to the screen, and opened a box full of glittering gilded articles.

There was color enough in her face now, flooding it from brow to throat.

“Won’t you help me?” he asked. “It is ruin for me if you don’t.”

She searched his face. There was nothing in the eyes that a woman might not look upon, might not meet with a smile, might not respond to. She measured him in breathless silence, red lips parted. He was her own kind.

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

Then excitement transfigured him. She scarcely knew his face, lighted into quick enthusiasm.

“Never, never, have I had such a model!” he cried, delighted as a boy. “Never have I seen such color, such exquisite loveliness. Good Heavens! A man might really paint with you before him! Don’t—don’t look at me that way—don’t be frightened. I’m simply astonished at my fortune—I don’t mean to be rude—you know I don’t!”

“Yes, I know it,” she said tremulously.

“May I suggest how you should tie the sandals?”

“Am I to—to be barefooted?”

“With sandals, you know, and that gorgeous gold and blue Byzantine robe hung straight from the shoulders! Everything is here. I’ll step out and smoke a cigarette. Will you knock when you are ready?”

She nodded, looking down at the crumpled heaps of gold and turquoise stuff.

Enchanted, he saw her raise her pretty arms and begin to unpin her hat, with its floating veil.

Then he went out.

For half an hour he walked the resounding corridor, smoking madly. Once or twice he doubted her—half convinced that she meant to lock him out—and the idea scared him. But at last a low knocking on the inside of the door summoned him; he entered, blinking in the flood of light after the darkness of the hallway, and the vision was revealed slowly to his dazzled eyes.

White—a trifle too pale; her eyes burned like azure stars under the gold-red glory of her hair, which fell in two loose, heavy braids straight down, framing her body from shoulders to hips.

The rounded throat, the white arms glimmering along the seams of the blue and golden robe, the sandals accenting the snowy feet—and in her eyes the straight, fearless gaze of a child—left him mute, stunned, utterly spellbound, overwhelmed by a magic that sometimes wears another name.

She did not need to ask his criticism. The faint rose color came into her face again slowly.

She turned and mounted the model stand without a word, seating herself in the carved marble chair; and, glancing at the painted figure, let her arms fall in harmony with the drawing. Then she placed one little sandal-shod foot upon the silken cushion at her feet. When she looked up, with a pale smile, he had already begun to paint.

His hand, not steady at first—for a new emotion had given him new eyes—became steadier. Magnificent tints and hues grew upon the canvas, stiff gold folds and creases shimmered, framing the snowy contours of perfect arms.

The glory of hair, the wonder of wide azure-tinted eyes, the lips full scarlet, all took color and loveliness as his brushes flew. And into the picture came something else-a joyousness, a tint of youth and freshness, and something subtle, indefinable.

And now he seemed to hold the whole power of the world in his grasp. The color-wet point of every brush hovered, then left its message of beauty on an enchanted canvas. Power was his; he dominated; he could do anything, achieve anything—with her before him. Difficulties? There were none. He had but to wet a brush with purest tints, look her in the eyes, and the thing was wrought.

Twice she rested. He said nothing, nor did she, and, when she was ready, he went on. But already the work was done-finished! He lingered over it, thrilled, touching it here and there fearlessly, with the silent certainty of mastery.

At last he lay back on his chair, and the arm supporting his palette dropped to his side.

“Won’t you have mercy?” she asked in a low voice.

“Are you tired? Oh, I am so sorry!” he cried, springing to his feet.

She rose. He held out his hand. She laid hers on his arm and descended.

“You are terribly tired!” he said anxiously, almost tenderly.

“No—but—I am a little—hungry.”

He dragged out his watch. “Good Lord! It’s four—almost dark!” he cried. “What a—a beast I am! I must be crazy!”

She stood smiling beside him, looking curiously at the picture in the fading light.

“Am I as—as glorious as that!” she said under her breath. It was not a question, besides he scarcely dared answer, for the magic was thick about him.

“Do you know,” she said slowly, “there is something in that canvas that I have never before seen?”

“What is it?”

“The—the eyes you have given me-as though I had just opened them on paradise.”

They are like yours.”

“But I—I never saw paradise. What a heavenly beauty you have given me. My soul was never as untroubled as is hers—the lovely, snowy, golden saint you have raised up on my shadow. What eyes do you see with to work such miracles?”

“You are the miracle. I never painted like that until you came.”

She turned to look at him. And, perhaps, the magic light was strong enough to dazzle her, too, for she thought there was something in his eyes that he had painted into hers upon the canvas.

For a little while they stood silent. Then she raised her head. “And now?” she questioned.

“Now?”

“Yes. What am I to do?”

He gazed at her blankly. “You are not going away?”

“Your picture is finished.”

“Yes, but where are you going?”

“Where?” She pressed her white hand over her brow. “I—I don’t exactly know. I—I thought you had a plan—”

“As long as you have run away,” he began slowly—”

“Yes? And as long as I have done all the dreadful things I have done. Go on!”

“All those dreadful things—”

“Yes; all those common horrid things. Go on.”

“I—I think—”

“That we—that we might further degrade ourselves by—”

“Yes—go on!”

“By taking tea together.”

“Do you think so?”

“I do,” he said solemnly.

She reflected for a moment. “But what after that?”

“We must consider the situation at the tea table,” he said gravely. “We’ll go out as soon as you can change your gown. And—is there any likelihood of our jumping any of your family if we go to Sherry’s?”

“I’ll risk it,” she said slowly.

“Then,” and he smiled at her through a rosy light which really didn’t exist, “then I’ll go out and smoke until you are ready.”

And he did, no longer tormented with the fears of being locked out, and presently she opened the door and stood a moment on the threshold, looking at him.

“I wonder,” she said, “if ever a girl has done as mad a thing as I have to-day?”

She stepped out and closed the door behind her.

“Listen,” she said; “a thousand dreadful questions are on my lips—tortured pride refuses to ask for mercy—but—oh, I do care to know what you think of me!”

He told her as much as he dared tell, haltingly, stammering under the enchantment thickening always around them.

“You—you think—that?”

“More. May—shall I say—”

“Not—not now.”

Dazed, their young heads turned, they descended the marble steps together.

Elevator boys, hall servants, the gorgeous porter in his green and gilt livery, stared at the runaway. She passed them, head high.

“There is going to be a great deal of trouble about nothing, I fear,” she said softly, as they walked out into Fifth Avenue.

“I fear so,” he mused.

“You—you will probably be evicted by Mr. Thorne when the porter tells him where I’ve been.”

“Probably,” he smiled.

“Where will you go when you are evicted?”

“Where are you going?”

She glanced at him sweetly. “To tea—with you.”

“And after that?” he asked unsteadily.

But she pretended not to hear him, repeating, “To tea with the great artist, Mr. Leeds. Oh, you are surprised that I know how great you are? Did you think I didn’t know? Dear me, don’t my sisters talk of you as though our family discovered you?”

“That settles it then,” he said, enchanted.

“What settles what, if you please?”

“My status. I’m one of your family and entitled to advise you.”

A moment later two flushed young people entered Sherry’s, utterly oblivious of cloak rooms, bellboys, and butlers, and instinctively chose a remote table secluded in a corner, banked high with verdure.

They may have had tea. They were so absorbed in talking to each other that they not only paid no attention to what they ordered, but did not notice whether they had eaten anything or not, when the early winter night found them on Fifth Avenue once more, strolling slowly uptown, absorbed in one another to the exclusion of time and similar unimportant trifles.

She was saying in that full-throated sweet voice, pitched a trifle lower than the roar of traffic, “Yes, I do trust you. I have been horrid and common and silly to go dashing around that trust company, but you are perfectly lovely to understand, and I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do—except—”

“What?”

“Oh—you wouldn’t ask me that!”

“What?”

“To—to marry him—”

“Good God,” he breathed.

After a silence he said: “I have promised you an offer. But first you must go back as though nothing had happened.”

“Yes, I will. There’s no use in my going to a hotel like a silly, romantic creature, and starting out to look for work in the morning. Besides, my mother would be frantic and call up the police. Besides, I haven’t enough money to really run away; I have only a dollar and some pennies.”

“Home is the place for you,” he said, laughing under his breath. “When am I to come to tell you about my plan for you?”

“You’d better hurry,” she said sincerely. “I’ll probably lose courage and be bullied into something or other if you don’t.”

“May I come to-morrow?”

“No; there’s a luncheon I don’t dare cut out, and in the evening there’s a dance at the Carringtons’. Do you—do you ever go about? I go to the Lanarks’ dance to-night———”

“I was asked to that dance, too—”

“Oh!” she cried enraptured, “will you come? Please—please! If you don’t, I won’t go. Mr. Thorne will be there, and between mamma and him I’ll be driven into something before I know it. Will you?”

“Yes, I will. And I’ll do more,” he added under his breath ; “I’ll lay that offer before you.”

“That will be perfectly delightful! You won’t fail, will you? And”—she paused at the door of her own house and gave him a small gloved hand—“and I want to tell you how happy I am to have helped you, and how glad I am that you are able to keep to that wicked contract, and that I have had a perfectly lovely time, and I shall never—never forget how nice you have been even if I have behaved like a brainless ninny. And I am so glad you don’t think me as horrid as I seemed to be. I was reckless for the first time in my life, and did all those desperate things because I’ve been—I’ve been a trifle unhappy.”

And so he left her, the door opening to engulf her, she turning her pretty head to nod to him as it closed. And he went away soberly, walking up the dark avenue under the flaring electric lights, absorbed, almost stunned, by what had come so suddenly into a life that, but a few hours since, had seemed to him too full, too complete, to hold anything except the love he bore for his profession.

He dined at the club where he lived, read the evening papers, scarcely conscious of what he was reading, then went upstairs to his room, sat a long while on the bed’s edge, staring at vacancy, and finally lay down, closing his eyes. The Ghost of Chance stood by the bed a moment, considering his victim.

Hour after hour he lay there, thinking as clearly as the tumult in his breast permitted. Later he bathed, dressed very carefully, and, descending, climbed into a hansom.

“I’ve a ghost of a chance,” he muttered. “Thorne told me to take it once, and his advice was good. Now, I’ll try it again—for I have got a ghost of a chance again, and I’ll take that chance to-night!”

And so he came to the great house of the Lanarkses, overlooking the wintry park, and he climbed out of his humble hansom amid the clustering clatter of the rich and great and agreeable, and entered the house which he might not have troubled himself to enter, had a young girl with red hair and wonderful blue eyes not asked him.

After drifting about in the scented crush for half an hour, he caught a glimpse of her surrounded by a dozen men, among them a diplomat or two, and several attachés; and now, with the intention of claiming her, he marked her down in the glittering throng as carefully as he might have marked a flushed quail in a thicket of golden willow.

But when, pressing his way through barriers of black coats and threading half an acre of rustling silk and lace, he found the spot where he had expected to find her, she was no longer there; only the red fez of the Turkish Ambassador, nodding affably above the press, indicated that he had reached the spot upon the floor that he had aimed at.

Glancing up at the gilded musicians’ gallery to verify his bearings, he struck a circle, as he would have done in the woods, and presently came across young Terriss, who was also in love with her—but Leeds did not know that.

“Thorne took her off,” said Terriss sullenly. “They’re in the conservatory. By the way, I didn’t know you knew her.”

“I do,” growled Leeds.

“That pasty-white Russian prince, the fellow with a fat face and a thin nose splitting a brace of eyes too close together”—Terriss shrugged his shoulders—“he’s hanging about, looking for her, too. Her mother steered him off. I suppose it will be announced to-night.”

Leeds saw her mother and recalled himself to her memory, and her mother’s cordiality surprised and flattered him until he found he could not get past her to the conservatory.

Meanwhile the musicians were playing away madly. He attempted to dodge her, affably explaining that it was his dance with her daughter.

“But Naida is not in here,” said her mother, carefully riding him off.

“Terriss said—”

“Doubtless,” continued her mother cheerfully, “Naida is waiting for you with Constance. Do you remember my daughter Constance? If you take me across, Mr. Leeds, we can find Naida.”

Steered off, vaguely aware of too much sweetness in the matron’s guileless smile, he looked back and beheld the girl he was seeking emerging from the thicket of palms with Thorne, followed by a heavy and very white young man, with rings on his fingers and under his eyes.

The girl looked at Leeds as though she had never before seen him. For a moment, as he instinctively stepped forward, they faced one another in silence. Then a faint recognition animated her eyes. She looked at Thorne, at the Russian, at her mother, then, as Leeds said a conventional but decisive word or two, she smiled, laid one hand on his shoulder as he encircled her waist with his right arm, nodded at her mother, and glided off into the glitter with a man who danced well enough to leave her indifferent and occupied with her own reflections.

How long she had been dancing with him she did not know, nor care, when his voice roused her from a meditation that had left her red mouth sullen and her eyebrows bent.

“What did you say?” she asked. “I beg your pardon—”

“Nothing. I wondered whether you were bored? I dance pretty well, you know.”

“You dance very well. Do I look bored?”

“You certainly do.”

“I am.”

They swung out through the center of the perfumed crush a little recklessly, but with sufficient skill.

“I wish you would look at me—once,” he said. “What has happened since we parted?”

She raised her eyes, amused. “The inevitable. I couldn’t escape.”

“I can’t give you up yet to your own reflections,” he said. “You dance too perfectly. What do you mean by the ‘inevitable’?”

“Oh, it is not you or the dancing that I meant! You must not mind me ; I am likely to say anything to-night.”

“Anything?”

“Absolutely anything to anybody.” She raised her eyes again to his face. It was a cleanly modeled countenance, rather lean—not at all like Thorne’s or Prince Minksky’s.

A vague feeling of being at home again after a foreign tour came over her, a comfortable sensation, lasting for a second—time enough to contrast his amiable features with the features of the man she had been with in the conservatory.

Constantly passing dancers nodded to them, exchanged a word or two or a brief smile—Terriss with a pretty girl who called her Naida, the British third secretary, very gay in his greeting, dozens and dozens, all whirling by; and through the brilliant glare, the scented breezy wavering scene, Leeds guided the girl with the ruddy gold hair and the sulky mouth—sulky, for she was preoccupied again, oblivious of all in her perfect grace and poise, swinging where he led, as easily, as unconsciously as a wind-blown bird floating half asleep in the flow of the upper air.

“If you are really too much bored,” he breathed—She looked up disturbed. “I told you it was not you. You don’t bore me. You don’t know me well enough.”

“Is there no chance that I might know you better?”

“No, no chance.”

“May I try it?”

Her beautiful brows unbent. “Why, yes, try it; but I am not worth the effort.”

“Very well. For this evening you and I will speak the absolute and unvarnished truth; shall we? You may ask me whatever you care to; I will ask you. Dare you?”

She had shaken her head first, but at the word “dare” her indifference changed to a slight amusement.

“Oh, I dare anything to-night,” she said. “What question am I to answer?”

“Is it a bargain that we tell the truth?” he persisted.

“Certainly, if it amuses you. It won’t amuse me.”

“And I may venture to be cheerfully impertinent?”

She nodded, smiling.

“Then tell me why you asked me to come to this dance?”

She hesitated. A little more color crept into her face.

“Am I to answer truthfully?”

“You promised.”

Then her entire personality changed with an impulse as illogical, as sudden as any caprice that ever swept over a heart too young to bear bitterness.

“I asked you,” she said, “to come because—because I was happy with you to-day. But now—now it is too late. I am for sale once more. Will you buy me?”

“Willingly,” he returned, amazed but smiling.

“Too late,” she said, looking up; “I have sold myself.”

They were on the outer edge of the whirl now. Her hand slid from his shoulder, and she stepped back, flushed, brilliant-eyed, perfectly self-possessed.

“Thank you for offering to purchase,” she laughed, looking him straight in the face. “Shall we finish the dance? I am ready.”

“Let me see your card,” he said coolly. She held out the cluster of ivory and gold filigree for his inspection.

“I thought you had undertaken to amuse me,” she observed. “I didn’t bargain to amuse you.”

Her blue eyes were too brilliant, her color almost feverish now.

“I am going to,” he said. “But I warn you, you may not like it.”

“Try. Perhaps I may.”

“I’m going to rub out these names,” he said, watching her.

“That will be deliciously rude and impertinent. Do it. Can you think of anything else?”

“Oh, yes!” he said, filling in the card with his own name.

“Let me see,” she breathed, looking over his shoulder. “Delightful! Why, what you have done is exquisitely indecent, and will certainly involve us both in everything unpleasant. Now, what else are you going to do?”

“That sale,” he reflected—“you remember?”

“Oh, yes!”

“It’s canceled.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said with a laugh ending in a little check. “But you may compromise me if you—if you can manage it. I’ll flirt with you if you can keep the others off.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said, looking at her, scarcely knowing what he was saying. “You danced too well for me to let you go when I bored you; now that I don’t, do you think I shall let you go?”

She was on the verge of something—laughter or tears. He felt it, yet knew that she would not pass the verge.

“Now I have amused you a little,” he said, “will you sit out the rest of this dance with me?”

“How can I help it? Your name has replaced the others.”

He erased his name, and, from memory, filled in the other names in sequence. Then pocketing the tablets, he said airily: “Technically, I recover my self-respect—but, there’s a second conservatory beyond this one where I may lose yours.”

“I hope it is dark,” she said calmly.

“It is. We’ll go to the farthest corner.”

Passing through palms and tree ferns, they heard the music behind them cease; and they moved a trifle more quickly.

“It’s locked,” he said.

“I don’t care. Unlock it.”

He turned the key. They entered. A few electric bulbs glimmered here and there, gilding thickets of blossoms. There were no chairs to be found, and he had started to return for them, when she called his attention to a green bench under a mass of flowering vines, and, seating herself, looked up at him expectantly.

“Now,” he said, as he took his place beside her, “you may tell me anything or nothing, as you please. You are terribly excited—I’m rather excited, too. Every normal man is always reckless; every normal woman is, once in a lifetime. It’s a crisis; you’ve reached it. I’m a decent sort of fellow—safer than the next man, maybe. And now I’m keyed up, ready to listen, ready to talk, seriously or frivolously—ready to make love—either way.”

“Make love to me, seriously?” she said gayly. “Ah, but you are safe to say so—knowing that I am sold!” After a moment she looked up: “Why don’t you ask me who bought me?”

“Oh, I know,” he nodded.

“How do you know?”

“I saw your face—after the bargain.” The smile on her mouth remained, but he looked away, unable to meet her haunted eyes. “Rub out these names,” she said suddenly, offering to take the card again. And, as he made no movement, she suddenly tore it to pieces in her gloved hands and held the fragments toward him with a miserable little laugh. He took them, retaining her hand in his.

“You are the prettiest girl in the world,” he said lightly. “Shall I tell you more?”

“Do you know that I am engaged to Mr. Thorne again?”

“But I am going to make love to you.”

“But—I am really going to marry him—on Monday.”

He laughed, looking her in the eyes.

“Do you not believe me?” she asked.

“No,” he said, laughing.

“But it is true. I have put it off—I have waited until the last moment—you know what I said to-day—”

Incredulous, smiling, he recovered the hand she had withdrawn. She suffered it to lie in his, looking at him almost frightened.

“It is stupid not to believe me,” she said. “Can’t a man tell when a girl is speaking the truth? I tell you I must marry him on Monday, if I’m to get anything from my grandfather—”

His hand, holding hers, relaxed; he looked at her uneasily.

“All my sisters did the same thing,” she went on—“all hung back until the last moment. Then, like me, deadly tired of the pressure, they gave in in a hurry. I’m the youngest and last—thank Heaven!”

“What is all this?” he demanded.

“Nothing—indolence—an idea that I might fall in love, perhaps—kept me from marrying.”

Her voice trailed, vaguely reminiscent; she gazed at him with dimmed, speculative eyes, resting her chin on one curved wrist, elbow denting her silken knee.

“If a girl has a fool for a grandfather, what can she do? And I’m tired of the home pressure.”

She bent her head, idly lifting finger after finger of the white gloved hand that lay passively in his palm.

“So there you are,” she added; and, as he said nothing, she went on: “Tuesday, I’m twenty-one. Isn’t it absurd and dreadful? But there you are; I put it off and put it off, vowing and declaring I wouldn’t marry just to inherit my part. Mother has wept most of this year; but I said ‘No! no! no!’ and I refused to be the victim of any grandfather, and I declined to consider his wishes, or Mr. Thorne’s.”

She shrugged her shoulders: “But—you see? Cupidity at the last moment!”

“Whose cupidity?” he asked coolly.

“Mine,” she said, but he knew she was not truthful.

“That’s all right,” he observed cheerfully—“as long as it was not your family’s.” And, still smiling, he thought of her mother adroitly blocking his way until the daughter and the merchant had concluded the bargain and patched up a broken truce.

“It will be one of those ‘married-while-you-wait’ affairs,” she said, watching him; “traveling clothes and a few of the family. Don’t you want to come? You must come!” she added; “will you?”

“I have an idea,” he said, with a curious stare, “that I may be present at your wedding.”

“Good! Come with Jack Terriss and Prince Minsksky.”

“Oh, do you already number me with the Jack Terrisses?” he drawled.

“Certainly. Am I not pretty? Wouldn’t you kiss me if you—could? He always wants to; others have wanted to. Then I number you with the others; they were no more serious than you are.”

“Is it they or you who are not serious?” he asked. “I think if you gave any of them the chance you have given Thorne—”

“Yes, but I don’t love any of them. And Mr. Thorne is inevitable.”

“I see,” said Leeds carelessly. “So I am to say to-night: ‘Much happiness!’ and other stupidities. Am I not to say all these things?”

“Yes, if you like.”

“But I won’t.”

“That would be rude, wouldn’t it?” She looked up at him smiling, yet with something of concern, for he had both her hands now.

“Do you know what I am going to do?” he asked.

“No.”

“I am going to make love to you at once.”

“You may; I’m engaged.”

He listened a moment; the music rang distantly; somebody was missing a dance with the woman whose gloved hands lay in his.

“If you are going to marry for pure cupidity, why not take me?” he asked. “Any man would do for your amiable grandfather—and it seems to be all the same to you.”

“I did not know you well enough to ask you,” she said audaciously.

“Would I have done as well as anybody?” he demanded.

“Yes, as well—for me. Mother prefers the inevitable one.”

“Would I have done better than anybody—for you?” he persisted.

“Must I answer?”

“Yes; you have only fibbed once to-night.”

“Then—I’d rather—not answer. Don’t—don’t pretend to be serious. Be as frivolous as you will; make love to me if you wish—only don’t pretend.”

“No, I won’t pretend,” he said. She looked at him; his face caught fire though he strove to speak gayly: “I never believed I should fall in love-like this—not even when I first met you. You are faultlessly beautiful, with your thick, ruddy-gold hair—the hair I painted into my picture—and I painted your splendid, innocent eyes, and that scarlet, sulky mouth—not sullen then, Naida. Had I known such things were bought and sold I should have bid—”

“Stop,” she breathed.

“But all I should have offered was an ordinary heart—and you say that counts nothing against—other considerations.”

“Nothing,” she said, setting her lips.

“It counts nothing,” he repeated, watching her.

“Nothing—absolutely nothing. Is this how you amuse me? Is this what you call making love?”

“Partly this,” he said, “partly”—and he deliberately and unskillfully kissed her—“partly this.”

She rose, blushing scarlet, whisking her hands from his. He stood up to confront her, rather white.

“You are too—” she began unsteadily.

“What?”

“Brutal. I have been kissed before—but not stupidly—as you did. It was almost an affront—if such a woman as I can be affronted.” Cheeks and eyes were ablaze.

“I told you,” he said between lips almost colorless, “that I should speak the truth. I do; I love you. Can you give me a ghost of a chance?”

“You are clumsy and silly,” she said. “I—I was ready for almost anything—supposing you were clever enough to carry it all off lightly—”

“I can; I’ve kissed plenty of girls, but only one I’ve cared for—that’s why I was so awkward; I was scared to death. Why on earth did I awake at the eleventh hour to find that I loved you!”

“You are imposing on us both,” she said calmly. “Besides, I don’t believe you’ve kissed very many girls. Jack Terriss says you have no use for them except as models.”

“Jack’s crazy. Girls? Why, the girls I’ve kissed,” he explained blandly, “would fill that ballroom—”

“And overflow into this conservatory,” she added, quietly curious, yet perfectly convinced now that his experience had been as limited as her own. For she had never before been kissed.

“If you’ll let me show you—” he suggested.

“Show me what?”

“That I do know how to kiss a girl—”

She looked at him, then sat up straight, stripping off her gloves. Her face was hot; she used her fan.

He picked up one of her hands and she demurred, but he held to it with a fascinated determination that made a struggle unreasonable.

“What is the use,” she said, “of kissing a girl who is engaged? No, I will not! I forbid you! I—please don’t do—”

“Do what?” he asked.

“That! You have done it twice—when I asked you not to.”

“Was I clumsy this time?”

“Yes!”

“Then—”

“No—no—no!” Hands locked, she bent backward, evading him breathlessly, yet looking into his eyes with a curiosity, a fear, and something else that no man had ever seen in her gaze—something that he saw, and which the scarlet mouth, no longer sulky, tremblingly confirmed.

“There is a chance—a ghost of a chance!” he said, steadying his voice.

“No-no! There is no chance—even if you did—”

“What?”

“Love me! No chance, no ghost of a chance. Release me—please—I beg you. Oh, won’t you listen? You—you must not put your arm around me—”

The struggle was brief; she strained away from him desperately; and when he had her closer, she avoided his lips, hiding her face—and, as the hiding place happened to be, by some dreadful mistake, his shoulder, he drew her face upward and kissed her mouth again and again, until her head lay there quietly, eyes closed, wet lashes on her burning cheeks.

Then he used what voice he could command in a very manly and earnest fashion; and whether she heeded or whether even she heard was uncertain, for the tears kept her lashes wet, and her hands covered her face.

This was all very well, particularly when he drew one hand away, and her slim fingers closed convulsively over his. Between them they wrecked her delicate ivory fan, but neither seemed conscious of any loss.

“Now will you give me a ghost of a chance?” he whispered.

“I—I can’t—”

“Look at me, Naida—”

“No.”

“You must. I love you.”

“How can you—a girl bought—sold—”

“I bid higher, dear.”

“I know—my—my first kiss. You will not believe it—of a girl you kissed so easily. But it is— I have never before been kissed. But I can’t take the price; I’m sold—You had better kiss me for all the years to come.”

He bent his head; her eyes unclosed, and, looking up at him, she put both arms around his neck.

“You do love me,” he breathed.

She only looked at him.

“You must!”

“I might—if there was time. How can I have time to love you?”

“Marry me; and you shall have years of time.”

“But suppose I found I did not love you, silly?”

“You would be no worse off than if you married the inevitable.”

Her head lay on his shoulder; she looked at him reflectively. “Suppose,” she said, “suppose I marry neither of you—for a while-and let that wretched inheritance go!”

“For God’s sake, let it go!” he said fiercely. “Give me a ghost of a chance; that is all I ask—more than I dare hope.”

“And—if I loved you—in the remote future, would you marry a penniless girl?”

“Will that penniless girl promise me?” he asked under his breath.

“No!” said her mother from the glass doorway. And they both stood up.

“The dishonorable part you have played,” continued the quivering matron, “matches your lack of the elemental decencies, and your ignorance of the ordinary observances of conventional—”

Fury choked her.

“I only desire to marry your daughter, madam.”

“Naida!”

“Yes, mamma.”

She hesitated, turned to the man beside her, and looked up at him.

“Good-by,” she said; “don’t forget.”

Forget what, silly child? A flirt whom he had so easily kissed in a conservatory? Why, men find them everywhere—and not too difficult. Her first? Why, some man must be a coquette’s first—and in her case it happened to be Leeds.

So she walked slowly to the door, and her mother took her arm, and she looked back at the man standing there, his hands fumbling the shreds of her broken fan.

“Good night!” she said; and to her mother: “You hurt my arm, dear.”

“Are you mad?” hissed that horrified matron.

“Quite. I told him I was likely to do anything to-night.”

“You have done it!”

“I hope so, mother.”

“Hope what?”

“That I’ve made him love me.”

“Merciful Heaven! What has—” She halted, turning her tall daughter to face her. “Is it champagne?” she demanded.

“No; do I look dreadfully mussed? Oh, well—it was my first kiss, you know. One doesn’t understand how to take it coolly; I was very awkward—and fool enough to cry. My head aches. I fancy I look perfectly disreputable. Mother, will you—there he is now!—will you please keep off your Thornes and your Russians until I can escape? I will be in the dressing room—quite ready to go, mother dear.”

“Naida,” she said, her voice trembling, “I tell you now that if you are actually in love—”

“Yes, dear?”

“If you are, don’t consider my—my wishes—”

“About Mr. Thorne?”

“About anybody—even a man disreputable enough to kiss you—”

“Any man—to save my inheritance, mother?”

“Any eligible man, we decided.”

“Then it’s got to be somebody?”

“It has, little daughter—unless we’re a pair of fools!”

“Well, then—if it’s to be a man, I think—I think___” She turned and looked back into the long conservatories. But what she thought she did not utter, for at that moment the Russian spied her and came up palled and speechlessly fierce. And she took his arm very sweetly.

“Now we’ll dance until daylight if you desire,” she said, heading him off in the midst of an astonished inquiry concerning her disappearance. “I think we had better have the jolliest time we can—while it lasts. Because,” she added pensively, “I may run away from everybody some day. I’m quite likely to do anything, you know; am I not, mother?”

His alarm was so genuine that she threw back her head and laughed the most delicious and carefree laugh he had ever heard from her.

“Ah! It iss a pleasantry!” he said, inexpressibly relieved.

“Of course,” she said gayly. “I shall keep my legacy and marry somebody—you or Thorne or somebody. Therefore, monsieur, I require sleep; therefore”—she dropped his arm and a courtesy at the same time—“adieu, monsieur.”

“So soon, mademoiselle!”

“None too soon, monsieur. Mother! If you are ready? The prince is waiting to make his adieus.”

An hour later her mother kissed her good night with the humble and modest conviction that she had done well by every daughter, and had garnered every penny with which that miserable will had tantalized her so long.

“Good night, Naida,” she said affectionately. “De Peyster is a lovable fellow. If you can’t love him, you can’t love anybody.”

“I don’t know; I’ll see how I sleep, mother.”

“What do you mean, Naida?” she asked anxiously.

“That’s just it—I don’t know exactly what I do mean. But I’ll know if I don’t sleep. Good night, mother. If I am not in my room in the morning you will know I have married—somebody.”

“You—you wouldn’t do—”

“Oh, you know I am likely to do anything! I wish I could guess what it is to be—the next thing I am destined to do.”

She turned over in her great white bed, burying her hot cheeks in the pillow. She heard her mother leave the room; then her maid tiptoeing about, and presently the click of the electric button. She opened her eyes in darkness, and lying there fell a-thinking of the ghost of a chance a man had lost forever—or was it the man who had lost it? Was it not the maid after all?

“Men kiss pretty women when they can,” she reasoned, raising her hands to her heated cheeks. “He meant nothing that he will not forget this time next month…. So that is how it feels to be kissed! And I sniveled…. dear me!

“Still—if I had only had time—I could have made him love me—I think…. But artists are notoriously inconstant…. and usually very poor. If I—I could have married him, I should have felt morally obliged to bring him something. So there you are; I didn’t know he was like that or I might have hunted him up and given him a chance a year ago…. Why didn’t he take it? He—it is impossible he could suddenly love me—now—at the last moment, when it’s too late…. And I suppose it was abominable of him to have kissed me…. And he did it so frequently…. As a matter of fact, I, lying here, am a thoroughly kissed girl…. And I’m shamelessly indifferent to his guilt and mine. So—I think I’ll sleep a little.”

But she couldn’t.

“If I really find that I can’t sleep,” she said softly to herself, “I’m likely to do almost anything. I wonder whether he is asleep.”

He was not; he was seated in a rather small, dark, and chilly room not half a mile uptown. Jaws set, chin on his clenched fist, looking into the hollow eyes of a ghost—the Ghost of Chance. But the ghost as yet had made no sign.

For a while she lay there, wide-eyed, restless, face and arms flushed, her heart quickening to the rapid rush of disordered thought hurrying her onward—whither, she scarcely knew, until she found herself standing before her mirror, the electric light flooding the room once more.

“I can’t lie there,” she said to herself; “I can’t sleep; it seems to me as if I could never sleep again.”

The small gilt clock struck the hour—five! She considered it, turned and went to the window, and, raising the shade, looked out. The shadows of the electric lamps played quivering over the snow; nothing else stirred. She crossed the room and opened her door, listening there in the darkness. Then, treading softly, the tips of her fingers on the mahogany rail to guide her, she felt her way down the stairs, her small bare feet brushing the velvet carpet.

There was an electric jet in the lower hall; she turned it on, groped about on the telephone shelf for the directory, and turned the leaves noiselessly until she came to the letter, L. Very carefully she traced the column of names, eyes following her moving finger, until she found what she wanted. Then she turned, unhooked the receiver, and pressed it to her ear:

“Hello!” she almost whispered. “Please give me nine—O—three—Lenox Hill.”

And after a throbbing wait:

“Is this the Lenox Club?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Has Mr. Leeds come in yet?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Perhaps he isn’t asleep. Please find out. No, I can’t give my name.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes; it is of great importance. If he is asleep, please wake him.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, I’ll hold the wire.”

The receiver against her ear was trembling, but she could not control her hand.

“Yes!… Is that you, Mr. Leeds?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Can’t you guess who it is?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“You can’t! Do you mean to intimate that other gir—other people call you up at five o’clock in the morning!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Of course it is I!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, Naida.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“I am at home. I could not sleep, so I thought I would find out whether you could. Besides, I wanted to know whether you stayed for the cotillon.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“But why didn’t you?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Oh! that is very nice of you—to say that I—And haven’t you really been asleep?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Doing what?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Thinking of me!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“All alone in your room at this ghastly hour of the morning, thinking about me? Do you expect me to believe—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“I won’t tell you—now.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Haven’t I enough to keep me awake thinking?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“No, I don’t mean that. You know perfectly well that you gave me sufficient to think about—for the rest of my days.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Don’t say that over the ’phone! Yes, it was the first—the very first time it had ever been—been done to me.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“No, I don’t forget anything; I never shall. What do you mean by a ghost of a chance?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Oh! Do you truly mean that? I am so—so dreadfully happy to hear you say that—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Ye-s—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Oh-h!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“What! Now!!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Do you mean now?—at five o’clock in the—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“I do! I am in love with you! But I’m not insane—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Oh, this is dreadful!—Yes, I’ll hold the wire. Yes, the other name for it is the Church of the Transfiguration, but—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Nobody will do it for us at this hour!”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Well, I’ll wait—”

She leaned against the telephone shelf, the receiver pressed convulsively to her ear, blue eyes closed. Years seemed to drag Time in endless chains across her vision; her knees fell trembling; thought, run riot, raced through her brain, and every little pulse clamored to the heart’s hard beating.

“Yes!” she gasped with a start; “I’m still here.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“No, I am not dressed for—for the street—”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes—if you wish it…. It will take only a few minutes. But, oh-do you think—?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Truly I will; I do love you.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Yes, I will hurry. Good-by——”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“I do! I do! You will see!”

Up the dark stairway once more in velvet-footed haste, giving herself no moment for considering what she was about to do; masses of heavy, glowing hair in a tangle, with comb and brush flying; the soft, intimate perfume of lace and delicate linen, silk, and the flutter of ribbon; then gown and hat and furs—a stare at the unknown face in the mirror—her last adieu to the girl she had known so long. But, in the dark outside her door, she heard the summons—the voiceless call of the Ghost of Chance, waiting attendance; and her heart responded passionately. Down through the darkness again—fumbling at chain and bolt—the keen night air in her throat; and, through the wintry silence veiled in darkness, the yellow lamps of a brougham gilding her face, dazzling her as she laid her groping hand on the arm of the man who sprang forward to guide her.

“You mustn’t shiver so—you must not tremble that way,” he whispered. “It is all right, dear; I’ve got McManus and Kenna for witnesses; they’re at the church; I’ve made arrangements. Naida! Naida! The inevitable was never inevitable while there was the ghost of a chance that you loved me.”

She caught his hands in hers, staring into his face, which was as white as her own. “Oh!” she breathed. “I love you so. As maid—as wife, you have taken all there is to me—all of good, of evil—with my first kiss! I am yours—no matter what an outward fate might hold for me… Listen; look at me! Am I to go with you? Shall you repent it? Wait—hush, dear; it is not too late yet. I am not thinking of myself—for the first time in my life I am not thinking of self; nor of my mother; she is easily reconciled. I am thinking of you—of you and all that splendor your spirit lives in—all the heavenly world into which you set me—into which you painted me, transfigured, with eyes that seemed just opening in paradise!

“Tell me, dear; your life is important; it is really not your own to throw away. Shall I go with you? Shall I stay here, quiet with your memory—my life already fulfilled?”

His answer was so low that she bent her head close to his to listen. And, after a long while, unclosing her eyes, she saw through the carriage window the dim gas lamps shining and the stained light of a church window tracing across the snow a celestial pathway tinted with crimson, azure, and gold. The horses halted with a snowy thud of dancing hoofs; the wintry air rushed into her face as the carriage door was opened by two tall Irishmen wearing very shiny silk hats.

“Naida, Mr. McManus—Mr. Kenna—”

The tall hats of the tall Irishmen swept the snow; to each in turn she offered an unsteady little hand; then leaning on Leeds’s arm she entered the iron gateway, the two contractors following.

“The purty lady,” purred Kenna; “d’ye mind the little hand of her, McManus?”

“I did so; an’ I seen the mitten to fit it. Shquare yer chist, man; we’re walkin’ on shtocks and bonds; we’re walkin’ on the red neck o’ pride and power, Kenna. Whisht; cock yer hat, an’ thread majestic!”

And so though the snowy darkness of dawn they passed across the frozen gardens to that little church around the corner where no sweeter bride shall ever kneel than knelt there then at prayer among the tinted shadows. And behind them knelt the Ghost of Chance.

The sun rose at seven; and a little later the bride left the church, her pale, enraptured face uplifted to the rosy zenith. She returned to earth presently: “Jim, shall we stop and breakfast with—our mother?”

He pressed her hand in agonized acquiescence; he was too scared to speak. At the same time he seemed to be conscious of something at his elbow, laughing in silence. It was the Ghost of Chance bidding them au revoir. Then the brougham drove up at a signal from Kenna; the bride entered, and Leeds turned to McManus: “At five o’clock this morning I wired Thorne that the key panel was finished and ready to deliver. We leave for Florida this afternoon. Will you see that the contract is carried out?”

“Arrah, leave it to Kenna, Misther Leeds. Is that all, sorr?”

“All—I think—”

“There is wan little item I’m thinkin’ yer sweet lady has forgotten—but mayhap she has no need ov it—now—”

“What’s that, McManus?”

“The other mitten, sorr,” giggled McManus. Leeds looked at him for a full second; they shook hands very seriously.

Then, as the carriage wheeled and drove west, the bride, leaning on her husband’s shoulder to look back, caught a last glimpse of a snowy little church, an ice-festooned fountain behind the shrubbery, and, moving majestically in the middle distance, shoulder to shoulder, arm under arm, two dignified Irishmen, their tall hats burnished into splendor by the rising sun.

POLICE!!!

(1915)

CONTENTS:

… Dedication
… Foreword
… Preface
… Note
The Third Eye
The Immortal
The Ladies of the Lake

One Over
(In Search of the Mammoth)

Un Peu d’Amour

The Eggs of the Silver Moon

MAIN ToC     INDEX

TO LOUISE JOCELYN

All the pretty things you say,

All the pretty things you do

In your own delightful way

Make me fall in love with you,

Turning Autumn into May.

Every day is twice as gay

Just because of you, Louise!

Which is going some, you say?

In my dull, pedantic way

I am fashioning my lay

Just because I want to please.

Just because the things you say,

Just because the things you do

In your clever, charming way

Make me fall in love with you.

That is all, my dear, to-day.

—R. W. C.

Christmas, 1915.

FOREWORD

Give me no gold nor palaces

Nor quarts of gems in chalices

Nor mention me in Who is Who

I’d rather roam abroad with you

Investigating sky and land,

Volcanoes, lakes, and glacial sand

I’d rather climb with all my legs

To find a nest of speckled eggs,

Or watch the spotted spider spin

Or see a serpent shed its skin!

Give me no star-and-garter blue!

I’d rather roam around with you.

Flatten me not with flattery!

Walk with me to the Battery,

And see in glassy tanks the seals,

The sturgeons, flounders, smelt and eels

Disport themselves in ichthyic curves—

And when it gets upon our nerves

Then, while our wabbling taxi honks

I’ll tell you all about the Bronx,

Where captive wild things mope and stare

Through grills of steel that bar each lair

Doomed to imprisonment for life—

And you may go and take your wife.

Come to the Park[*] with me;

I’ll show you crass stupidity

Which sentences the hawk and fox

To inactivity, and locks

The door of freedom on the lynx

Where puma pines and eagle stinks.

Never a slaver’s fetid hold

Has held the misery untold

That crowds the great cats’ kennels where

Their vacant eyes glare blank despair

Half crazed by sloth, half dazed by fear

All day, all night, year after year.

To the swift, clean things that cleave the air

To the swift, clean things that cleave the sea

To the swift, clean things that brave and dare

Forest and peak and prairie free,

A cage to craze and stifle and stun

And a fat man feeding a penny bun

And a she-one giggling, “Ain’t it grand!”

As she drags a dirty-nosed brat by the hand.

[*] Central Park, filthiest, cruellest and most outrageous of zoological exhibitions.

PREFACE

On a beautiful day in spring as I was running as hard as I could run, pursued by the New York police and a number of excited citizens, my mind, which becomes brilliantly active under physical exhilaration, began to work busily.

I thought about all sorts of things: I thought about hard times and financial depression and about our great President who is in a class all alone with himself and soon to become extinct; I thought about art and why there isn’t any when it’s talked about; I thought of macro-lepidoptera, of metagrammatism, monoliths, manicures, and monsoons.

And all the time I was running as fast as I could run; and the faster I ran the more things I thought about until my terrific pace set my brain whizzing like a wheel.

I felt no remorse at having published these memoirs of my life—which was why the police and populace were pursuing me, maddened to frenzy by the fearless revelation of mighty scientific truths in this little volume you are about to attempt to read. Ubicumque ars ostentatur, veritas abesse videtur!

I thought about it clearly, calmly, concisely as I fled. The maddened shouts of the prejudiced populace did not disturb me. Around and around the Metropolitan Museum of Art I ran; the inmates of that institution came out to watch me and they knew at a glance that I was one of them for they set up a clamor like a bunch of decoy ducks when one of their wild comrades comes whirling by.

“Police! Police!” they shouted; but I went careering on uptown, afraid only that the park squirrels might club together to corner me. There are corners in grain. Why not in—but let that pass.

I took the park wall in front of the great Mr. Carnegie’s cottage at a single bound. He stood on his terrace and shouted, “Police!” He was quite logical.

The Equal Franchise Society was having a May party in the park near the Harlem Mere. They had chosen the Honorable William Jennings Bryan as Queen of the May. He wore low congress-gaiters and white socks; he was walking under a canopy, crowned with paper flowers, his hair curled over his coat collar, the tips of his fingers were suavely joined over his abdomen.

The moment he caught sight of me he shouted, “Police!”

He was right. The cabinet lacked only me.

And I might have consented to tarry—might have allowed myself to be apprehended for political purposes, had not a nobler, holier, more imperative duty urged me northward still.

Though all Bloomingdale shouted, “Stop him!” and all Matteawan yelled, “Police!” I should not have consented to pause. Even the quackitudinous recognition spontaneously offered by the Metropolitan Museum had not been sufficient to decoy me to my fellows.

I knew, of course, that I could find a sanctuary and a welcome in many places—in almost any sectarian edifice, any club, any newspaper office, any of the great publishers’, any school, any museum; I knew that I would be welcomed at Columbia University, at the annex to the Hall of Fame, in the Bishop’s Palace on Morningside Heights—there were many places all ready to receive, understand and honour me.

For a sufficiently crippled intellect, for a still-born brain, for the intellectually aborted, there is always a place on some editorial, sectarian, or educational staff.

Try It!

But I had other ideas as I galloped northward. The voiceless summons of the most jealous of mistresses was making siren music in my ears. That coquettish jade, Science, was calling me by wireless, and I was responding with both legs.

And so, at last, I arrived at the Bronx Park and dashed into the Administration Building where everybody rose and cheered me to the echo.

I was at home at last, unterrified, undismayed, and ready again as always to dedicate my life to the service of Truth and to every caprice and whim of my immortal mistress, Science. But I don’t want to marry her.

Magna est veritas! Sed major et longinquo reverentia.

[There is a great truth! Respect is greater when coming from a distance.]

POLICE!!!

Being a few deathless truths concerning several mysteries recently and scientifically unravelled by a modest servant of Science.

Quo quisque stultior, eo magis insolescit.

THE THIRD EYE

Although the man’s back was turned toward me, I was uncomfortably conscious that he was watching me. How he could possibly be watching me while I stood directly behind him, I did not ask myself; yet, nevertheless, instinct warned me that I was being inspected; that somehow or other the man was staring at me as steadily as though he and I had been face to face and his faded, sea-green eyes were focussed upon me.

It was an odd sensation which persisted in spite of logic, and of which I could not rid myself. Yet the little waitress did not seem to share it. Perhaps she was not under his glassy inspection. But then, of course, I could not be either.

No doubt the nervous tension incident to the expedition was making me supersensitive and even morbid.

Our sail-boat rode the shallow torquoise-tinted waters at anchor, rocking gently just off the snowy coral reef on which we were now camping. The youthful waitress who, for economy’s sake, wore her cap, apron, collar and cuffs over her dainty print dress, was seated by the signal fire writing in her diary. Sometimes she thoughtfully touched her pencil point with the tip of her tongue; sometimes she replenished the fire from a pile of dead mangrove branches heaped up on the coral reef beside her. Whatever she did she accomplished gracefully.

As for the man, Grue, his back remained turned toward us both and he continued, apparently, to scan the horizon for the sail which we all expected. And all the time I could not rid myself of the unpleasant idea that somehow or other he was looking at me, watching attentively the expression of my features and noting my every movement.

The smoke of our fire blew wide across leagues of shallow, sparkling water, or, when the wind veered, whirled back into our faces across the reef, curling and eddying among the standing mangroves like fog drifting.

Seated there near the fire, from time to time I swept the horizon with my marine glasses; but there was no sign of Kemper; no sail broke the far sweep of sky and water; nothing moved out there save when a wild duck took wing amid the dark raft of its companions to circle low above the ocean and settle at random, invisible again except when, at intervals, its white breast flashed in the sunshine.

Meanwhile the waitress had ceased to write in her diary and now sat with the closed book on her knees and her pencil resting against her lips, gazing thoughtfuly at the back of Grue’s head.

It was a ratty head of straight black hair, and looked greasy. The rest of him struck me as equally unkempt and dingy—a youngish man, lean, deeply bitten by the sun of the semi-tropics to a mahogany hue, and unusually hairy.

I don’t mind a brawny, hairy man, but the hair on Grue’s arms and chest was a rusty red, and like a chimpanzee’s in texture, and sometimes a wildly absurd idea possessed me that the man needed it when he went about in the palm forests without his clothes.

But he was only a “poor white”—a “cracker” recruited from one of the reefs near Pelican Light, where he lived alone by fishing and selling his fish to the hotels at Heliatrope City. The sail-boat was his; he figured as our official guide on this expedition—an expedition which already had begun to worry me a great deal.

For it was, perhaps, the wildest goose chase and the most absurdly hopeless enterprise ever undertaken in the interest of science by the Bronx Park authorities.

Nothing is more dreaded by scientists than ridicule; and it was in spite of this terror of ridicule that I summoned sufficient courage to organize an exploring party and start out in search of something so extraordinary, so hitherto unheard of, that I had not dared reveal to Kemper by letter the object of my quest.

No, I did not care to commit myself to writing just yet; I had merely sent Kemper a letter to join me on Sting-ray Key.

He telegraphed me from Tampa that he would join me at the rendezvous; and I started directly from Bronx Park for Heliatrope City; arrived there in three days; found the waitress all ready to start with me; inquired about a guide and discovered the man Grue in his hut off Pelican Light; made my bargain with him; and set sail for Sting-ray Key, the most excited and the most nervous young man who ever had dared disaster in the sacred cause of science.

Everything was now at stake, my honour, reputation, career, fortune. For, as chief of the Anthropological Field Survey Department of the great Bronx Park Zoölogical Society, I was perfectly aware that no scientific reputation can survive ridicule.

Nevertheless, the die had been cast, the Rubicon crossed in a sail-boat containing one beachcombing cracker, one hotel waitress, a pile of camping kit and special utensils, and myself!

How was I going to tell Kemper? How was I going to confess to him that I was staking my reputation as an anthropologist upon a letter or two and a personal interview with a young girl—a waitress at the Hotel Gardenia in Heliatrope City?

•      •      •      •      •      •

I lowered my sea-glasses and glanced sideways at the waitress. She was still chewing the end of her pencil, reflectively.

She was a pretty girl, one Evelyn Grey, and had been a country school-teacher in Massachusetts until her health broke.

Florida was what she required; but that healing climate was possible to her only if she could find there a self-supporting position.

Also she had nourished an ambition for a postgraduate education, with further aspirations to a Government appointment in the Smithsonian Institute.

All very worthy, no doubt—in fact, particularly commendable because the wages she saved as waitress in a Florida hotel during the winter were her only means of support while studying for college examinations during the summer in Boston, where she lived.

Yet, although she was an inmate of Massachusetts, her face and figure would have ornamented any light-opera stage. I never looked at her but I thought so; and her cuffs and apron merely accentuated the delusion. Such ankles are seldom seen when the curtain rises after the overture. Odd that frivolous thoughts could flit through an intellect dedicated only to science!

The man, Grue, had not stirred from his survey of the Atlantic Ocean. He had a somewhat disturbing capacity for remaining motionless—like a stealthy and predatory bird which depends on immobility for aggressive and defensive existence.

The sea-wind fluttered his cotton shirt and trousers and the tattered brim of his straw hat. And always I felt as though he were watching me out of the back of his ratty head, through the ravelled straw brim that sagged over his neck.

The pretty waitress had now chewed the end of her pencil to a satisfactory pulp, and she was writing again in her diary, very intently, so that my cautious touch on her arm seemed to startle her.

Meeting her inquiring eyes I said in a low voice:

“I am not sure why, but I don’t seem to care very much for that man, Grue. Do you?”

She glanced at the water’s edge, where Grue stood, immovable, his back still turned to us.

“I never liked him,” she said under her breath.

“Why?” I asked cautiously.

She merely shrugged her shoulders. She did it gracefully.

I said:

“Have you any particular reason for disliking him?”

“He’s dirty.”

“He looks dirty, yet every day he goes into the sea and swims about. He ought to be clean enough.”

She thought for a moment, then:

“He seems, somehow, to be fundamentally unclean—I don’t mean that he doesn’t wash himself. But there are certain sorts of animals and birds and other creatures from which one instinctively shrinks—not, perhaps, because they are materially unclean—”

“I understand,” I said. After a silence I added: “Well, there’s no chance now of sending him back, even if I were inclined to do so. He appears to be familiar with these latitudes. I don’t suppose we could find a better man for our purpose. Do you?”

“No. He was a sponge fisher once, I believe.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“No. But yesterday, when you took the boat and cruised to the south, I sat writing here and keeping up the fire. And I saw Grue climbing about among the mangroves over the water in a most uncanny way; and two snake-birds sat watching him, and they never moved.

“He didn’t seem to see them; his back was toward them. And then, all at once, he leaped backward at them where they sat on a mangrove, and he got one of them by the neck—”

“What!”

The girl nodded.

“By the neck,” she repeated, “and down they went into the water. And what do you suppose happened?”

“I can’t imagine,” said I with a grimace.

“Well, Grue went under, still clutching the squirming, flapping bird; and he stayed under.”

“Stayed under the water?”

“Yes, longer than any sponge diver I ever heard of. And I was becoming frightened when the bloody bubbles and feathers began to come up—”

“What was he doing under water?”

“He must have been tearing the bird to pieces. Oh, it was quite unpleasant, I assure you, Mr. Smith. And when he came up and looked at me out of those very vitreous eyes he resembled something horridly amphibious…. And I felt rather sick and dizzy.”

“He’s got to stop that sort of thing!” I said angrily. “Snake-birds are harmless and I won’t have him killing them in that barbarous fashion. I’ve warned him already to let birds alone. I don’t know how he catches them or why he kills them. But he seems to have a mania for doing it—”

I was interrupted by Grue’s soft and rather pleasant voice from the water’s edge, announcing a sail on the horizon. He did not turn when speaking.

The next moment I made out the sail and focussed my glasses on it.

“It’s Professor Kemper,” I announced presently.

“I’m so glad,” remarked Evelyn Grey.

I don’t know why it should have suddenly occurred to me, apropos of nothing, that Billy Kemper was unusually handsome. Or why I should have turned and looked at the pretty waitress—except that she was, perhaps, worth gazing upon from a purely non-scientific point of view. In fact, to a man not entirely absorbed in scientific research and not passionately and irrevocably wedded to his profession, her violet-blue eyes and rather sweet mouth might have proved disturbing.

As I was thinking about this she looked up at me and smiled.

“It’s a good thing,” I thought to myself, “that I am irrevocably wedded to my profession.” And I gazed fixedly across the Atlantic Ocean.

•      •      •      •      •      •

There was scarcely sufficient breeze of a steady character to bring Kemper to Sting-ray Key; but he got out his sweeps when I hailed him and came in at a lively clip, anchoring alongside of our boat and leaping ashore with that unnecessary dash and abandon which women find pleasing.

Glancing sideways at my waitress through my spectacles, I found her looking into a small hand mirror and patting her hair with one slim and suntanned hand.

When Professor Kemper landed on the coral he shot a curious look at Grue, and then came striding across the reef to me.

“Hello, Smithy!” he said, holding out his hand. “Here I am, you see! Now what’s up—”

Just then Evelyn Grey got up from her seat beside the fire; and Kemper turned and gazed at her with every symptom of unfeigned approbation.

I introduced him. Evelyn Grey seemed a trifle indifferent. A good-looking man doesn’t last long with a clever woman. I smiled to myself, polishing my spectacles gleefully. Yet, I had no idea why I was smiling.

We three people turned and walked toward the comb of the reef. A solitary palm represented the island’s vegetation, except, of course, for the water-growing mangroves.

I asked Miss Grey to precede us and wait for us under the palm; and she went forward in that light-footed way of hers which, to any non-scientific man, might have been a trifle disturbing. It had no effect upon me. Besides, I was looking at Grue, who had gone to the fire and was evidently preparing to fry our evening meal of fish and rice. I didn’t like to have him cook, but I wasn’t going to do it myself; and my pretty waitress didn’t know how to cook anything more complicated than beans. We had no beans.

Kemper said to me:

“Why on earth did you bring a waitress?”

“Not to wait on table,” I replied, amused. “I’ll explain her later. Meanwhile, I merely want to say that you need not remain with this expedition if you don’t want to. It’s optional with you.”

“That’s a funny thing to say!”

“No, not funny; sad. The truth is that if I fail I’ll be driven into obscurity by the ridicule of my brother scientists the world over. I had to tell them at the Bronx what I was going after. Every man connected with the society attempted to dissuade me, saying that the whole thing was absurd and that my reputation would suffer if I engaged in such a ridiculous quest. So when you hear what that girl and I are after out here in the semi-tropics, and when you are in possession of the only evidence I have to justify my credulity, if you want to go home, go. Because I don’t wish to risk your reputation as a scientist unless you choose to risk it yourself.”

He regarded me curiously, then his eyes strayed toward the palm-tree which Evelyn Grey was now approaching.

“All right,” he said briefly, “let’s hear what’s up.”

So we moved forward to rejoin the girl, who had already seated herself under the tree.

She looked very attractive in her neat cuffs, tiny cap, and pink print gown, as we approached her.

“Why does she dress that way?” asked Kemper, uneasily.

“Economy. She desires to use up the habiliments of a service which there will be no necessity for her to reënter if this expedition proves successful.”

“Oh. But Smithy—”

“What?”

“Was it—moral—to bring a waitress?”

“Perfectly,” I replied sharply. “Science knows no sex!”

“I don’t understand how a waitress can be scientific,” he muttered, “and there seems to be no question about her possessing plenty of sex—”

“If that girl’s conclusions are warranted,” I interrupted coldly, “she is a most intelligent and clever person. I think they are warranted. If you don’t, you may go home as soon as you like.”

I glanced at him; he was smiling at her with that strained politeness which alters the natural expression of men in the imminence of a conversation with a new and pretty woman.

I often wonder what particular combination of facial muscles are brought into play when that politely receptive expression transforms the normal and masculine features into a fixed simper.

When Kemper and I had seated ourselves, I calmly cut short the small talk in which he was already indulging, and to which, I am sorry to say, my pretty waitress was beginning to respond. I had scarcely thought it of her—but that’s neither here nor there—and I invited her to recapitulate the circumstances which had resulted in our present foregathering here on this strip of coral in the Atlantic Ocean.

She did so very modestly and without embarrassment, stating the case and reviewing the evidence so clearly and so simply that I could see how every word she uttered was not only amazing but also convincing Kemper.

When she had ended he asked a few questions very seriously:

“Granted,” he said, “that the pituitary gland represents what we assume it represents, how much faith is to be placed in the testimony of a Seminole Indian?”

“A Seminole Indian,” she replied, “has seldom or never been known to lie. And where a whole tribe testify alike the truth of what they assert can not be questioned.”

“How did you make them talk? They are a sullen, suspicious people, haughty, uncommunicative, seldom even replying to an ordinary question from a white man.”

“They consider me one of them.”

“Why?” he asked in surprise.

“I’ll tell you why. It came about through a mere accident. I was waitress at the hotel; it happened to be my afternoon off; so I went down to the coquina dock to study. I study in my leisure moments, because I wish to fit myself for a college examination.”

Her charming face became serious; she picked up the hem of her apron and continued to pleat it slowly and with precision as she talked:

“There was a Seminole named Tiger-tail sitting there, his feet dangling above his moored canoe, evidently waiting for the tide to turn before he went out to spear crayfish. I merely noticed he was sitting there in the sunshine, that’s all. And then I opened my mythology book and turned to the story of Argus, on which I was reading up.

“And this is what happened: there was a picture of the death of Argus, facing the printed page which I was reading—the well-known picture where Juno is holding the head of the decapitated monster—and I had read scarcely a dozen words in the book before the Seminole beside me leaned over and placed his forefinger squarely upon the head of Argus.

“‘Who?’ he demanded.

“I looked around good-humoredly and was surprised at the evident excitement of the Indian. They’re not excitable, you know.

“‘That,’ said I, ‘is a Greek gentleman named Argus.’ I suppose he thought I meant a Minorcan, for he nodded. Then, without further comment, he placed his finger on Juno.

“‘Who?’ he inquired emphatically.

“I said flippantly: ‘Oh, that’s only my aunt, Juno.’

“‘Aunty of you?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘She kill ’um Three-eye?’

“Argus had been depicted with three eyes.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘my Aunt Juno had Argus killed.’

“‘Why kill ’um?’

“‘Well, Aunty needed his eyes to set in the tails of the peacocks which drew her automobile. So when they cut off the head of Argus my aunt had the eyes taken out; and that’s a picture of how she set them into the peacock.’

“‘Aunty of you?’ he repeated.

“‘Certainly,’ I said gravely; ‘I am a direct descendant of the Goddess of Wisdom. That’s why I’m always studying when you see me down on the dock here.’

“‘You Seminole!’ he said emphatically.

“‘Seminole?’ I repeated, puzzled.

“‘You Seminole! Aunty Seminole—you Seminole!’

“‘Why, Tiger-tail?’

“‘Seminole hunt Three-eye long time—hundred, hundred year—hunt ’um Three-eye, kill ’um Three-eye.’

“‘You say that for hundreds of years the Seminoles have hunted a creature with three eyes?’

“‘Sure! Hunt ’um now!’

“‘Now?’

“‘Sure!’

“‘But, Tiger-tail, if the legends of your people tell you that the Seminoles hunted a creature with three eyes hundreds of years ago, certainly no such three-eyed creatures remain today?’

“‘Some.’

“‘What! Where?’

“‘Black Bayou.’

“‘Do you mean to tell me that a living creature with three eyes still inhabits the forests of Black Bayou?’

“‘Sure. Me see ’um. Me kill ’um three-eye man.’

“‘You have killed a man who had three eyes?’

“‘Sure!’

“‘A man? With three eyes?’

“‘Sure.’”

•      •      •      •      •      •

The pretty waitress, excitedly engrossed in her story, was unconsciously acting out the thrilling scene of her dialogue with the Indian, even imitating his voice and gestures. And Kemper and I listened and watched her breathlessly, fascinated by her lithe and supple grace as well as by the astounding story she was so frankly unfolding with the consummate artlessness of a natural actress.

She turned her flushed face to us:

“I made up my mind,” she said, “that Tiger-tail’s story was worth investigating. It was perfectly easy for me to secure corroboration, because that Seminole went back to his Everglade camp and told every one of his people that I was a white Seminole because my ancestors also hunted the three-eyed man and nobody except a Seminole could know that such a thing as a three-eyed man existed.

“So, the next afternoon off, I embarked in Tiger-tail’s canoe and he took me to his camp. And there I talked to his people, men and women, questioning, listening, putting this and that together, trying to discover some foundation for their persistent statements concerning men, still living in the jungles of Black Bayou, who had three eyes instead of two.

“All told the same story; all asserted that since the time their records ran the Seminoles had hunted and slain every three-eyed man they could catch; and that as long as the Seminoles had lived in the Everglades the three-eyed men had lived in the forests beyond Black Bayou.”

She paused, dramatically, cooling her cheeks in her palms and looking from Kemper to me with eyes made starry by excitement.

“And what do you think!” she continued, under her breath. “To prove what they said they brought for my inspection a skull. And then two more skulls like the first one.

“Every skull had been painted with Spanish red; the coarse black hair still stuck to the scalps. And, behind, just over where the pituitary gland is situated, was a hollow, bony orbit—unmistakably the socket of a third eye!”

“W-where are those skulls?” demanded Kemper, in a voice not entirely under control.

“They wouldn’t part with one of them. I tried every possible persuasion. On my own responsibility, and even before I communicated with Mr. Smith—” turning toward me, “—I offered them twenty thousand dollars for a single skull, staking my word of honour that the Bronx Museum would pay that sum.

“It was useless. Not only do the Seminoles refuse to part with one of those skulls, but I have also learned that I am the first person with a white skin who has ever even heard of their existence—so profoundly have these red men of the Everglades guarded their secret through centuries.”

After a silence Kemper, rather pale, remarked:

“This is a most astonishing business, Miss Grey.”

“What do you think about it?” I demanded. “Is it not worth while for us to explore Black Bayou?”

He nodded in a dazed sort of way, but his gaze remained riveted on the girl. Presently he said:

“Why does Miss Grey go?”

She turned in surprise:

“Why am I going? But it is my discovery—my contribution to science, isn’t it?”

“Certainly!” we exclaimed warmly and in unison. And Kemper added: “I was only thinking of the dangers and hardships. Smith and I could do the actual work—”

“Oh!” she cried in quick protest, “I wouldn’t miss one moment of the excitement, one pain, one pang! I love it! It would simply break my heart not to share every chance, hazard, danger of this expedition—every atom of hope, excitement, despair, uncertainty—and the ultimate success—the unsurpassable thrill of exultation in the final instant of triumph!”

She sprang to her feet in a flash of uncontrollable enthusiasm, and stood there, aglow with courage and resolution, making a highly agreeable picture in her apron and cuffs, the sea wind fluttering the bright tendrils of her hair under her dainty cap.

We got to our feet much impressed; and now absolutely convinced that there did exist, somewhere, descendants of prehistoric men in whom the third eye—placed in the back of the head for purposes of defensive observation—had not become obsolete and reduced to the traces which we know only as the pituitary body or pituitary gland.

Kemper and I were, of course, aware that in the insect world the ocelli served the same purpose that the degenerate pituitary body once served in the occiput of man.

As we three walked slowly back to the campfire, where our evening meal was now ready, Evelyn Grey, who walked between us, told us what she knew about the hunting of these three-eyed men by the Seminoles—how intense was the hatred of the Indians for these people, how murderously they behaved toward any one of them whom they could track down and catch.

“Tiger-tail told me,” she went on, “that in all probability the strange race was nearing extinction, but that all had not yet been exterminated because now and then, when hunting along Black Bayou, traces of living three-eyed men were still found by him and his people.

“No later than last week Tiger-tail himself had startled one of these strange denizens of Black Bayou from a meal of fish; and had heard him leap through the bushes and plunge into the water. It appears that centuries of persecution have made these three-eyed men partly amphibious—that is, capable of filling their lungs with air and remaining under water almost as long as a turtle.”

“That’s impossible!” said Kemper bluntly.

“I thought so myself,” she said with a smile, “until Tiger-tail told me a little more about them. He says that they can breathe through the pores of their skins; that their bodies are covered with a thick, silky hair, and that when they dive they carry down with them enough air to form a sort of skin over them, so that under water their bodies appear to be silver-plated.”

“Good Lord!” faltered Kemper. “That is a little too much!”

“Yet,” said I, “that is exactly what air-breathing water beetles do. The globules of air, clinging to the body-hairs, appear to silver-plate them; and they can remain below indefinitely, breathing through spiracles. Doubtless the skin pores of these men have taken on the character of spiracles.”

“You know,” he said in a curious, flat voice, which sounded like the tones of a partly stupified man, “this whole business is so grotesque—apparently so wildly absurd—that it’s having a sort of nightmare effect on me.” And, dropping his voice to a whisper close to my ear: “Good heavens!” he said. “Can you reconcile such a creature as we are starting out to hunt, with anything living known to science?”

“No,” I replied in guarded tones. “And there are moments, Kemper, since I have come into possession of Miss Grey’s story, when I find myself seriously doubting my own sanity.”

“I’m doubting mine, now,” he whispered, “only that girl is so fresh and wholesome and human and sane—”

“She is a very clever girl,” I said.

“And really beautiful!”

“She is intelligent,” I remarked. There was a chill in my tone which doubtless discouraged Kemper, for he ventured nothing further concerning her superficially personal attractions.

After all, if any questions of priority were to arise, the pretty waitress was my discovery. And in the scientific world it is an inflexible rule that he who first discovers any particular specimen of any species whatever is first entitled to describe and comment upon that specimen without interference or unsolicited advice from anybody.

Maybe there was in my eye something that expressed as much. For when Kemper caught my cold gaze fixed upon him he winced and looked away like a reproved setter dog who knew better. Which also, for the moment, put an end to the rather gay and frivolous line of small talk which he had again begun with the pretty waitress.

I was exceedingly surprised at Professor William Henry Kemper, D.F.

As we approached the campfire the loathsome odour of frying mullet saluted my nostrils.

Kemper, glancing at Grue, said aside to me:

“That’s an odd-looking fellow. What is he? Minorcan?”

“Oh, just a beachcomber. I don’t know what he is. He strikes me as dirty—though he can’t be so, physically. I don’t like him and I don’t know why. And I wish we’d engaged somebody else to guide us.”

Toward dawn something awoke me and I sat up in my blanket under the moon. But my leg had not been pulled.

Kemper snored at my side. In her little dog-tent the pretty waitress probably was fast asleep. I knew it because the string she had tied to one of her ornamental ankles still lay across the ground convenient to my hand. In any emergency I had only to pull it to awake her.

A similar string, tied to my ankle, ran parallel to hers and disappeared under the flap of her tent. This was for her to pull if she liked. She had never yet pulled it. Nor I the other. Nevertheless I truly felt that these humble strings were, in a subtler sense, ties that bound us together. No wonder Kemper’s behaviour had slightly irritated me.

I looked up at the silver moon; I glanced at Kemper’s unlovely bulk, swathed in a blanket; I contemplated the dog-tent with, perhaps, that slight trace of sentiment which a semi-tropical moon is likely to inspire even in a jellyfish. And suddenly I remembered Grue and looked for him.

He was accustomed to sleep in his boat, but I did not see him in either of the boats. Here and there were a few lumpy shadows in the moonlight, but none of them was Grue lying prone on the ground. Where the devil had he gone?

Cautiously I untied my ankle string, rose in my pajamas, stepped into my slippers, and walked out through the moonlight.

There was nothing to hide Grue, no rocks or vegetation except the solitary palm on the back-bone of the reef.

I walked as far as the tree and looked up into the arching fronds. Nobody was up there. I could see the moonlit sky through the fronds. Nor was Grue lying asleep anywhere on the other side of the coral ridge.

And suddenly I became aware of all my latent distrust and dislike for the man. And the vigour of my sentiments surprised me because I really had not understood how deep and thorough my dislike had been.

Also, his utter disappearance struck me as uncanny. Both boats were there; and there were many leagues of sea to the nearest coast.

Troubled and puzzled I turned and walked back to the dead embers of the fire. Kemper had merely changed the timbre of his snore to a whistling aria, which at any other time would have enraged me. Now, somehow, it almost comforted me.

Seated on the shore I looked out to sea, racking my brains for an explanation of Grue’s disappearance. And while I sat there racking them, far out on the water a little flock of ducks suddenly scattered and rose with frightened quackings and furiously beating wings.

For a moment I thought I saw a round, dark object on the waves where the flock had been.

And while I sat there watching, up out of the sea along the reef to my right crawled a naked, dripping figure holding a dead duck in his mouth.

Fascinated, I watched it, recognising Grue with his ratty black hair all plastered over his face.

Whether he caught sight of me or not, I don’t know; but he suddenly dropped the dead duck from his mouth, turned, and dived under water.

It was a grim and horrid species of sport or pastime, this amphibious business of his, catching wild birds and dragging them about as though he were an animal.

Evidently he was ashamed of himself, for he had dropped the duck. I watched it floating by on the waves, its head under water. Suddenly something jerked it under, a fish perhaps, for it did not come up and float again, as far as I could see.

When I went back to camp Grue lay apparently asleep on the north side of the fire. I glanced at him in disgust and crawled into my tent.

The next day Evelyn Grey awoke with a headache and kept her tent. I had all I could do to prevent Kemper from prescribing for her. I did that myself, sitting beside her and testing her pulse for hours at a time, while Kemper took one of Grue’s grains and went off into the mangroves and speared grunt and eels for a chowder which he said he knew how to concoct.

Toward afternoon the pretty waitress felt much better, and I warned Kemper and Grue that we should sail for Black Bayou after dinner.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Dinner was a mess, as usual, consisting of fried mullet and rice, and a sort of chowder in which the only ingredients I recognised were sections of crayfish.

After we had finished and had withdrawn from the fire, Grue scraped every remaining shred of food into a kettle and went for it. To see him feed made me sick, so I rejoined Miss Grey and Kemper, who had found a green coconut and were alternately deriving nourishment from the milk inside it.

Somehow or other there seemed to me a certain levity about that performance, and it made me uncomfortable; but I managed to smile a rather sickly smile when they offered me a draught, and I took a pull at the milk—I don’t exactly know why, because I don’t like it. But the moon was up over the sea, now, and the dusk was languorously balmy, and I didn’t care to leave those two drinking milk out of the same coconut under a tropic moon.

Not that my interest in Evelyn Grey was other than scientific. But after all it was I who had discovered her.

We sailed as soon as Grue, gobbling and snuffling, had cleaned up the last crumb of food. Kemper blandly offered to take Miss Grey into his boat, saying that he feared my boat was overcrowded, what with the paraphernalia, the folding cages, Grue, Miss Grey, and myself.

I sat on that suggestion, but offered to take my own tiller and lend him Grue. He couldn’t wriggle out of it, seeing that his alleged motive had been the overcrowding of my boat, but he looked rather sick when Grue went aboard his boat.

As for me, I hoisted sail with something so near a chuckle that it surprised me; and I looked at Evelyn Grey to see whether she had noticed the unseemly symptom.

Apparently she had not. She sat forward, her eyes fixed soulfully upon the moon. Had I been dedicated to any profession except a scientific one—but let that pass.

Grue in Kemper’s sail-boat led, and my boat followed out into the silvery and purple dusk, now all sparkling under the high lustre of the moon.

Dimly I saw vast rafts of wild duck part and swim leisurely away to port and starboard, leaving a glittering lane of water for us to sail through; into the scintillant night from the sea sprang mullet, silvery, quivering, falling back into the wash with a splash.

Here and there in the moonlight steered ominous black triangles, circling us, leading us, sheering across bow and flashing wake, all phosphorescent with lambent sea-fire—the fins of great sharks.

“You need have no fear,” said I to the pretty waitress.

She said nothing.

“Of course if you are afraid,” I added, “perhaps you might care to change your seat.”

There was room in the stern where I sat.

“Do you think there is any danger?” she asked.

“From sharks?”

“Yes.”

“Reaching up and biting you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I don’t really suppose there is,” I said, managing to convey the idea, I am ashamed to say, that the catastrophe was a possibility.

She came over and seated herself beside me. I was very much ashamed of myself, but I could not repress a triumphant glance ahead at the other boat, where Kemper sat huddled forward, evidently bored to extinction.

Every now and then I could see him turn and crane his neck as though in an effort to distinguish what was going on in our boat.

There was nothing going on, absolutely nothing. The moon was magnificent; and I think the pretty waitress must have been a little tired, for her head drooped and nodded at moments, even while I was talking to her about a specimen of Euplectilla speciosa on which I had written a monograph. So she must have been really tired, for the subject was interesting.

“You won’t incommode my operations with sheet and tiller,” I said to her kindly, “if you care to rest your head against my shoulder.”

Evidently she was very tired, for she did so, and closed her eyes.

After a while, fearing that she might fall over backward into the sea—but let that pass…. I don’t know whether or not Kemper could distinguish anything aboard our boat. He craned his head enough to twist it off his neck.

To be so utterly, so blindly devoted to science is a great safeguard for a man. Single-mindedness, however, need not induce atrophy of every humane impulse. I drew the pretty waitress closer—not that the night was cold, but it might become so. Changes in the tropics come swiftly. It is well to be prepared.

Her cheek felt very soft against my shoulder. There seemed to be a faint perfume about her hair. It really was odd how subtly fragrant she seemed to be—almost, perhaps, a matter of scientific interest.

Her hands did not seem to be chilled; they did seem unusually smooth and soft.

I said to her: “When at home, I suppose your mother tucks you in; doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” she nodded sleepily.

“And what does she do then?” said I, with something of that ponderous playfulness with which I make scientific jokes at a meeting of the Bronx Anthropological Association, when I preside.

“She kisses me and turns out the light,” said Evelyn Grey, innocently.

I don’t know how much Kemper could distinguish. He kept dodging about and twisting his head until I really thought it would come off, unless it had been screwed on like the top of a piano stool.

A few minutes later he fired his pistol twice; and Evelyn sat up. I never knew why he fired; he never offered any explanation.

Toward midnight I could hear the roar of breakers on our starboard bow. Evelyn heard them, too, and sat up inquiringly.

“Grue has found the inlet to Black Bayou, I suppose,” said I.

And it proved to be the case, for, with the surf thundering on either hand, we sailed into a smoothly flowing inlet through which the flood tide was running between high dunes all sparkling in the moonlight and crowned with shadowy palms.

Occasionally I heard noises ahead of us from the other boat, as though Kemper was trying to converse with us, but as his apropos was as unintelligible as it was inopportune, I pretended not to hear him. Besides, I had all I could do to manoeuvre the tiller and prevent Evelyn Grey from falling off backward into the bayou. Besides, it is not customary to converse with the man at the helm.

After a while—during which I seemed to distinguish in Kemper’s voice a quality that rhymes with his name—his tones varied through phases all the way from irony to exasperation. After a while he gave it up and took to singing.

There was a moon, and I suppose he thought he had a voice. It didn’t strike me so. After several somewhat melancholy songs, he let off his pistol two or three times and then subsided into silence.

I didn’t care; neither his songs nor his shots interrupted—but let that pass, also.

We were now sailing into the forest through pool after pool of interminable lagoons, startling into unseen and clattering flight hundreds of waterfowl. I could feel the wind from their whistling wings in the darkness, as they drove by us out to sea. It seemed to startle the pretty waitress. It is a solemn thing to be responsible for a pretty girl’s peace of mind. I reassured her continually, perhaps a trifle nervously. But there were no more pistol shots. Perhaps Kemper had used up his cartridges.

We were still drifting along under drooping sails, borne inland almost entirely by the tide, when the first pale, watery, gray light streaked the east. When it grew a little lighter, Evelyn sat up; all danger of sharks being over. Also, I could begin to see what was going on in the other boat. Which was nothing remarkable; Kemper slumped against the mast, his head turned in our direction; Grue sat at the helm, motionless, his tattered straw hat sagging on his neck.

When the sun rose, I called out cheerily to Kemper, asking him how he had passed the night. Evelyn also raised her head, pausing while bringing her disordered hair under discipline, to listen to his reply.

But he merely mumbled something. Perhaps he was still sleepy.

As for me, I felt exceedingly well; and when Grue turned his craft in shore, I did so, too; and when, under the overhanging foliage of the forest, the nose of my boat grated on the sand, I rose and crossed the deck with a step distinctly frolicsome.

Kemper seemed distant and glum; Evelyn Grey spoke to him shyly now and then, and I noticed she looked at him only when he was gazing elsewhere than at her. She had a funny, conciliatory air with him, half ashamed, partly humorous and amused, as though something about Kemper’s sulky ill-humour was continually making tiny inroads on her gravity.

Some mullet had jumped into the two boats—half a dozen during our moonlight voyage—and these were now being fried with rice for us by Grue. Lord! How I hated to eat them!

After we had finished breakfast, Grue, as usual, did everything to the remainder except to get into the fry-pan with both feet; and as usual he sickened me.

When he’d cleaned up everything, I sent him off into the forest to find a dry shell-mound for camping purposes; then I made fast both boats, and Kemper and I carried ashore our paraphernalia, spare batterie-de-cuisine, firearms, fishing tackle, spears, harpoons, grains, oars, sails, spars, folding cage—everything with which a strictly scientific expedition is usually burdened.

Evelyn was washing her face in the crystal waters of a branch that flowed into the lagoon from under the live-oaks. She looked very pretty doing it, like a naiad or dryad scrubbing away at her forest toilet.

It was, in fact, such a pretty spectacle that I was going over to sit beside her while she did it, but Kemper started just when I was going to, and I turned away. Some men invariably do the wrong thing. But a handsome man doesn’t last long with a pretty girl.

I was thinking of this as I stood contemplating an alligator slide, when Grue came back saying that the shore on which we had landed was the termination of a shell-mound, and that it was the only dry place he had found.

So I bade him pitch our tents a few feet back from the shore; and stood watching him while he did so, one eye reverting occasionally to Evelyn Grey and Kemper. They both were seated cross-legged beside the branch, and they seemed to be talking a great deal and rather earnestly. I couldn’t quite understand what they found to talk about so earnestly and volubly all of a sudden, inasmuch as they had heretofore exchanged very few observations during a most brief and formal acquaintance, dating only from sundown the day before.

Grue set up our three tents, carried the luggage inland, and then hung about for a while until the vast shadow of a vulture swept across the trees.

I never saw such an indescribable expression on a human face as I saw on Grue’s as he looked up at the huge, unclean bird. His vitreous eyes fairly glittered; the corners of his mouth quivered and grew wet; and to my astonishment he seemed to emit a low, mewing noise.

“What the devil are you doing?” I said impulsively, in my amazement and disgust.

He looked at me, his eyes still glittering, the corners of his mouth still wet; but the curious sounds had ceased.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. I thought you spoke.” I didn’t know what else to say.

He made no reply. Once, when I had partly turned my head, I was aware that he was warily turning his to look at the vulture, which had alighted heavily on the ground near the entrails and heads of the mullet, where he had cast them on the dead leaves.

I walked over to where Evelyn Grey and Kemper sat so busily conversing; and their volubility ceased as they glanced up and saw me approaching. Which phenomenon both perplexed and displeased me.

I said:

“This is the Black Bayou forest, and we have the most serious business of our lives before us. Suppose you and I start out, Kemper, and see if there are any traces of what we are after in the neighborhood of our camp.”

“Do you think it safe to leave Miss Grey alone in camp?” he asked gravely.

I hadn’t thought of that:

“No, of course not,” I said. “Grue can stay.”

“I don’t need anybody,” she said quickly. “Anyway, I’m rather afraid of Grue.”

“Afraid of Grue?” I repeated.

“Not exactly afraid. But he’s—unpleasant.”

“I’ll remain with Miss Grey,” said Kemper politely.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “I couldn’t ask that. It is true that I feel a little tired and nervous, but I can go with you and Mr. Smith and Grue—”

I surveyed Kemper in cold perplexity. As chief of the expedition, I couldn’t very well offer to remain with Evelyn Grey, but I didn’t propose that Kemper should, either.

“Take Grue,” he suggested, “and look about the woods for a while. Perhaps after dinner Miss Grey may feel sufficiently rested to join us.”

“I am sure,” she said, “that a few hours’ rest in camp will set me on my feet. All I need is rest. I didn’t sleep very soundly last night.”

I felt myself growing red, and I looked away from them both.

“Oh,” said Kemper, in apparent surprise, “I thought you had slept soundly all night long.”

“Nobody,” said I, “could have slept very pleasantly during that musical performance of yours.”

“Were you singing?” she asked innocently of Kemper.

“He was singing when he wasn’t firing off his pistol,” I remarked. “No wonder you couldn’t sleep with any satisfaction to yourself.”

Grue had disappeared into the forest; I stood watching for him to come out again. After a few minutes I heard a furious but distant noise of flapping; the others also heard it; and we listened in silence, wondering what it was.

“It’s Grue killing something,” faltered Evelyn Grey, turning a trifle pale.

“Confound it!” I exclaimed. “I’m going to stop that right now.”

Kemper rose and followed me as I started for the woods; but as we passed the beached boats Grue appeared from among the trees.

“Where have you been?” I demanded.

“In the woods.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing.”

There was a bit of down here and there clinging to his cotton shirt and trousers, and one had caught and stuck at the corner of his mouth.

“See here, Grue,” I said, “I don’t want you to kill any birds except for camp purposes. Why do you try to catch and kill birds?”

“I don’t.”

I stared at the man and he stared back at me out of his glassy eyes.

“You mean to say that you don’t, somehow or other, manage to catch and kill birds?”

“No, I don’t.”

There was nothing further for me to say unless I gave him the lie. I didn’t care to do that, needing his services.

Evelyn Grey had come up to join us; there was a brief silence; we all stood looking at Grue; and he looked back at us out of his pale, washed-out, and unblinking eyes.

“Grue,” I said, “I haven’t yet explained to you the object of this expedition to Black Bayou. Now, I’ll tell you what I want. But first let me ask you a question or two. You know the Black Bayou forests, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see anything unusual in these forests?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

The man stared at us, one after another. Then he said:

“What are you looking for in Black Bayou?”

“Something very curious, very strange, very unusual. So strange and unusual, in fact, that the great Zoölogical Society of the Bronx in New York has sent me down here at the head of this expedition to search the forests of Black Bayou.”

“For what?” he demanded, in a dull, accentless voice.

“For a totally new species of human being, Grue. I wish to catch one and take it back to New York in that folding cage.”

His green eyes had grown narrow as though sun-dazzled. Kemper had stepped behind us into the woods and was now busy setting up the folding cage. Grue remained motionless.

“I am going to offer you,” I said, “the sum of one thousand dollars in gold if you can guide us to a spot where we may see this hitherto unknown species—a creature which is apparently a man but which has, in the back of his head, a third eye—”

I paused in amazement: Grue’s cheeks had suddenly puffed out and were quivering; and from the corners of his slitted mouth he was emitting a whimpering sound like the noise made by a low-circling pigeon.

“Grue!” I cried. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What is he doing?” screamed Grue, quivering from head to foot, but not turning around.

“Who?” I cried.

“The man behind me!”

“Professor Kemper? He’s setting up the folding cage—”

With a screech that raised my hair, Grue whipped out his murderous knife and hurled himself backward at Kemper, but the latter shrank aside behind the partly erected cage, and Grue whirled around, snarling, hacking, and even biting at the wood frame and steel bars.

And then occurred a thing so horrid that it sickened me to the pit of my stomach; for the man’s sagging straw hat had fallen off, and there, in the back of his head, through the coarse, black, ratty hair, I saw a glassy eye glaring at me.

“Kemper!” I shouted. “He’s got a third eye! He’s one of them! Knock him flat with your riflestock!” And I seized a shot-gun from the top of the baggage bundle on the ground beside me, and leaped at Grue, aiming a terrific blow at him.

But the glassy eye in the back of his head was watching me between the clotted strands of hair, and he dodged both Kemper and me, swinging his heavy knife in circles and glaring at us both out of the front and back of his head.

Kemper seized him by his arm, but Grue’s shirt came off, and I saw his entire body was as furry as an ape’s. And all the while he was snapping at us and leaping hither and thither to avoid our blows; and from the corners of his puffed cheeks he whined and whimpered and mewed through the saliva foam.

“Keep him from the water!” I panted, following him with clubbed shot-gun; and as I advanced I almost stepped on a soiled heap of foulness—the dead buzzard which he had caught and worried to death with his teeth.

Suddenly he threw his knife at my head, hurling it backward; dodged, screeched, and bounded by me toward the shore of the lagoon, where the pretty waitress was standing, petrified.

For one moment I thought he had her, but she picked up her skirts, ran for the nearest boat, and seized a harpoon; and in his fierce eagerness to catch her he leaped clear over the boat and fell with a splash into the lagoon.

As Kemper and I sprang aboard and looked over into the water, we could see him going down out of reach of a harpoon; and his body seemed to be silver-plated, flashing and glittering like a burnished eel, so completely did the skin of air envelope him, held there by the fur that covered him.

And, as he rested for a moment on the bottom, deep down through the clear waters of the lagoon where he lay prone, I could see, as the current stirred his long, black hair, the third eye looking up at us, glassy, unwinking, horrible.

•      •      •      •      •      •

A bubble or two, like globules of quicksilver, were detached from the burnished skin of air that clothed him, and came glittering upward.

Suddenly there was a flash; a flurrying cloud of blue mud; and Grue was gone.

•      •      •      •      •      •

After a long while I turned around in the muteness of my despair. And slowly froze.

For the pretty waitress, becomingly pale, was gathered in Kemper’s arms, her cheek against his shoulder. Neither seemed to be aware of me.

“Darling,” he said, in the imbecile voice of a man in love, “why do you tremble so when I am here to protect you? Don’t you love and trust me?”

“Oo—h—yes,” she sighed, pressing her cheek closer to his shoulder.

I shoved my hands into my pockets, passed them without noticing them, and stepped ashore.

And there I sat down under a tree, with my back toward them, all alone and face to face with the greatest grief of my life.

But which it was—the loss of her or the loss of Grue, I had not yet made up my mind.

THE IMMORTAL

I

As everybody knows, the great majority of Americans, upon reaching the age of natural selection, are elected to the American Institute of Arts and Ethics, which is, so to speak, the Ellis Island of the Academy.

Occasionally a general mobilization of the Academy is ordered and, from the teeming population of the Institute, a new Immortal is selected for the American Academy of Moral Endeavor by the simple process of blindfolded selection from Who’s Which.

The motto of this most stately of earthly institutions is a peculiarly modest, truthful, and unintentional epigram by Tupper:

“Unknown, I became Famous; Famous, I remain Unknown.”

And so I found it to be the case; for, when at last I was privileged to write my name, “Smith, Academician,” I discovered to my surprise that I knew none of my brother Immortals, and, more amazing still, none of them had ever heard of me.

This latter fact became the more astonishing to me as I learned the identity of the other Immortals.

Even the President of our great republic was numbered among these Olympians. I had every right to suppose that he had heard of me. I had happened to hear of him, because his Secretary of State once mentioned him at Chautauqua.

It was a wonderfully meaningless sensation to know nobody and to discover myself equally unknown amid that matchless companionship. We were like a mixed bunch of gods, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Hottentot—all gathered on Olympus, having never heard of each other but taking it for granted that we were all gods together and all members of this club.

My initiation into the Academy had been fixed for April first, and I was much worried concerning the address which I was of course expected to deliver on that occasion before my fellow members.

It had to be an exciting address because slumber was not an infrequent phenomenon among the Immortals on such solemn occasions. Like dozens of dozing Joves, a dull discourse always set them nodding.

But always under such circumstances the pretty ushers from Barnard College passed around refreshments; a suffragette orchestra struck up; the ushers uprooted the seated Immortals and fox-trotted them into comparative consciousness.

But I didn’t wish to have my inaugural address interrupted, therefore I was at my wits’ ends to discover a subject of such exciting scientific interest that my august audience could not choose but listen as attentively as they would listen from the front row to some deathless stunt in vaudeville.

That morning I had left the Bronx rather early, hoping that a long walk might compose my thoughts and enable me to think of some sufficiently entertaining and unusual subject for my inaugural address.

I walked as far as Columbia University, gazed with rapture upon its magnificent architecture until I was as satiated as though I had arisen from a banquet at Childs’.

To aid mental digestion I strolled over to the noble home of the Academy and Institute adjoining Mr. Huntington’s Hispano-Moresque Museum.

It was a fine, sunny morning, and the Immortals were being exercised by a number of pretty ushers from Barnard.

I gazed upon the impressive procession with pride unutterable; very soon I also should walk two and two in the sunshine, my dome crowned with figurative laurels, cracking scientific witticisms with my fellow inmates, or, perhaps, squeezing the pretty fingers of some—But let that pass.

I was, as I say, gazing upon this inspiring scene on a beautiful morning in February, when I became aware of a short and visibly vulgar person beside me, plucking persistently at my elbow.

“Are you the great Academician, Perfessor Smith?” he asked, tipping his pearl-coloured and somewhat soiled bowler.

“Yes,” I said condescendingly. “Your description of me precludes further doubt. What can I do for you, my good man?”

“Are you this here Perfessor Smith of the Department of Anthropology in the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society?” he persisted.

“What do you desire of me?” I repeated, taking another look at him. He was exceedingly ordinary.

“Prof, old sport,” he said cordially, “I took a slant at the papers yesterday, an’ I seen all about the big time these guys had when you rode the goat—”

“Rode—what?”

“When you was elected. Get me?”

I stared at him. He grinned in a friendly way.

“The privacy of those solemn proceedings should remain sacred. It were unfit to discuss such matters with the world at large,” I said coldly.

“I get you,” he rejoined cheerfully.

“What do you desire of me?” I repeated. “Why this unseemly apropos?”

“I was comin’ to it. Perfessor, I’ll be frank. I need money—”

“You need brains!”

“No,” he said good-humouredly, “I’ve got ’em; plenty of ’em; I’m overstocked with idees. What I want to do is to sell you a few—”

“Do you know you are impudent!”

“Listen, friend. I seen a piece in the papers as how you was to make the speech of your life when you ride the goat for these here guys on April first—”

“I decline to listen—”

“One minute, friend! I want to ask you one thing! What are you going to talk about?”

I was already moving away but I stopped and stared at him.

“That’s the question,” he nodded with unimpaired cheerfulness, “what are you going to talk about on April the first? Remember it’s the hot-air party of your life. Ree-member that each an’ every paper in the United States will print what you say. Now, how about it, friend? Are you up in your lines?”

Swallowing my repulsion for him I said: “Why are you concerned as to what may be the subject of my approaching address?”

“There you are, Prof!” he exclaimed delightedly; “I want to do business with you. That’s me! I’m frank about it. Say, there ought to be a wad of the joyful in it for us both—”

“What?”

“Sure. We can work it any old way. Take Tyng, Tyng and Company, the typewriter people. I’d be ashamed to tell you what I can get out o’ them if you’ll mention the Tyng-Tyng typewriter in your speech—”

“What you suggest is infamous!” I said haughtily.

“Believe me there’s enough in it to make it a financial coup, and I ask you, Prof, isn’t a financial coup respectable?”

“You seem to be morally unfitted to comprehend—”

“Pardon me! I’m fitted up regardless with all kinds of fixtures. I’m fixed to undertake anything. Now if you’d prefer the Bunsen Baby Biscuit bunch—why old man Bunsen would come across—”

“I won’t do such things!” I said angrily.

“Very well, very well. Don’t get riled, sir. That’s only one way to build on Fifth Avenoo. I’ve got one hundred thousand other ways—”

“I don’t want to talk to you—”

“They’re honest—some of them. Say, if you want a stric’ly honest deal I’ve got the goods. Only it ain’t as easy and the money ain’t as big—”

“I don’t want to talk to you—”

“Yes you do. You don’t reelize it but you do. Why you’re fixin’ to make the holler of your life, ain’t you? What are you goin’ to say? Hey? What you aimin’ to say to make those guys set up? What’s the use of up-stagin’? Ain’t you willin’ to pay me a few plunks if I dy-vulge to you the most startlin’ phenomena that has ever electrified civilization sense the era of P.T. Barnum!”

I was already hurrying away when the mention of that great scientist’s name halted me once more.

The little flashy man had been tagging along at my heels, talking cheerfully and volubly all the while; and now, as I halted again, he struck an attitude, legs apart, thumbs hooked in his arm-pits, and his head cocked knowingly on one side.

“Prof,” he said, “if you’d work in the Tyng-Tyng Company, or fix it up with Bunsen to mention his Baby Biscuits as the most nootritious of condeements, there’d be more in it for you an’ me. But it’s up to you.”

“Well I won’t!” I retorted.

“Very well, ve-ry well,” he said soothingly. “Then look over another line o’ samples. No trouble to show ’em—none at all, sir! Now if P.T. Barnum was alive—”

I said very seriously: “The name of that great discoverer falling from your illiterate lips has halted me a second time. His name alone invests your somewhat suspicious conversation with a dignity and authority heretofore conspicuously absent. If, as you hint, you have any scientific information for sale which P.T. Barnum might have considered worth purchasing, you may possibly find in me a client. Proceed, young sir.”

“Say, listen, Bo—I mean, Prof. I’ve got the goods. Don’t worry. I’ve got information in my think-box that would make your kick-in speech the event of the century. The question remains, do I get mine?”

“What is this scientific information?”

We had now walked as far as Riverside Drive. There were plenty of unoccupied benches. I sat down and he seated himself beside me.

For a few moments I gazed upon the magnificent view. Even he seemed awed by the proportions of the superb iron gas tank dominating the prospect.

I gazed at the colossal advertisements across the Hudson, at the freight trains below; I gazed upon the lordly Hudson itself, that majestic sewer which drains the Empire State, bearing within its resistless flood millions of tons of insoluble matter from that magic fairyland which we call “up-state,” to the sea. And, thinking of disposal plants, I thought of that sublime paraphrase—“From the Mohawk to the Hudson, and from the Hudson to the Sea.”

“Bo,” he said, “I gotta hand it to you. Them guys might have got wise if you had worked in the Tyng-Tyng Company or the Bunsen stuff. There was big money into it, but it might not have went.”

I waited curiously.

“But this here dope I’m startin’ in to cook for you is a straight, reelible, an’ hones’ pill. P.T. Barnum he would have went a million miles to see what I seen last Janooary down in the Coquina country—”

“Where is that?”

“Say; that’s what costs money to know. When I put you wise I’m due to retire from actyve business. Get me?”

“Go on.”

“Sure. I was down to the Coquina country, a-doin’—well, I was doin’ rubes. I gotta be hones’ with you, Prof. That’s what I was a-doin’ of—sellin’ farms under water to suckers. Bee-u-tiful Florida! Own your own orange grove. Seven crops o’ strawberries every winter in Gawd’s own country—get me?”

He bestowed upon me a loathsome wink.

“Well, it went big till I made a break and got in Dutch with the Navy Department what was surveyin’ the Everglades for a safe and sane harbor of refuge for the navy in time o’ war.

“Sir, they was a-dredgin’ up the farms I was sellin’, an’ the suckers heard of it an’ squealed somethin’ fierce, an’ I had to hustle! Yes, sir, I had to git up an’ mosey cross-lots. And what with the Federal Gov’ment chasin’ me one way an’ them rubes an’ the sheriff of Pickalocka County racin’ me t’other, I got lost for fair—yes, sir.”

He smiled reminiscently, produced from his pockets the cold and offensive remains of a partly consumed cigar, and examined it critically. Then he requested a match.

“I shall now pass over lightly or in subdood silence the painful events of my flight,” he remarked, waving his cigar and expelling a long squirt of smoke from his unshaven lips. “Surfice it to say that I got everythin’ that was comin’ to me, an’ then some, what with snakes and murskeeters, an’ briers an’ mud, an’ hunger an’ thirst an’ heat. Wasn’t there a wop named Pizarro or somethin’ what got lost down in Florida? Well, he’s got nothin’ on me. I never want to see the dam’ state again. But I’ll go back if you say so!”

His small rat eyes rested musingly upon the river; he sucked thoughtfully at his cigar, hooked one soiled thumb into the armhole of his fancy vest and crossed his legs.

“To resoom,” he said cheerily; “I come out one day, half nood, onto the banks of the Miami River. The rest was a pipe after what I had went through.

“I trimmed a guy at Miami, got clothes and railroad fare, an’ ducked.

“Now the valyble portion of my discourse is this here partial information concernin’ what I seen—or rather what I run onto durin’ my crool flight from my ree-lentless persecutors.

“An’ these here is the facts: There is, contrary to maps, Coast Survey guys, an’ general opinion, a range of hills in Florida, made entirely of coquina.

“It’s a good big range, too, fifty miles long an’ anywhere from one to five miles acrost.

“An’ what I’ve got to say is this: Into them there Coquina hills there still lives the expirin’ remains of the cave-men—”

“What!” I exclaimed incredulously.

“Or,” he continued calmly, “to speak more stric’ly, the few individools of that there expirin’ race is now totally reduced to a few women.”

“Your statement is wild—”

“No; but they’re wild. I seen ’em. Bein’ extremely bee-utiful I approached nearer, but they hove rocks at me, they did, an’ they run into the rocks like squir’ls, they did, an’ I was too much on the blink to stick around whistlin’ for dearie.

“But I seen ’em; they was all dolled up in the skins of wild annermals. When I see the first one she was eatin’ onto a ear of corn, an’ I nearly ketched her, but she run like hellnall—yes, sir. Just like that.

“So next I looked for some cave guy to waltz up an’ paste me, but no. An’ after I had went through them dam’ Coquina mountains I realized that there was nary a guy left in this here expirin’ race, only women, an’ only about a dozen o’ them.”

He ceased, meditatively expelled a cloud of pungent smoke, and folded his arms.

“Of course,” said I with a sneer, “you have proofs to back your pleasant tale?”

“Sure. I made a map.”

“I see,” said I sarcastically. “You propose to have me pay you for that map?”

“Sure.”

“How much, my confiding friend?”

“Ten thousand plunks.”

I began to laugh. He laughed, too: “You’ll pay ’em if you take my map an’ go to the Coquina hills,” he said.

I stopped laughing: “Do you mean that I am to go there and investigate before I pay you for this information?”

“Sure. If the goods ain’t up to sample the deal is off.”

“Sample? What sample?” I demanded derisively.

He made a gesture with one soiled hand as though quieting a balky horse.

“I took a snapshot, friend. You wanta take a slant at it?”

“You took a photograph of one of these alleged cave-dwellers?”

“I took ten but when these here cave-ladies hove rocks at me the fillums was put on the blink—all excep’ this one which I dee-veloped an’ printed.”

He drew from his inner coat pocket a photograph and handed it to me—the most amazing photograph I ever gazed upon. Astounded, almost convinced I sat looking at this irrefutable evidence in silence. The smoke of his cigar drifting into my face aroused me from a sort of dazed inertia.

“Listen,” I said, half strangled, “are you willing to wait for payment until I personally have verified the existence of these—er—creatures?”

“You betcher! When you have went there an’ have saw the goods, just let me have mine if they’re up to sample. Is that right?”

“It seems perfectly fair.”

“It is fair. I wouldn’t try to do a scientific guy—no, sir. Me without no eddycation, only brains? Fat chance I’d have to put one over on a Academy sport what’s chuck-a-block with Latin an’ Greek an’ scientific stuff an’ all like that!”

I admitted to myself that he’d stand no chance.

“Is it a go?” he asked.

“Where is the map?” I inquired, trembling internally with excitement.

“Ha—ha!” he said. “Listen to my mirth! The map is inside here, old sport!” and he tapped his retreating forehead with one nicotine-stained finger.

“I see,” said I, trying to speak carelessly; “you desire to pilot me.”

“I don’t desire to but I gotta go with you.”

“An accurate map—”

“Can it, old sport! A accurate map is all right when it’s pasted over the front of your head for a face. But I wear the other kind of map inside me conk. Get me?”

“I confess that I do not.”

“Well, get this, then. It’s a cash deal. If the goods is up to sample you hand me mine then an’ there. I don’t deliver no goods F.O.B. I shows ’em to you. After you have saw them it’s up to you to round ’em up. That’s all, as they say when our great President pulls a gun. There ain’t goin’ to be no shootin’; walk out quietly, ladies!”

After I had sat there for fully ten minutes staring at him I came to the only logical conclusion possible to a scientific mind.

I said: “You are, admittedly, unlettered; you are confessedly a chevalier of industry; personally you are exceedingly distasteful to me. But it is useless to deny that you are the most extraordinary man I ever saw…. How soon can you take me to these Coquina hills?”

“Gimme twenty-four hours to—fix things,” he said gaily.

“Is that all?”

“It’s plenty, I guess. An’—say!”

“What?”

“It’s a stric’ly cash deal. Get me?”

“I shall have with me a certified check for ten thousand dollars. Also a pair of automatics.”

He laughed: “Huh!” he said, “I could loco your cabbage-palm soup if I was that kind! I’m on the level, Perfessor. If I wasn’t I could get you in about a hundred styles while you was blinkin’ at what you was a-thinkin’ about. But I ain’t no gun-man. You hadn’t oughta pull that stuff on me. I’ve give you your chanst; take it or leave it.”

I pondered profoundly for another ten minutes. And at last my decision was irrevocably reached.

“It’s a bargain,” I said firmly. “What is your name?”

“Sam Mink. Write it Samuel onto that there certyfied check—if you can spare the extra seconds from your valooble time.”

II

On Monday, the first day of March, 1915, about 10:30 a.m., we came in sight of something which, until I had met Mink, I never had dreamed existed in southern Florida—a high range of hills.

It had been an eventless journey from New York to Miami, from Miami to Fort Coquina; but from there through an absolutely pathless wilderness as far as I could make out, the journey had been exasperating.

Where we went I do not know even now: saw-grass and water, hammock and shell mound, palm forests, swamps, wildernesses of water-oak and live-oak, vast stretches of pine, lagoons, sloughs, branches, muddy creeks, reedy reaches from which wild fowl rose in clouds where alligators lurked or lumbered about after stranded fish, horrible mangrove thickets full of moccasins and water-turkeys, heronry more horrible still, out of which the heat from a vertical sun distilled the last atom of nauseating effluvia—all these choice spots we visited under the guidance of the wretched Mink. I seemed to be missing nothing that might discourage or disgust me.

He appeared to know the way, somehow, although my compass became mysteriously lost the first day out from Fort Coquina.

Again and again I felt instinctively that we were travelling in a vast circle, but Mink always denied it, and I had no scientific instruments to verify my deepening suspicions.

Another thing bothered me: Mink did not seem to suffer from insects or heat; in fact, to my intense annoyance, he appeared to be having a comfortable time of it, eating and drinking with gusto, sleeping snugly under a mosquito bar, permitting me to do all camp work, the paddling as long as we used a canoe, and all the cooking, too, claiming, on his part, a complete ignorance of culinary art.

Sometimes he condescended to catch a few fish for the common pan; sometimes he bestirred himself to shoot a duck or two. But usually he played on his concertina during his leisure moments which were plentiful.

I began to detest Samuel Mink.

At first I was murderously suspicious of him, and I walked about with my automatic arsenal ostentatiously displayed. But he looked like such a miserable little shrimp that I became ashamed of my precautions. Besides, as he cheerfully pointed out, a little koonti soaked in my drinking water, would have done my business for me if he had meant me any physical harm. Also he had a horrid habit of noosing moccasins for sport; and it would have been easy for him to introduce one to me while I slept.

Really what most worried me was the feeling which I could not throw off that somehow or other we were making very little progress in any particular direction.

He even admitted that there was reason for my doubts, but he confided to me that to find these Coquina hills, was like traversing a maze. Doubling to and fro among forests and swamps, he insisted, was the only possible path of access to the undiscovered Coquina hills of Florida. Otherwise, he argued, these Coquina hills would long ago have been discovered.

And it seemed to me that he had been right when at last we came out on the edge of a palm forest and beheld that astounding blue outline of hills in a country which has always been supposed to lie as flat as a flabby flap-jack.

A desert of saw-palmetto stretched away before us to the base of the hills; game trails ran through it in every direction like sheep paths; a few moth-eaten Florida deer trotted away as we appeared.

Into one of these trails stepped Samuel Mink, burdened only with his concertina and a box of cigars. I, loaded with seventy pounds of impedimenta including a moving-picture apparatus, reeled after him.

He walked on jauntily toward the hills, his pearl-coloured bowler hat at an angle. Occasionally he played upon his concertina as he advanced; now and then he cut a pigeon wing. I hated him. At every toilsome step I hated him more deeply. He played “Tipperary” on his concertina.

“See ’em, old top?” he inquired, nodding toward the hills. “I’m a man of my word, I am. Look at ’em! Take ’em in, old sport! An’ reemember, each an’ every hill is guaranteed to contain one bony fidy cave-lady what is the last vanishin’ traces of a extinc’ an’ dissappeerin’ race!”

We toiled on—that is, I did, bowed under my sweating load of paraphernalia. He skipped in advance like some degenerate twentieth century faun, playing on his pipes the unmitigated melodies of George Cohan.

“Watch your step!” he cried, nimbly avoiding the attentions of a ground-rattler which tried to caress his ankle from under a saw-palmetto.

With a shudder I gave the deadly little reptile room and floundered forward a prey to exhaustion, melancholy, and red-bugs. A few buzzards kept pace with me, their broad, black shadows gliding ominously over the sun-drenched earth; blue-tail lizards went rustling and leaping away on every side; floppy soft-winged butterflies escorted me; a strange bird which seemed to be dressed in a union suit of checked gingham, flew from tree to tree as I plodded on, and squealed at me persistently.

At last I felt the hard coquina underfoot; the cool blue shadow of the hills enveloped me; I slipped off my pack, dumped it beside a little rill of crystal water which ran sparkling from the hills, and sat down on a soft and fragrant carpet of hound’s-tongue.

After a while I drank my fill at the rill, bathed head, neck, face and arms, and, feeling delightfully refreshed, leaned back against the fern-covered slab of coquina.

“What are you doing?” I demanded of Mink who was unpacking the kit and disengaging the moving-picture machine.

“Gettin’ ready,” he replied, fussing busily with the camera.

“You don’t expect to see any cave people here, do you?” I asked with a thrill of reviving excitement.

“Why not?”

“Here?”

“Cert’nly. Why the first one I seen was a-drinkin’ into this brook.”

“Here! Where I’m sitting?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes, sir, right there. It was this way; I was lyin’ down, tryin’ to figure the shortes’ way to Fort Coquina, an’ wishin’ I was nearer Broadway than I was to the Equator, when I heard a voice say, ‘Blub-blub, muck-a-muck!’ an’ then I seen two cave-ladies come sof’ly stealin’ along.”

“W-where?”

“Right there where you are a-sittin’. Say, they was lookers! An’ they come along quiet like two big-eyed deer, kinder nosin’ the air and listenin’.

“‘Gee whiz,’ thinks I, ‘Longacre ain’t got so much on them dames!’ An’ at that one o’ them wore a wild-cat’s skin an’ that’s all—an’ a wild-cat ain’t big. And t’other she sported pa’m-leaf pyjamas.

“So when they don’t see nothin’ around to hinder, they just lays down flat and takes a drink into that pool, lookin’ up every swallow like little birds listenin’ and kinder thankin’ God for a good square drink.

“I knowed they was wild girls soon as I seen ’em. Also they sez to one another, ‘Blub-blub!’ kinder sof’ly. All the same I’ve seen wilder ladies on Broadway so I took a chanst where I was squattin’ behind a rock.

“So sez I, ‘Ah there, sweetie Blub-blub! Have a taxi on me!’ An’ with that they is on their feet, quiverin’ all over an’ nosin’ the wind. So first I took some snapshots at ’em with my Bijoo camera.

“I guess they scented me all right for I seen their eyes grow bigger, an’ then they give a bound an’ was off over the rocks; an’ me after ’em. Say, that was some steeple-chase until a few more cave-ladies come out on them rocks above us an’ hove chunks of coquina at me.

“An’ with all that dodgin’ an’ duckin’ of them there rocks the cave-girls got away; an’ I seen ’em an’ the other cave-ladies scurryin’ into little caves—one whisked into this hole, another scuttled into that—bing! all over!

“All I could think of was to light a cigar an’ blow the smoke in after the best-lookin’ cave-girl. But I couldn’t smoke her out, an’ I hadn’t time to starve her out. So that’s all I know about this here pree-historic an’ extinc’ race o’ vanishin’ cave-ladies.”

As his simple and illiterate narrative advanced I became proportionally excited; and, when he ended, I sprang to my feet in an uncontrollable access of scientific enthusiasm:

“Was she really pretty?” I asked.

“Listen, she was that peachy—”

“Enough!” I cried. “Science expects every man to do his duty! Are your films ready to record a scene without precedent in the scientific annals of creation?”

“They sure is!”

“Then place your camera and your person in a strategic position. This is a magnificent spot for an ambush! Come over beside me!”

He came across to where I had taken cover among the ferns behind the parapet of coquina, and with a thrill of pardonable joy I watched him unlimber his photographic artillery and place it in battery where my every posture and action would be recorded for posterity if a cave-lady came down to the water-hole to drink.

“It were futile,” I explained to him in a guarded voice, “for me to attempt to cajole her as you attempted it. Neither playful nor moral suasion could avail, for it is certain that no cave-lady understands English.”

“I thought o’ that, too,” he remarked. “I said, ‘Blub-blub! muck-a-muck!’ to ’em when they started to run, but it didn’t do no good.”

I smiled: “Doubtless,” said I, “the spoken language of the cave-dweller is made up of similarly primitive exclamations, and you were quite right in attempting to communicate with the cave-ladies and establish a cordial entente. Professor Garner has done so among the Simian population of Gaboon. Your attempt is most creditable and I shall make it part of my record.

“But the main idea is to capture a living specimen of cave-lady, and corroborate every detail of that pursuit and capture upon the films.

“And believe me, Mr. Mink,” I added, my voice trembling with emotion, “no Academician is likely to go to sleep when I illustrate my address with such pictures as you are now about to take!”

“The police might pull the show,” he suggested.

“No,” said I, “Science is already immune; art is becoming so. Only nature need fear the violence of prejudice; and doubtless she will continue to wear pantalettes and common-sense nighties as long as our great republic endures.”

I unslung my field-glasses, adjusted them and took a penetrating squint at the hillside above.

Nothing stirred up there except a buzzard or two wheeling on tip-curled pinions above the palms.

Presently Mink inquired whether I had “lamped” anything, and I replied that I had not.

“They may be snoozin’ in their caves,” he suggested. “But don’t you fret, old top; you’ll get what’s comin’ to you and I’ll get mine.”

“About that check—” I began and hesitated.

“Sure. What about it?”

“I suppose I’m to give it to you when the first cave-woman appears.”

“That’s what!”

I pondered the matter for a while in silence. I could see no risk in paying him this draft on sight.

“All right,” I said. “Bring on your cave-dwellers.”

Hour succeeded hour, but no cave-dwellers came down to the pool to drink. We ate luncheon—a bit of cold duck, some koonti-bread, and a dish of palm-cabbage. I smoked an inexpensive cigar; Mink lit a more pretentious one. Afterward he played on his concertina at my suggestion on the chance that the music might lure a cave-girl down the hill. Nymphs were sometimes caught that way, and modern science seems to be reverting more and more closely to the simpler truths of the classics which, in our ignorance and arrogance, we once dismissed as fables unworthy of scientific notice.

However this Broadway faun piped in vain: no white-footed dryad came stealing through the ferns to gaze, perhaps to dance to the concertina’s plaintive melodies.

So after a while he put his concertina into his pocket, cocked his derby hat on one side, gathered his little bandy legs under his person, and squatted there in silence, chewing the wet and bitter end of his extinct cigar.

Toward mid-afternoon I unslung my field-glasses again and surveyed the hill.

At first I noticed nothing, not even a buzzard; then, of a sudden, my attention was attracted to something moving among the fern-covered slabs of coquina just above where we lay concealed—a slim, graceful shape half shadowed under a veil of lustrous hair which glittered like gold in the sun.

“Mink!” I whispered hoarsely. “One of them is coming! This—this indeed is the stupendous and crowning climax of my scientific career!”

His comment was incredibly coarse: “Gimme the dough,” he said without a tremor of surprise. Indeed there was a metallic ring of menace in his low and entirely cold tones as he laid one hand on my arm. “No welchin’,” he said, “or I put the whole show on the bum!”

The overwhelming excitement of the approaching crisis neutralized my disgust; I fished out the certified check from my pocket and flung the miserable scrap of paper at him. “Get your machine ready!” I hissed. “Do you understand what these moments mean to the civilized world!”

“I sure do,” he said.

Nearer and nearer came the lithe white figure under its glorious crown of hair, moving warily and gracefully amid the great coquina slabs—nearer, nearer, until I no longer required my glasses.

She was a slender red-lipped thing, blue-eyed, dainty of hand and foot.

The spotted pelt of a wild-cat covered her, or attempted to.

I unfolded a large canvas sack as she approached the pool. For a moment or two she stood gazing around her and her close-set ears seemed to be listening. Then, apparently satisfied, she threw back her beautiful young head and sent a sweet wild call floating back to the sunny hillside.

“Blub-blub!” rang her silvery voice; “blub-blub! Muck-a-muck!” And from the fern-covered hollows above other voices replied joyously to her reassuring call, “Blub-blub-blub!”

The whole bunch was coming down to drink—the entire remnant of a prehistoric and almost extinct race of human creatures was coming to quench its thirst at this water-hole. How I wished for James Barnes at the camera’s crank! He alone could do justice to this golden girl before me.

One by one, clad in their simple yet modest gowns of pelts and garlands, five exquisitively superb specimens of cave-girl came gracefully down to the water-hole to drink.

Almost swooning with scientific excitement I whispered to the unspeakable Mink: “Begin to crank as soon as I move!” And, gathering up my big canvas sack I rose, and, still crouching, stole through the ferns on tip-toe.

They had already begun to drink when they heard me; I must have made some slight sound in the ferns, for their keen ears detected it and they sprang to their feet.

It was a magnificent sight to see them there by the pool, tense, motionless, at gaze, their dainty noses to the wind, their beautiful eyes wide and alert.

For a moment, enchanted, I remained spellbound in the presence of this prehistoric spectacle, then, waving my sack, I sprang out from behind the rock and cantered toward them.

Instead of scattering and flying up the hillside they seemed paralyzed, huddling together as though to get into the picture. Delighted I turned and glanced at Mink; he was cranking furiously.

With an uncontrollable shout of triumph and delight I pranced toward the huddling cave-girls, arms outspread as though heading a horse or concentrating chickens. And, totally forgetting the uselessness of urbanity and civilized speech as I danced around that lovely but terrified group, “Ladies!” I cried, “do not be alarmed, because I mean only kindness and proper respect. Civilization calls you from the wilds! Sentiment, pity, piety propel my legs, not the ruthless desire to injure or enslave you! Ladies! You are under the wing of science. An anthropologist is speaking to you! Fear nothing! Rather rejoice! Your wonderful race shall be rescued from extinction—even if I have to do it myself! Ladies, don’t run!” They had suddenly scattered and were now beginning to dodge me. “I come among you bearing the precious promises of education, of religion, of equal franchise, of fashion!”

“Blub-blub!” they whimpered continuing to dodge me.

“Yes!” I cried in an excess of transcendental enthusiasm. “Blub-blub! And though I do not comprehend the exquisite simplicity of your primeval speech, I answer with all my heart, ‘Blub-blub!’”

Meanwhile, they were dodging and eluding me as I chased first one, then another, one hand outstretched, the other invitingly clutching the sack.

A hasty glance at Mink now and then revealed him industriously cranking away.

Once I fell into the pool. That section of the film should never be released, I determined, as I blew the water out of my mouth, gasped, and started after a lovely, ruddy-haired cave-girl whose curiosity had led her to linger beside the pool in which I was floundering.

But run as fast as I could and skip hither and thither with all the agility I could muster I did not seem to be able to seize a single cave-girl.

Every few minutes, baffled and breathless, I rested; and they always clustered together uttering their plaintively musical “blub-blub,” not apparently very much afraid of me, and even exhibiting curiosity. Now and then they cast glances toward Mink who was grinding away steadily, and I could scarcely retain a shout of joy as I realized what wonderful pictures he was taking. Indeed luck seemed to be with me, so far, for never once did these beautiful prehistoric creatures retire out of photographic range.

But otherwise the problem was becoming serious. I could not catch one of them; they eluded me with maddening swiftness and grace; my pauses to recover my breath became more frequent.

At last, dead beat, I sat down on a slab of coquina. And when I was able to articulate I turned around toward Mink.

“You’ll have to drop your camera and come over and help me,” I panted. “I’m all in!”

“Not quite,” he said.

For a moment I did not understand him; then under my outraged eyes, and within the hearing of my horrified ears a terrible thing occurred.

“Now, ladies!” yelled Mink, “all on for the fine-ally! Up-stage there, you red-headed little spot-crabber! Mabel! Take the call! Now smile the whole bloomin’ bunch of you!”

What was he saying? I did not comprehend. I stared dully at the six cave-girls as they grouped themselves in a semi-circle behind me.

Then, as one of them came up and unfolded a white strip of cloth behind my head, the others drew from concealed pockets in their kilts of cat-fur, little silk flags of all nations and began to wave them.

Paralyzed I turned my head. On the strip of white cloth, which the tallest cave-girl was holding directly behind my head, was printed in large black letters:

SUNSET SOAP

For one cataclysmic instant I gazed upon this hideous spectacle, then with an unearthly cry I collapsed into the arms of the nicest looking one.

There is little more to say. Contrary to my fears the release of this outrageous film did not injure my scientific standing. Modern science, accustomed to proprietary testimonials, has become reconciled to such things.

My appearance upon the films in the movies in behalf of Sunset Soap, oddly enough, seemed to enhance my scientific reputation. Even such austere purists as Guilford, the Cubist poet, congratulated me upon my fearless independence of ethical tradition.

And I had lived to learn a gentler truth than that, for, the pretty girl who had been cast for Cave-girl No. 3—But let that pass. Adhibenda est in jocando moderatio.

Sweet are the uses of adver-tisement.

THE LADIES OF THE LAKE

I

At the suggestion of several hundred thousand ladies desiring to revel and possibly riot in the saturnalia of equal franchise, the unnamed lakes in that vast and little known region in Alaska bounded by the Ylanqui River and the Thunder Mountains were now being inexorably named after women.

It was a beautiful thought. Already several exquisite, lonely bits of water, gem-set among the eternal peaks, mirrors for cloud and soaring eagle, a glass for the moon as keystone to the towering arch of stars, had been irrevocably labelled.

Already there was Lake Amelia Jones, Lake Sadie Dingleheimer, Lake Maggie McFadden, and Lake Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt.

I longed to see these lakes under the glamour of their newly added beauty.

Imagine, therefore, my surprise and happiness when I received the following communication from my revered and beloved chief, Professor Farrago, dated from the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, whither he had been summoned in haste to examine and pronounce upon the identity of a very small bird supposed to be a specimen of that rare and almost extinct creature, the two-toed titmouse, Mustitta duototus, to be scientifically exact, as I invariably strive to be.

The important letter in question was as follows:

To

Percy Smith, B.S., D.F., etc., etc.,

Curator, Department of Anthropology,

Administration Building,

Bronx Park, N.Y.

My Dear Mr. Smith:

Several very important and determined ladies, recently honoured by the Government in having a number of lakes in Alaska named after them, have decided to make a pilgrimage to that region, inspired by a characteristic desire to gaze upon the lakes named after them individually.

They request information upon the following points:

1st. Are the waters of the lakes in that locality sufficiently clear for a lady to do her hair by? In that event, the expedition will not burden itself with looking-glasses.

2nd. Are there any hotels? (You need merely say, no. I have tried to explain to them that it is, for the most part, an unexplored wilderness, but they insist upon further information from you.)

3rd. If there are hotels, is there also running water to be had? (You may tell them that there is plenty of running water.)

4th. What are the summer outdoor amusements? (You may inform them that there is plenty of bathing, boating, fishing, and an abundance of shade trees. Also, excellent mountain-climbing to be had in the vicinity. You need not mention the pastimes of “Hunt the Flea” or “Dodge the Skeeter.”)

I am not by nature cruel, Mr. Smith, but when these ladies informed me that they had decided to penetrate that howling and unexplored wilderness without being burdened or interfered with by any member of my sex, for one horrid and criminal moment I hoped they would. Because in that event none of them would ever come back.

However, in my heart milder and more humane sentiments prevailed. I pointed out to them the peril of their undertaking, the dangers of an unexplored region, the necessity of masculine guidance and support.

My earnestness and solicitude were, I admit, prompted partly by a desire to utilize this expensively projected expedition as a vehicle for the accumulation of scientific data.

As soon as I heard of it I conceived the plan of attaching two members of our Bronx Park scientific staff to the expedition—you, and Mr. Brown.

But no sooner did these determined ladies hear of it than they repelled the suggestion with indignation.

Now, the matter stands as follows: These ladies don’t want any man in the expedition; but they have at last realized that they’ve got to take a guide or two. And there are no feminine guides in Alaska.

Therefore, considering the immense and vital importance of such an opportunity to explore and report upon this unknown region at somebody else’s expense, I suggest that you and Brown meet these ladies at Lake Mrs. Susan W. Pillsbury, which lies on the edge of the region to be explored; that you, without actually perjuring yourselves too horribly, convey to them the misleading impression that you are the promised guides provided for them by a cowed and avuncular Government; and that you take these fearsome ladies about and let them gaze at their reflections in the various lakes named after them; and that, while the expedition lasts, you secretly make such observations, notes, reports, and collections of the flora and fauna of the region as your opportunities may permit.

No time is to be lost. If, at Lake Susan W. Pillsbury, you find regular guides awaiting these ladies, you will bribe these guides to go away and you yourselves will then impersonate the guides. I know of no other way for you to explore this region, as all our available resources at Bronx Park have already been spent in painting appropriate scenery to line the cages of the mammalia, and also in the present exceedingly expensive expedition in search of the polka-dotted boom-bock, which is supposed to inhabit the jungle beyond Lake Niggerplug.

My most solemn and sincere wishes accompany you. Bless you!

Farrago.

II

This, then, is how it came about that “Kitten” Brown and I were seated, one midgeful morning in July, by the pellucid waters of Lake Susan W. Pillsbury, gnawing sections from a greasily fried trout, upon which I had attempted culinary operations.

Brown’s baptismal name was William; but the unfortunate young man was once discovered indiscreetly embracing a pretty assistant in the Administration Building at Bronx, and, furthermore, was overheard to address her as “Kitten.”

So Kitten Brown it was for him in future. After he had fought all the younger members of the scientific staff in turn, he gradually became resigned to this annoying nom d’amour.

Lightly but thoroughly equipped for scientific field research, we had arrived at the rendezvous in time to bribe the two guides engaged by the Government to go back to their own firesides.

A week later the formidable expedition of representative ladies arrived; and now they were sitting on the shore of Lake Susan W. Pillsbury, at a little distance from us, trying to keep the midges from their features and attempting to eat the fare provided for them by me.

I myself couldn’t eat it. No wonder they murmured. But hunger goaded them to attack the greasy mess of trout and fried cornmeal.

Kitten was saying to me:

“Our medicine chest isn’t very extensive. I hope they brought their own. If they didn’t, some among us will never again see New York.”

I stole a furtive glance at the unfortunate women. There was one among them—but let me first enumerate their heavy artillery:

There was the Reverend Dr. Amelia Jones, blond, adipose, and close to the four-score mark. She stepped high in the Equal Franchise ranks. Nobody had ever had the temerity to answer her back.

There was Miss Sadie Dingleheimer, fifty, emaciated, anemic, and gauntly glittering with thick-lensed eye-glasses. She was the President of the National Prophylactic Club, whatever that may be.

There was Miss Margaret McFadden, a Titian, profusely toothed, muscular, and President of the Hair Dressers’ Union of the United States.

There was Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt, a grass one—Batt being represented as a vanishing point—President of the National Eugenic and Purity League; tall, gnarled, sinuously powerful, and prone to emotional attacks. The attacks were directed toward others.

These, then, composed the heavy artillery. The artillery of the light brigade consisted only of a single piece. Her name was Angelica White, a delegate from the Trained Nurses’ Association of America. The nurses had been too busy with their business to attend such picnics, so one had been selected by lot to represent the busy Association on this expedition.

Angelica White was a tall, fair, yellow-haired girl of twenty-two or three, with violet-blue eyes and red lips, and a way of smiling a little when spoken to—but let that pass. I mean only to be scientifically minute. A passion for fact has ever obsessed me. I have little literary ability and less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of letters known as fiction. Once in my life my mania for accuracy involved me lyrically. It was a short poem, but an earnest one:

Truth is mighty and must prevail,

Otherwise it were inadvisable to tell the tale.

I bestowed it upon the New York Evening Post, but declined remuneration. My message belonged to the world. I don’t mean the newspaper.

Her eyes, then, were tinted with that indefinable and agreeable nuance which modifies blue to a lilac or violet hue.

Watching her askance, I was deeply sorry that my cooking seemed to pain her.

“Guide!” said Mrs. Doolittle Batt, in that remarkable, booming voice of hers.

“Ma’am!” said Kitten Brown and I with spontaneous alacrity, leaping from the ground as though shot at.

“This cooking,” she said, with an ominous stare at us, “is atrocious. Don’t you know how to cook?”

I said with a smiling attempt at ease:

“There are various ways of cooking food for the several species of mammalia which an all-wise Providence—”

“Do you think you’re cooking for wild-cats?” she demanded.

Our smiles faded.

“It’s my opinion that you’re incompetent,” remarked the Reverend Dr. Jones, slapping at midges with a hand that might have rocked all the cradles of the nation, but had not rocked any.

“We’re not getting our money’s worth,” said Miss Dingleheimer, “even if the Government does pay your salaries.”

I looked appealingly from one stony face to another. In Miss McFadden’s eye there was the somber glint of battle. She said:

“If you can guide us no better than you cook, God save us all this day week!” And she hurled the contents of her tin plate into Lake Susan W. Pillsbury.

Mrs. Doolittle Batt arose:

“Come,” she said; “it is time we started. What is the name of the first lake we may hope to encounter?”

We knew no more than did they, but we said that Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt was the first, hoping to placate that fearsome woman.

“Come on, then!” she cried, picking up her carved and varnished mountain staff.

Miss Dingleheimer had brought one, too, from the Catskills.

So Kitten Brown and I loaded our mule, set him in motion, and drove him forward into the unknown.

Where we were going we had not the slightest idea; the margin of the lake was easy travelling, so easy that we never noticed that we had already gone around the lake three times, until Mrs. Batt recognized the fact and turned on us furiously.

I didn’t know how to explain it, except to say feebly that I was doing it as a sort of preliminary canter to harden and inure the ladies.

“We don’t need hardening!” she snarled. “Do you understand that!”

I comprehended that at once. But I forced a sickly smile and skipped forward in the wake of my mule, with something of the same abandon which characterizes the flight of an unwelcome dog.

In the terrified ear of Kitten I voiced my doubts concerning the prospects of a pleasant journey.

We marched in the following order: Arthur, the heavily laden mule, led; then came Kitten Brown and myself, all hung over with stew-pans, shotguns, rifles, cartridge-belts, ponchos, and the toilet reticules of the ladies; then marched the Reverend Dr. Jones, and, in order, filing behind her, Miss Dingleheimer, Mrs. Batt, Miss McFadden, and Miss White—the latter in her trained nurse’s costume and wearing a red cross on her sleeve—an idea of Mrs. Batt, who believed in emergency methods.

Mrs. Batt also bore a banner, much interfered with by the foliage, bearing the inscription:

EQUAL RIGHTS!
EUGENICS OR EXTERMINATION!

After a while she shouted:

“Guide! Here, you may carry this banner for a while! I’m tired.”

Kitten and I took turns with it after that. It was hard work, particularly as one by one in turn they came up and hung their parasols and shopping reticules all over us. We plodded forward like a pair of moving department stores, not daring to shift our burdens to Arthur, because we had already stuffed into the panniers of that simple and dignified animal all our collecting boxes, cyanide jars, butterfly nets, note-books, reels of piano wire, thermometers, barometers, hydrometers, stereometers, aeronoids, adenoids—everything, in fact, that guides are not supposed to pack into the woods, but which we had smuggled unbeknown to those misguided ones we guided.

And, to make room for our scientific paraphernalia, we had been obliged to do a thing so mean, so inexpressibly low, that I blush to relate it. But facts are facts; we discarded nearly a ton of feminine impedimenta. There was fancy work of all sorts in the making or in the raw—materials for knitting, embroidering, tatting, sewing, hemming, stitching, drawn-work, lace-making, crocheting.

Also we disposed of almost half a ton of toilet necessities—powder, perfumery, cosmetics, hot-water bags, slippers, negligees, novels, magazines, bonbons, chewing-gum, hat-boxes, gloves, stockings, underwear.

We left enough apparel for each lady to change once. They’d have to do some scrubbing now. Science can not be halted by hatpins; cosmos can not be side-tracked by cosmetics.

Toward sunset we came upon a small, crystal clear pond, set between the bases of several lofty mountains. I was ready to drop with fatigue, but I nerved myself, drew a deep, exultant breath, and with one of those fine, sweeping gestures, I cried:

“Lake Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt! Eureka! At last! Excelsior!”

There was a profound silence behind me. I turned, striving to mask my apprehension with a smile. The ladies were regarding the pond in surprise. I admit that it was a pond, not a lake.

Injecting into my voice the last remnants of glee which I could summon, I shouted, “Eureka!” and began to caper about as though the size and beauty of the pond had affected me with irrepressible enthusiasm, hoping by my emotion to stampede the convention.

The cold voice of Mrs. Doolittle Batt checked my transports:

“Is that puddle named after me?” she demanded.

“M-ma’am?” I stammered.

“If that wretched frog-pond has been christened with my name, somebody is going to get into trouble,” she said ominously.

A profound silence ensued. Arthur patiently switched at flies. As for me, I looked up at the majestic pines, gazed upon the lofty and eternal hills, then ventured a sneaking glance all around me. But I could discover no avenue of escape in case Mrs. Batt should charge me.

“I had been informed,” she began dangerously, “that the majestic body of water, which I understood had been honoured with my name, was twelve miles long and three miles wide. This appears to be a puddle!”

“B-b-but it’s very p-pretty,” I protested feebly. “It’s quite round and clear, and it’s nearly a quarter of a mile in d-diameter—”

“Mind your business!” retorted Mrs. Doolittle Batt. “I’ve been swindled!”

Kitten Brown knew more about women than did I. He said in a fairly steady voice:

“Madame, it is an outrage! The women of this mighty nation should make the Government answerable for its duplicity! Your lake should have been at least twenty miles long!”

Everybody turned and looked at Kitten. He was a handsome dog.

“This young man appears to have some trace of common-sense,” said Mrs. Batt. “I shall see to it that the Government is held responsible for this odious act of insulting duplicity. I—I won’t have my name given to this—this wallow!—” She advanced toward me, her small eyes blazing: I retreated to leeward of Arthur.

“Guide!” she said in a voice still trembling with passion. “Are you certain that you have made no mistake? You appear to be unusually ignorant.”

“I am afraid there can be no room for doubt,” I said, almost scared out of my senses.

“And on top of this outrage, am I to eat your cooking?” she demanded passionately. “Did I come here to look at this frog-pond and choke on your cooking? Did I?”

“I can cook,” said a clear, pleasant voice at my elbow. And Miss White came forward, cool, clean, fresh as a posy in her uniform and cap. I immediately got behind her.

“I can cook very nicely,” she said smilingly. “It is part of my profession, you know. So if you two guides will be kind enough to build the fire and help me—” She let her violet eyes linger on me for an instant, then on Brown. A moment later he and I were jostling each other in our eagerness to obey her slightest suggestion. It is that way with men.

So we built her a fire and unpacked our provisions, and we waited very politely on the ladies when dinner was ready.

It was a fine dinner—coffee, bacon, flap-jacks, soup, ash-bread, stewed chicken.

The heavy artillery, made ravenous by their journey, required vast quantities of ammunition. They banqueted largely. I gazed in amazement at Mrs. Doolittle Batt as she swallowed one flap-jack after another, while her eyes bulged larger and larger.

Nor was the capacity of Miss Dingleheimer and the Reverend Dr. Jones to be mocked at by pachyderms.

Brown and I left them eating while we erected the row of little tents. Every lady had demanded a separate tent.

So we cut saplings, set up the silk, drove pegs, and brought armfuls of balsam boughs.

I was afraid they’d demand their knitting and other utensils, but they had eaten to repletion, and were sleepy; and as each toilet case or reticule contained also a nightgown, they drew the flaps of their several tents without insisting that we unpack Arthur’s panniers.

They all had disappeared within their tents except Miss White, who insisted on cooking something for us, although we protested that the scraps of the banquet were all right for mere guides.

She stood beside us for a few minutes, watching us busy with our delicious dinner.

“You poor fellows,” she said gently. “You are nearly starved.”

It is agreeable to be sympathized with by a tall, fair, fresh young girl. We looked up, simpering gratefully.

“This is really a most lovely little lake,” she said, gazing out across the still, crystalline water which was all rose and gold in the sunset, save where the sombre shapes of the towering mountains were mirrored in glassy depths.

“It’s odd,” I said, “that no trout are jumping. There ought to be lots of them there, and this is their jumping hour.”

We all looked at the quiet, oval bit of water. Not a circle, not the slightest ripple disturbed it.

“It must be deep,” remarked Brown.

We gazed up at the three lofty peaks, the bases of which were the shores of this tiny gem among lakes. Deep, deep, plunging down into dusky profundity, the rocks fell away sheer into limpid depths.

“That little lake may be a thousand feet deep,” I said. “In 1903 Professor Farrago, of Bronx Park, measured a lake in the Thunder Mountains, which was two thousand seven hundred and sixty-nine feet deep.”

Miss White looked at me curiously.

Into a patch of late sunshine flitted a small butterfly—one of the Grapta species. It settled on a chip of wood, uncoiled its delicate proboscis, and spread its fulvous and deeply indented wings.

“Grapta California,” remarked Brown to me.

“Vanessa asteriska” I corrected him. “Note the anal angle of the secondaries and the argentiferous discal area bordering the subcostal nervule.”

“The characteristic stripes on the primaries are wanting,” he demurred.

“It is double brooded. The summer form lacks the three darker bands.”

A few moments’ silence was broken by the voice of Miss White.

“I had no idea,” she remarked, “that Alaskan guides were so familiar with entomological terms and nomenclature.”

We both turned very red.

Brown mumbled something about having picked up a smattering. I added that Brown had taught me.

Perhaps she believed us; her blue eyes rested on us curiously, musingly. Also, at moments, I fancied there was the faintest glint of amusement in them.

She said:

“Two scientific gentlemen from New York requested permission to join this expedition, but Mrs. Batt refused them.” She gazed thoughtfully upon the waters of Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt. “I wonder,” she murmured, “what became of those two gentlemen.”

It was evident that we had betrayed ourselves to this young girl.

She glanced at us again, and perhaps she noticed in our fascinated gaze an expression akin to terror, for suddenly she laughed—such a clear, sweet, silvery little laugh!

“For my part,” she said, “I wish they had come with us. I like—men.”

With that she bade us goodnight very politely and went off to her tent, leaving us with our hats pressed against our stomachs, attempting by the profundity of our bows to indicate the depth of our gratitude.

“There’s a girl!” exclaimed Brown, as soon as she had disappeared behind her tent flaps. “She’ll never let on to Medusa, Xantippe, Cassandra and Company. I like that girl, Smith.”

“You’re not the only one imbued by such sentiments,” said I.

He smiled a fatuous and reminiscent smile. He certainly was good-looking. Presently he said:

“She has the most delightful way of gazing at a man—”

“I’ve noticed,” I said pleasantly.

“Oh. Did she happen to glance at you that way?” he inquired. I wanted to beat him.

All I said was:

“She’s certainly some kitten.” Which bottled that young man for a while.

We lay on the bank of the tiny lake, our backs against a huge pine-tree, watching the last traces of colour fading from peak and tree-top.

“Isn’t it queer,” I said, “that not a trout has splashed? It can’t be that there are no fish in the lake.”

“There are such lakes.”

“Yes, very deep ones. I wonder how deep this is.”

“We’ll be out at sunrise with our reel of piano wire and take soundings,” he said. “The heavy artillery won’t wake until they’re ready to be loaded with flap-jacks.”

I shuddered:

“They’re fearsome creatures, Brown. Somehow, that resolute and bony one has inspired me with a terror unutterable.”

“Mrs. Batt?”

“Yes.”

He said seriously:

“She’ll make a horrid outcry when she asks for her knitting. What are you going to tell her?”

“I shall say that Indians ambuscaded us while she was asleep, and carried off all those things.”

“You lie very nicely, don’t you?” he remarked admiringly.

“In vitium ducit culpae fuga,” said I. “Besides, they don’t really need those articles.”

He laughed. He didn’t seem to be very much afraid of Mrs. Batt.

It had grown deliciously dusky, and myriads of stars were coming out. Little by little the lake lost its shape in the darkness, until only an irregular, star-set area of quiet water indicated that there was any lake there at all.

I remember that Brown and I, reclining at the foot of the tree, were looking at the still and starry surface of the lake, over which numbers of bats were darting after insects; and I recollect that I was just about to speak, when, of a sudden, the silent and luminous surface of the water was shattered as with a subterranean explosion; a geyser of scintillating spray shot upward flashing, foaming, towering a hundred feet into the air. And through it I seemed to catch a glimpse of a vast, quivering, twisting mass of silver falling back with a crash into the lake, while the huge fountain rained spray on every side and the little lake rocked and heaved from shore to shore, sending great sheets of surf up over the rocks so high that the very tree-tops dripped.

Petrified, dumb, our senses almost paralyzed by the shock, our ears still deafened by the watery crash of that gigantic something that had fallen into the lake, and our eyes starting from their sockets, we stared at the darkness.

Slap—slash—slush went the waves, hitting the shore with a clashing sound almost metallic. Vision and hearing told us that the water in the lake was rocking like the contents of a bath-tub.

“G-g-good Lord!” whispered Brown. “Is there a v-volcano under that lake?”

“Did you see that huge, glittering shape that seemed to fall into the water?” I gasped.

“Yes. What was it? A meteor?”

“No. It was something that first came out of the lake and fell back—the way a trout leaps. Heavens! It couldn’t have been alive, could it?”

“W-wh-what do you mean?” stammered Brown.

“It couldn’t have been a f-f-fish, could it?” I asked with chattering teeth.

“No! No! It was as big as a Pullman car! It must have been a falling star. Did you ever hear of a fish as big as a sleeping car?”

I was too thoroughly unnerved to reply. The roaring of the surf had subsided somewhat, enough for another sound to reach our ears—a raucous, gallinacious, squawking sound.

I sprang up and looked at the row of tents. White-robed figures loomed in front of them. The heavy artillery was evidently frightened.

We went over to them, and when we got nearer they chastely scuttled into their tents and thrust out a row of heads—heads hideous with curl-papers.

“What was that awful noise? An earthquake?” shrilled the Reverend Dr. Jones. “I think I’ll go home.”

“Was it an avalanche?” demanded Mrs. Batt, in a deep and shaky voice. “Are we in any immediate danger, young man?”

I said that it was probably a flying-star which had happened to strike the lake and explode.

“What an awful region!” wailed Miss Dingleheimer. “I’ve had my money’s worth. I wish to go back to New York at once. I’ll begin to dress immediately—”

“It might be a million years before another meteor falls in this latitude,” I said, soothingly.

“Or it might be ten minutes,” sobbed Miss Dingleheimer. “What do you know about it, anyway! I want to go home. I’m putting on my stockings now. I’m getting dressed as fast as I can—”

Her voice was blotted out in a mighty crash from the lake. Appalled, I whirled on my heel, just in time to see another huge jet of water rise high in the starlight, another, another, until the entire lake was but a cluster of gigantic geysers exploding a hundred feet in the air, while through them, falling back into the smother of furious foam, great silvery bulks dropped crashing, one after another.

I don’t know how long the incredible vision lasted; the woods roared with the infernal pandemonium, echoed and re-echoed from mountain to mountain; the tree-tops fairly stormed spray, driving it in sheets through the leaves; and the shores of the lake spouted surf long after the last vast, silvery shape had fallen back again into the water.

As my senses gradually recovered, I found myself supporting Mrs. Batt on one arm and the Reverend Dr. Jones upon my bosom. Both had fainted. I released them with a shudder and turned to look for Brown.

Somebody had swooned in his arms, too.

He was not noticing me, and as I approached him I heard him say something resembling the word “kitten.”

In spite of my demoralization, another fear seized me, and I drew nearer and peered closely at what he was holding so nobly in his arms. It was, as I supposed, Angelica White.

I don’t know whether my arrival occultly revived her, for as I stumbled over a tent-peg she opened her blue eyes, and then disengaged herself from Brown’s arms.

“Oh, I am so frightened,” she murmured. She looked at me sideways when she said it.

“Come,” said I coldly to Brown, “let Miss White retire and lie down. This meteoric shower is over and so is the danger.”

He evinced a desire to further soothe and minister to Miss White, but she said, with considerable composure, that she was feeling better; and Brown came unwillingly with me to inspect the heavy artillery lines.

That formidable battery was wrecked, the pieces dismounted and lying tumbled about in their emplacements.

But a vigorous course of cold water in dippers revived them, and we herded them into one tent and quieted them with some soothing prevarication, the details of which I have forgotten; but it was something about a flock of meteors which hit the earth every twelve billion years, and that it was now all over for another such interim, and everybody could sleep soundly with the consciousness of having assisted at a spectacle never before beheld except by a primordial protoplasmic cell.

Which flattered them, I think, for, seated once more at the base of our tree, presently we heard weird noises from the reconcentrados, like the moaning of the harbour bar.

They slept, the heavy guns, like unawakened engines of destruction all a-row in battery. But Brown and I, fearfully excited, still dazed and bewildered, sat with our fascinated eyes fixed on the lake, asking each other what in the name of miracles it was that we had witnessed and heard.

On one thing we were agreed. A scientific discovery of the most enormous importance awaited our investigation.

This was no time for temporising, for deception, for any species of polite shilly-shallying. We must, on the morrow, tear off our masks and appear before these misguided and feminine victims of our duplicity in our own characters as scientists. We must boldly avow our identities and flatly refuse to stir from this spot until the mystery of this astounding lake had been thoroughly investigated.

And so, discussing our policy, our plans for the morrow, and mutually reassuring each other concerning our common ability to successfully defy the heavy artillery, we finally fell asleep.

III

Dawn awoke me, and I sat up in my blanket and aroused Brown.

No birds were singing. It seemed unusual, and I spoke of it to Brown. Never have I witnessed such a still, strange daybreak. Mountains, woods, and water were curiously silent. There was not a sound to be heard, nothing stirred except the thin veil of vapour over the water, shreds of which were now parting from the shore and steaming slowly upward.

There was, it seemed to me, something slightly uncanny about this lake, even in repose. The water seemed as translucent as a dark crystal, and as motionless as the surface of a mirror. Nothing stirred its placid surface, not a ripple, not an insect, not a leaf floating.

Brown had lugged the pneumatic raft down to the shore where he was now pumping it full: I followed with the paddles, pole, and hydroscope. When the raft had been pumped up and was afloat, we carried the reel of gossamer piano-wire aboard, followed it, pushed off, and paddled quietly through the level cobwebs of mist toward the centre of the lake. From the shore I heard a gruesome noise. It originated under one of the row of tents of the heavy artillery. Medusa, snoring, was an awesome sound in that wilderness and solitude of dawn.

I was unscrewing the centre-plug from the raft and screwing into the empty socket the lens of the hydroscope and attaching the battery, while Brown started his sounding; and I was still busy when an exclamation from my companion started me:

“We’re breaking some records! Do you know it, Smith?”

“Where is the lead?”

“Three hundred fathoms and still running!”

“Nonsense!”

“Look at it yourself! It goes on unreeling: I’ve put the drag on. Hurry and adjust the hydroscope!”

I sighted the powerful instrument for two thousand feet, altering it from minute to minute as Brown excitedly announced the amazing depth of the lake. When he called out four thousand feet, I stared at him.

“There’s something wrong—” I began.

“There’s nothing wrong!” he interrupted. “Four thousand five hundred! Five thousand! Five thousand five hundred—”

“Are you squatting there and trying to tell me that this lake is over a mile deep!”

“Look for yourself!” he said in an unsteady voice. “Here is the tape! You can read, can’t you? Six thousand feet—and running evenly. Six thousand five hundred!… Seven thousand! Seven thousand five—”

“It can’t be!” I protested.

But it was true. Astounded, I continued to adjust the hydroscope to a range incredible, turning the screw to focus at a mile and a half, at two miles, at two and a quarter, a half, three-quarters, three miles, three miles and a quarter—click!

“Good Heavens!” he whispered. “This lake is three miles and a quarter deep!”

Mechanically I set the lachet, screwed the hood firm, drew out the black eye-mask, locked it, then, kneeling on the raft I rested my face in the mask, felt for the lever, and switched on the electric light.

Quicker than thought the solid lance of dazzling light plunged down through profundity, and the vast abyss of water was revealed along its pathway.

Nothing moved in those tremendous depths except, nearly two miles below, a few spots of tinsel glittered and drifted like flakes of mica.

At first I scarcely noticed them, supposing them to be vast beds of silvery bottom sand glittering under the electric pencil of the hydroscope. But presently it occurred to me that these brilliant specks in motion were not on the bottom—were a little less than two miles deep, and therefore suspended.

To be seen at all, at two miles’ depth, whatever they were they must have considerable bulk.

“Do you see anything?” demanded Brown.

“Some silvery specks at a depth of two miles.”

“What do they look like?”

“Specks.”

“Are they in motion?”

“They seem to be.”

“Do they come any nearer?”

After a while I answered:

“One of the specks seems to be growing larger…. I believe it is in motion and is floating slowly upward…. It’s certainly getting bigger…. It’s getting longer.”

“Is it a fish?”

“It can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“It’s impossible. Fish don’t attain the size of whales in mountain ponds.”

There was a silence. After an interval I said:

“Brown, I don’t know what to make of that thing.”

“Is it coming any nearer?”

“Yes.”

“What does it look like now?”

“It looks like a fish. But it can’t be. It looks like a tiny, silver minnow. But it can’t be. Why, if it resembles a minnow in size at this distance—what can be its actual dimensions?”

“Let me look,” he said.

Unwillingly I raised my head from the mask and yielded him my place.

A long silence followed. The western mountain-tops reddened under the rising sun; the sky grew faintly bluer. Yet, there was not a bird-note in that still place, not a flash of wings, nothing stirring.

Here and there along the lake shore I noticed unusual-looking trees—very odd-looking trees indeed, for their trunks seemed bleached and dead, and as though no bark covered them, yet every stark limb was covered with foliage—a thick foliage so dark in colour that it seemed black to me.

I glanced at my motionless companion where he knelt with his face in the mask, then I unslung my field-glasses and focussed them on the nearest of the curious trees.

At first I could not quite make out what I was looking at; then, to my astonishment, I saw that these stark, gray trees were indeed lifeless, and that what I had mistaken for dark foliage were velvety clusters of bats hanging there asleep—thousands of them thickly infesting and clotting the dead branches with a sombre and horrid effect of foliage.

I don’t mind bats in ordinary numbers. But in such soft, motionless masses they slightly sickened me. There must have been literally tons of them hanging to the dead trees.

“This is pleasant,” I said. “Look at those bats, Brown.”

When Brown spoke without lifting his head, his voice was so shaken, so altered, that the mere sound of it scared me:

“Smith,” he said, “there is a fish in here, shaped exactly like a brook minnow. And I should judge, by the depth it is swimming in, that it is about as long as an ordinary Pullman car.”

His voice shook, but his words were calm to the point of commonplace. Which made the effect of his statement all the more terrific.

“A— a minnow—as big as a Pullman car?” I repeated, dazed.

“Larger, I think…. It looks to me through the hydroscope, at this distance, exactly like a tiny, silvery minnow. It’s half a mile down…. Swimming about…. I can see its eyes; they must be about ten feet in diameter. I can see its fins moving. And there are about a dozen others, much deeper, swimming around…. This is easily the most overwhelming contribution made to science since the discovery of the purple-spotted dingle-bock, Bukkus dinglii…. We’ve got to catch one of those gigantic fish!”

“How?” I gasped. “How are we going to catch a minnow as large as a sleeping car?”

“I don’t know, but we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to manage it, somehow.”

“It would require a steel cable to hold such a fish and a donkey engine to reel him in! And what about a hook? And if we had hook, line, steam-winch, and everything else, what about bait?”

He knelt for some time longer, watching the fish, before he resigned the hydroscope to me. Then I watched it; but it came no nearer, seeming contented to swim about at the depth of a little more than half a mile. Deep under this fish I could see others glittering as they sailed or darted to and fro.

Presently I raised my head and sat thinking. The sun now gilded the water; a little breeze ruffled it here and there where dainty cat’s-paws played over the surface.

“What on earth do you suppose those gigantic fish feed on?” asked Brown under his breath.

I thought a moment longer, then it came to me in a flash of understanding, and I pointed at the dead trees.

“Bats!” I muttered. “They feed on bats as other fish feed on the little, gauzy-winged flies which dance over ponds! You saw those bats flying over the pond last night, didn’t you? That explains the whole thing! Don’t you understand? Why, what we saw were these gigantic fish leaping like trout after the bats. It was their feeding time!”

I do not imagine that two more excited scientists ever existed than Brown and I. The joy of discovery transfigured us. Here we had discovered a lake in the Thunder Mountains which was the deepest lake in the world; and it was inhabited by a few gigantic fish of the minnow species, the existence of which, hitherto, had never even been dreamed of by science.

“Kitten,” I said, my voice broken by emotion, “which will you have named after you, the lake or the fish? Shall it be Lake Kitten Brown, or shall it be Minnius kittenii? Speak!”

“What about that old party whose name you said had already been given to the lake?” he asked piteously.

“Who? Mrs. Batt? Do you think I’d name such an important lake after her? Anyway, she has declined the honour.”

“Very well,” he said, “I’ll accept it. And the fish shall be known as Minnius Smithii!”

Too deeply moved to speak, we bent over and shook hands with each other. In that solemn and holy moment, surcharged with ecstatic emotion, a deep, distant reverberation came across the water to our ears. It was the heavy artillery, snoring.

Never can I forget that scene; sunshine glittering on the pond, the silent forests and towering peaks, the blue sky overhead, the dead trees where thousands of bats hung in nauseating clusters, thicker than the leaves in Valembrosa—and Kitten Brown and I, cross-legged upon our pneumatic raft, hands clasped in pledge of deathless devotion to science and a fraternity unending.

“And how about that girl?” he asked.

“What girl?”

“Angelica White?”

“Well,” said I, “what about her?”

“Does she go with the lake or with the fish?”

“What do you mean?” I asked coldly, withdrawing my hand from his clasp.

“I mean, which of us gets the first chance to win her?” he said, blushing. “There’s no use denying that we both have been bowled over by her; is there?”

I pondered for several moments.

“She is an extremely intelligent girl,” I said, stalling.

“Yes, and then some.”

After a few minutes’ further thought, I said:

“Possibly I am in error, but at moments it has seemed to me that my marked attentions to Miss White are not wholly displeasing to her. I may be mistaken—”

“I think you are, Smith.”

“Why?”

“Because—well, because I seem to think so.”

I said coldly:

“Because she happened to faint away in your arms last night is no symptom that she prefers you. Is it?”

“No.”

“Then why do you seem to think that tactful, delicate, and assiduous attentions on my part may prove not entirely unwelcome to this unusually intelligent—”

“Smith!”

“What?”

“Miss White is not only a trained nurse, but she also is about to receive her diploma as a physician.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“When?”

“When you were building the fire last night. Also, she informed me that she had relentlessly dedicated herself to a eugenic marriage.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“While you were bringing in a bucket of water from the lake last night. And furthermore, she told me that I was perfectly suited for a eugenic marriage.”

“When did she tell you that?” I demanded.

“When she had—fainted—in my arms.”

“How the devil did she come to say a thing like that?”

He became conspicuously red about the ears:

“Well, I had just told her that I had fallen in love with her—”

“Damn!” I said. And that’s all I said; and seizing a paddle I made furiously for shore. Behind me I heard the whirr of the piano wire as Brown started the electric reel. Later I heard him clamping the hood on the hydroscope; but I was too disgusted for any further words, and I dug away at the water with my paddle.

In various and weird stages of morning déshabillé the heavy artillery came down to the shore for morning ablutions, all a-row like a file of ducks.

They glared at me as I leaped ashore:

“I want my breakfast!” snapped Mrs. Batt. “Do you hear what I say, guide? And I don’t wish to be kept waiting for it either! I desire to get out of this place as soon as possible.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I intend to stay here for some time.”

“What!” bawled the heavy artillery in booming unison.

But my temper had been sorely tried, and I was in a mood to tell the truth and make short work of it, too.

“Ladies,” I said, “I’ll not mince matters. Mr. Brown and I are not guides; we are scientists from Bronx Park, and we don’t know a bally thing about this wilderness we’re in!”

“Swindler!” shouted Mrs. Batt, in an enraged voice. “I knew very well that the United States Government would never have named that puddle of water after me!”

“Don’t worry, madam! I’ve named it after Mr. Brown. And the new species of gigantic fish which I discovered in this lake I have named after myself. As for leaving this spot until I have concluded my scientific study of these fish, I simply won’t. I intend to observe their habits and to capture one of them if it requires the remainder of my natural life to do so. I shall be sorry to detain you here during such a period, but it can’t be helped. And now you know what the situation is, and you are at liberty to think it over after you have washed your countenances in Lake Kitten Brown.”

Rage possessed the heavy artillery, and a fury indescribable seized them when they discovered that Indians had raided their half ton of feminine perquisites. I went up a tree.

When the tumult had calmed sufficiently for them to distinguish what I said, I made a speech to them. From the higher branches of a neighboring tree Kitten Brown applauded and cried, “Hear! Hear!”

“Ladies,” I said, “you know the worst, now. If you keep me up this tree and starve me to death it will be murder. Also, you don’t know enough to get out of these forests, but I can guide you back the way you came. I’ll do it if you cease your dangerous demonstrations and permit Mr. Brown and myself to remain here and study these giant fish for a week or two.”

They now seemed disposed to consider the idea. There was nothing else for them to do. So after an hour or two, Brown and I ventured to descend from our trees, and we went among them to placate them and ingratiate ourselves as best we might.

“Think,” I argued, “what a matchless opportunity for you to be among the first discoverers of a totally new and undescribed species of giant fish! Think what a legacy it will be to leave such a record to posterity! Think how proud and happy your descendants will be to know that their ancestors assisted at the discovery of Minnius Smithii!”

“Why can’t they be named after me?” demanded Mrs. Batt.

“Because,” I explained patiently, “they have already been named after me!”

“Couldn’t something be named after me?” inquired that fearsome lady.

“The bats,” suggested Brown politely, “we could name a bat after you with pleasure—”

I thought for a moment she meant to swing on him. He thought so, too, and ducked.

“A bat!” she shouted. “Name a bat after me!”

“Many a celebrated scientist has been honoured by having his name conferred upon humbler fauna,” I explained.

But she remained dangerous, so I went and built the fire, and squatted there, frying bacon, while on the other side of the fire, sitting side by side, Kitten Brown and Angelica White gazed upon each other with enraptured eyes. It was slightly sickening—but let that pass. I was beginning to understand that science is a jealous mistress and that any contemplated infidelity of mine stood every chance of being squelched. No; evidently I had not been fashioned for the joys of legal domesticity. Science, the wanton jade, had not yet finished her dance with me. Apparently my maxixe with her was to be external. Fides servanda est.

•      •      •      •      •      •

That afternoon the heavy artillery held a council of war, and evidently came to a conclusion to make the best of the situation, for toward sundown they accosted me with a request for the raft, explaining that they desired to picnic aboard and afterward row about the lake and indulge in song.

So Brown and I put aboard the craft a substantial cold supper; and the heavy artillery embarked, taking aboard a guitar to be worked by Miss Dingleheimer, and knitting for the others.

It was a lovely evening. Brown and I had been discussing a plan to dynamite the lake and stun the fish, that method appealing to us as the only possible way to secure a specimen of the stupendous minnows which inhabited the depths. In fact, it was our only hope of possessing one of these creatures—fishing with a donkey engine, steel cable, and a hook baited with a bat being too uncertain and far more laborious and expensive.

I was still smoking my pipe, seated at the foot of the big pine-tree, watching the water turn from gold to pink: Brown sat higher up the slope, his arm around Angelica White. I carefully kept my back toward them.

On the lake the heavy artillery were revelling loudly, banqueting, singing, strumming the guitar, and trailing their hands overboard across the sunset-tinted water.

I was thinking of nothing in particular as I now remember, except that I noticed the bats beginning to flit over the lake; when Brown called to me from the slope above, asking whether it was perfectly safe for the heavy artillery to remain out so late.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Suppose,” he shouted, “that those fish should begin to jump and feed on the bats again?”

I had never thought of that.

I rose and hurried nervously down to the shore, and, making a megaphone of my hands, I shouted:

“Come in! It isn’t safe to remain out any longer!”

Scornful laughter from the artillery answered my appeal.

“You’d better come in!” I called. “You can’t tell what might happen if any of those fish should jump.”

“Mind your business!” retorted Mrs. Batt. “We’ve had enough of your prevarications—”

Then, suddenly, without the faintest shadow of warning, from the centre of the lake a vast geyser of water towered a hundred feet in the air.

For one dreadful second I saw the raft hurled skyward, balanced on the crest of the stupendous fountain, spilling ladies, supper, guitars, and knitting in every direction.

Then a horrible thing occurred; fish after fish shot up out of the storm of water and foam, seizing, as they fell, ladies, luncheon, and knitting in mid-air, falling back with a crashing shock which seemed to rock the very mountains.

“Help!” I screamed. And fainted dead away.

Is it necessary to proceed? Literature nods; Science shakes her head. No, nothing but literature lies beyond the ripples which splashed musically upon the shore, terminating forever the last vibration from that immeasurable catastrophe.

Why should I go on? The newspapers of the nation have recorded the last scenes of the tragedy.

We know that tons of dynamite are being forwarded to that solitary lake. We know that it is the determination of the Government to rid the world of those gigantic minnows.

And yet, somehow, it seems to me as I sit writing here in my office, amid the verdure of Bronx Park, that the destruction of these enormous fish is a mistake.

What more splendid sarcophagus could the ladies of the lake desire than these huge, silvery, itinerant and living tombs?

What reward more sumptuous could anybody wish for than to rest at last within the interior dimness of an absolutely new species of anything?

For me, such a final repose as this would represent the highest pinnacle of sublimity, the uttermost zenith of mortal dignity.

•      •      •      •      •      •

So what more is there for me to say?

As for Angelica—but no matter. I hope she may be comparatively happy with Kitten Brown. Yet, as I have said before, handsome men never last. But she should have thought of that in time.

I absolve myself of all responsibility. She had her chance.

ONE OVER

[In Search of the Mammoth]

I

Professor Farrago had remarked to me that morning:

“The city of New York always reminds me of a slovenly, fat woman with her dress unbuttoned behind.”

I nodded.

“New York’s architecture,” said I, “—or what popularly passes for it—is all in front. The minute you get to the rear a pitiable condition is exposed.”

He said: “Professor Jane Bottomly is all façade; the remainder of her is merely an occiputal backyard full of theoretical tin cans and broken bottles. I think we all had better resign.”

It was a fearsome description. I trembled as I lighted an inexpensive cigar.

The sentimental feminist movement in America was clearly at the bottom of the Bottomly affair.

Long ago, in a reactionary burst of hysteria, the North enfranchised the Ethiopian. In a similar sentimental explosion of dementia, some sixty years later, the United States wept violently over the immemorial wrongs perpetrated upon the restless sex, opened the front and back doors of opportunity, and sobbed out, “Go to it, ladies!”

They are still going.

Professor Jane Bottomly was wished on us out of a pleasant April sky. She fell like a meteoric mass of molten metal upon the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society splashing her excoriating personality over everybody until everybody writhed.

I had not yet seen the lady. I did not care to. Sooner or later I’d be obliged to meet her but I was not impatient.

Now the Field Expeditionary Force of the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society is, perhaps, the most important arm of the service. Professor Bottomly had just been appointed official head of all field work. Why? Nobody knew. It is true that she had written several combination nature and love romances. In these popular volumes trees, flowers, butterflies, birds, animals, dialect, sobs, and sun-bonnets were stirred up together into a saccharine mess eagerly gulped down by a provincial reading public, which immediately protruded its tongue for more.

The news of her impending arrival among us was an awful blow to everybody at the Bronx. Professor Farrago fainted in the arms of his pretty stenographer; Professor Cornelius Lezard of the Batrachian Department ran around his desk all day long in narrowing circles and was discovered on his stomach still feebly squirming like an expiring top; Dr. Hans Fooss, our beloved Professor of Pachydermatology sat for hours weeping into his noodle soup. As for me, I was both furious and frightened, for, within the hearing of several people, Professor Bottomly had remarked in a very clear voice to her new assistant, Dr. Daisy Delmour, that she intended to get rid of me for the good of the Bronx because of my reputation for indiscreet gallantry among the feminine employees of the Bronx Society.

Professor Lezard overhead that outrageous remark and he hastened to repeat it to me.

I was lunching at the time in my private office in the Administration Building with Dr. Hans Fooss—he and I being too busy dissecting an unusually fine specimen of Dingue to go to the Rolling Stone Inn for luncheon—when Professor Lezard rushed in with the scandalous libel still sizzling in his ears.

“Everybody heard her say it!” he went on, wringing his hands. “It was a most unfortunate thing for anybody to say about you before all those young ladies. Every stenographer and typewriter there turned pale and then red.”

“What!” I exclaimed, conscious that my own ears were growing large and hot. “Did that outrageous woman have the bad taste to say such a thing before all those sensitive girls!”

“She did. She glared at them when she said it. Several blondes and one brunette began to cry.”

“I hope,” said I, a trifle tremulously, “that no typewriter so far forgot herself as to admit noticing playfulness on my part.”

“They all were tearfully unanimous in declaring you to be a perfect gentleman!”

“I am,” I said. “I am also a married man—irrevocably wedded to science. I desire no other spouse. I am ineligible; and everybody knows it. If at times a purely scientific curiosity leads me into a detached and impersonally psychological investigation of certain—ah—feminine idiosyncrasies—”

“Certainly,” said Lezard. “To investigate the feminine is more than a science; it is a duty!”

“Of a surety!” nodded Dr. Fooss.

I looked proudly upon my two loyal friends and bit into my cheese sandwich. Only men know men. A jury of my peers had exonerated me. What did I care for Professor Bottomly!

“All the same,” added Lezard, “you’d better be careful or Professor Bottomly will put one over on you yet.”

“I am always careful,” I said with dignity.

“All men should be. It is the only protection of a defenseless coast line,” nodded Lezard.

“Und neffer, neffer commid nodding to paper,” added Dr. Fooss. “Don’d neffer write it, ‘I lofe you like I was going to blow up alretty!’ Ach, nein! Don’d you write down somedings. Effery man he iss entitled to protection; und so iss it he iss protected.”

Stein in hand he beamed upon us benevolently over his knifeful of sauerfisch, then he fed himself and rammed it down with a hearty draught of Pilsner. We gazed with reverence upon Kultur as embodied in this great Teuton.

“That woman,” remarked Lezard to me, “certainly means to get rid of you. It seems to me that there are only two possible ways for you to hold down your job at the Bronx. You know it, don’t you?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said; “either I must pay marked masculine attention to Professor Bottomly or I must manage to put one over on her.”

“Of course,” said Lezard, “the first method is the easier for you—”

“Not for a minute!” I said, hastily; “I simply couldn’t become frolicsome with her. You say she’s got a voice like a drill-sergeant and she goose-steps when she walks; and I don’t mind admitting she has me badly scared already. No; she must be scientifically ruined. It is the only method which makes her elimination certain.”

“But if her popular nature books didn’t ruin her scientifically, how can we hope to lead her astray?” inquired Lezard.

“There is,” I said, thoughtfully, “only one thing that can really ruin a scientist. Ridicule! I have braved it many a time, taking my scientific life in my hands in pursuit of unknown specimens which might have proved only imaginary. Public ridicule would have ended my scientific career in such an event. I know of no better way to end Professor Bottomly’s scientific career and capability for mischief than to start her out after something which doesn’t exist, inform the newspapers, and let her suffer the agonising consequences.”

Dr. Fooss began to shout:

“The idea iss schön! colossal! prachtvol! ausgezeichnet! wunderbar! wunderschön! gemütlich—” A large, tough noodle checked him. While he labored with Teutonic imperturbability to master it Lezard and I exchanged suggestions regarding the proposed annihilation of this fearsome woman who had come ravening among us amid the peaceful and soporific environment of Bronx Park.

It was a dreadful thing for us to have our balmy Lotus-eaters’ paradise so startlingly invaded by a large, loquacious, loud-voiced lady who had already stirred us all out of our agreeable, traditional and leisurely inertia. Inertia begets cogitation, and cogitation begets ideas, and ideas beget reflexion, and profound reflexion is the fundamental cornerstone of that immortal temple in which the goddess Science sits asleep between her dozing sisters, Custom and Religion.

This thought seemed to me so unusually beautiful that I wrote it with a pencil upon my cuff.

While I was writing it, quietly happy in the deep pleasure that my intellectual allegory afforded me, Dr. Fooss swabbed the last morsel of nourishment from his plate with a wad of rye bread, then bolting the bread and wiping his beard with his fingers and his fingers on his waistcoat, he made several guttural observations too profoundly German to be immediately intelligible, and lighted his porcelain pipe.

“Ach wass!” he remarked in ruminative fashion. “Dot Frauenzimmer she iss to raise hell alretty determined. Von Pachydermatology she knows nodding. Maybe she leaves me alone, maybe it is to be ‘raus mit me. I’ weis’ ni’! It iss aber besser one over on dat lady to put, yess?”

“It certainly is advisable,” replied Lezard.

“Let us try to think of something sufficiently disastrous to terminate her scientific career,” said I. And I bowed my rather striking head and rested the point of my forefinger upon my forehead. Thought crystallises more quickly for me when I assume this attitude.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lezard fold his arms and sit frowning at infinity.

Dr. Fooss lay back in a big, deeply padded armchair and closed his prominent eyes. His pipe went out presently, and now and then he made long-drawn nasal remarks, in German, too complicated for either Lezard or for me to entirely comprehend.

“We must try to get her as far away from here as possible,” mused Lezard. “Is Oyster Bay too far and too cruel?”

I pondered darkly upon the suggestion. But it seemed unpleasantly like murder.

“Lezard,” said I, “come, let us reason together. Now what is woman’s besetting emotion?”

“Curiosity?”

“Very well; assuming that to be true, what—ah—quality particularly characterizes woman when so beset.”

“Ruthless determination.”

“Then,” said I, “we ought to begin my exciting the curiosity of Professor Bottomly; and her ruthless determination to satisfy that curiosity should logically follow.”

“How,” he asked, “are we to arouse her curiosity?”

“By pretending that we have knowledge of something hitherto undiscovered, the discovery of which would redound to our scientific glory.”

“I see. She’d want the glory for herself. She’d swipe it.”

“She would,” said I.

“Tee—hee!” he giggled; “Wouldn’t it be funny to plant something phony on her—”

I waved my arms rather gracefully in my excitement:

“That is the germ of an idea!” I said. “If we could plant something—something—far away from here—very far away—if we could bury something—like the Cardiff Giant—”

“Hundreds and hundreds of miles away!”

“Thousands!” I insisted, enthusiastically.

“Tee-hee! In Tasmania, for example! Maybe a Tasmanian Devil might acquire her!”

“There exists a gnat,” said I, “in Borneo—Gnatus soporificus—and when this tiny gnat stings people they never entirely wake up. It’s really rather a pleasurable catastrophe, I understand. Life becomes one endless cat-nap—one delightful siesta, with intervals for light nourishment…. She—ah—could sit very comfortably in some pleasant retreat and rock in a rocking-chair and doze quite happily through the years to come…. And from your description of her I should say that the Soldiers’ Home might receive her.”

“It won’t do,” he said, gloomily.

“Why? Is it too much like crime?”

“Oh not at all. Only if she went to Borneo she’d be sure to take a mosquito-bar with her.”

In the depressed silence which ensued Dr. Fooss suddenly made several Futurist observations through his nose with monotonous but authoritative regularity. I tried to catch his meaning and his eye. The one remained cryptic, the other shut.

Lezard sat thinking very hard. And as I fidgetted in my chair, fiddling nervously with various objects lying on my desk I chanced to pick up a letter from the pile of still unopened mail at my elbow.

Still pondering on Professor Bottomly’s proposed destruction, I turned the letter over idly and my preoccupied gaze rested on the postmark. After a moment I leaned forward and examined it more attentively. The letter directed to me was postmarked Fort Carcajou, Cook’s Peninsula, Baffin Land; and now I recalled the handwriting, having already seen it three or four times within the last month or so.

“Lezard,” I said, “that lunatic trapper from Baffin Land has written to me again. What do you suppose is the matter with him? Is he just plain crazy or does he think he can be funny with me?”

Lezard gazed at me absently. Then, all at once a gleam of savage interest lighted his somewhat solemn features.

“Read the letter to me,” he said, with an evil smile which instantly animated my own latent imagination. And immediately it occurred to me that perhaps, in the humble letter from the wilds of Baffin Land, which I was now opening with eager and unsteady fingers, might lie concealed the professional undoing of Professor Jane Bottomly, and the only hope of my own ultimate and scientific salvation.

The room became hideously still as I unfolded the pencil-scrawled sheets of cheap, ruled letter paper.

Dr. Fooss opened his eyes, looked at me, made porcine sounds indicative of personal well-being, relighted his pipe, and disposed himself to listen. But just as I was about to begin, Lezard suddenly laid his forefinger across his lips conjuring us to densest silence.

For a moment or two I heard nothing except the buzzing of flies. Then I stole a startled glance at my door. It was opening slowly, almost imperceptibly.

But it did not open very far—just a crack remained. Then, listening with all our might, we heard the cautiously suppressed breathing of somebody in the hallway just outside of my door.

Lezard turned and cast at me a glance of horrified intelligence. In dumb pantomime he outlined in the air, with one hand, the large and feminine amplification of his own person, conveying to us the certainty of his suspicions concerning the unseen eavesdropper.

We nodded. We understood perfectly that she was out there prepared to listen to every word we uttered.

A flicker of ferocious joy disturbed Lezard’s otherwise innocuous features; he winked horribly at Dr. Fooss and at me, and uttered a faint click with his teeth and tongue like the snap of a closing trap.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in the guarded yet excited voice of a man who is confident of not being overheard, “the matter under discussion admits of only one interpretation: a discovery—perhaps the most vitally important discovery of all the centuries—is imminent.

“Secrecy is imperative; the scientific glory is to be shared by us alone, and there is enough of glory to go around.

“Mr. Chairman, I move that epoch-making letter be read aloud!”

“I second dot motion!” said Dr. Fooss, winking so violently at me that his glasses wabbled.

“Gentlemen,” said I, “it has been moved and seconded that this epoch-making letter be read aloud. All those in favor will kindly say ‘aye.’”

“Aye! Aye!” they exclaimed, fairly wriggling in their furtive joy.

“The contrary-minded will kindly emit the usual negation,” I went on…. “It seems to be carried…. It is carried. The chairman will proceed to the reading of the epoch-making letter.”

I quietly lighted a five-cent cigar, unfolded the letter and read aloud:

Joneses Shack,
Golden Glacier,
Cook’s Peninsula, Baffin Land,
March 15, 1915.

Professor, Dear Sir:

I already wrote you three times no answer having been rec’d perhaps you think I’m kiddin’ you’re a dam’ liar I ain’t.

Hoping to tempt you to come I will hereby tell you more’n I told you in my other letters, the terminal moraine of this here Golden Glacier finishes into a marsh, nothing to see for miles excep’ frozen tussock and mud and all flat as hell for fifty miles which is where I am trappin’ it for mink and otter and now ready to go back to Fort Carcajou. i told you what I seen stickin’ in under this here marsh, where anything sticks out the wolves have eat it, but most of them there ellerphants is in under the ice and mud too far for the wolves to git ’em.

i ain’t kiddin’ you, there is a whole herd of furry ellerphants in the marsh like as they were stuck there and all lay down and was drownded like. Some has tusks and some hasn’t. Two ellerphants stuck out of the ice, I eat onto one, the meat was good and sweet and joosy, the damn wolves eat it up that night, I had cut stakes and rost for three months though and am eating off it yet.

Thinking as how ellerphants and all like that is your graft, I being a keeper in the Mouse House once in the Bronx and seein’ you nosin’ around like you was full of scientific thinks, it comes to me to write you and put you next.

If you say so I’ll wait here and help you with them ellerphants. Livin’ wages is all I ask also eleven thousand dollars for tippin’ you wise. I won’t tell nobody till I hear from you. I’m hones’ you can trus’ me. Write me to Fort Carcajou if you mean bizness. So no more respectfully,

James Skaw.

When I finished reading I cautiously glanced at the door, and, finding it still on the crack, turned and smiled subtly upon Lezard and Fooss.

In their slowly spreading grins I saw they agreed with me that somebody, signing himself James Skaw, was still trying to hoax the Great Zoölogical Society of Bronx Park.

“Gentlemen,” I said aloud, injecting innocent enthusiasm into my voice, “this secret expedition to Baffin Land which we three are about to organise is destined to be without doubt the most scientifically prolific field expedition ever organised by man.

“Imagine an entire herd of mammoths preserved in mud and ice through all these thousands of years!

“Gentlemen, no discovery ever made has even remotely approached in importance the discovery made by this simple, illiterate trapper, James Skaw.”

“I thought,” protested Lezard, “that we are to be announced as the discoverers.”

“We are,” said I, “the discoverers of James Skaw, which makes us technically the finders of the ice-preserved herd of mammoths—technically, you understand. A few thousand dollars,” I added, carelessly, “ought to satiate James Skaw.”

“We could name dot glacier after him,” suggested Dr. Fooss.

“Certainly—the Skaw Glacier. That ought to be enough glory for him. It ought to satisfy him and prevent any indiscreet remarks,” nodded Lezard.

“Gentlemen,” said I, “there is only one detail that really troubles me. Ought we to notify our honoured and respected Chief of Division concerning this discovery?”

“Do you mean, should we tell that accomplished and fascinating lady, Professor Bottomly, about this herd of mammoths?” I asked in a loud, clear voice. And immediately answered my own question: “No,” I said, “no, dear friends. Professor Bottomly already has too much responsibility weighing upon her distinguished mind. No, dear brothers in science, we should steal away unobserved as though setting out upon an ordinary field expedition. And when we return with fresh and immortal laurels such as no man before has ever worn, no doubt that our generous-minded Chief of Division will weave for us further wreaths to crown our brows—the priceless garlands of professional approval!” And I made a horrible face at my co-conspirators.

Before I finished Lezard had taken his own face in his hands for the purpose of stifling raucous and untimely mirth. As for Dr. Fooss, his small, porcine eyes snapped and twinkled madly behind his spectacles, but he seemed rather inclined to approve my flowers of rhetoric.

“Ja,” said he, “so iss it besser oursellufs dot ge-frozenss herd von elephanten to discover, und, by and by, die elephanten bei der Pronx Bark home yet again once more to bring. We shall therefore much praise thereby bekommen. Ach wass!”

“Gentlemen,” said I, distinctly, “it is decided, then, that we shall say nothing concerning the true object of this expedition to Professor Bottomly.”

Lezard and Fooss nodded assent. Then, in the silence, we all strained our ears to listen. And presently we detected the scarcely heard sound of cautiously retreating footsteps down the corridor.

When it was safe to do so I arose and closed my door.

“I think,” said I, with a sort of infernal cheerfulness in my tones, “that we are about to do something jocose to Jane Bottomly.”

“A few,” said Professor Lezard. He rose and silently executed a complicated ballet-step.

“I shall laff,” said Dr. Fooss, earnestly, “und I shall laff, und I shall laff—ach Gott how I shall laff my pally head off!”

I folded my arms and turned romanesquely toward the direction in which Professor Bottomly had retreated.

“Viper!” I said. “The Bronx shall nourish you in its bosom no more! Fade away, Ophidian!”

The sentiment was applauded by all. There chanced to be in my desk a bottle marked: “That’s all!” On the label somebody had written: “Do it now!” We did.

II

It was given out at the Bronx that our field expedition to Baffin Land was to be undertaken solely for the purpose of bringing back living specimens of the five-spotted Arctic woodcock—Philohela quinquemaculata—in order to add to our onomatology and our glossary of onomatopoeia an ontogenesis of this important but hitherto unstudied sub-species.

I trust I make myself clear. Scientific statements should be as clear as the Spuyten Duyvil. Sola in stagno salus!

But two things immediately occurred which worried us; Professor Bottomly sent us official notification that she approved our expedition to Baffin Land, designated the steamer we were to take, and enclosed tickets. That scared us. Then to add to our perplexity Professor Bottomly disappeared, leaving Dr. Daisy Delmour in charge of her department during what she announced might be “a somewhat prolonged absence on business.”

And during the four feverish weeks of our pretended preparations for Baffin Land not one word did we hear from Jane Bottomly, which caused us painful inquietude as the hour approached for our departure.

Was this formidable woman actually intending to let us depart alone for the Golden Glacier? Was she too lazy to rob us of the secretly contemplated glory which we had pretended awaited us?

We had been so absolutely convinced that she would forbid our expedition, pack us off elsewhere, and take charge herself of an exploring party to Baffin Land, that, as the time for our leaving drew near we became first uneasy, and then really alarmed.

It would be a dreadful jest on us if she made us swallow our own concoction; if she revealed to our colleagues our pretended knowledge of the Golden Glacier and James Skaw and the supposedly ice-imbedded herd of mammoths, and then publicly forced us to investigate this hoax.

More horrible still would it be if she informed the newspapers and gave them a hint to make merry over the three wise men of the Bronx who went to Baffin Land in a boat.

“What do you suppose that devious and secretive female is up to?” inquired Lezard who, within the last few days, had grown thin with worry. “Is it possible that she is sufficiently degraded to suspect us of trying to put one over on her? Is that what she is now doing to us?”

“Terminus est—it is the limit!” said I.

He turned a morbid eye upon me. “She is making a monkey of us. That’s what!”

“Suspendenda omnia naso,” I nodded; “tarde sed tute. When I think aloud in Latin it means that I am deeply troubled. Suum quemque scelus agitat. Do you get me, Professor? I’m sorry I attempted to be sportive with this terrible woman. The curse of my scientific career has been periodical excesses of frivolity. See where this frolicsome impulse has landed me!—super abyssum ambulans. Trahit sua quemque voluptas; transeat in exemplum! She means to let us go to our destruction on this mammoth frappé affair.”

But Dr. Fooss was optimistic:

“I tink she iss alretty herselluf by dot Baffin Land ge-gone,” he said. “I tink she has der bait ge-swallowed. Ve vait; ve see; und so iss it ve know.”

“But why hasn’t she stopped our preparations?” I demanded. “If she wants all the glory herself why does she permit us to incur this expense in getting ready?”

“No mans can to know der vorkings of der mental brocess by a Frauenzimmer,” said Dr. Fooss, wagging his head.

The suspense became nerve-racking; we were obliged to pack our camping kits; and it began to look as though we would have either to sail the next morning or to resign from the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society, because all the evening papers had the story in big type—the details and objects of the expedition, the discovery of the herd of mammoths in cold storage, the prompt organization of an expedition to secure this unparalleled deposit of prehistoric mammalia—everything was there staring at us in violent print, excepting only the name of the discoverer and the names of those composing the field expedition.

“She means to betray us after we have sailed,” said Lezard, greatly depressed. “We might just as well resign now before this hoax explodes and bespatters us. We can take our chances in vaudeville or as lecturing professors with the movies.”

I thought so, too, in point of fact we all had gathered in my study to write out our resignations, when there came a knock at the door and Dr. Daisy Delmour walked in.

Oddly enough I had not before met Dr. Delmour personally; only formal written communications had hitherto passed between us. My idea of her had doubtless been inspired by the physical and intellectual aberrations of her chief; I naturally supposed her to be either impossible and corporeally redundant, or intellectually and otherwise as weazened as last year’s Li-che nut.

I was criminally mistaken. And why Lezard, who knew her, had never set me right I could not then understand. I comprehended later.

For the feminine assistant of Professor Jane Bottomly, who sauntered into my study and announced herself, had the features of Athene, the smile of Aphrodite, and the figure of Psyche. I believe I do not exaggerate these scientific details, although it has been said of me that any pretty girl distorts my vision and my intellectual balance to the detriment of my calmer reason and my differentiating ability.

“Gentlemen,” said Dr. Delmour, while we stood in a respectful semi-circle before her, modestly conscious of our worth, our toes turned out, and each man’s features wreathed with that politely unnatural smirk which masculine features assume when confronted by feminine beauty. “Gentlemen, on the eve of your proposed departure for Baffin Land in quest of living specimens of the five-spotted Philohela quinquemaculata, I have been instructed by Professor Bottomly to announce to you a great good fortune for her, for you, for the Bronx, for America, for the entire civilized world.

“It has come to Professor Bottomly’s knowledge, recently I believe, that an entire herd of mammoths lie encased in the mud and ice of the vast flat marshes which lie south of the terminal moraine of the Golden Glacier in that part of Baffin Land known as Dr. Cook’s Peninsula.

“The credit of this epoch-making discovery is Professor Bottomly’s entirely. How it happened, she did not inform me. One month ago today she sailed in great haste for Baffin Land. At this very hour she is doubtless standing all alone upon the frozen surface of that wondrous marsh, contemplating with reverence and awe and similar holy emotions the fruits of her own unsurpassed discovery!”

Dr. Delmour’s lovely features became delicately suffused and transfigured as she spoke; her exquisite voice thrilled with generous emotion; she clasped her snowy hands and gazed, enraptured, at the picture of Dr. Bottomly which her mind was so charmingly evoking.

“Perhaps,” she whispered, “perhaps at this very instant, in the midst of that vast and flat and solemn desolation the only protuberance visible for miles and miles is Professor Bottomly. Perhaps the pallid Arctic sun is setting behind the majestic figure of Professor Bottomly, radiating a blinding glory to the zenith, illuminating the crowning act of her career with its unearthly aura!”

She gazed at us out of dimmed and violet eyes.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “I am ordered to take command of this expedition of yours; I am ordered to sail with you tomorrow morning on the Labrador and Baffin Line steamer Dr. Cook.

“The object of your expedition, therefore, is not to be the quest of Philohela quinquemaculata; your duty now is to corroborate the almost miraculous discovery of Professor Bottomly, and to disinter for her the vast herd of frozen mammoths, pack and pickle them, and get them to the Bronx.

“Tomorrow’s morning papers will have the entire story: the credit and responsibility for the discovery and the expedition belong to Professor Bottomly, and will be given to her by the press and the populace of our great republic.

“It is her wish that no other names be mentioned. Which is right. To the discoverer belongs the glory. Therefore, the marsh is to be named Bottomly’s Marsh, and the Glacier, Bottomly’s Glacier.

“Yours and mine is to be the glory of laboring incognito under the direction of the towering scientific intellect of the age, Professor Bottomly.

“And the most precious legacy you can leave your children—if you get married and have any—is that you once wielded the humble pick and shovel for Jane Bottomly on the bottomless marsh which bears her name!”

•      •      •      •      •      •

After a moment’s silence we three men ventured to look sideways at each other. We had certainly killed Professor Bottomly, scientifically speaking. The lady was practically dead. The morning papers would consummate the murder. We didn’t know whether we wanted to laugh or not.

She was now virtually done for; that seemed certain. So greedily had this egotistical female swallowed the silly bait we offered, so arrogantly had she planned to eliminate everybody excepting herself from the credit of the discovery, that there seemed now nothing left for us to do except to watch her hurdling deliriously toward destruction. Should we burst into hellish laughter?

We looked hard at Dr. Delmour and we decided not to—yet.

Said I: “To assist at the final apotheosis of Professor Bottomly makes us very, very happy. We are happy to remain incognito, mere ciphers blotted out by the fierce white light which is about to beat upon Professor Bottomly, fore and aft. We are happy that our participation in this astonishing affair shall never be known to science.

“But, happiest of all are we, dear Dr. Delmour, in the knowledge that you are to be with us and of us, incognito on this voyage now imminent; that you are to be our revered and beloved leader.

“And I, for one, promise you personally the undivided devotion of a man whose entire and austere career has been dedicated to science—in all its branches.”

I stepped forward rather gracefully and raised her little hand to my lips to let her see that even the science of gallantry had not been neglected by me.

Dr. Daisy Delmour blushed.

“Therefore,” said I, “considering the fact that our names are not to figure in this expedition; and, furthermore, in consideration of the fact that you are going, we shall be very, very happy to accompany you, Dr. Delmour.” I again saluted her hand, and again Dr. Delmour blushed and looked sideways at Professor Lezard.

III

It was, to be accurate, exactly twenty-three days later that our voyage by sea and land ended one Monday morning upon the gigantic terminal moraine of the Golden Glacier, Cook’s Peninsula, Baffin Land.

Four pack-mules carried our luggage, four more bore our persons; an arctic dicky-bird sat on a bowlder and said, “Pilly-willy-willy! Tweet! Tweet!”

As we rode out to the bowlder-strewn edge of the moraine the rising sun greeted us cordially, illuminating below us the flat surface of the marsh which stretched away to the east and south as far as the eye could see.

So flat was it that we immediately made out the silhouettes of two mules tethered below us a quarter of a mile away.

Something about the attitude of these mules arrested our attention, and, gazing upon them through our field-glasses we beheld Professor Bottomly.

That resourceful lady had mounted a pneumatic hammock upon the two mules, their saddles had sockets to fit the legs of the galvanized iron tripod.

No matter in which way the mules turned, sliding swivels on the hollow steel frames regulated the hammock slung between them. It was an infernal invention.

There lay Jane Bottomly asleep, her black hair drying over the hammock’s edge, gilded to a peroxide lustre by the rays of the rising sun.

I gazed upon her with a sort of ferocious pity. Her professional days were numbered. I also had her number!

“How majestically she slumbers,” whispered Dr. Delmour to me, “dreaming, doubtless, of her approaching triumph.”

Dr. Fooss and Professor Lezard, driving the pack-mules ahead of them, were already riding out across the marsh.

“Daisy,” I said, leaning from my saddle and taking one of her gloved hands into mine, “the time has come for me to disillusion you. There are no mammoths in that mud down there.”

She looked at me in blue-eyed amazement.

“You are mistaken,” she said; “Professor Bottomly is celebrated for the absolute and painstaking accuracy of her deductions and the boldness and the imagination of her scientific investigations. She is the most cautious scientist in America; she would never announce such a discovery to the newspapers unless she were perfectly certain of its truth.”

I was sorry for this young girl. I pressed her hand because I was sorry for her. After a few moments of deepest thought I felt so sorry for her that I kissed her.

“You mustn’t,” said Dr. Delmour, blushing.

The things we mustn’t do are so many that I can’t always remember all of them.

“Daisy,” I said, “shall we pledge ourselves to each other for eternity—here in the presence of this immemorial glacier which moves a thousand inches a year—I mean an inch every thousand years—here in these awful solitudes where incalculable calculations could not enlighten us concerning the number of cubic tons of mud in that marsh—here in the presence of these innocent mules—”

“Oh, look!” exclaimed Dr. Delmour, lifting her flushed cheek from my shoulder. “There is a man in the hammock with Professor Bottomly!”

I levelled my field-glasses incredulously. Good Heavens! There was a man there. He was sitting on the edge of the hammock in a dejected attitude, his booted legs dangling.

And, as I gazed, I saw the arm of Professor Bottomly raised as though groping instinctively for something in her slumber—saw her fingers close upon the blue-flannel shirt of her companion, saw his timid futile attempts to elude her, saw him inexorably hauled back and his head forcibly pillowed upon her ample chest.

“Daisy!” I faltered, “what does yonder scene of presumable domesticity mean?”

“I—I haven’t the faintest idea!” she stammered.

“Is that lady married! Or is this revelry?” I asked, sternly.

“She wasn’t married when she sailed from N-New-York,” faltered Dr. Delmour.

We rode forward in pained silence, spurring on until we caught up with Lezard and Fooss and the pack-mules; then we all pressed ahead, a prey, now, to the deepest moral anxiety and agitation.

The splashing of our mule’s feet on the partly melted surface of the mud aroused the man as we rode up and he scrambled madly to get out of the hammock as soon as he saw us.

A detaining feminine hand reached mechanically for his collar, groped aimlessly for a moment, and fell across the hammock’s edge. Evidently its owner was too sleepy for effort.

Meanwhile the man who had floundered free from the hammock, leaped overboard and came hopping stiffly over the slush toward us like a badly-winged snipe.

“Who are you?” I demanded, drawing bridle so suddenly that I found myself astride of my mule’s ears. Sliding back into the saddle, I repeated the challenge haughtily, inwardly cursing my horsemanship.

He stood balancing his lank six feet six of bony altitude for a few moments without replying. His large gentle eyes of baby blue were fixed on me.

“Speak!” I said. “The reputation of a lady is at stake! Who are you? We ask, before we shoot you, for purpose of future identification.”

He gazed at me wildly. “I dunno who I be,” he replied. “My name was James Skaw before that there lady went an’ changed it on me. She says she has changed my name to hers. I dunno. All I know is I’m married.”

“Married!” echoed Dr. Delmour.

He looked dully at the girl, then fixed his large mild eyes on me.

“A mission priest done it for her a month ago when we was hikin’ towards Fort Carcajou. Hoon-hel are you?” he added.

I informed him with dignity; he blinked at me, at the others, at the mules. Then he said with infinite bitterness:

“You’re a fine guy, ain’t you, a-wishin’ this here lady onto a pore pelt-hunter what ain’t never done nothin’ to you!”

“Who did you say I wished on you?” I demanded, bewildered.

“That there lady a-sleepin’ into the nuptool hammick! You wished her onto me—yaas you did! Whatnhel have I done to you, hey?”

We were dumb. He shoved his hand into his pocket, produced a slug of twist, slowly gnawed off a portion, and buried the remains in his vast jaw.

“All I done to you,” he said, “was to write you them letters sayin’s as how I found a lot of ellerphants into the mud.

“What you done to me was to send that there lady here. Was that gratitood? Man to man I ask you?”

A loud snore from the hammock startled us all. James Skaw twisted his neck turkey-like, and looked warily at the hammock, then turning toward me:

“Aw,” he said, “she don’t never wake up till I have breakfast ready.”

“James Skaw,” I said, “tell me what has happened. On my word of honor I don’t know.”

He regarded me with lack-lustre eyes.

“I was a-settin’ onto a bowlder,” said he, “a-fig-urin’ out whether you was a-comin’ or not, when that there lady rides up with her led-mule a trailin’.

“Sez she: ‘Are you James Skaw?’

“Yes, marm,’ sez I, kinder scared an’ puzzled.

“‘Where is them ellerphants?’ sez she, reachin’ down from her saddle an’ takin’ me by the shirt collar, an’ beatin’ me with her umbrella.

“Sez I, ‘I have wrote to a certain gent that I would show him them ellerphants for a price. Bein’ strictly hones’ I can’t show ’em to no one else until I hear from him.’

“With that she continood to argoo the case with her umbrella, never lettin’ go of my shirt collar. Sir, she argood until dinner time, an’ then she resoomed the debate until I fell asleep. The last I knowed she was still conversin’.

“An’ so it went next day, all day long, an’ the next day. I couldn’t stand it no longer so I started for Fort Carcajau. But she bein’ onto a mule, run me down easy, an’ kep’ beside me conversin’ volooble.

“Sir, do you know what it is to listen to umbrella argooment every day, all day long, from sun-up to night-fall? An’ then some more?

“I was loony, I tell you, when we met the mission priest. ‘Marry me,’ sez she, ‘or I’ll talk you to death!’ I didn’t realise what she was sayin’ an’ what I answered. But them words I uttered done the job, it seems.

“We camped there an’ slep’ for two days without wakin.’ When I waked up I was convalescent.

“She was good to me. She made soup an’ she wrapped blankets onto me an’ she didn’t talk no more until I was well enough to endoor it.

“An’ by’m’by she broke the nooze to me that we was married an’ that she had went as far as to marry me in the sacred cause of science because man an’ wife is one, an’ what I knowed about them ellerphants she now had a right to know.

“Sir, she had put one over on me. So bein’ strickly hones’ I had to show her where them ellerphants lay froze up under the marsh.”

IV

Where the ambition of this infatuated woman had led her appalled us all. The personal sacrifice she had made in the name of science awed us.

Still, when I remembered that detaining arm sleepily lifted from the nuptual hammock, I was not so certain concerning her continued martyrdom.

I cast an involuntary glance of critical appraisal upon James Skaw. He had the golden hair and beard of the early Christian martyr. His features were classically regular; he stood six feet six; he was lean because fit, sound as a hound’s tooth, and really a superb specimen of masculine health.

Curry him and trim him and clothe him in evening dress and his physical appearance would make a sensation at the Court of St. James. Only his English required manicuring.

The longer I looked at him the better I comprehended that detaining hand from the hammock. Fabas indulcet fames.

Then, with a shock, it rushed over me that there evidently had been some ground for this man’s letters to me concerning a herd of frozen mammoths.

Professor Bottomly had not only married him to obtain the information but here she was still camping on the marsh!

“James Skaw,” I said, tremulously, “where are those mammoths?”

He looked at me, then made a vague gesture:

“Under the mud—everywhere—all around us.”

“Has she seen them?”

“Yes, I showed her about a hundred. There’s one under you. Look! you can see him through the slush.”

“Ach Gott!” burst from Dr. Fooss, and he tottered in his saddle. Lezard, frightfully pale, passed a shaking hand over his brow. As for me my hair became dank with misery, for there directly under my feet, the vast hairy bulk of a mammoth lay dimly visible through the muddy ice.

What I had done to myself when I was planning to do Professor Bottomly suddenly burst upon me in all its hideous proportions. Fame, the plaudits of the world, the highest scientific honours—all these in my effort to annihilate her, I had deliberately thrust upon this woman to my own everlasting detriment and disgrace.

A sort of howl escaped from Dr. Fooss, who had dismounted and who had been scratching in the slush with his feet like a hen. For already this slight gallinaceous effort of his had laid bare a hairy section of frozen mammoth.

Lezard, weeping bitterly, squatted beside him clawing at the thin skin of ice with a pick-axe.

It seemed more than I could bear and I flung myself from my mule and seizing a spade, fell violently to work, the tears of rage and mortification coursing down my cheeks.

“Hurrah!” cried Dr. Delmour, excitedly, scrambling down from her mule and lifting a box of dynamite from her saddle-bags.

Transfigured with enthusiasm she seized a crowbar, traced in the slush the huge outlines of the buried beast, then, measuring with practiced eye the irregular zone of cleavage, she marked out a vast oval, dug holes along it with her bar, dropped into each hole a stick of dynamite, got out the batteries and wires, attached the fuses, covered each charge, and retired on a run toward the moraine, unreeling wire as she sped upward among the bowlders.

Half frantic with grief and half mad with the excitement of the moment we still had sense enough to shoulder our tools and drive our mules back across the moraine.

Only the mule-hammock in which reposed Professor Bottomly remained on the marsh. For one horrid instant temptation assailed me to press the button before James Skaw could lead the hammock-mules up to the moraine. It was my closest approach to crime.

With a shudder I viewed the approach of the mules. James Skaw led them by the head; the hammock on its bar and swivels swung gently between them; Professor Bottomly slept, lulled, no doubt, to deeper slumber by the gently swaying hammock.

When the hammock came up, one by one we gazed upon its unconscious occupant.

And, even amid dark and revengeful thoughts, amid a mental chaos of grief and fury and frantic self-reproach, I had to admit to myself that Jane Bottomly was a fine figure of a woman, and good-looking, too, and that her hair was all her own and almost magnificent at that.

With a modiste to advise her, a maid to dress her, I myself might have—but let that pass. Only as I gazed upon her fresh complexion and the softly parted red lips of Professor Bottomly, and as I noted the beautiful white throat and prettily shaped hands, a newer, bitterer, and more overwhelming despair seized me; and I realized now that perhaps I had thrown away more than fame, honours, applause; I had perhaps thrown away love!

At that moment Professor Bottomly awoke. For a moment her lilac-tinted eyes had a dazed expression, then they widened, and she lay very quietly looking from one to another of us, cradled in the golden glory of her hair, perfectly mistress of herself, and her mind as clear as a bell.

“Well,” she said, “so you have arrived at last.” And to Dr. Delmour she smilingly extended a cool, fresh hand.

“Have you met my husband?” she inquired.

We admitted that we had.

“James!” she called.

At the sound of her voice James Skaw hopped nimbly to do her bidding. A tender smile came into her face as she gazed upon her husband. She made no explanation concerning him, no apology for him. And, watching her, it slowly filtered into my mind that she liked him.

With one hand in her husband’s and one on Dr. Delmour’s arm she listened to Daisy’s account of what we were about to do to the imbedded mammoth, and nodded approval.

James Skaw turned the mules so that she might watch the explosion. She twisted up her hair, then sat up in her hammock; Daisy Delmour pressed the electric button; there came a deep jarring sound, a vast upheaval, and up out of the mud rose five or six dozen mammoths and toppled gently over upon the surface of the ice.

Miserable as we were at such an astonishing spectacle we raised a tragic cheer as Professor Bottomly sprang out of her hammock and, telling Dr. Delmour to get a camera, seized her husband and sped down to where one of the great, hairy frozen beasts lay on the ice in full sunshine.

And then we tasted the last drop of gall which our over-slopping cup of bitterness held for us; Professor Bottomly climbed up the sides of the frozen mammoth, dragging her husband with her, and stood there waving a little American flag while Dr. Delmour used up every film in the camera to record the scientific triumph of the ages.

Almost idiotic with the shock of my great grief I reeled and tottered away among the bowlders. Fooss came to find me; and when he found me he kicked me violently for some time. “Esel dumkopf!” he said.

When he was tired Lezard came and fell upon me, showering me with kicks and anathema.

When he went away I beat my head with my fists for a while. Every little helped.

After a time I smelled cooking, and presently Dr. Delmour came to where I sat huddled up miserably in the sun behind the bowlder.

“Luncheon is ready,” she said.

I groaned.

“Don’t you feel well?”

I said that I did not.

She lingered apparently with the idea of cheering me up. “It’s been such fun,” she said. “Professor Lezard and I have already located over a hundred and fifty mammoths within a short distance of here, and apparently there are hundreds, if not thousands, more in the vicinity. The ivory alone is worth over a million dollars. Isn’t it wonderful!”

She laughed excitedly and danced away to join the others. Then, out of the black depth of my misery a feeble gleam illuminated the Stygian obscurity. There was one way left to stay my approaching downfall—only one. Professor Bottomly meant to get rid of me, “for the good of the Bronx,” but there remained a way to ward off impending disaster. And though I had lost the opportunity of my life by disbelieving the simple honesty of James Skaw,—and though the honors and emoluments and applause which ought to have been mine were destined for this determined woman, still, if I kept my head, I should be able to hold my job at the Bronx.

Dr. Delmour was immovable in the good graces of Professor Bottomly; and the only way for me to retain my position was to marry her.

The thought comforted me. After a while I felt well enough to arise and partake of some luncheon.

They were all seated around the campfire when I approached. I was welcomed politely, inquiries concerning my health were offered; but the coldly malevolent glare of Dr. Fooss and the calm contempt in Lezard’s gaze chilled me; and I squatted down by Daisy Delmour and accepted a dish of soup from her in mortified silence.

Professor Bottomly and James Skaw were feasting connubially side by side, and she was selecting titbits for him which he dutifully swallowed, his large mild eyes gazing at vacancy in a gentle, surprised sort of way as he gulped down what she offered him.

Neither of them paid any attention to anybody else.

Fooss gobbled his lunch in a sort of raging silence; Lezard, on the other side of Dr. Delmour, conversed with her continually in undertones.

After a while his persistent murmuring began to make me uneasy, even suspicious, and I glared at him sideways.

Daisy Delmour, catching my eye, blushed, hesitated, then leaning over toward me with delightful confusion she whispered:

“I know that you will be glad to hear that I have just promised to marry your closest friend, Professor Lezard—”

“What!” I shouted with all my might, “have you put one over on me, too?”

Lezard and Fooss seized me, for I had risen and was jumping up and down and splashing them with soup.

“Everybody has put one over on me!” I shrieked. “Everybody! Now I’m going to put one over on myself!”

And I lifted my plate of soup and reversed it on my head.

They told me later that I screamed for half an hour before I swooned.

Afterward, my intellect being impaired, instead of being dismissed from my department, I was promoted to the position which I now hold as President Emeritus of the Consolidated Art Museums and Zoölogical Gardens of the City of New York.

I have easy hours, little to do, and twenty ornamental stenographers and typewriters engaged upon my memoirs which I dictate when I feel like it, steeped in the aroma of the most inexpensive cigar I can buy at the Rolling Stone Inn.

There is one typist in particular—but let that pass.

Vir sapit qui pauca loquitor.

[It is a wise person who speaks.]

UN PEU D’AMOUR

When I returned to the plateau from my investigation of the crater, I realized that I had descended the grassy pit as far as any human being could descend. No living creature could pass that barrier of flame and vapour. Of that I was convinced.

Now, not only the crater but its steaming effluvia was utterly unlike anything I had ever before beheld. There was no trace of lava to be seen, or of pumice, ashes, or of volcanic rejecta in any form whatever. There were no sulphuric odours, no pungent fumes, nothing to teach the olfactory nerves what might be the nature of the silvery steam rising from the crater incessantly in a vast circle, ringing its circumference halfway down the slope.

Under this thin curtain of steam a ring of pale yellow flames played and sparkled, completely encircling the slope.

The crater was about half a mile deep; the sides sloped gently to the bottom.

But the odd feature of the entire phenomenon was this: the bottom of the crater seemed to be entirely free from fire and vapour. It was disk-shaped, sandy, and flat, about a quarter of a mile in diameter. Through my field-glasses I could see patches of grass and wild flowers growing in the sand here and there, and the sparkle of water, and a crow or two, feeding and walking about.

I looked at the girl who was standing beside me, then cast a glance around at the very unusual landscape.

We were standing on the summit of a mountain some two thousand feet high, looking into a cup-shaped depression or crater, on the edges of which we stood.

This low, flat-topped mountain, as I say, was grassy and quite treeless, although it rose like a truncated sugar-cone out of a wilderness of trees which stretched for miles below us, north, south, east, and west, bordered on the horizon by towering blue mountains, their distant ranges enclosing the forests as in a vast amphitheatre.

From the centre of this enormous green floor of foliage rose our grassy hill, and it appeared to be the only irregularity which broke the level wilderness as far as the base of the dim blue ranges encircling the horizon.

Except for the log bungalow of Mr. Blythe on the eastern edge of this grassy plateau, there was not a human habitation in sight, nor a trace of man’s devastating presence in the wilderness around us.

Again I looked questioningly at the girl beside me and she looked back at me rather seriously.

“Shall we seat ourselves here in the sun?” she asked.

I nodded.

Very gravely we settled down side by side on the thick green grass.

“Now,” she said, “I shall tell you why I wrote you to come out here. Shall I?”

“By all means, Miss Blythe.”

Sitting cross-legged, she gathered her ankles into her hands, settling herself as snugly on the grass as a bird settles on its nest.

“The phenomena of nature,” she said, “have always interested me intensely, not only from the artistic angle but from the scientific point of view.

“It is different with father. He is a painter; he cares only for the artistic aspects of nature. Phenomena of a scientific nature bore him. Also, you may have noticed that he is of a—a slightly impatient disposition.”

I had noticed it. He had been anything but civil to me when I arrived the night before, after a five-hundred mile trip on a mule, from the nearest railroad—a journey performed entirely alone and by compass, there being no trail after the first fifty miles.

To characterize Blythe as slightly impatient was letting him down easy. He was a selfish, bad-tempered old pig.

“Yes,” I said, answering her, “I did notice a negligible trace of impatience about your father.”

She flushed.

“You see I did not inform my father that I had written to you. He doesn’t like strangers; he doesn’t like scientists. I did not dare tell him that I had asked you to come out here. It was entirely my own idea. I felt that I must write you because I am positive that what is happening in this wilderness is of vital scientific importance.”

“How did you get a letter out of this distant and desolate place?” I asked.

“Every two months the storekeeper at Windflower Station sends in a man and a string of mules with staples for us. The man takes our further orders and our letters back to civilization.”

I nodded.

“He took my letter to you—among one or two others I sent——”

A charming colour came into her cheeks. She was really extremely pretty. I liked that girl. When a girl blushes when she speaks to a man he immediately accepts her heightened colour as a personal tribute. This is not vanity: it is merely a proper sense of personal worthiness.

She said thoughtfully:

“The mail bag which that man brought to us last week contained a letter which, had I received it earlier, would have made my invitation to you unnecessary. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“I am not,” said I, looking into her beautiful eyes.

I twisted my mustache into two attractive points, shot my cuffs, and glanced at her again, receptively.

She had a far-away expression in her eyes. I straightened my necktie. A man, without being vain, ought to be conscious of his own worth.

“And now,” she continued, “I am going to tell you the various reasons why I asked so celebrated a scientist as yourself to come here.”

I thanked her for her encomium.

“Ever since my father retired from Boston to purchase this hill and the wilderness surrounding it,” she went on, “ever since he came here to live a hermit’s life—a life devoted solely to painting landscapes—I also have lived here all alone with him.

“That is three years, now. And from the very beginning—from the very first day of our arrival, somehow or other I was conscious that there was something abnormal about this corner of the world.”

She bent forward, lowering her voice a trifle:

“Have you noticed,” she asked, “that so many things seem to be circular out here?”

“Circular?” I repeated, surprised.

“Yes. That crater is circular; so is the bottom of it; so is this plateau, and the hill; and the forests surrounding us; and the mountain ranges on the horizon.”

“But all this is natural.”

“Perhaps. But in those woods, down there, there are, here and there, great circles of crumbling soil—perfect circles a mile in diameter.”

“Mounds built by prehistoric man, no doubt.”

She shook her head:

“These are not prehistoric mounds.”

“Why not?”

“Because they have been freshly made.”

“How do you know?”

“The earth is freshly upheaved; great trees, partly uprooted, slant at every angle from the sides of the enormous piles of newly upturned earth; sand and stones are still sliding from the raw ridges.”

She leaned nearer and dropped her voice still lower:

“More than that,” she said, “my father and I both have seen one of these huge circles in the making!”

“What!” I exclaimed, incredulously.

“It is true. We have seen several. And it enrages father.”

“Enrages?”

“Yes, because it upsets the trees where he is painting landscapes, and tilts them in every direction. Which, of course, ruins his picture; and he is obliged to start another, which vexes him dreadfully.”

I think I must have gaped at her in sheer astonishment.

“But there is something more singular than that for you to investigate,” she said calmly. “Look down at that circle of steam which makes a perfect ring around the bowl of the crater, halfway down. Do you see the flicker of fire under the vapour?”

“Yes.”

She leaned so near and spoke in such a low voice that her fragrant breath fell upon my cheek:

“In the fire, under the vapours, there are little animals.”

“What!!”

“Little beasts live in the fire—slim, furry creatures, smaller than a weasel. I’ve seen them peep out of the fire and scurry back into it…. Now are you sorry that I wrote you to come? And will you forgive me for bringing you out here?”

An indescribable excitement seized me, endowing me with a fluency and eloquence unusual:

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart!” I cried; “—from the depths of a heart the emotions of which are entirely and exclusively of scientific origin!”

In the impulse of the moment I held out my hand; she laid hers in it with charming diffidence.

“Yours is the discovery,” I said. “Yours shall be the glory. Fame shall crown you; and perhaps if there remains any reflected light in the form of a by-product, some modest and negligible little ray may chance to illuminate me.”

Surprised and deeply moved by my eloquence, I bent over her hand and saluted it with my lips.

She thanked me. Her pretty face was rosy.

It appeared that she had three cows to milk, new-laid eggs to gather, and the construction of some fresh butter to be accomplished.

At the bars of the grassy pasture slope she dropped me a curtsey, declining very shyly to let me carry her lacteal paraphernalia.

So I continued on to the bungalow garden, where Blythe sat on a camp stool under a green umbrella, painting a picture of something or other.

“Mr. Blythe!” I cried, striving to subdue my enthusiasm. “The eyes of the scientific world are now open upon this house! The searchlight of Fame is about to be turned upon you—”

“I prefer privacy,” he interrupted. “That’s why I came here. I’ll be obliged if you’ll turn off that searchlight.”

“But, my dear Mr. Blythe—”

“I want to be let alone,” he repeated irritably. “I came out here to paint and to enjoy privately my own paintings.”

If what stood on his easel was a sample of his pictures, nobody was likely to share his enjoyment.

“Your work,” said I, politely, “is—is——”

“Is what!” he snapped. “What is it—if you think you know?”

“It is entirely, so to speak, per se—by itself—”

“What the devil do you mean by that?”

I looked at his picture, appalled. The entire canvas was one monotonous vermillion conflagration. I examined it with my head on one side, then on the other side; I made a funnel with both hands and peered intently through it at the picture. A menacing murmuring sound came from him.

“Satisfying—exquisitely satisfying,” I concluded. “I have often seen such sunsets—”

“What!”

“I mean such prairie fires—”

“Damnation!” he exclaimed. “I’m painting a bowl of nasturtiums!”

“I was speaking purely in metaphor,” said I with a sickly smile. “To me a nasturtium by the river brink is more than a simple flower. It is a broader, grander, more magnificent, more stupendous symbol. It may mean anything, everything—such as sunsets and conflagrations and Götterdämmerungs! Or—” and my voice was subtly modulated to an appealing and persuasive softness—“it may mean nothing at all—chaos, void, vacuum, negation, the exquisite annihilation of what has never even existed.”

He glared at me over his shoulder. If he was infected by Cubist tendencies he evidently had not understood what I said.

“If you won’t talk about my pictures I don’t mind your investigating this district,” he grunted, dabbing at his palette and plastering a wad of vermilion upon his canvas; “but I object to any public invasion of my artistic privacy until I am ready for it.”

“When will that be?”

He pointed with one vermilion-soaked brush toward a long, low, log building.

“In that structure,” he said, “are packed one thousand and ninety-five paintings—all signed by me. I have executed one or two every day since I came here. When I have painted exactly ten thousand pictures, no more, no less, I shall erect here a gallery large enough to contain them all.

“Only real lovers of art will ever come here to study them. It is five hundred miles from the railroad. Therefore, I shall never have to endure the praises of the dilettante, the patronage of the idler, the vapid rhapsodies of the vulgar. Only those who understand will care to make the pilgrimage.”

He waved his brushes at me:

“The conservation of national resources is all well enough—the setting aside of timber reserves, game preserves, bird refuges, all these projects are very good in a way. But I have dedicated this wilderness as a last and only refuge in all the world for true Art! Because true Art, except for my pictures, is, I believe, now practically extinct!… You’re in my way. Would you mind getting out?”

I had sidled around between him and his bowl of nasturtiums, and I hastily stepped aside. He squinted at the flowers, mixed up a flamboyant mess of colour on his palette, and daubed away with unfeigned satisfaction, no longer noticing me until I started to go. Then:

“What is it you’re here for, anyway?” he demanded abruptly. I said with dignity:

“I am here to investigate those huge rings of earth thrown up in the forest as by a gigantic mole.” He continued to paint for a few moments:

“Well, go and investigate ’em,” he snapped. “I’m not infatuated with your society.”

“What do you think they are?” I asked, mildly ignoring his wretched manners.

“I don’t know and I don’t care, except, that sometimes when I begin to paint several trees, the very trees I’m painting are suddenly heaved up and tilted in every direction, and all my work goes for nothing. That makes me mad! Otherwise, the matter has no interest for me.”

“But what in the world could cause—”

“I don’t know and I don’t care!” he shouted, waving palette and brushes angrily. “Maybe it’s an army of moles working all together under the ground; maybe it’s some species of circular earthquake. I don’t know! I don’t care! But it annoys me. And if you can devise any scientific means to stop it, I’ll be much obliged to you. Otherwise, to be perfectly frank, you bore me.”

“The mission of Science,” said I solemnly, “is to alleviate the inconveniences of mundane existence. Science, therefore, shall extend a helping hand to her frailer sister, Art—”

“Science can’t patronize Art while I’m around!” he retorted. “I won’t have it!”

“But, my dear Mr. Blythe—”

“I won’t dispute with you, either! I don’t like to dispute!” he shouted. “Don’t try to make me. Don’t attempt to inveigle me into discussion! I know all I want to know. I don’t want to know anything you want me to know, either!”

I looked at the old pig in haughty silence, nauseated by his conceit.

After he had plastered a few more tubes of vermilion over his canvas he quieted down, and presently gave me an oblique glance over his shoulder.

“Well,” he said, “what else are you intending to investigate?”

“Those little animals that live in the crater fires,” I said bluntly.

“Yes,” he nodded, indifferently, “there are creatures which live somewhere in the fires of that crater.”

“Do you realize what an astounding statement you are making?” I asked.

“It doesn’t astound me. What do I care whether it astounds you or anybody else? Nothing interests me except Art.”

“But—”

“I tell you nothing interests me except Art!” he yelled. “Don’t dispute it! Don’t answer me! Don’t irritate me! I don’t care whether anything lives in the fire or not! Let it live there!”

“But have you actually seen live creatures in the flames?”

“Plenty! Plenty! What of it? What about it? Let ’em live there, for all I care. I’ve painted pictures of ’em, too. That’s all that interests me.”

“What do they look like, Mr. Blythe?”

“Look like? I don’t know! They look like weasels or rats or bats or cats or—stop asking me questions! It irritates me! It depresses me! Don’t ask any more! Why don’t you go in to lunch? And—tell my daughter to bring me a bowl of salad out here. I’ve no time to stuff myself. Some people have. I haven’t. You’d better go in to lunch…. And tell my daughter to bring me seven tubes of Chinese vermilion with my salad!”

“You don’t mean to mix—” I began, then checked myself before his fury.

“I’d rather eat vermilion paint on my salad than sit here talking to you!” he shouted.

I cast a pitying glance at this impossible man, and went into the house. After all, he was her father. I had to endure him.

After Miss Blythe had carried to her father a large bucket of lettuce leaves, she returned to the veranda of the bungalow.

A delightful luncheon awaited us; I seated her, then took the chair opposite.

A delicious omelette, fresh biscuit, salad, and strawberry preserves, and a tall tumbler of iced tea imbued me with a sort of mild exhilaration.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Blythe down in the garden, munching his lettuce leaves like an ill-tempered rabbit, and daubing away at his picture while he munched.

“Your father,” said I politely, “is something of a genius.”

“I am so glad you think so,” she said gratefully. “But don’t tell him so. He has been surfeited with praise in Boston. That is why we came out here.”

“Art,” said I, “is like science, or tobacco, or tooth-wash. Every man to his own brand. Personally, I don’t care for his kind. But who can say which is the best kind of anything? Only the consumer. Your father is his own consumer. He is the best judge of what he likes. And that is the only true test of art, or anything else.”

“How delightfully you reason!” she said. “How logically, how generously!”

“Reason is the handmaid of Science, Miss Blythe.”

She seemed to understand me. Her quick intelligence surprised me, because I myself was not perfectly sure whether I had emitted piffle or an epigram.

As we ate our strawberry preserves we discussed ways and means of capturing a specimen of the little fire creatures which, as she explained, so frequently peeped out at her from the crater fires, and, at her slightest movement, scurried back again into the flames. Of course I believed that this was only her imagination. Yet, for years I had entertained a theory that fire supported certain unknown forms of life.

“I have long believed,” said I, “that fire is inhabited by living organisms which require the elements and temperature of active combustion for their existence—microörganisms, but not,” I added smilingly, “any higher type of life.”

“In the fireplace,” she ventured diffidently, “I sometimes see curious things—dragons and snakes and creatures of grotesque and peculiar shapes.”

I smiled indulgently, charmed by this innocently offered contribution to science. Then she rose, and I rose and took her hand in mine, and we wandered over the grass toward the crater, while I explained to her the difference between what we imagine we see in the glowing coals of a grate fire and my own theory that fire is the abode of living animalculae.

On the grassy edge of the crater we paused and looked down the slope, where the circle of steam rose, partly veiling the pale flash of fire underneath.

“How near can we go?” I inquired.

“Quite near. Come; I’ll guide you.”

Leading me by the hand, she stepped over the brink and we began to descend the easy grass slope together.

There was no difficulty about it at all. Down we went, nearer and nearer to the wall of steam, until at last, when but fifteen feet away from it, I felt the heat from the flames which sparkled below the wall of vapour.

Here we seated ourselves upon the grass, and I knitted my brows and fixed my eyes upon this curious phenomenon, striving to discover some reason for it.

Except for the vapour and the fires, there was nothing whatever volcanic about this spectacle, or in the surroundings.

From where I sat I could see that the bed of fire which encircled the crater; and the wall of vapour which crowned the flames, were about three hundred feet wide. Of course this barrier was absolutely impassable. There was no way of getting through it into the bottom of the crater.

A slight pressure from Miss Blythe’s fingers engaged my attention; I turned toward her, and she said:

“There is one more thing about which I have not told you. I feel a little guilty, because that is the real reason I asked you to come here.”

“What is it?”

“I think there are emeralds on the floor of that crater.”

“Emeralds!”

“I think so.” She felt in the ruffled pocket of her apron, drew out a fragment of mineral, and passed it to me.

I screwed a jeweler’s glass into my eye and examined it in astonished silence. It was an emerald; a fine, large, immensely valuable stone, if my experience counted for anything. One side of it was thickly coated with vermilion paint.

“Where did this come from?” I asked in an agitated voice.

“From the floor of the crater. Is it really an emerald?”

I lifted my head and stared at the girl incredulously.

“It happened this way,” she said excitedly. “Father was painting a picture up there by the edge of the crater. He left his palette on the grass to go to the bungalow for some more tubes of colour. While he was in the house, hunting for the colours which he wanted, I stepped out on the veranda, and I saw some crows alight near the palette and begin to stalk about in the grass. One bird walked right over his wet palette; I stepped out and waved my sun-bonnet to frighten him off, but he had both feet in a sticky mass of Chinese vermilion, and for a moment was unable to free himself.

“I almost caught him, but he flapped away over the edge of the crater, high above the wall of vapour, sailed down onto the crater floor, and alighted.

“But his feet bothered him; he kept hopping about on the bottom of the crater, half running, half flying; and finally he took wing and rose up over the hill.

“As he flew above me, and while I was looking up at his vermilion feet, something dropped from his claws and nearly struck me. It was that emerald.”

When I had recovered sufficient composure to speak steadily, I took her beautiful little hand in mine.

“This,” said I, “is the most exciting locality I have ever visited for purposes of scientific research. Within this crater may lie millions of value in emeralds. You are probably, today, the wealthiest heiress upon the face of the globe!”

I gave her a winning glance. She smiled, shyly, and blushingly withdrew her hand.

For several exquisite minutes I sat there beside her in a sort of heavenly trance. How beautiful she was! How engaging—how sweet—how modestly appreciative of the man beside her, who had little beside his scientific learning, his fame, and a kind heart to appeal to such youth and loveliness as hers!

There was something about her that delicately appealed to me. Sometimes I pondered what this might be; sometimes I wondered how many emeralds lay on that floor of sandy gravel below us.

Yes, I loved her. I realised it now. I could even endure her father for her sake. I should make a good husband. I was quite certain of that.

I turned and gazed upon her, meltingly. But I did not wish to startle her, so I remained silent, permitting the chaste language of my eyes to interpret for her what my lips had not yet murmured. It was a brief but beautiful moment in my life.

“The way to do,” said I, “is to trap several dozen crows, smear their feet with glue, tie a ball of Indian twine to the ankle of every bird, then liberate them. Some are certain to fly into the crater and try to scrape the glue off in the sand. Then,” I added, triumphantly, “all we have to do is to haul in our birds and detach the wealth of Midas from their sticky claws!”

“That is an excellent suggestion,” she said gratefully, “but I can do that after you have gone. All I wanted you to tell me was whether the stone is a genuine emerald.”

I gazed at her blankly.

“You are here for purposes of scientific investigation,” she added, sweetly. “I should not think of taking your time for the mere sake of accumulating wealth for my father and me.”

There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say at that moment. Chilled, I gazed at the flashing ring of fire.

And, as I gazed, suddenly I became aware of a little, pointed muzzle, two pricked-up ears, and two ruby-red eyes gazing intently out at me from the mass of flames.

The girl beside me saw it, too.

“Don’t move!” she whispered. “That is one of the flame creatures. It may venture out if you keep perfectly still.”

Rigid with amazement, I sat like a stone image, staring at the most astonishing sight I had ever beheld.

For several minutes the ferret-like creature never stirred from where it crouched in the crater fire; the alert head remained pointed toward us; I could even see that its thick fur must have possessed the qualities of asbestos, because here and there a hair or two glimmered incandescent; and its eyes, nose, and whiskers glowed and glowed as the flames pulsated around it.

After a long while it began to move out of the fire, slowly, cautiously, cunning eyes fixed on us—a small, slim, wiry, weasel-like creature on which the sunlight fell with a vitreous glitter as it crept forward into the grass.

Then, from the fire behind, another creature of the same sort appeared, another, others, then dozens of eager, lithe, little animals appeared everywhere from the flames and began to frisk and play and run about in the grass and nibble the fresh, green, succulent herbage with a snipping sound quite audible to us.

One came so near my feet that I could examine it minutely.

Its fur and whiskers seemed heavy and dense and like asbestos fibre, yet so fine as to appear silky. Its eyes, nose, and claws were scarlet, and seemed to possess a glassy surface.

I waited my opportunity, and when the little thing came nosing along within reach, I seized it.

Instantly it emitted a bewildering series of whistling shrieks, and twisted around to bite me. Its body was icy.

“Don’t let it bite!” cried the girl. “Be careful, Mr. Smith!”

But its jaws were toothless; only soft, cold gums pinched me, and I held it twisting and writhing, while the icy temperature of its body began to benumb my fingers and creep up my wrist, paralyzing my arm; and its incessant and piercing shrieks deafened me.

In vain I transferred it to the other hand, and then passed it from one hand to the other, as one shifts a lump of ice or a hot potato, in an attempt to endure the temperature: it shrieked and squirmed and doubled, and finally wriggled out of my stiffened and useless hands, and scuttled away into the fire.

It was an overwhelming disappointment. For a moment it seemed unendurable.

“Never mind,” I said, huskily, “if I caught one in my hands, I can surely catch another in a trap.”

“I am so sorry for your disappointment,” she said, pitifully.

“Do you care, Miss Blythe?” I asked.

She blushed.

“Of course I care,” she murmured.

My hands were too badly frost-nipped to become eloquent. I merely sighed and thrust them into my pockets. Even my arm was too stiff to encircle her shapeful waist. Devotion to Science had temporarily crippled me. Love must wait. But, as we ascended the grassy slope together, I promised myself that I would make her a good husband, and that I should spend at least part of every day of my life in trapping crows and smearing their claws with glue.

That evening I was seated on the veranda beside Wilna—Miss Blythe’s name was Wilna—and what with gazing at her and fitting together some of the folding box-traps which I always carried with me—and what with trying to realise the pecuniary magnificence of our future existence together, I was exceedingly busy when Blythe came in to display, as I supposed, his most recent daub to me.

The canvas he carried presented a series of crimson speckles, out of which burst an eruption of green streaks—and it made me think of stepping on a caterpillar.

My instinct was to placate this impossible man. He was her father. I meant to honour him if I had to assault him to do it.

“Supremely satisfying!” I nodded, chary of naming the subject. “It is a stride beyond the art of the future: it is a flying leap out of the Not Yet into the Possibly Perhaps! I thank you for enlightening me, Mr. Blythe. I am your debtor.”

He fairly snarled at me:

“What are you talking about!” he demanded.

I remained modestly mute.

To Wilna he said, pointing passionately at his canvas:

“The crows have been walking all over it again! I’m going to paint in the woods after this, earthquakes or no earthquakes. Have the trees been heaved up anywhere recently?”

“Not since last week,” she said, soothingly. “It usually happens after a rain.”

“I think I’ll risk it then—although it did rain early this morning. I’ll do a moonlight down there this evening.” And, turning to me: “If you know as much about science as you do about art you won’t have to remain here long—I trust.”

“What?” said I, very red.

He laughed a highly disagreeable laugh, and marched into the house. Presently he bawled for dinner, and Wilna went away. For her sake I had remained calm and dignified, but presently I went out and kicked up the turf two or three times; and, having foozled my wrath, I went back to dinner, realising that I might as well begin to accustom myself to my future father-in-law.

It seemed that he had a mania for prunes, and that’s all he permitted anybody to have for dinner.

Disgusted, I attempted to swallow the loathly stewed fruit, watching Blythe askance as he hurriedly stuffed himself, using a tablespoon, with every symptom of relish.

“Now,” he cried, shoving back his chair, “I’m going to paint a moonlight by moonlight. Wilna, if Billy arrives, make him comfortable, and tell him I’ll return by midnight.” And without taking the trouble to notice me at all, he strode away toward the veranda, chewing vigorously upon his last prune.

“Your father,” said I, “is eccentric. Genius usually is. But he is a most interesting and estimable man. I revere him.”

“It is kind of you to say so,” said the girl, in a low voice.

I thought deeply for a few moments, then:

“Who is ‘Billy?’” I inquired, casually.

I couldn’t tell whether it was a sudden gleam of sunset light on her face, or whether she blushed.

“Billy,” she said softly, “is a friend of father’s. His name is William Green.”

“Oh.”

“He is coming out here to visit—father—I believe.”

“Oh. An artist; and doubtless of mature years.”

“He is a mineralogist by profession,” she said, “—and somewhat young.”

“Oh.”

“Twenty-four years old,” she added. Upon her pretty face was an absent expression, vaguely pleasant. Her blue eyes became dreamy and exquisitely remote.

I pondered deeply for a while:

“Wilna?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Smith?” as though aroused from agreeable meditation.

But I didn’t know exactly what to say, and I remained uneasily silent, thinking about that man Green and his twenty-four years, and his profession, and the bottom of the crater, and Wilna—and striving to satisfy myself that there was no logical connection between any of these.

“I think,” said I, “that I’ll take a bucket of salad to your father.”

Why I should have so suddenly determined to ingratiate myself with the old grouch I scarcely understood: for the construction of a salad was my very best accomplishment.

Wilna looked at me in a peculiar manner, almost as though she were controlling a sudden and not unpleasant inward desire to laugh.

Evidently the finer and more delicate instincts of a woman were divining my motive and sympathizing with my mental and sentimental perplexity.

So when she said: “I don’t think you had better go near my father,” I was convinced of her gentle solicitude in my behalf.

“With a bucket of salad,” I whispered softly, “much may be accomplished, Wilna.” And I took her little hand and pressed it gently and respectfully. “Trust all to me,” I murmured.

She stood with her head turned away from me, her slim hand resting limply in mine. From the slight tremor of her shoulders I became aware how deeply her emotion was now swaying her. Evidently she was nearly ready to become mine.

But I remained calm and alert. The time was not yet. Her father had had his prunes, in which he delighted. And when pleasantly approached with a bucket of salad he could not listen otherwise than politely to what I had to say to him. Quick action was necessary—quick but diplomatic action—in view of the imminence of this young man Green, who evidently was persona grata at the bungalow of this irritable old dodo.

Tenderly pressing the pretty hand which I held, and saluting the finger-tips with a gesture which was, perhaps, not wholly ungraceful, I stepped into the kitchen, washed out several heads of lettuce, deftly chopped up some youthful onions, constructed a seductive French dressing, and, stirring together the crisp ingredients, set the savoury masterpiece away in the ice-box, after tasting it. It was delicious enough to draw sobs from any pig.

When I went out to the veranda, Wilna had disappeared. So I unfolded and set up some more box-traps, determined to lose no time.

Sunset still lingered beyond the chain of western mountains as I went out across the grassy plateau to the cornfield.

Here I set and baited several dozen aluminium crow-traps, padding the jaws so that no injury could be done to the birds when the springs snapped on their legs.

Then I went over to the crater and descended its gentle, grassy slope. And there, all along the borders of the vapoury wall, I set box-traps for the lithe little denizens of the fire, baiting every trap with a handful of fresh, sweet clover which I had pulled up from the pasture beyond the cornfield.

My task ended, I ascended the slope again, and for a while stood there immersed in pleasurable premonitions.

Everything had been accomplished swiftly and methodically within the few hours in which I had first set eyes upon this extraordinary place—everything!—love at first sight, the delightfully lightning-like wooing and winning of an incomparable maiden and heiress; the discovery of the fire creatures; the solving of the emerald problem.

And now everything was ready, crow-traps, fire-traps, a bucket of irresistible salad for Blythe, a modest and tremulous avowal for Wilna as soon as her father tasted the salad and I had pleasantly notified him of my intentions concerning his lovely offspring.

Daylight faded from rose to lilac; already the mountains were growing fairy-like under that vague, diffuse lustre which heralds the rise of the full moon. It rose, enormous, yellow, unreal, becoming imperceptibly silvery as it climbed the sky and hung aloft like a stupendous arc-light flooding the world with a radiance so white and clear that I could very easily have written verses by it, if I wrote verses.

Down on the edge of the forest I could see Blythe on his camp-stool, madly besmearing his moonlit canvas, but I could not see Wilna anywhere. Maybe she had shyly retired somewhere by herself to think of me.

So I went back to the house, filled a bucket with my salad, and started toward the edge of the woods, singing happily as I sped on feet so light and frolicsome that they seemed to skim the ground. How wonderful is the power of love!

When I approached Blythe he heard me coming and turned around.

“What the devil do you want?” he asked with characteristic civility.

“I have brought you,” said I gaily, “a bucket of salad.”

“I don’t want any salad!”

“W-what?”

“I never eat it at night.”

I said confidently:

“Mr. Blythe, if you will taste this salad I am sure you will not regret it.” And with hideous cunning I set the bucket beside him on the grass and seated myself near it. The old dodo grunted and continued to daub the canvas; but presently, as though forgetfully, and from sheer instinct, he reached down into the bucket, pulled out a leaf of lettuce, and shoved it into his mouth.

My heart leaped exultantly. I had him!

“Mr. Blythe,” I began in a winningly modulated voice, and, at the same instant, he sprang from his camp-chair, his face distorted.

“There are onions in this salad!” he yelled. “What the devil do you mean! Are you trying to poison me! What are you following me about for, anyway? Why are you running about underfoot every minute!”

“My dear Mr. Blythe,” I protested—but he barked at me, kicked over the bucket of salad, and began to dance with rage.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway!” he bawled. “Why are you trying to feed me? What do you mean by trying to be attentive to me!”

“I—I admire and revere you—”

“No you don’t!” he shouted. “I don’t want you to admire me! I don’t desire to be revered! I don’t like attention and politeness! Do you hear! It’s artificial—out of date—ridiculous! The only thing that recommends a man to me is his bad manners, bad temper, and violent habits. There’s some meaning to such a man, none at all to men like you!”

He ran at the salad bucket and kicked it again.

“They all fawned on me in Boston!” he panted. “They ran about underfoot! They bought my pictures! And they made me sick! I came out here to be rid of ’em!”

I rose from the grass, pale and determined.

“You listen to me, you old grouch!” I hissed. “I’ll go. But before I go I’ll tell you why I’ve been civil to you. There’s only one reason in the world: I want to marry your daughter! And I’m going to do it!”

I stepped nearer him, menacing him with outstretched hand:

“As for you, you pitiable old dodo, with your bad manners and your worse pictures, and your degraded mania for prunes, you are a necessary evil that’s all, and I haven’t the slightest respect for either you or your art!”

“Is that true?” he said in an altered voice.

“True?” I laughed bitterly. “Of course it’s true, you miserable dauber!”

“D-dauber!” he stammered.

“Certainly! I said ‘dauber,’ and I mean it. Why, your work would shame the pictures on a child’s slate!”

“Smith,” he said unsteadily, “I believe I have utterly misjudged you. I believe you are a good deal of a man, after all—”

“I’m man enough,” said I, fiercely, “to go back, saddle my mule, kidnap your daughter, and start for home. And I’m going to do it!”

“Wait!” he cried. “I don’t want you to go. If you’ll remain I’ll be very glad. I’ll do anything you like. I’ll quarrel with you, and you can insult my pictures. It will agreeably stimulate us both. Don’t go, Smith—”

“If I stay, may I marry Wilna?”

“If you ask me I won’t let you!”

“Very well!” I retorted, angrily. “Then I’ll marry her anyway!”

“That’s the way to talk! Don’t go, Smith. I’m really beginning to like you. And when Billy Green arrives you and he will have a delightfully violent scene—”

“What!”

He rubbed his hands gleefully.

“He’s in love with Wilna. You and he won’t get on. It is going to be very stimulating for me—I can see that! You and he are going to behave most disagreeably to each other. And I shall be exceedingly unpleasant to you both! Come, Smith, promise me that you’ll stay!”

Profoundly worried, I stood staring at him in the moonlight, gnawing my mustache.

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll remain if—”

Something checked me, I did not quite know what for a moment. Blythe, too, was staring at me in an odd, apprehensive way. Suddenly I realised that under my feet the ground was stirring.

“Look out!” I cried; but speech froze on my lips as beneath me the solid earth began to rock and crack and billow up into a high, crumbling ridge, moving continually, as the sod cracks, heaves up, and crumbles above the subterranean progress of a mole.

Up into the air we were slowly pushed on the ever-growing ridge; and with us were carried rocks and bushes and sod, and even forest trees.

I could hear their tap-roots part with pistol-like reports; see great pines and hemlocks and oaks moving, slanting, settling, tilting crazily in every direction as they were heaved upward in this gigantic disturbance.

Blythe caught me by the arm; we clutched each other, balancing on the crest of the steadily rising mound.

“W-what is it?” he stammered. “Look! It’s circular. The woods are rising in a huge circle. What’s happening? Do you know?”

Over me crept a horrible certainty that something living was moving under us through the depths of the earth—something that, as it progressed, was heaping up the surface of the world above its unseen and burrowing course—something dreadful, enormous, sinister, and alive!

“Look out!” screamed Blythe; and at the same instant the crumbling summit of the ridge opened under our feet and a fissure hundreds of yards long yawned ahead of us.

And along it, shining slimily in the moonlight, a vast, viscous, ringed surface was moving, retracting, undulating, elongating, writhing, squirming, shuddering.

“It’s a worm!” shrieked Blythe. “Oh, God! It’s a mile long!”

As in a nightmare we clutched each other, struggling frantically to avoid the fissure; but the soft earth slid and gave way under us, and we fell heavily upon that ghastly, living surface.

Instantly a violent convulsion hurled us upward; we fell on it again, rebounding from the rubbery thing, strove to regain our feet and scramble up the edges of the fissure, strove madly while the mammoth worm slid more rapidly through the rocking forests, carrying us forward with a speed increasing.

Through the forest we tore, reeling about on the slippery back of the thing, as though riding on a plowshare, while trees clashed and tilted and fell from the enormous furrow on every side; then, suddenly out of the woods into the moonlight, far ahead of us we could see the grassy upland heave up, cake, break, and crumble above the burrowing course of the monster.

“It’s making for the crater!” gasped Blythe; and horror spurred us on, and we scrambled and slipped and clawed the billowing sides of the furrow until we gained the heaving top of it.

As one runs in a bad dream, heavily, half-paralyzed, so ran Blythe and I, toiling over the undulating, tumbling upheaval until, half-fainting, we fell and rolled down the shifting slope onto solid and unvexed sod on the very edges of the crater.

Below us we saw, with sickened eyes, the entire circumference of the crater agitated, saw it rise and fall as avalanches of rock and earth slid into it, tons and thousands of tons rushing down the slope, blotting from our sight the flickering ring of flame, and extinguishing the last filmy jet of vapour.

Suddenly the entire crater caved in and filled up under my anguished eyes, quenching for all eternity the vapour wall, the fire, and burying the little denizens of the flames, and perhaps a billion dollars’ worth of emeralds under as many billion tons of earth.

Quieter and quieter grew the earth as the gigantic worm bored straight down into depths immeasurable. And at last the moon shone upon a world that lay without a tremor in its milky lustre.

“I shall name it Verma gigantica,” said I, with a hysterical sob; “but nobody will ever believe me when I tell this story!”

Still terribly shaken, we turned toward the house. And, as we approached the lamplit veranda, I saw a horse standing there and a young man hastily dismounting.

And then a terrible thing occurred; for, before I could even shriek, Wilna had put both arms around that young man’s neck, and both of his arms were clasping her waist.

Blythe was kind to me. He took me around the back way and put me to bed.

And there I lay through the most awful night I ever experienced, listening to the piano below, where Wilna and William Green were singing, “Un Peu d’Amour.”

THE EGGS OF THE SILVER MOON

In the new white marble Administration Building at Bronx Park, my private office separated the offices of Dr. Silas Quint and Professor Boomly; and it had been arranged so on purpose, because of the increasingly frequent personal misunderstanding between these two celebrated entomologists. It was very plain to me that a crisis in this quarrel was rapidly approaching.

A bitter animosity had for some months existed on both sides, born of the most intense professional jealousy. They had been friends for years. No unseemly rivalry disturbed this friendship as long as it was merely a question of collecting, preparing, and mounting for exhibition the vast numbers of butterflies and moths which haunt this insectivorous earth. Even their zeal in the eternal hunt for new and undescribed species had not made them enemies.

I am afraid that my suggestion for the construction of a great glass flying-cage for living specimens of moths and butterflies started the trouble between these hitherto godly and middle-aged men. That, and the Carnegie Educational Medal were the causes which began this deplorable affair.

Various field collectors, employed by both Quint and Boomly, were always out all over the world foraging for specimens; also, they were constantly returning with spoils from every quarter of the globe.

Now, to secure rare and beautiful living specimens of butterflies and moths for the crystal flying-cage was a serious and delicate job. Such tropical insects could not survive the journey of several months from the wilds of Australia, India, Asia, Africa, or the jungles of South America—nor could semi-tropical species endure the captivity of a few weeks or even days, when captured in the West Indies, Mexico, or Florida. Only our duller-coloured, smaller, and hardier native species tolerated capture and exhibition.

Therefore, the mode of procedure which I suggested was for our field expeditions to obtain males and females of the same species of butterfly or moth, mate them, and, as soon as any female deposited her eggs, place the tiny pearl-like eggs in cold storage to retard their hatching, which normally occurs, in the majority of species, within ten days or two weeks.

This now was the usual mode of procedure followed by the field collectors employed by Dr. Quint and Professor Boomly. And not only were the eggs of various butterflies and moths so packed for transportation, but a sufficient store of their various native food-plants was also preserved, where such food-plants could not be procured in the United States. So when the eggs arrived at Bronx Park, and were hatched there in due time, the young caterpillars had plenty of nourishment ready for them in cold storage.

Might I not, legitimately, have expected the Carnegie Educational Medal for all this? I have never received it. I say this without indignation—even without sorrow. I merely make the statement.

Yet, my system was really a very beautiful system; a tiny batch of eggs would arrive from Ceylon, or Sumatra, or Africa; when taken from cold storage and placed in the herbarium they would presently hatch; the caterpillars were fed with their accustomed food-plant—a few leaves being taken from cold storage every day for them—they would pass through their three or four moulting periods, cease feeding in due time, transform into the chrysalis stage, and finally appear in all the splendour and magnificence of butterfly or moth.

The great glass flying-cage was now alive with superb moths and butterflies, flitting, darting, fluttering among the flowering bushes or feeding along the sandy banks of the brook which flowed through the flying-cage, bordered by thickets of scented flowers. And it was like looking at a meteoric shower of winged jewels, where the huge metallic-blue Morphos from South America flapped and sailed, and the orange and gold and green Ornithoptera from Borneo pursued their majestic, bird-like flight—where big, glittering Papilios flashed through the bushes or alighted nervously to feed for a few moments on jasmine and phlox, and where the slowly flopping Heliconians winged their way amid the denser tangles of tropical vegetation.

Nothing like this flying-cage had ever before been seen in New York; thousands and thousands of men, women, and children thronged the lawn about the flying-cage all day long.

By night, also, the effect was wonderful; the electric lights among the foliage broke out; the great downy-winged moths, which had been asleep all day while the butterflies flitted through the sunshine, now came out to display their crimson or peacock-spotted wings, and the butterflies folded their wings and went to bed for the night.

The public was enchanted, the authorities of the Bronx proud and delighted; all apparently was happiness and harmony. Except that nobody offered me the Carnegie medal.

I was sitting one morning in my office, which, as I have said, separated the offices of Dr. Quint and Professor Boomly, when there came a loud rapping on my door, and, at my invitation, Dr. Quint bustled in—a little, meagre, excitable, near-sighted man with pointed mustaches and a fleck of an imperial smudging his lower lip.

“Last week,” he began angrily, “young Jones arrived from Singapore bringing me the eggs of Erebia astarte, the great Silver Moon butterfly. Attempts to destroy them have been made. Last night I left them in a breeding-cage on my desk. Has anybody been in there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What has happened?”

“I found an ichneumon fly in the cage yesterday!” he shouted; “and this morning the eggs have either shrunk to half their size or else the eggs of another species have been secretly substituted for them and the Silver Moon eggs stolen! Has he been in there?”

“Who?” I asked, pretending to misunderstand.

“He!” demanded Quint fiercely. “If he has I’ll kill him some day.”

He meant his one-time friend, Dr. Boomly. Alas!

“For heaven’s sake, why are you two perpetually squabbling?” I asked wearily. “You used to be inseparable friends. Why can’t you make up?”

“Because I’ve come to know him. That’s why! I have unmasked this—this Borgia—this Machiavelli—this monster of duplicity! Matters are approaching a point where something has got to be done short of murder. I’ve stood all his envy and jealousy and cheap imputations and hints and contemptible innuendoes that I’m going to—”

He stopped short, glaring at the doorway, which had suddenly been darkened by the vast bulk of Professor Boomly—a figure largely abdominal but majestic—like the massive butt end of an elephant. For the rest, he had a rather insignificant and peevish face and a melancholy mustache that usually looked damp.

“Mr. Smith,” he said to me, in his thin, high, sarcastic voice—a voice incongruously at variance with his bulk—“has anybody had the infernal impudence to enter my room and nose about my desk?”

“Yes, I have!” replied Quint excitedly. “I’ve been in your room. What of it? What about it?”

Boomly permitted his heavy-lidded eyes to rest on Quint for a moment, then, turning to me:

“I want a patent lock put on my door. Will you speak to Professor Farrago?”

“I want one put on mine, too!” cried Quint. “I want a lock put on my door which will keep envious, dull-minded, mentally broken-down, impertinent, and fat people out of my office!”

Boomly flushed heavily:

“Fat?” he repeated, glaring at Quint. “Did you say ‘fat?’”

“Yes, fat—intellectually and corporeally fat! I want that kind of individual kept out. I don’t trust them. I’m afraid of them. Their minds are atrophied. They are unmoral, possibly even criminal! I don’t want them in my room snooping about to see what I have and what I’m doing. I don’t want them to sneak in, eaten up with jealousy and envy, and try to damage the eggs of the Silver Moon butterfly because the honour and glory of hatching them would probably procure for me the Carnegie Educational Medal—”

“Why, you little, dried-up, protoplasmic atom!” burst out Boomly, his face suffused with passion, “Are you insinuating that I have any designs on your batch of eggs?”

“It’s my belief,” shouted Quint, “that you want that medal yourself, and that you put an ichneumon fly in my breeding-cage in hopes it would sting the eggs of the Silver Moon.”

“If you found an ichneumon fly there,” retorted Boomly, “you probably hatched it in mistake for a butterfly!” And he burst into a peal of contemptuous laughter, but his little, pig-like eyes under the heavy lids were furious.

“I now believe,” said Quint, trembling with rage, “that you have criminally substituted a batch of common Plexippus eggs for the Silver Moon eggs I had in my breeding-cage! I believe you are sufficiently abandoned to do it!”

“Ha! Ha!” retorted Boomly scornfully. “I don’t believe you ever had anything in your breeding-cage except a few clothes moths and cockroaches!”

Quint began to dance:

“You did take them!” he yelled; “and you left me a bunch of milkweed butterflies’ eggs! Give me my eggs or I shall violently assault you!”

“Assault your grandmother!” remarked Boomly, with unscientific brevity. “What do you suppose I want of your ridiculous eggs? Haven’t I enough eggs of Heliconius salome hatching to give me the Carnegie medal if I want it?”

“The Silver Moon eggs are unique!” cried Quint. “You know it! You know that if they hatch, pupate, and become perfect insects that I shall certainly be awarded—”

“You’ll be awarded the Matteawan medal,” remarked Boomly with venom.

Quint ran at him with a half-suppressed howl, his momentum carrying him halfway up Professor Boomly’s person. Then, losing foothold, he fell to the floor and began to kick in the general direction of Professor Boomly. It was a sorrowful sight to see these two celebrated scientists panting, mauling, scuffling and punching each other around the room, tables and chairs and scrapbaskets flying in every direction, and I mounted on the window-sill horrified, speechless, trying to keep clear of the revolving storm centre.

“Where are my Silver Moon eggs!” screamed Dr. Quint. “Where are my eggs that Jones brought me from Singapore—you entomological robber! You’ve got ’em somewhere! If you don’t give ’em up I’ll find means to destroy you!”

“You insignificant pair of maxillary palpi!” bellowed Professor Boomly, galloping after Dr. Quint as he dodged around my desk. “I’ll pull off those antennae you call whiskers if I can get hold of ’em—”

Dr. Quint’s threatened mustaches bristled as he fled before the elephantine charge of Professor Boomly—once again around my desk, then out into the hall, where I heard the door of his office slam, and Boomly, gasping, panting, breathing vengeance outside, and vowing to leave Quint quite whiskerless when he caught him.

It was a painful scene for scientists to figure in or to gaze upon. Profoundly shocked and upset, I locked up the anthropological department offices and went out into the Park, where the sun was shining and a gentle June wind stirred the trees.

Too completely upset to do any more work that day, I wandered about amid the gaily dressed crowds at hazard; sometimes I contemplated the monkeys; sometimes gazed sadly upon the seals. They dashed and splashed and raced round and round their tank, or crawled up on the rocks, craned their wet, sleek necks, and barked—houp! houp! houp!

For luncheon I went over to the Rolling Stone Restaurant. There was a very pretty girl there—an unusually pretty girl—or perhaps it was one of those days on which every girl looked unusually pretty to me. There are such days.

Her voice was exquisite when she spoke. She said:

“We have, today, corned beef hash, fried ham and eggs, liver and bacon—” but let that pass, too.

I took my tea very weak; by that time I learned that her name was Mildred Case; that she had been a private detective employed in a department store, and that her duties had been to nab wealthy ladies who forgot to pay for objects usually discovered in their reticules, bosoms, and sometimes in their stockings.

But the confinement of indoor work had been too much for Mildred Case, and the only outdoor job she could find was the position of lady waitress in the rustic Rolling Stone Inn.

She was very, very beautiful, or perhaps it was one of those days—but let that pass, too.

“You are the great Mr. Percy Smith, Curator of the Anthropological Department, are you not?” she asked shyly.

“Yes,” I said modestly; and, to slightly rebuke any superfluous pride in me, I paraphrased with becoming humility, pointing upward: “but remember, Mildred, there is One greater than I.”

“Mr. Carnegie?” she nodded innocently. That was true, too. I let it go at that.

We chatted: she mentioned Professor Boomly and Dr. Quint, gently deploring the rupture of their friendship. Both gentlemen, in common with the majority of the administration personnel, were daily customers at the Rolling Stone Inn. I usually took my lunch from my boarding-house to my office, being too busy to go out for mere nourishment.

That is why I had hitherto missed Mildred Case.

“Mildred,” I said, “I do not believe it can be wholesome for a man to eat sandwiches while taking minute measurements of defunct monkeys. Also, it is not a fragrant pastime. Hereafter I shall lunch here.”

“It will be a pleasure to serve you,” said that unusually—there I go again! It was an unusually beautiful day in June. Which careful, exact, and scientific statement, I think ought to cover the subject under consideration.

After luncheon I sadly selected a five-cent cigar; and, as I hesitated, lingering over the glass case, undecided still whether to give full rein to this contemplated extravagance, I looked up and found her beautiful grey eyes gazing into mine.

“What gentle thoughts are yours, Mildred?” I said softly.

“The cigar you have selected,” she murmured, “is fly-specked.”

Deeply touched that this young girl should have cared—that she should have expressed her solicitude so modestly, so sweetly, concerning the maculatory condition of my cigar, I thanked her and purchased, for the same sum, a packet of cigarettes.

That was going somewhat far for me. I had never in all my life even dreamed of smoking a cigarette. To a reserved, thoughtful, and scientific mind there is, about a packet of cigarettes, something undignified, something vaguely frolicsome.

When I paid her for them I felt as though, for the first time in my life, I had let myself go.

Oddly enough, in this uneasy feeling of gaiety and abandon, a curious sensation of exhilaration persisted.

We had quite a merry little contretemps when I tried to light my cigarette and the match went out, and then she struck another match, and we both laughed, and that match was extinguished by her breath.

Instantly I quoted: “‘Her breath was like the new-mown hay—’”

“Mr. Smith!” she said, flushing slightly.

“‘Her eyes,’ I quoted, ‘were like the stars at even!’”

“You don’t mean my eyes, do you?”

I took a puff at my unlighted cigarette. It also smelled like recently mown hay. I felt that I was slipping my cables and heading toward an unknown and tempestuous sea.

“What time are you free, Mildred?” I asked, scarcely recognising my own voice in such reckless apropos.

She shyly informed me.

I struck a match, relighted my cigarette, and took one puff. That was sufficient: I was adrift. I realised it, trembled internally, took another puff.

“If,” said I carelessly, “on your way home you should chance to stroll along the path beyond the path that leads to the path which—”

I paused, checked by her bewildered eyes. We both blushed.

“Which way do you usually go home?” I asked, my ears afire.

She told me. It was a suitably unfrequented path.

So presently I strolled thither; and seated myself under the trees in a bosky dell.

Now, there is a quality in boskiness not inappropriate to romantic thoughts. Boskiness, cigarettes, a soft afternoon in June, the hum of bees, and the distant barking of the seals, all these were delicately blending to inspire in me a bashful sentiment.

A specimen of Papilio turnus, di-morphic form, Glaucus, alighted near me; I marked its flight with scientific indifference. Yet it is a rare species in Bronx Park.

A mock-orange bush was in snowy bloom behind me; great bunches of wistaria hung over the rock beside me.

The combination of these two exquisite perfumes seemed to make the boskiness more bosky.

There was an unaccustomed and sportive lightness to my step when I rose to meet Mildred, where she came loitering along the shadow-dappled path.

She seemed surprised to see me.

She thought it rather late to sit down, but she seated herself. I talked to her enthusiastically about anthropology. She was so interested that after a while she could scarcely keep still, moving her slim little feet restlessly, biting her pretty lower lip, shifting her position—all certain symptoms of an interest in science which even approached excitement.

Warmed to the heart by her eager and sympathetic interest in the noble science so precious, so dear to me, I took her little hand to soothe and quiet her, realizing that she might become overexcited as I described the pituitary body and why its former functions had become atrophied until the gland itself was nearly obsolete.

So intense her interest had been that she seemed a little tired. I decided to give adequate material support to her spinal process. It seemed to rest and soothe her. I don’t remember that she said anything except: “Mr. Smith!” I don’t recollect what we were saying when she mentioned me by name rather abruptly.

The afternoon was wonderfully still and calm. The month was June.

After a while—quite a while—some little time in point of accurate fact—she detected the sound of approaching footsteps.

I remember that she was seated at the opposite end of the bench, rather feverishly occupied with her hat and her hair, when young Jones came hastily along the path, caught sight of us, halted, turned violently red—being a shy young man—but instead of taking himself off, he seemed to recover from a momentary paralysis.

“Mr. Smith!” he said sharply. “Professor Boomly has disappeared; there’s a pool of blood on his desk; his coat, hat, and waistcoat are lying on the floor, the room is a wreck, and Dr. Quint is in there tearing up the carpet and behaving like a madman. We think he suddenly went insane and murdered Professor Boomly. What is to be done?”

Horrified, I had risen at his first word. And now, as I understood the full purport of his dreadful message, my hair stirred under my hat and I gazed at him, appalled.

“What is to be done?” he demanded. “Shall I telephone for the police?”

“Do you actually believe,” I faltered, “that this unfortunate man has murdered Boomly?”

“I don’t know. I looked over the transom, but I couldn’t see Professor Boomly. Dr. Quint has locked the door.”

“And he’s tearing up the carpet?”

“Like a lunatic. I didn’t want to call in the police until I’d asked you. Such a scandal in Bronx Park would be a frightful thing for us all—” He hesitated, looked around, coldly, it seemed to me, at Mildred Case. “A scandal,” he repeated, “is scarcely what might be expected among a harmonious and earnest band of seekers after scientific knowledge. Is it, Mil—Miss Case?”

Now, I don’t know why Mildred should have blushed. There was nothing that I could see in this young man’s question to embarrass her.

Preoccupied, still confused by the shock of this terrible news, I looked at Jones and at Mildred; and they were staring rather oddly at each other.

I said: “If this affair turns out to be as ghastly as it seems to promise, we’ll have to call in a detective. I’ll go back immediately—”

“Why not take me, also?” asked Mildred Case, quietly.

“What?” I asked, looking at her.

“Why not, Mr. Smith? I was once a private detective.”

Surprised at the suggestion, I hesitated.

“If you desire to keep this matter secret—if you wish to have it first investigated privately and quietly—would it not be a good idea to let me use my professional knowledge before you call in the police? Because as soon as the police are summoned all hope of avoiding publicity is at an end.”

She spoke so sensibly, so quietly, so modestly, that her offer of assistance deeply impressed me.

As for young Jones, he looked at her steadily in that odd, chilling manner, which finally annoyed me. There was no need of his being snobbish because this very lovely and intelligent young girl happened to be a waitress at the Rolling Stone Inn.

“Come,” I said unsteadily, again a prey to terrifying emotions; “let us go to the Administration Building and learn how matters stand. If this affair is as terrible as I fear it to be, science has received the deadliest blow ever dealt it since Cagliostro perished.”

As we three strode hastily along the path in the direction of the Administration Building, I took that opportunity to read these two youthful fellow beings a sermon on envy, jealousy, and coveteousness.

“See,” said I, “to what a miserable condition the desire for notoriety and fame has brought two learned and enthusiastic delvers in the vineyard of endeavor! The mad desire for the Carnegie medal completely turned the hitherto perfectly balanced brains of these devoted disciples of Science. Envy begat envy, jealousy begat jealousy, pride begat pride, hatred begat hatred—”

“It’s like that book in the Bible where everybody begat everybody else,” said Mildred seriously.

At first I thought she had made an apt and clever remark; but on thinking it over I couldn’t quite see its relevancy. I turned and looked into her sweet face. Her eyes were dancing with brilliancy and her sensitive lips quivered. I feared, she was near to tears from the reaction of the shock. Had Jones not been walking with us—but let that go, too.

We were now entering the Administration Building, almost running; and as soon as we came to the closed door of Dr. Quint’s room, I could hear a commotion inside—desk drawers being pulled out and their contents dumped, curtains being jerked from their rings, an unmistakable sound indicating the ripping up of a carpet—and through all this din the agitated scuffle of footsteps.

I rapped on the door. No notice taken. I rapped and knocked and called in a low, distinct voice.

Suddenly I recollected I had a general pass-key on my ring which unlocked any door in the building. I nodded to Jones and to Mildred to stand aside, then, gently fitting the key, I suddenly pushed out the key which remained on the inside, turned the lock, and flung open the door.

A terrible sight presented itself: Dr. Quint, hair on end, both mustaches pulled out, shirt, cuffs, and white waistcoat smeared with blood, knelt amid the general wreckage on the floor, in the act of ripping up the carpet.

“Doctor!” I cried in a trembling voice. “What have you done to Professor Boomly?”

He paused in his carpet ripping and looked around at us with a terrifying laugh.

“I’ve settled him!” he said. “If you don’t want to get all over dust you’d better keep out—”

“Quint!” I cried. “Are you crazy?”

“Pretty nearly. Let me alone—”

“Where is Boomly!” I demanded in a tragic voice. “Where is your old friend, Billy Boomly? Where is he, Quint? And what does that mean—that pool of blood on the floor? Whose is it?”

“It’s Bill’s,” said Quint, coolly ripping up another breadth of carpet and peering under it.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Do you admit that?”

“Certainly I admit it. I told him I’d terminate him if he meddled with my Silver Moon eggs.”

“You mean to say that you shed blood—the blood of your old friend—merely because he meddled with a miserable batch of butterfly’s eggs?” I asked, astounded.

“I certainly did shed his blood for just that particular thing! And listen; you’re in my way—you’re standing on a part of the carpet which I want to tear up. Do you mind moving?”

Such cold-blooded calmness infuriated me. I sprang at Quint, seized him, and shouted to Jones to tie his hands behind him with the blood-soaked handkerchief which lay on the floor.

At first, while Jones and I were engaged in the operation of securing the wretched man, Quint looked at us both as though surprised; then he grew angry and asked us what the devil we were about.

“Those who shed blood must answer for it!” I said solemnly.

“What? What’s the matter with you?” he demanded in a rage. “Shed blood? What if I did? What’s that to you? Untie this handkerchief, you unmentionable idiot!”

I looked at Jones:

“His mind totters,” I said hoarsely.

“What’s that!” cried Quint, struggling to get off the chair whither I had pushed him: but with my handkerchief we tied his ankles to the rung of the chair, heedless of his attempts to kick us, and sprang back out of range.

“Now,” I said, “what have you done with the poor victim of your fury? Where is he? Where is all that remains of Professor Boomly?”

“Boomly? I don’t know where he is. How the devil should I know?”

“Don’t lie,” I said solemnly.

“Lie! See here, Smith, when I get out of this chair I’ll settle you, too—”

“Quint! There is another and more terrible chair which awaits such criminals as you!”

“You old fluff!” he shouted. “I’ll knock your head off, too. Do you understand? I’ll attend to you as I attended to Boomly—”

“Assassin!” I retorted calmly. “Only an alienist can save you now. In this awful moment—”

A light touch on my arm interrupted me, and, a trifle irritated, as any man might be when checked in the full flow of eloquence, I turned to find Mildred at my elbow.

“Let me talk to him,” she said in a quiet voice. “Perhaps I may not irritate him as you seem to.”

“Very well,” I said. “Jones and I are here as witnesses.” And I folded my arms in an attitude not, perhaps, unpicturesque.

“Dr. Quint,” said Mildred in her soft, agreeable voice, and actually smiling slightly at the self-confessed murderer, “is it really true that you are guilty of shedding the blood of Professor Boomly?”

“It is,” said Quint, coolly.

She seemed rather taken aback at that, but presently recovered her equanimity.

“Why?” she asked gently.

“Because he attempted a most hellish crime!” yelled Quint.

“W-what crime?” she asked faintly.

“I’ll tell you. He wanted the Carnegie medal, and he knew it would be given to me if I could incubate and hatch my batch of Silver Moon butterfly eggs. He realised well enough that his Heliconian eggs were not as valuable as my Silver Moon eggs. So first he sneaked in here and put an ichneumon fly in my breeding-cage. And next he stole the Silver Moon eggs and left in their place some common Plexippus eggs, thinking that because they were very similar I would not notice the substitution.

“I did notice it! I charged him with that cataclysmic outrage. He laughed. We came into personal collision. He chased me into my room.”

Panting, breathless with rage at the memory of the morning’s defeat which I had witnessed, Quint glared at me for a moment. Then he jerked his head toward Mildred:

“As soon as he went to luncheon—Boomly, I mean—I climbed over that transom and dropped into this room. I had been hunting for ten minutes before I found my Silver Moon eggs hidden under the carpet. So I pocketed them, climbed back over the transom, and went to my room.”

He paused dramatically, staring from one to another of us:

“Boomly was there!” he said slowly.

“Where?” asked Mildred with a shudder.

“In my room. He had picked the lock. I told him to get out! He went. I shouted after him that I had recovered the Silver Moon eggs and that I should certainly be awarded the Carnegie medal.

“Then that monster in human form laughed a horrible laugh, avowing himself guilty of a crime still more hideous than the theft of the Silver Moon eggs! Do you know what he had done?”

“W-what?” faltered Mildred.

“He had stolen from cold storage and had concealed the leaves of the Bimba bush, brought from Singapore to feed the Silver Moon caterpillars! That’s what Boomly had done!

“And my Silver Moon eggs had already begun to hatch!!! And my caterpillars would starve!!!!”

His voice ended in a yell; he struggled on his chair until it nearly upset.

“You lunatic!” I shouted. “Was that a reason for spilling the blood of a human being!”

“It was reason enough for me!”

“Madman!”

“Let me loose! He’s hidden those leaves somewhere or other! I’ve torn this place to pieces looking for them. I’ve got to find them, I tell you—”

Mildred went to the infuriated entomologist and laid a firm hand on his shoulder:

“Listen,” she said: “how do you know that Professor Boomly has not concealed these Bimba leaves on his own person?”

Quint ceased his contortions and gaped at her.

“I never thought of that,” he said.

“What have you done with him?” she asked, very pale.

“I tell you, I don’t know.”

“You must know what you did with him,” she insisted.

Quint shook his head impatiently, apparently preoccupied with other thoughts. We stood watching him in silence until he looked up and became conscious of our concentrated gaze.

“My caterpillars are starving,” he began violently. “I haven’t anything else they’ll eat. They feed only on the Bimba leaf. They won’t eat anything else. It’s a well-known fact that they won’t. Why, in Johore, where they came from, they’ll travel miles over the ground to find a Bimba bush—”

“What!” exclaimed Mildred.

“Certainly—miles! They’d starve sooner than eat anything except Bimba leaves. If there’s a bush within twenty miles they’ll find it—”

“Wait,” said Mildred quietly. “Where are these starving caterpillars?”

“In a glass jar in my pocket—here! What the devil are you doing!” For the girl had dexterously slipped the glass jar from his coat pocket and was holding it up to the light.

Inside it were several dozen tiny, dark caterpillars, some resting disconsolately on the sides of the glass, some hungrily travelling over the bottom in pitiful and hopeless quest of nourishment.

Heedless of the shouts and threats of Dr. Quint, the girl calmly uncorked the jar, took on her slender forefinger a single little caterpillar, replaced the cork, and, kneeling down, gently disengaged the caterpillar. It dropped upon the floor, remained motionless for a moment, then, turning, began to travel rapidly toward the doorway behind us.

“Now,” she said, “if poor Professor Boomly really has concealed these Bimba leaves upon his own person, this little caterpillar, according to Dr. Quint, is certain to find those leaves.”

Overcome with excitement and admiration for this intelligent and unusually beautiful girl, I seized her hands and congratulated her.

“Murder,” said I to the miserable Quint, “will out! This infant caterpillar shall lead us to that dark and secret spot where you had hoped to conceal the horrid evidence of your guilt. Three things have undone you—a caterpillar replete with mysterious instinct, a humble bunch of Bimba leaves, and the marvellous intelligence of this young and lovely girl. Madman, your hour has struck!”

He looked at me in a dazed sort of way, as though astonishment had left him unable to articulate. But I had become tired of his violence and his shouts and yells; so I asked Jones for his handkerchief, and, before Quint knew what I was up to I had tied it over his mouth.

He became a brilliant purple, but all he could utter was a furious humming, buzzing noise.

Meanwhile, Jones had opened the door; the little caterpillar, followed by Mildred and myself, continued to hustle along as though he knew quite well where he was going.

Down the hallway he went in undulating haste, past my door, we all following in silent excitement as we discovered that, parallel to the caterpillar’s course, ran a gruesome trail of blood drops.

And when the little creature turned and made straight for the door of Professor Farrago, our revered chief, the excitement among us was terrific.

The caterpillar halted; I gently tried the door; it was open.

Instantly the caterpillar crossed the threshold, wriggling forward at top speed. We followed, peering fearfully around us. Nobody was visible.

Could Quint have dragged his victim here? By Heaven, he had! For the caterpillar was travelling straight under the lounge upon which Professor Farrago was accustomed to repose after luncheon, and, dropping on one knee, I saw a fat foot partly protruding from under the shirred edges of the fringed drapery.

“He’s there!” I whispered, in an awed voice to the others.

“Courage, Miss Case! Try not to faint.”

Jones turned and looked at her with that same odd expression; then he went over to where she stood and coolly passed one arm around her waist.

“Try not to faint, Mildred,” he said. “It might muss your hair.”

It was a strange thing to say, but I had no time then to analyze it, for I had seized the fat foot which partly protruded from under the sofa, clad in a low-cut congress gaiter and a white sock.

And then I nearly fainted, for instead of the dreadful, inert resistance of lifeless clay, the foot wriggled and tried to kick at me.

“Help!” came a thin but muffled voice. “Help! Help, in the name of Heaven!”

“Boomly!” I cried, scarcely believing my ears.

“Take that man away, Smith!” whimpered Boomly. “He’s a devil! He’ll murder me! He made my nose bleed all over everything!”

“Boomly! You’re not dead!”

“Yes, I am!” he whined. “I’m dead enough to suit me. Keep that little lunatic off—that’s all I ask. He can have his Carnegie medal for all I care, only tie him up somewhere—”

“Professor Boomly!” cried Mildred excitedly. “Have you any Bimba leaves concealed about your person?”

“Yes, I have,” he said sulkily. There came a hitch of the fat foot, a heavy scuffling sound, heavy panting, and then, skittering out across the floor came a flat, sealed parcel.

“There you are,” he said; “now, let me alone until that fiend has gone home.”

“He won’t attack you again,” I said. “Come out.”

But Professor Boomly flatly declined to stir.

I looked at the parcel: it was marked: “Bimba leaves; Johore.”

With a sigh of unutterable relief, I picked up the ravenous little caterpillar, placed him on the packet, and turned to go. And didn’t.

It is a very sickening fact I have now to record. But to a scientist all facts are sacred, sickening or otherwise.

For what I caught a glimpse of, just outside the door in the hallway, was Jones kissing Mildred Case. And being shyly indemnified for his trouble with a gentle return in kind. Both his arms were around her waist; both her hands rested upon his shoulders; and, as I looked—but let it pass!—let it pass.

Deliberately I fished in my pocket, found my packet of cigarettes, lighted one.

Tobacco diffugiunt mordaces curae et laetificat cor hominis!

[Tobacco diffuses the bite of care and gladdens the heart of man.]

IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

(1904)

CONTENTS:

… Dedication
… Preface
… Epigraph
ch. 1–5:  The Harbor-Master;
In Search of the Great Auk
ch. 6–8:  In Quest of the Dingue
ch. 9–12:  Is the Ux Extinct?

ch. 13–17:  What Is the Sphyx?

ch. 17–21:  The Thermosaurus
(A Matter of Interest)

ch. 22–25:  The Pythagoreans
(The Man at the Next Table)

Note: A group of previously published short stories with a “zoölogical” science-fiction theme comprise this novel-length narrative. These chapter titles were assigned in the creation of this ebook; they do not exist in the original book.—ecm

MAIN ToC     INDEX

TO
MY FRIEND
E. LE GRAND BEERS

My dear Le Grand,—You and I were early drawn together by a common love of nature. Your researches into the natural history of the tree-toad, your observations upon the mud-turtles of Providence Township, your experiments with the fresh-water lobster, all stimulated my enthusiasm in a scientific direction, which has crystallized in this helpful little book, dedicated to you.

Pray accept it as an insignificant payment on account for all I owe to you.

The Author

PREFACE

It appears to the writer that there is urgent need of more “nature books”—books that are scraped clear of fiction and which display only the carefully articulated skeleton of fact. Hence this little volume, presented with some hesitation and more modesty. Various chapters have, at intervals, appeared in the pages of various publications. The continued narrative is now published for the first time; and the writer trusts that it may inspire enthusiasm for natural and scientific research, and inculcate a passion for accurate observation among the young.

The Author

April 1, 1904.

~ ~ ~ ~

Where the slanting forest eaves,

Shingled tight with greenest leaves,

Sweep the scented meadow-sedge,

Let us snoop along the edge;

Let us pry in hidden nooks,

Laden with our nature books,

Scaring birds with happy cries,

Chloroforming butterflies,

Rooting up each woodland plant,

Pinning beetle, fly, and ant,

So we may identify

What we’ve ruined, by-and-by.

IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

I

[The Harbor-Master]

[In Search of the Great Auk]

Because it all seems so improbable—so horribly impossible to me now, sitting here safe and sane in my own library—I hesitate to record an episode which already appears to me less horrible than grotesque. Yet, unless this story is written now, I know I shall never have the courage to tell the truth about the matter—not from fear of ridicule, but because I myself shall soon cease to credit what I now know to be true. Yet scarcely a month has elapsed since I heard the stealthy purring of what I believed to be the shoaling undertow—scarcely a month ago, with my own eyes, I saw that which, even now, I am beginning to believe never existed. As for the harbor-master—and the blow I am now striking at the old order of things—But of that I shall not speak now, or later; I shall try to tell the story simply and truthfully, and let my friends testify as to my probity and the publishers of this book corroborate them.

On the 29th of February I resigned my position under the government and left Washington to accept an offer from Professor Farrago—whose name he kindly permits me to use—and on the first day of April I entered upon my new and congenial duties as general superintendent of the water-fowl department connected with the Zoological Gardens then in course of erection at Bronx Park, New York.

For a week I followed the routine, examining the new foundations, studying the architect’s plans, following the surveyors through the Bronx thickets, suggesting arrangements for water-courses and pools destined to be included in the enclosures for swans, geese, pelicans, herons, and such of the waders and swimmers as we might expect to acclimate in Bronx Park.

It was at that time the policy of the trustees and officers of the Zoological Gardens neither to employ collectors nor to send out expeditions in search of specimens. The society decided to depend upon voluntary contributions, and I was always busy, part of the day, in dictating answers to correspondents who wrote offering their services as hunters of big game, collectors of all sorts of fauna, trappers, snarers, and also to those who offered specimens for sale, usually at exorbitant rates.

To the proprietors of five-legged kittens, mangy lynxes, moth-eaten coyotes, and dancing bears I returned courteous but uncompromising refusals—of course, first submitting all such letters, together with my replies, to Professor Farrago.

One day towards the end of May, however, just as I was leaving Bronx Park to return to town, Professor Lesard, of the reptilian department, called out to me that Professor Farrago wanted to see me a moment; so I put my pipe into my pocket again and retraced my steps to the temporary, wooden building occupied by Professor Farrago, general superintendent of the Zoological Gardens. The professor, who was sitting at his desk before a pile of letters and replies submitted for approval by me, pushed his glasses down and looked over them at me with a whimsical smile that suggested amusement, impatience, annoyance, and perhaps a faint trace of apology.

“Now, here’s a letter,” he said, with a deliberate gesture towards a sheet of paper impaled on a file—“a letter that I suppose you remember.” He disengaged the sheet of paper and handed it to me.

“Oh yes,” I replied, with a shrug; “of course the man is mistaken—or—”

“Or what?” demanded Professor Farrago, tranquilly, wiping his glasses.

“—Or a liar,” I replied.

After a silence he leaned back in his chair and bade me read the letter to him again, and I did so with a contemptuous tolerance for the writer, who must have been either a very innocent victim or a very stupid swindler. I said as much to Professor Farrago, but, to my surprise, he appeared to waver.

“I suppose,” he said, with his near-sighted, embarrassed smile, “that nine hundred and ninety-nine men in a thousand would throw that letter aside and condemn the writer as a liar or a fool?”

“In my opinion,” said I, “he’s one or the other.”

“He isn’t—in mine,” said the professor, placidly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Here is a man living all alone on a strip of rock and sand between the wilderness and the sea, who wants you to send somebody to take charge of a bird that doesn’t exist!”

“How do you know,” asked Professor Farrago, “that the bird in question does not exist?”

“It is generally accepted,” I replied, sarcastically, “that the great auk has been extinct for years. Therefore I may be pardoned for doubting that our correspondent possesses a pair of them alive.”

“Oh, you young fellows,” said the professor, smiling wearily, “you embark on a theory for destinations that don’t exist.”

He leaned back in his chair, his amused eyes searching space for the imagery that made him smile.

“Like swimming squirrels, you navigate with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but you never land where you hope to—do you?”

Rather red in the face, I said: “Don’t you believe the great auk to be extinct?”

“Audubon saw the great auk.”

“Who has seen a single specimen since?”

“Nobody—except our correspondent here,” he replied, laughing.

I laughed, too, considering the interview at an end, but the professor went on, coolly:

“Whatever it is that our correspondent has—and I am daring to believe that it is the great auk itself—I want you to secure it for the society.”

When my astonishment subsided my first conscious sentiment was one of pity. Clearly, Professor Farrago was on the verge of dotage—ah, what a loss to the world!

I believe now that Professor Farrago perfectly interpreted my thoughts, but he betrayed neither resentment nor impatience. I drew a chair up beside his desk—there was nothing to do but to obey, and this fool’s errand was none of my conceiving.

Together we made out a list of articles necessary for me and itemized the expenses I might incur, and I set a date for my return, allowing no margin for a successful termination to the expedition.

“Never mind that,” said the professor. “What I want you to do is to get those birds here safely. Now, how many men will you take?”

“None,” I replied, bluntly; “it’s a useless expense, unless there is something to bring back. If there is I’ll wire you, you may be sure.”

“Very well,” said Professor Farrago, good-humoredly, “you shall have all the assistance you may require. Can you leave to-night?”

The old gentleman was certainly prompt. I nodded, half-sulkily, aware of his amusement.

“So,” I said, picking up my hat, “I am to start north to find a place called Black Harbor, where there is a man named Halyard who possesses, among other household utensils, two extinct great auks—”

We were both laughing by this time. I asked him why on earth he credited the assertion of a man he had never before heard of.

“I suppose,” he replied, with the same half-apologetic, half-humorous smile, “it is instinct. I feel, somehow, that this man Halyard has got an auk—perhaps two. I can’t get away from the idea that we are on the eve of acquiring the rarest of living creatures. It’s odd for a scientist to talk as I do; doubtless you’re shocked—admit it, now!”

But I was not shocked; on the contrary, I was conscious that the same strange hope that Professor Farrago cherished was beginning, in spite of me, to stir my pulses, too.

“If he has—” I began, then stopped.

The professor and I looked hard at each other in silence.

“Go on,” he said, encouragingly.

But I had nothing more to say, for the prospect of beholding with my own eyes a living specimen of the great auk produced a series of conflicting emotions within me which rendered speech profanely superfluous.

As I took my leave Professor Farrago came to the door of the temporary, wooden office and handed me the letter written by the man Halyard. I folded it and put it into my pocket, as Halyard might require it for my own identification.

“How much does he want for the pair?” I asked.

“Ten thousand dollars. Don’t demur—if the birds are really—”

“I know,” I said, hastily, not daring to hope too much.

“One thing more,” said Professor Farrago, gravely; “you know, in that last paragraph of his letter, Halyard speaks of something else in the way of specimens—an undiscovered species of amphibious biped—just read that paragraph again, will you?”

I drew the letter from my pocket and read as he directed:

When you have seen the two living specimens of the great auk, and have satisfied yourself that I tell the truth, you may be wise enough to listen without prejudice to a statement I shall make concerning the existence of the strangest creature ever fashioned. I will merely say, at this time, that the creature referred to is an amphibious biped and inhabits the ocean near this coast. More I cannot say, for I personally have not seen the animal, but I have a witness who has, and there are many who affirm that they have seen the creature. You will naturally say that my statement amounts to nothing; but when your representative arrives, if he be free from prejudice, I expect his reports to you concerning this sea-biped will confirm the solemn statements of a witness I know to be unimpeachable.

Yours truly,

Burton Halyard.

Black Harbor.

“Well,” I said, after a moment’s thought, “here goes for the wild-goose chase.”

“Wild auk, you mean,” said Professor Farrago, shaking hands with me. “You will start to-night, won’t you?”

“Yes, but Heaven knows how I’m ever going to land in this man Halyard’s door-yard. Good-bye!”

“About that sea-biped—” began Professor Farrago, shyly.

“Oh, don’t!” I said; “I can swallow the auks, feathers and claws, but if this fellow Halyard is hinting he’s seen an amphibious creature resembling a man—”

“—Or a woman,” said the professor, cautiously.

I retired, disgusted, my faith shaken in the mental vigor of Professor Farrago.

II

The three days’ voyage by boat and rail was irksome. I bought my kit at Sainte Croix, on the Central Pacific Railroad, and on June 1st I began the last stage of my journey via the Sainte Isole broad-gauge, arriving in the wilderness by daylight. A tedious forced march by blazed trail, freshly spotted on the wrong side, of course, brought me to the northern terminus of the rusty, narrow-gauge lumber railway which runs from the heart of the hushed pine wilderness to the sea.

Already a long train of battered flat-cars, piled with sluice-props and roughly hewn sleepers, was moving slowly off into the brooding forest gloom, when I came in sight of the track; but I developed a gratifying and unexpected burst of speed, shouting all the while. The train stopped; I swung myself aboard the last car, where a pleasant young fellow was sitting on the rear brake, chewing spruce and reading a letter.

“Come aboard, sir,” he said, looking up with a smile; “I guess you’re the man in a hurry.”

“I’m looking for a man named Halyard,” I said, dropping rifle and knapsack on the fresh-cut, fragrant pile of pine. “Are you Halyard?”

“No, I’m Francis Lee, bossing the mica pit at Port-of-Waves,” he replied, “but this letter is from Halyard, asking me to look out for a man in a hurry from Bronx Park, New York.”

“I’m that man,” said I, filling my pipe and offering him a share of the weed of peace, and we sat side by side smoking very amiably, until a signal from the locomotive sent him forward and I was left alone, lounging at ease, head pillowed on both arms, watching the blue sky flying through the branches overhead.

Long before we came in sight of the ocean I smelled it; the fresh, salt aroma stole into my senses, drowsy with the heated odor of pine and hemlock, and I sat up, peering ahead into the dusky sea of pines.

Fresher and fresher came the wind from the sea, in puffs, in mild, sweet breezes, in steady, freshening currents, blowing the feathery crowns of the pines, setting the balsam’s blue tufts rocking.

Lee wandered back over the long line of flats, balancing himself nonchalantly as the cars swung around a sharp curve, where water dripped from a newly propped sluice that suddenly emerged from the depths of the forest to run parallel to the railroad track.

“Built it this spring,” he said, surveying his handiwork, which seemed to undulate as the cars swept past. “It runs to the cove—or ought to—” He stopped abruptly with a thoughtful glance at me.

“So you’re going over to Halyard’s?” he continued, as though answering a question asked by himself.

I nodded.

“You’ve never been there—of course?”

“No,” I said, “and I’m not likely to go again.”

I would have told him why I was going if I had not already begun to feel ashamed of my idiotic errand.

“I guess you’re going to look at those birds of his,” continued Lee, placidly.

“I guess I am,” I said, sulkily, glancing askance to see whether he was smiling.

But he only asked me, quite seriously, whether a great auk was really a very rare bird; and I told him that the last one ever seen had been found dead off Labrador in January, 1870. Then I asked him whether these birds of Halyard’s were really great auks, and he replied, somewhat indifferently, that he supposed they were—at least, nobody had ever before seen such birds near Port-of-Waves.

“There’s something else,” he said, running, a pine-sliver through his pipe-stem—“something that interests us all here more than auks, big or little. I suppose I might as well speak of it, as you are bound to hear about it sooner or later.”

He hesitated, and I could see that he was embarrassed, searching for the exact words to convey his meaning.

“If,” said I, “you have anything in this region more important to science than the great auk, I should be very glad to know about it.”

Perhaps there was the faintest tinge of sarcasm in my voice, for he shot a sharp glance at me and then turned slightly. After a moment, however, he put his pipe into his pocket, laid hold of the brake with both hands, vaulted to his perch aloft, and glanced down at me.

“Did you ever hear of the harbor-master?” he asked, maliciously.

“Which harbor-master?” I inquired.

“You’ll know before long,” he observed, with a satisfied glance into perspective.

This rather extraordinary observation puzzled me. I waited for him to resume, and, as he did not, I asked him what he meant.

“If I knew,” he said, “I’d tell you. But, come to think of it, I’d be a fool to go into details with a scientific man. You’ll hear about the harbor-master—perhaps you will see the harbor-master. In that event I should be glad to converse with you on the subject.”

I could not help laughing at his prim and precise manner, and, after a moment, he also laughed, saying:

“It hurts a man’s vanity to know he knows a thing that somebody else knows he doesn’t know. I’m damned if I say another word about the harbor-master until you’ve been to Halyard’s!”

“A harbor-master,” I persisted, “is an official who superintends the mooring of ships—isn’t he?”

But he refused to be tempted into conversation, and we lounged silently on the lumber until a long, thin whistle from the locomotive and a rush of stinging salt-wind brought us to our feet. Through the trees I could see the bluish-black ocean, stretching out beyond black headlands to meet the clouds; a great wind was roaring among the trees as the train slowly came to a stand-still on the edge of the primeval forest.

Lee jumped to the ground and aided me with my rifle and pack, and then the train began to back away along a curved side-track which, Lee said, led to the mica-pit and company stores.

“Now what will you do?” he asked, pleasantly. “I can give you a good dinner and a decent bed to-night if you like—and I’m sure Mrs. Lee would be very glad to have you stop with us as long as you choose.”

I thanked him, but said that I was anxious to reach Halyard’s before dark, and he very kindly led me along the cliffs and pointed out the path.

“This man Halyard,” he said, “is an invalid. He lives at a cove called Black Harbor, and all his truck goes through to him over the company’s road. We receive it here, and send a pack-mule through once a month. I’ve met him; he’s a bad-tempered hypochondriac, a cynic at heart, and a man whose word is never doubted. If he says he has a great auk, you may be satisfied he has.”

My heart was beating with excitement at the prospect; I looked out across the wooded headlands and tangled stretches of dune and hollow, trying to realize what it might mean to me, to Professor Farrago, to the world, if I should lead back to New York a live auk.

“He’s a crank,” said Lee; “frankly, I don’t like him. If you find it unpleasant there, come back to us.”

“Does Halyard live alone?” I asked.

“Yes—except for a professional trained nurse—poor thing!”

“A man?”

“No,” said Lee, disgustedly.

Presently he gave me a peculiar glance; hesitated, and finally said: “Ask Halyard to tell you about his nurse and—the harbor-master. Good-bye—I’m due at the quarry. Come and stay with us whenever you care to; you will find a welcome at Port-of-Waves.”

We shook hands and parted on the cliff, he turning back into the forest along the railway, I starting northward, pack slung, rifle over my shoulder. Once I met a group of quarrymen, faces burned brick-red, scarred hands swinging as they walked. And, as I passed them with a nod, turning, I saw that they also had turned to look after me, and I caught a word or two of their conversation, whirled back to me on the sea-wind.

They were speaking of the harbor-master.

III

Towards sunset I came out on a sheer granite cliff where the sea-birds were whirling and clamoring, and the great breakers dashed, rolling in double-thundered reverberations on the sun-dyed, crimson sands below the rock.

Across the half-moon of beach towered another cliff, and, behind this, I saw a column of smoke rising in the still air. It certainly came from Halyard’s chimney, although the opposite cliff prevented me from seeing the house itself.

I rested a moment to refill my pipe, then resumed rifle and pack, and cautiously started to skirt the cliffs. I had descended half-way towards the beech, and was examining the cliff opposite, when something on the very top of the rock arrested my attention—a man darkly outlined against the sky. The next moment, however, I knew it could not be a man, for the object suddenly glided over the face of the cliff and slid down the sheer, smooth lace like a lizard. Before I could get a square look at it, the thing crawled into the surf—or, at least, it seemed to—but the whole episode occurred so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I was not sure I had seen anything at all.

However, I was curious enough to climb the cliff on the land side and make my way towards the spot where I imagined I saw the man. Of course, there was nothing there—not a trace of a human being, I mean. Something had been there—a sea-otter, possibly—for the remains of a freshly killed fish lay on the rock, eaten to the back-bone and tail.

The next moment, below me, I saw the house, a freshly painted, trim, flimsy structure, modern, and very much out of harmony with the splendid savagery surrounding it. It struck a nasty, cheap note in the noble, gray monotony of headland and sea.

The descent was easy enough. I crossed the crescent beach, hard as pink marble, and found a little trodden path among the rocks, that led to the front porch of the house.

There were two people on the porch—I heard their voices before I saw them—and when I set my foot upon the wooden steps, I saw one of them, a woman, rise from her chair and step hastily towards me.

“Come back!” cried the other, a man with a smooth-shaven, deeply lined face, and a pair of angry, blue eyes; and the woman stepped back quietly, acknowledging my lifted hat with a silent inclination.

The man, who was reclining in an invalid’s rolling-chair, clapped both large, pale hands to the wheels and pushed himself out along the porch. He had shawls pinned about him, an untidy, drab-colored hat on his head, and, when he looked down at me, he scowled.

“I know who you are,” he said, in his acid voice; “you’re one of the Zoological men from Bronx Park. You look like it, anyway.”

“It is easy to recognize you from your reputation,” I replied, irritated at his discourtesy.

“Really,” he replied, with something between a sneer and a laugh, “I’m obliged for your frankness. You’re after my great auks, are you not?”

“Nothing else would have tempted me into this place,” I replied, sincerely.

“Thank Heaven for that,” he said. “Sit down a moment; you’ve interrupted us.” Then, turning to the young woman, who wore the neat gown and tiny cap of a professional nurse, he bade her resume what she had been saying. She did so, with deprecating glance at me, which made the old man sneer again.

“It happened so suddenly,” she said, in her low voice, “that I had no chance to get back. The boat was drifting in the cove; I sat in the stern, reading, both oars shipped, and the tiller swinging. Then I heard a scratching under the boat, but thought it might be sea-weed—and, next moment, came those soft thumpings, like the sound of a big fish rubbing its nose against a float.”

Halyard clutched the wheels of his chair and stared at the girl in grim displeasure.

“Didn’t you know enough to be frightened?” he demanded.

“No—not then,” she said, coloring faintly; “but when, after a few moments, I looked up and saw the harbor-master running up and down the beach, I was horribly frightened.”

“Really?” said Halyard, sarcastically; “it was about time.” Then, turning to me, he rasped out: “And that young lady was obliged to row all the way to Port-of-Waves and call to Lee’s quarrymen to take her boat in.”

Completely mystified, I looked from Halyard to the girl, not in the least comprehending what all this meant.

“That will do,” said Halyard, ungraciously, which curt phrase was apparently the usual dismissal for the nurse.

She rose, and I rose, and she passed me with an inclination, stepping noiselessly into the house.

“I want beef-tea!” bawled Halyard after her; then he gave me an unamiable glance.

“I was a well-bred man,” he sneered; “I’m a Harvard graduate, too, but I live as I like, and I do what I like, and I say what I like.”

“You certainly are not reticent,” I said, disgusted.

“Why should I be?” he rasped; “I pay that young woman for my irritability; it’s a bargain between us.”

“In your domestic affairs,” I said, “there is nothing that interests me. I came to see those auks.”

“You probably believe them to be razor-billed auks,” he said, contemptuously. “But they’re not; they’re great auks.”

I suggested that he permit me to examine them, and he replied, indifferently, that they were in a pen in his backyard, and that I was free to step around the house when I cared to.

I laid my rifle and pack on the veranda, and hastened off with mixed emotions, among which hope no longer predominated. No man in his senses would keep two such precious prizes in a pen in his backyard, I argued, and I was perfectly prepared to find anything from a puffin to a penguin in that pen.

I shall never forget, as long as I live, my stupor of amazement when I came to the wire-covered enclosure. Not only were there two great auks in the pen, alive, breathing, squatting in bulky majesty on their sea-weed bed, but one of them was gravely contemplating two newly hatched chicks, all bill and feet, which nestled sedately at the edge of a puddle of salt-water, where some small fish were swimming.

For a while excitement blinded, nay, deafened me. I tried to realize that I was gazing upon the last individuals of an all but extinct race—the sole survivors of the gigantic auk, which, for thirty years, has been accounted an extinct creature.

I believe that I did not move muscle nor limb until the sun had gone down and the crowding darkness blurred my straining eyes and blotted the great, silent, bright-eyed birds from sight.

Even then I could not tear myself away from the enclosure; I listened to the strange, drowsy note of the male bird, the fainter responses of the female, the thin plaints of the chicks, huddling under her breast; I heard their flipper-like, embryotic wings beating sleepily as the birds stretched and yawned their beaks and clacked them, preparing for slumber.

“If you please,” came a soft voice from the door, “Mr. Halyard awaits your company to dinner.”

IV

I dined well—or, rather, I might have enjoyed my dinner if Mr. Halyard had been eliminated; and the feast consisted exclusively of a joint of beef, the pretty nurse, and myself. She was exceedingly attractive—with a disturbing fashion of lowering her head and raising her dark eyes when spoken to.

As for Halyard, he was unspeakable, bundled up in his snuffy shawls, and making uncouth noises over his gruel. But it is only just to say that his table was worth sitting down to and his wine was sound as a bell.

“Yah!” he snapped, “I’m sick of this cursed soup—and I’ll trouble you to fill my glass—”

“It is dangerous for you to touch claret,” said the pretty nurse.

“I might as well die at dinner as anywhere,” he observed.

“Certainly,” said I, cheerfully passing the decanter, but he did not appear overpleased with the attention.

“I can’t smoke, either,” he snarled, hitching the shawls around until he looked like Richard the Third.

However, he was good enough to shove a box of cigars at me, and I took one and stood up, as the pretty nurse slipped past and vanished into the little parlor beyond.

We sat there for a while without speaking. He picked irritably at the bread-crumbs on the cloth, never glancing in my direction; and I, tired from my long foot-tour, lay back in my chair, silently appreciating one of the best cigars I ever smoked.

“Well,” he rasped out at length, “what do you think of my auks—and my veracity?”

I told him that both were unimpeachable.

“Didn’t they call me a swindler down there at your museum?” he demanded.

I admitted that I had heard the term applied. Then I made a clean breast of the matter, telling him that it was I who had doubted; that my chief, Professor Farrago, had sent me against my will, and that I was ready and glad to admit that he, Mr. Halyard, was a benefactor of the human race.

“Bosh!” he said. “What good does a confounded wobbly, bandy-toed bird do to the human race?”

But he was pleased, nevertheless; and presently he asked me, not unamiably, to punish his claret again.

“I’m done for,” he said; “good things to eat and drink are no good to me. Some day I’ll get mad enough to have a fit, and then—”

He paused to yawn.

“Then,” he continued, “that little nurse of mine will drink up my claret and go back to civilization, where people are polite.”

Somehow or other, in spite of the fact that Halyard was an old pig, what he said touched me. There was certainly not much left in life for him—as he regarded life.

“I’m going to leave her this house,” he said, arranging his shawls. “She doesn’t know it. I’m going to leave her my money, too. She doesn’t know that. Good Lord! What kind of a woman can she be to stand my bad temper for a few dollars a month!”

“I think,” said I, “that it’s partly because she’s poor, partly because she’s sorry for you.”

He looked up with a ghastly smile.

“You think she really is sorry?”

Before I could answer he went on: “I’m no mawkish sentimentalist, and I won’t allow anybody to be sorry for me—do you hear?”

“Oh, I’m not sorry for you!” I said, hastily, and, for the first time since I had seen him, he laughed heartily, without a sneer.

We both seemed to feel better after that; I drank his wine and smoked his cigars, and he appeared to take a certain grim pleasure in watching me.

“There’s no fool like a young fool,” he observed, presently.

As I had no doubt he referred to me, I paid him no attention.

After fidgeting with his shawls, he gave me an oblique scowl and asked me my age.

“Twenty-four,” I replied.

“Sort of a tadpole, aren’t you?” he said.

As I took no offence, he repeated the remark.

“Oh, come,” said I, “there’s no use in trying to irritate me. I see through you; a row acts like a cocktail on you—but you’ll have to stick to gruel in my company.”

“I call that impudence!” he rasped out, wrathfully.

“I don’t care what you call it,” I replied, undisturbed, “I am not going to be worried by you. Anyway,” I ended, “it is my opinion that you could be very good company if you chose.”

The proposition appeared to take his breath away—at least, he said nothing more; and I finished my cigar in peace and tossed the stump into a saucer.

“Now,” said I, “what price do you set upon your birds, Mr. Halyard?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” he snapped, with an evil smile.

“You will receive a certified check when the birds are delivered,” I said, quietly.

“You don’t mean to say you agree to that outrageous bargain—and I won’t take a cent less, either—Good Lord!—haven’t you any spirit left?” he cried, half rising from his pile of shawls.

His piteous eagerness for a dispute sent me into laughter impossible to control, and he eyed me, mouth open, animosity rising visibly.

Then he seized the wheels of his invalid chair and trundled away, too mad to speak; and I strolled out into the parlor, still laughing.

The pretty nurse was there, sewing under a hanging lamp.

“If I am not indiscreet—” I began.

“Indiscretion is the better part of valor,” said she, dropping her head but raising her eyes.

So I sat down with a frivolous smile peculiar to the appreciated.

“Doubtless,” said I, “you are hemming a ‘kerchief.”

“Doubtless I am not,” she said; “this is a night-cap for Mr. Halyard.”

A mental vision of Halyard in a night-cap, very mad, nearly set me laughing again.

“Like the King of Yvetot, he wears his crown in bed,” I said, flippantly.

“The King of Yvetot might have made that remark,” she observed, re-threading her needle.

It is unpleasant to be reproved. How large and red and hot a man’s ears feel.

To cool them, I strolled out to the porch; and, after a while, the pretty nurse came out, too, and sat down in a chair not far away. She probably regretted her lost opportunity to be flirted with.

“I have so little company—it is a great relief to see somebody from the world,” she said. “If you can be agreeable, I wish you would.”

The idea that she had come out to see me was so agreeable that I remained speechless until she said: “Do tell me what people are doing in New York.”

So I seated myself on the steps and talked about the portion of the world inhabited by me, while she sat sewing in the dull light that straggled out from the parlor windows.

She had a certain coquetry of her own, using the usual methods with an individuality that was certainly fetching. For instance, when she lost her needle—and, another time, when we both, on hands and knees, hunted for her thimble.

However, directions for these pastimes may be found in contemporary classics.

I was as entertaining as I could be—perhaps not quite as entertaining as a young man usually thinks he is. However, we got on very well together until I asked her tenderly who the harbor-master might be, whom they all discussed so mysteriously.

“I do not care to speak about it,” she said, with a primness of which I had not suspected her capable.

Of course I could scarcely pursue the subject after that—and, indeed, I did not intend to—so I began to tell her how I fancied I had seen a man on the cliff that afternoon, and how the creature slid over the sheer rock like a snake.

To my amazement, she asked me to kindly discontinue the account of my adventures, in an icy tone, which left no room for protest.

“It was only a sea-otter,” I tried to explain, thinking perhaps she did not care for snake stories.

But the explanation did not appear to interest her, and I was mortified to observe that my impression upon her was anything but pleasant.

“She doesn’t seem to like me and my stories,” thought I, “but she is too young, perhaps, to appreciate them.”

So I forgave her—for she was even prettier than I had thought her at first—and I took my leave, saying that Mr. Halyard would doubtless direct me to my room.

Halyard was in his library, cleaning a revolver, when I entered.

“Your room is next to mine,” he said; “pleasant dreams, and kindly refrain from snoring.”

“May I venture an absurd hope that you will do the same!” I replied, politely.

That maddened him, so I hastily withdrew.

I had been asleep for at least two hours when a movement by my bedside and a light in my eyes awakened me. I sat bolt upright in bed, blinking at Halyard, who, clad in a dressing-gown and wearing a night-cap, had wheeled himself into my room with one hand, while with the other he solemnly waved a candle over my head.

“I’m so cursed lonely,” he said—“come, there’s a good fellow—talk to me in your own original, impudent way.”

I objected strenuously, but he looked so worn and thin, so lonely and bad-tempered, so lovelessly grotesque, that I got out of bed and passed a spongeful of cold water over my head.

Then I returned to bed and propped the pillows up for a back-rest, ready to quarrel with him if it might bring some little pleasure into his morbid existence.

“No,” he said, amiably, “I’m too worried to quarrel, but I’m much obliged for your kindly offer. I want to tell you something.”

“What?” I asked, suspiciously.

“I want to ask you if you ever saw a man with gills like a fish?”

“Gills?” I repeated.

“Yes, gills! Did you?”

“No,” I replied, angrily, “and neither did you.”

“No, I never did,” he said, in a curiously placid voice, “but there’s a man with gills like a fish who lives in the ocean out there. Oh, you needn’t look that way—nobody ever thinks of doubting my word, and I tell you that there’s a man—or a thing that looks like a man—as big as you are, too—all slate-colored—with nasty red gills like a fish!—and I’ve a witness to prove what I say!”

“Who?” I asked, sarcastically.

“The witness? My nurse.”

“Oh! She saw a slate-colored man with gills?”

“Yes, she did. So did Francis Lee, superintendent of the Mica Quarry Company at Port-of-Waves. So have a dozen men who work in the quarry. Oh, you needn’t laugh, young man. It’s an old story here, and anybody can tell you about the harbor-master.”

“The harbor-master!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, that slate-colored thing with gills, that looks like a man—and—by Heaven! is a man—that’s the harbor-master. Ask any quarryman at Port-of-Waves what it is that comes purring around their boats at the wharf and unties painters and changes the mooring of every cat-boat in the cove at night! Ask Francis Lee what it was he saw running and leaping up and down the shoal at sunset last Friday! Ask anybody along the coast what sort of a thing moves about the cliffs like a man and slides over them into the sea like an otter—”

“I saw it do that!” I burst out.

“Oh, did you? Well, what was it?”

Something kept me silent, although a dozen explanations flew to my lips.

After a pause, Halyard said: “You saw the harbor-master, that’s what you saw!”

I looked at him without a word.

“Don’t mistake me,” he said, pettishly; “I don’t think that the harbor-master is a spirit or a sprite or a hobgoblin, or any sort of damned rot. Neither do I believe it to be an optical illusion.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“I think it’s a man—I think it’s a branch of the human race—that’s what I think. Let me tell you something: the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean is a trifle over five miles deep—and I suppose you know that this place lies only about a quarter of a mile off this headland. The British exploring vessel, Gull, Captain Marotte, discovered and sounded it, I believe. Anyway, it’s there, and it’s my belief that the profound depths are inhabited by the remnants of the last race of amphibious human beings!”

This was childish; I did not bother to reply.

“Believe it or not, as you will,” he said, angrily; “one thing I know, and that is this: the harbor-master has taken to hanging around my cove, and he is attracted by my nurse! I won’t have it! I’ll blow his fishy gills out of his head if I ever get a shot at him! I don’t care whether it’s homicide or not—anyway, it’s a new kind of murder and it attracts me!”

I gazed at him incredulously, but he was working himself into a passion, and I did not choose to say what I thought.

“Yes, this slate-colored thing with gills goes purring and grinning and spitting about after my nurse—when she walks, when she rows, when she sits on the beach! Gad! It drives me nearly frantic. I won’t tolerate it, I tell you!”

“No,” said I, “I wouldn’t either.” And I rolled over in bed convulsed with laughter.

The next moment I heard my door slam. I smothered my mirth and rose to close the window, for the land-wind blew cold from the forest, and a drizzle was sweeping the carpet as far as my bed.

That luminous glare which sometimes lingers after the stars go out, threw a trembling, nebulous radiance over sand and cove. I heard the seething currents under the breakers’ softened thunder—louder than I ever heard it. Then, as I closed my window, lingering for a last look at the crawling tide, I saw a man standing, ankle-deep, in the surf, all alone there in the night. But—was it a man? For the figure suddenly began running over the beach on all fours like a beetle, waving its limbs like feelers. Before I could throw open the window again it darted into the surf, and, when I leaned out into the chilling drizzle, I saw nothing save the flat ebb crawling on the coast—I heard nothing save the purring of bubbles on seething sands.

V

It took me a week to perfect my arrangements for transporting the great auks, by water, to Port-of-Waves, where a lumber schooner was to be sent from Petite Sainte Isole, chartered by me for a voyage to New York.

I had constructed a cage made of osiers, in which my auks were to squat until they arrived at Bronx Park. My telegrams to Professor Farrago were brief. One merely said “Victory!” Another explained that I wanted no assistance; and a third read: “Schooner chartered. Arrive New York July 1st. Send furniture-van to foot of Bluff Street.”

My week as a guest of Mr. Halyard proved interesting. I wrangled with that invalid to his heart’s content, I worked all day on my osier cage, I hunted the thimble in the moonlight with the pretty nurse. We sometimes found it.

As for the thing they called the harbor-master, I saw it a dozen times, but always either at night or so far away and so close to the sea that of course no trace of it remained when I reached the spot, rifle in hand.

I had quite made up my mind that the so-called harbor-master was a demented darky—wandered from, Heaven knows where—perhaps shipwrecked and gone mad from his sufferings. Still, it was far from pleasant to know that the creature was strongly attracted by the pretty nurse.

She, however, persisted in regarding the harbor-master as a sea-creature; she earnestly affirmed that it had gills, like a fish’s gills, that it had a soft, fleshy hole for a mouth, and its eyes were luminous and lidless and fixed.

“Besides,” she said, with a shudder, “it’s all slate color, like a porpoise, and it looks as wet as a sheet of india-rubber in a dissecting-room.”

The day before I was to set sail with my auks in a cat-boat bound for Port-of-Waves, Halyard trundled up to me in his chair and announced his intention of going with me.

“Going where?” I asked.

“To Port-of-Waves and then to New York,” he replied, tranquilly.

I was doubtful, and my lack of cordiality hurt his feelings.

“Oh, of course, if you need the sea-voyage—” I began.

“I don’t; I need you,” he said, savagely; “I need the stimulus of our daily quarrel. I never disagreed so pleasantly with anybody in my life; it agrees with me; I am a hundred per cent. better than I was last week.”

I was inclined to resent this, but something in the deep-lined face of the invalid softened me. Besides, I had taken a hearty liking to the old pig.

“I don’t want any mawkish sentiment about it,” he said, observing me closely; “I won’t permit anybody to feel sorry for me—do you understand?”

“I’ll trouble you to use a different tone in addressing me,” I replied, hotly; “I’ll feel sorry for you if I choose to!” And our usual quarrel proceeded, to his deep satisfaction.

By six o’clock next evening I had Halyard’s luggage stowed away in the cat-boat, and the pretty nurse’s effects corded down, with the newly hatched auk-chicks in a hat-box on top. She and I placed the osier cage aboard, securing it firmly, and then, throwing tablecloths over the auks’ heads, we led those simple and dignified birds down the path and across the plank at the little wooden pier. Together we locked up the house, while Halyard stormed at us both and wheeled himself furiously up and down the beach below. At the last moment she forgot her thimble. But we found it, I forget where.

“Come on!” shouted Halyard, waving his shawls furiously; “what the devil are you about up there?”

He received our explanation with a sniff, and we trundled him aboard without further ceremony.

“Don’t run me across the plank like a steamer trunk!” he shouted, as I shot him dexterously into the cock-pit. But the wind was dying away, and I had no time to dispute with him then.

The sun was setting above the pine-clad ridge as our sail flapped and partly filled, and I cast off, and began a long tack, east by south, to avoid the spouting rocks on our starboard bow.

The sea-birds rose in clouds as we swung across the shoal, the black surf-ducks scuttered out to sea, the gulls tossed their sun-tipped wings in the ocean, riding the rollers like bits of froth.

Already we were sailing slowly out across that great hole in the ocean, five miles deep, the most profound sounding ever taken in the Atlantic. The presence of great heights or great depths, seen or unseen, always impresses the human mind—perhaps oppresses it. We were very silent; the sunlight stain on cliff and beach deepened to crimson, then faded into sombre purple bloom that lingered long after the rose-tint died out in the zenith.

Our progress was slow; at times, although the sail filled with the rising land breeze, we scarcely seemed to move at all.

“Of course,” said the pretty nurse, “we couldn’t be aground in the deepest hole in the Atlantic.”

“Scarcely,” said Halyard, sarcastically, “unless we’re grounded on a whale.”

“What’s that soft thumping?” I asked. “Have we run afoul of a barrel or log?”

It was almost too dark to see, but I leaned over the rail and swept the water with my hand.

Instantly something smooth glided under it, like the back of a great fish, and I jerked my hand back to the tiller. At the same moment the whole surface of the water seemed to begin to purr, with a sound like the breaking of froth in a champagne-glass.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Halyard, sharply.

“A fish came up under my hand,” I said; “a porpoise or something—”

With a low cry, the pretty nurse clasped my arm in both her hands.

“Listen!” she whispered. “It’s purring around the boat.”

“What the devil’s purring?” shouted Halyard. “I won’t have anything purring around me!”

At that moment, to my amazement, I saw that the boat had stopped entirely, although the sail was full and the small pennant fluttered from the mast-head. Something, too, was tugging at the rudder, twisting and jerking it until the tiller strained and creaked in my hand. All at once it snapped; the tiller swung useless and the boat whirled around, heeling in the stiffening wind, and drove shoreward.

It was then that I, ducking to escape the boom, caught a glimpse of something ahead—something that a sudden wave seemed to toss on deck and leave there, wet and flapping—a man with round, fixed, fishy eyes, and soft, slaty skin.

But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and relaxed spasmodically, emitting a rasping, purring sound—two gasping, blood-red gills, all fluted and scolloped and distended.

Frozen with amazement and repugnance, I stared at the creature; I felt the hair stirring on my head and the icy sweat on my forehead.

“It’s the harbor-master!” screamed Halyard.

The harbor-master had gathered himself into a wet lump, squatting motionless in the bows under the mast; his lidless eyes were phosphorescent, like the eyes of living codfish. After a while I felt that either fright or disgust was going to strangle me where I sat, but it was only the arms of the pretty nurse clasped around me in a frenzy of terror.

There was not a fire-arm aboard that we could get at. Halyard’s hand crept backward where a steel-shod boat-hook lay, and I also made a clutch at it. The next moment I had it in my hand, and staggered forward, but the boat was already tumbling shoreward among the breakers, and the next I knew the harbor-master ran at me like a colossal rat, just as the boat rolled over and over through the surf, spilling freight and passengers among the sea-weed-covered rocks.

When I came to myself I was thrashing about knee-deep in a rocky pool, blinded by the water and half suffocated, while under my feet, like a stranded porpoise, the harbor-master made the water boil in his efforts to upset me. But his limbs seemed soft and boneless; he had no nails, no teeth, and he bounced and thumped and flapped and splashed like a fish, while I rained blows on him with the boat-hook that sounded like blows on a football. And all the while his gills were blowing out and frothing, and purring, and his lidless eyes looked into mine, until, nauseated and trembling, I dragged myself back to the beach, where already the pretty nurse alternately wrung her hands and her petticoats in ornamental despair.

Beyond the cove, Halyard was bobbing up and down, afloat in his invalid’s chair, trying to steer shoreward. He was the maddest man I ever saw.

“Have you killed that rubber-headed thing yet?” he roared.

“I can’t kill it,” I shouted, breathlessly. “I might as well try to kill a football!”

“Can’t you punch a hole in it?” he bawled. “If I can only get at him—”

His words were drowned in a thunderous splashing, a roar of great, broad flippers beating the sea, and I saw the gigantic forms of my two great auks, followed by their chicks, blundering past in a shower of spray, driving headlong out into the ocean.

“Oh, Lord!” I said. “I can’t stand that,” and, for the first time in my life, I fainted peacefully—and appropriately—at the feet of the pretty nurse.

•      •      •      •      •      •

It is within the range of possibility that this story may be doubted. It doesn’t matter; nothing can add to the despair of a man who has lost two great auks.

As for Halyard, nothing affects him—except his involuntary sea-bath, and that did him so much good that he writes me from the South that he’s going on a walking-tour through Switzerland—if I’ll join him. I might have joined him if he had not married the pretty nurse. I wonder whether—But, of course, this is no place for speculation.

In regard to the harbor-master, you may believe it or not, as you choose. But if you hear of any great auks being found, kindly throw a table-cloth over their heads and notify the authorities at the new Zoological Gardens in Bronx Park, New York. The reward is ten thousand dollars.

VI

[In Quest of the Dingue]

Before I proceed any further, common decency requires me to reassure my readers concerning my intentions, which, Heaven knows, are far from flippant.

To separate fact from fancy has always been difficult for me, but now that I have had the honor to be chosen secretary of the Zoological Gardens in Bronx Park, I realize keenly that unless I give up writing fiction nobody will believe what I write about science. Therefore it is to a serious and unimaginative public that I shall hereafter address myself; and I do it in the modest confidence that I shall neither be distrusted nor doubted, although unfortunately I still write in that irrational style which suggests covert frivolity, and for which I am undergoing a course of treatment in English literature at Columbia College. Now, having promised to avoid originality and confine myself to facts, I shall tell what I have to tell concerning the dingue, the mammoth, and—something else.

For some weeks it had been rumored that Professor Farrago, president of the Bronx Park Zoological Society, would resign, to accept an enormous salary as manager of Barnum & Bailey’s circus. He was now with the circus in London, and had promised to cable his decision before the day was over.

I hoped he would decide to remain with us. I was his secretary and particular favorite, and I viewed, without enthusiasm, the advent of a new president, who might shake us all out of our congenial and carefully excavated ruts. However, it was plain that the trustees of the society expected the resignation of Professor Farrago, for they had been in secret session all day, considering the names of possible candidates to fill Professor Farrago’s large, old-fashioned shoes. These preparations worried me, for I could scarcely expect another chief as kind and considerate as Professor Leonidas Farrago.

That afternoon in June I left my office in the Administration Building in Bronx Park and strolled out under the trees for a breath of air. But the heat of the sun soon drove me to seek shelter under a little square arbor, a shady retreat covered with purple wistaria and honeysuckle. As I entered the arbor I noticed that there were three other people seated there—an elderly lady with masculine features and short hair, a younger lady sitting beside her, and, farther away, a rough-looking young man reading a book.

For a moment I had an indistinct impression of having met the elder lady somewhere, and under circumstances not entirely agreeable, but beyond a stony and indifferent glance she paid no attention to me. As for the younger lady, she did not look at me at all. She was very young, with pretty eyes, a mass of silky brown hair, and a skin as fresh as a rose which had just been rained on.

With that delicacy peculiar to lonely scientific bachelors, I modestly sat down beside the rough young man, although there was more room beside the younger lady. “Some lazy loafer reading a penny dreadful,” I thought, glancing at him, then at the title of his book. Hearing me beside him, he turned around and blinked over his shabby shoulder, and the movement uncovered the page he had been silently conning. The volume in his hands was Darwin’s famous monograph on the monodactyl.

He noticed the astonishment on my face and smiled uneasily, shifting the short clay pipe in his mouth.

“I guess,” he observed, “that this here book is too much for me, mister.”

“It’s rather technical,” I replied, smiling.

“Yes,” he said, in vague admiration; “it’s fierce, ain’t it?”

After a silence I asked him if he would tell me why he had chosen Darwin as a literary pastime.

“Well,” he said, placidly, “I was tryin’ to read about annermals, but I’m up against a word-slinger this time all right. Now here’s a gum-twister,” and he painfully spelled out m-o-n-o-d-a-c-t-y-l, breathing hard all the while.

“Monodactyl,” I said, “means a single-toed creature.”

He turned the page with alacrity. “Is that the beast he’s talkin’ about?” he asked.

The illustration he pointed out was a wood-cut representing Darwin’s reconstruction of the dingue from the fossil bones in the British Museum. It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth in the middle distance.

“Yes,” I replied, “that is the dingue.”

“I’ve seen one,” he observed, calmly.

I smiled and explained that the dingue had been extinct for some thousands of years.

“Oh, I guess not,” he replied, with cool optimism. Then he placed a grimy forefinger on the mammoth.

“I’ve seen them things, too,” he remarked.

Again I patiently pointed out his error, and suggested that he referred to the elephant.

“Elephant be blowed!” he replied, scornfully. “I guess I know what I seen. An’ I seen that there thing you call a dingue, too.”

Not wishing to prolong a futile discussion, I remained silent. After a moment he wheeled around, removing his pipe from his hard mouth.

“Did you ever hear tell of Graham’s Glacier?” he demanded.

“Certainly,” I replied, astonished; “it’s the southernmost glacier in British America.”

“Right,” he said. “And did you ever hear tell of the Hudson Mountings, mister?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“What’s behind ’em?” he snapped out.

“Nobody knows,” I answered. “They are considered impassable.”

“They ain’t, though,” he said, doggedly; “I’ve been behind ’em.”

“Really!” I replied, tiring of his yarn.

“Ya-as, reely,” he repeated, sullenly. Then he began to fumble and search through the pages of his book until he found what he wanted. “Mister,” he said, “jest read that out loud, please.”

The passage he indicated was the famous chapter beginning:

Is the mammoth extinct? Is the dingue extinct? Probably. And yet the aborigines of British America maintain the contrary. Probably both the mammoth and the dingue are extinct; but until expeditions have penetrated and explored not only the unknown region in Alaska but also that hidden table-land beyond the Graham Glacier and the Hudson Mountains, it will not be possible to definitely announce the total extinction of either the mammoth or the dingue.

When I had read it, slowly, for his benefit, he brought his hand down smartly on one knee and nodded rapidly.

“Mister,” he said, “that gent knows a thing or two, and don’t you forgit it!” Then he demanded, abruptly, how I knew he hadn’t been behind the Graham Glacier.

I explained.

“Shucks!” he said; “there’s a road five miles wide inter that there table-land. Mister, I ain’t been in New York long; I come inter port a week ago on the Arctic Belle, whaler. I was in the Hudson range when that there Graham Glacier bust up—”

“What!” I exclaimed.

“Didn’t you know it?” he asked. “Well, mebbe it ain’t in the papers, but it busted all right—blowed up by a earthquake an’ volcano combine. An’, mister, it was orful. My, how I did run!”

“Do you mean to tell me that some convulsion of the earth has shattered the Graham Glacier?” I asked.

“Convulsions? Ya-as, an’ fits, too,” he said, sulkily. “The hull blame thing dropped inter a hole. An’ say, mister, home an’ mother is good enough fur me now.”

I stared at him stupidly.

“Once,” he said, “I ketched pelts fur them sharps at Hudson Bay, like any yaller husky, but the things I seen arter that convulsion-fit—the things I seen behind the Hudson Mountings—don’t make me hanker arter no life on the pe-rarie wild, lemme tell yer. I may be a Mother Carey chicken, but this chicken has got enough.”

After a long silence I picked up his book again and pointed at the picture of the mammoth.

“What color is it?” I asked.

“Kinder red an’ brown,” he answered, promptly. “It’s woolly, too.”

Astounded, I pointed to the dingue.

“One-toed,” he said, quickly; “makes a noise like a bell when scutterin’ about.”

Intensely excited, I laid my hand on his arm. “My society will give you a thousand dollars,” I said, “if you pilot me inside the Hudson table-land and show me either a mammoth or a dingue!”

He looked me calmly in the eye.

“Mister,” he said, slowly, “have you got a million for to squander on me?”

“No,” I said, suspiciously.

“Because,” he went on, “it wouldn’t be enough. Home an’ mother suits me now.”

He picked up his book and rose. In vain I asked his name and address; in vain I begged him to dine with me—to become my honored guest.

“Nit,” he said, shortly, and shambled off down the path.

But I was not going to lose him like that. I rose and deliberately started to stalk him. It was easy. He shuffled along, pulling on his pipe, and I after him.

It was growing a little dark, although the sun still reddened the tops of the maples. Afraid of losing him in the falling dusk, I once more approached him and laid my hand upon his ragged sleeve.

“Look here,” he cried, wheeling about, “I want you to quit follerin’ me. Don’t I tell you money can’t make me go back to them mountings!” And as I attempted to speak, he suddenly tore off his cap and pointed to his head. His hair was white as snow.

“That’s what come of monkeyin’ inter your cursed mountings,” he shouted, fiercely. “There’s things in there what no Christian oughter see. Lemme alone er I’ll bust yer.”

He shambled on, doubled fists swinging by his side. The next moment, setting my teeth obstinately, I followed him and caught him by the park gate. At my hail he whirled around with a snarl, but I grabbed him by the throat and backed him violently against the park wall.

“You invaluable ruffian,” I said, “now you listen to me. I live in that big stone building, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars to take me behind the Graham Glacier. Think it over and call on me when you are in a pleasanter frame of mind. If you don’t come by noon to-morrow I’ll go to the Graham Glacier without you.”

He was attempting to kick me all the time, but I managed to avoid him, and when I had finished I gave him a shove which almost loosened his spinal column. He went reeling out across the sidewalk, and when he had recovered his breath and his balance he danced with displeasure and displayed a vocabulary that astonished me. However, he kept his distance.

As I turned back into the park, satisfied that he would not follow, the first person I saw was the elderly, stony-faced lady of the wistaria arbor advancing on tiptoe. Behind her came the younger lady with cheeks like a rose that had been rained on.

Instantly it occurred to me that they had followed us, and at the same moment I knew who the stony-faced lady was. Angry, but polite, I lifted my hat and saluted her, and she, probably furious at having been caught tip-toeing after me, cut me dead. The younger lady passed me with face averted, but even in the dusk I could see the tip of one little ear turn scarlet.

Walking on hurriedly, I entered the Administration Building, and found Professor Lesard, of the reptilian department, preparing to leave.

“Don’t you do it,” I said, sharply; “I’ve got exciting news.”

“I’m only going to the theatre,” he replied. “It’s a good show—Adam and Eve; there’s a snake in it, you know. It’s in my line.”

“I can’t help it,” I said; and I told him briefly what had occurred in the arbor.

“But that’s not all,” I continued, savagely. “Those women followed us, and who do you think one of them turned out to be? Well, it was Professor Smawl, of Barnard College, and I’ll bet every pair of boots I own that she starts for the Graham Glacier within a week. Idiot that I was!” I exclaimed, smiting my head with both hands. “I never recognized her until I saw her tip-toeing and craning her neck to listen. Now she knows about the glacier; she heard every word that young ruffian said, and she’ll go to the glacier if it’s only to forestall me.”

Professor Lesard looked anxious. He knew that Miss Smawl, professor of natural history at Barnard College, had long desired an appointment at the Bronx Park gardens. It was even said she had a chance of succeeding Professor Farrago as president, but that, of course, must have been a joke. However, she haunted the gardens, annoying the keepers by persistently poking the animals with her umbrella. On one occasion she sent us word that she desired to enter the tigers’ enclosure for the purpose of making experiments in hypnotism. Professor Farrago was absent, but I took it upon myself to send back word that I feared the tigers might injure her. The miserable small boy who took my message informed her that I was afraid she might injure the tigers, and the unpleasant incident almost cost me my position.

“I am quite convinced,” said I to Professor Lesard, “that Miss Smawl is perfectly capable of abusing the information she overheard, and of starting herself to explore a region that, by all the laws of decency, justice, and prior claim, belongs to me.”

“Well,” said Lesard, with a peculiar laugh, “it’s not certain whether you can go at all.”

“Professor Farrago will authorize me,” I said, confidently.

“Professor Farrago has resigned,” said Lesard. It was a bolt from a clear sky.

“Good Heavens!” I blurted out. “What will become of the rest of us, then?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “The trustees are holding a meeting over in the Administration Building to elect a new president for us. It depends on the new president what becomes of us.”

“Lesard,” I said, hoarsely, “you don’t suppose that they could possibly elect Miss Smawl as our president, do you?”

He looked at me askance and bit his cigar.

“I’d be in a nice position, wouldn’t I?” said I, anxiously.

“The lady would probably make you walk the plank for that tiger business,” he replied.

“But I didn’t do it,” I protested, with sickly eagerness. “Besides, I explained to her—”

He said nothing, and I stared at him, appalled by the possibility of reporting to Professor Smawl for instructions next morning.

“See here, Lesard,” I said, nervously, “I wish you would step over to the Administration Building and ask the trustees if I may prepare for this expedition. Will you?”

He glanced at me sympathetically. It was quite natural for me to wish to secure my position before the new president was elected—especially as there was a chance of the new president being Miss Smawl.

“You are quite right,” he said; “the Graham Glacier would be the safest place for you if our next president is to be the Lady of the Tigers.” And he started across the park puffing his cigar.

I sat down on the doorstep to wait for his return, not at all charmed with the prospect. It made me furious, too, to see my ambition nipped with the frost of a possible veto from Miss Smawl.

“If she is elected,” thought I, “there is nothing for me but to resign—to avoid the inconvenience of being shown the door. Oh, I wish I had allowed her to hypnotize the tigers!”

Thoughts of crime flitted through my mind. Miss Smawl would not remain president—or anything else very long—if she persisted in her desire for the tigers. And then when she called for help I would pretend not to hear.

Aroused from criminal meditation by the return of Professor Lesard, I jumped up and peered into his perplexed eyes. “They’ve elected a president,” he said, “but they won’t tell us who the president is until to-morrow.”

“You don’t think—” I stammered.

“I don’t know. But I know this: the new president sanctions the expedition to the Graham Glacier, and directs you to choose an assistant and begin preparations for four people.”

Overjoyed, I seized his hand and said, “Hurray!” in a voice weak with emotion. “The old dragon isn’t elected this time,” I added, triumphantly.

“By-the-way,” he said, “who was the other dragon with her in the park this evening?”

I described her in a more modulated voice.

“Whew!” observed Professor Lesard, “that must be her assistant, Professor Dorothy Van Twiller! She’s the prettiest blue-stocking in town.”

With this curious remark my confrère followed me into my room and wrote down the list of articles I dictated to him. The list included a complete camping equipment for myself and three other men.

“Am I one of those other men?” inquired Lesard, with an unhappy smile.

Before I could reply my door was shoved open and a figure appeared at the threshold, cap in hand.

“What do you want?” I asked, sternly; but my heart was beating high with triumph.

The figure shuffled; then came a subdued voice:

“Mister, I guess I’ll go back to the Graham Glacier along with you. I’m Billy Spike, an’ it kinder scares me to go back to them Hudson Mountains, but somehow, mister, when you choked me and kinder walked me off on my ear, why, mister, I kinder took to you like.”

There was absolute silence for a minute; then he said:

“So if you go, I guess I’ll go, too, mister.”

“For a thousand dollars?”

“Fur nawthin’,” he muttered—“or what you like.”

“All right, Billy,” I said, briskly; “just look over those rifles and ammunition and see that everything’s sound.”

He slowly lifted his tough young face and gave me a doglike glance. They were hard eyes, but there was gratitude in them.

“You’ll get your throat slit,” whispered Lesard.

“Not while Billy’s with me,” I replied, cheerfully.

Late that night, as I was preparing for pleasant dreams, a knock came on my door and a telegraph-messenger handed me a note, which I read, shivering in my bare feet, although the thermometer marked eighty Fahrenheit:

You will immediately leave for the Hudson Mountains via Wellman Bay, Labrador, there to await further instructions. Equipment for yourself and one assistant will include following articles” [here began a list of camping utensils, scientific paraphernalia, and provisions]. “The steamer Penguin sails at five o’clock to-morrow morning. Kindly find yourself on board at that hour. Any excuse for not complying with these orders will be accepted as your resignation.

Susan Smawl,
President Bronx Zoological Society.

“Lesard!” I shouted, trembling with fury.

He appeared at his door, chastely draped in pajamas; and he read the insolent letter with terrified alacrity.

“What are you going to do—resign?” he asked, much frightened.

“Do!” I snarled, grinding my teeth; “I’m going—that’s what I’m going to do!”

“But—but you can’t get ready and catch that steamer, too,” he stammered.

He did not know me.

VII

And so it came about that one calm evening towards the end of June, William Spike and I went into camp under the southerly shelter of that vast granite wall called the Hudson Mountains, there to await the promised “further instructions.”

It had been a tiresome trip by steamer to Anticosti, from there by schooner to Widgeon Bay, then down the coast and up the Cape Clear River to Port Porpoise. There we bought three pack-mules and started due north on the Great Fur Trail. The second day out we passed Fort Boisé, the last outpost of civilization, and on the sixth day we were travelling eastward under the granite mountain parapets.

On the evening of the sixth day out from Fort Boisé we went into camp for the last time before entering the unknown land.

I could see it already through my field-glasses, and while William was building the fire I climbed up among the rocks above and sat down, glasses levelled, to study the prospect.

There was nothing either extraordinary or forbidding in the landscape which stretched out beyond; to the right the solid palisade of granite cut off the view; to the left the palisade continued, an endless barrier of sheer cliffs crowned with pine and hemlock. But the interesting section of the landscape lay almost directly in front of me—a rent in the mountain-wall through which appeared to run a level, arid plain, miles wide, and as smooth and even as a highroad.

There could be no doubt concerning the significance of that rent in the solid mountain-wall; and, moreover, it was exactly as William Spike had described it. However, I called to him and he came up from the smoky camp-fire, axe on shoulder.

“Yep,” he said, squatting beside me; “the Graham Glacier used to meander through that there hole, but somethin’ went wrong with the earth’s in’ards an’ there was a bust-up.”

“And you saw it, William?” I said, with a sigh of envy.

“Hey? Seen it? Sure I seen it! I was to Spoutin’ Springs, twenty mile west, with a bale o’ blue fox an’ otter pelt. Fust I knew them geysers begun for to groan egregious like, an’ I seen the caribou gallopin’ hell-bent south. ‘This climate,’ sez I, ‘is too bracin’ for me,’ so I struck a back trail an’ landed onto a hill. Then them geysers blowed up, one arter the next, an’ I heard somethin’ kinder cave in between here an’ China. I disremember things what happened. Somethin’ throwed me down, but I couldn’t stay there, for the blamed ground was runnin’ like a river—all wavy-like, an’ the sky hit me on the back o’ me head.”

“And then?” I urged, in that new excitement which every repetition of the story revived. I had heard it all twenty times since we left New York, but mere repetition could not apparently satisfy me.

“Then,” continued William, “the whole world kinder went off like a fire-cracker, an’ I come too, an’ ran like—”

“I know,” said I, cutting him short, for I had become wearied of the invariable profanity which lent a lurid ending to his narrative.

“After that,” I continued, “you went through the rent in the mountains?”

“Sure.”

“And you saw a dingue and a creature that resembled a mammoth?”

“Sure,” he repeated, sulkily.

“And you saw something else?” I always asked this question; it fascinated me to see the sullen fright flicker in William’s eyes, and the mechanical backward glance, as though what he had seen might still be behind him.

He had never answered this third question but once, and that time he fairly snarled in my face as he growled: “I seen what no Christian oughter see.”

So when I repeated: “And you saw something else, William?” he gave me a wicked, frightened leer, and shuffled off to feed the mules. Flattery, entreaties, threats left him unmoved; he never told me what the third thing was that he had seen behind the Hudson Mountains.

William had retired to mix up with his mules; I resumed my binoculars and my silent inspection of the great, smooth path left by the Graham Glacier when something or other exploded that vast mass of ice into vapor.

The arid plain wound out from the unknown country like a river, and I thought then, and think now, that when the glacier was blown into vapor the vapor descended in the most terrific rain the world has ever seen, and poured through the newly blasted mountain-gateway, sweeping the earth to bed-rock. To corroborate this theory, miles to the southward I could see the débris winding out across the land towards Wellman Bay, but as the terminal moraine of the vanished glacier formerly ended there I could not be certain that my theory was correct. Owing to the formation of the mountains I could not see more than half a mile into the unknown country. What I could see appeared to be nothing but the continuation of the glacier’s path, scored out by the cloud-burst, and swept as smooth as a floor.

Sitting there, my heart beating heavily with excitement, I looked through the evening glow at the endless, pine-crowned mountain-wall with its giant’s gateway pierced for me! And I thought of all the explorers and the unknown heroes—trappers, Indians, humble naturalists, perhaps—who had attempted to scale that sheer barricade and had died there or failed, beaten back from those eternal cliffs. Eternal? No! For the Eternal Himself had struck the rock, and it had sprung asunder, thundering obedience.

In the still evening air the smoke from the fire below mounted in a straight, slender pillar, like the smoke from those ancient altars builded before the first blood had been shed on earth.

The evening wind stirred the pines; a tiny spring brook made thin harmony among the rocks; a murmur came from the quiet camp. It was William adjuring his mules. In the deepening twilight I descended the hillock, stepping cautiously among the rocks.

Then, suddenly, as I stood outside the reddening ring of firelight, far in the depths of the unknown country, far behind the mountain-wall, a sound grew on the quiet air. William heard it and turned his face to the mountains. The sound faded to a vibration which was felt, not heard. Then once more I began to divine a vibration in the air, gathering in distant volume until it became a sound, lasting the space of a spoken word, fading to vibration, then silence.

Was it a cry?

I looked at William inquiringly. He had quietly fainted away.

I got him to the little brook and poked his head into the icy water, and after a while he sat up pluckily.

To an indignant question he replied: “Naw, I ain’t a-cussin’ you. Lemme be or I’ll have fits.”

“Was it that sound that scared you?” I asked.

“Ya-as,” he replied with a dauntless shiver.

“Was it the voice of the mammoth?” I persisted, excitedly. “Speak, William, or I’ll drag you about and kick you!”

He replied that it was neither a mammoth nor a dingue, and added a strong request for privacy, which I was obliged to grant, as I could not torture another word out of him.

I slept little that night; the exciting proximity of the unknown land was too much for me. But although I lay awake for hours, I heard nothing except the tinkle of water among the rocks and the plover calling from some hidden marsh. At daybreak I shot a ptarmigan which had walked into camp, and the shot set the echoes yelling among the mountains.

William, sullen and heavy-eyed, dressed the bird, and we broiled it for breakfast.

Neither he nor I alluded to the sound we had heard the night before; he boiled water and cleaned up the mess-kit, and I pottered about among the rocks for another ptarmigan. Wearying of this, presently, I returned to the mules and William, and sat down for a smoke.

“It strikes me,” I said, “that our instructions to ‘await further orders’ are idiotic. How are we to receive ‘further orders’ here?”

William did not know.

“You don’t suppose,” said I, in sudden disgust, “that Miss Smawl believes there is a summer hotel and daily mail service in the Hudson Mountains?”

William thought perhaps she did suppose something of the sort.

It irritated me beyond measure to find myself at last on the very border of the unknown country, and yet checked, held back, by the irresponsible orders of a maiden lady named Smawl. However, my salary depended upon the whim of that maiden lady, and although I fussed and fumed and glared at the mountains through my glasses, I realized that I could not stir without the permission of Miss Smawl. At times this grotesque situation became almost unbearable, and I often went away by myself and indulged in fantasies, firing my gun off and pretending I had hit Miss Smawl by mistake. At such moments I would imagine I was free at last to plunge into the strange country, and I would squat on a rock and dream of bagging my first mammoth.

The time passed heavily; the tension increased with each new day. I shot ptarmigan and kept our table supplied with brook-trout. William chopped wood, conversed with his mules, and cooked very badly.

“See here,” I said, one morning; “we have been in camp a week to-day, and I can’t stand your cooking another minute!”

William, who was washing a saucepan, looked up and begged me sarcastically to accept the cordon bleu. But I know only how to cook eggs, and there were no eggs within some hundred miles.

To get the flavor of the breakfast out of my mouth I walked up to my favorite hillock and sat down for a smoke. The next moment, however, I was on my feet, cheering excitedly and shouting for William.

“Here come ‘further instructions’ at last!” I cried, pointing to the southward, where two dots on the grassy plain were imperceptibly moving in our direction.

“People on mules,” said William, without enthusiasm.

“They must be messengers for us!” I cried, in chaste joy. “Three cheers for the northward trail, William, and the mischief take Miss—Well, never mind now,” I added.

“On them approachin’ mules,” observed William, “there is wimmen.”

I stared at him for a second, then attempted to strike him. He dodged wearily and repeated his incredible remark: “Ya-as, there is—wimmen—two female ladies onto them there mules.”

“Bring me my glasses!” I said, hoarsely; “bring me those glasses, William, because I shall destroy you if you don’t!”

Somewhat awed by my calm fury, he hastened back to camp and returned with the binoculars. It was a breathless moment. I adjusted the lenses with a steady hand and raised them.

Now, of all unexpected sights my fate may reserve for me in the future, I trust—nay, I know—that none can ever prove as unwelcome as the sight I perceived through my binoculars. For upon the backs of those distant mules were two women, and the first one was Miss Smawl!

Upon her head she wore a helmet, from which fluttered a green veil. Otherwise she was clothed in tweeds; and at moments she beat upon her mule with a thick umbrella.

Surfeited with the sickening spectacle, I sat down on a rock and tried to cry.

“I told yer so,” observed William; but I was too tired to attack him.

When the caravan rode into camp I was myself again, smilingly prepared for the worst, and I advanced, cap in hand, followed furtively by William.

“Welcome,” I said, violently injecting joy into my voice. “Welcome, Professor Smawl, to the Hudson Mountains!”

“Kindly take my mule,” she said, climbing down to mother earth.

“William,” I said, with dignity, “take the lady’s mule.”

Miss Smawl gave me a stolid glance, then made directly for the camp-fire, where a kettle of game-broth simmered over the coals. The last I saw of her she was smelling of it, and I turned my back and advanced towards the second lady pilgrim, prepared to be civil until snubbed.

Now, it is quite certain that never before had William Spike or I beheld so much feminine loveliness in one human body on the back of a mule. She was clad in the daintiest of shooting-kilts, yet there was nothing mannish about her except the way she rode the mule, and that only accentuated her adorable femininity.

I remembered what Professor Lesard had said about blue stockings—but Miss Dorothy Van Twiller’s were gray, turned over at the tops, and disappearing into canvas spats buckled across a pair of slim shooting-boots.

“Welcome,” said I, attempting to restrain a too violent cordiality. “Welcome, Professor Van Twiller, to the Hudson Mountains.”

“Thank you,” she replied, accepting my assistance very sweetly; “it is a pleasure to meet a human being again.”

I glanced at Miss Smawl. She was eating game-broth, but she resembled a human being in a general way.

“I should very much like to wash my hands,” said Professor Van Twiller, drawing the buckskin gloves from her slim fingers.

I brought towels and soap and conducted her to the brook.

She called to Professor Smawl to join her, and her voice was crystalline; Professor Smawl declined, and her voice was batrachian.

“She is so hungry!” observed Miss Van Twiller. “I am very thankful we are here at last, for we’ve had a horrid time. You see, we neither of us know how to cook.”

I wondered what they would say to William’s cooking, but I held my peace and retired, leaving the little brook to mirror the sweetest face that was ever bathed in water.

VIII

That afternoon our expedition, in two sections, moved forward. The first section comprised myself and all the mules; the second section was commanded by Professor Smawl, followed by Professor Van Twiller, armed with a tiny shot-gun. William, loaded down with the ladies’ toilet articles, skulked in the rear. I say skulked; there was no other word for it.

“So you’re a guide, are you?” observed Professor Smawl when William, cap in hand, had approached her with well-meant advice. “The woods are full of lazy guides. Pick up those Gladstone bags! I’ll do the guiding for this expedition.”

Made cautious by William’s humiliation, I associated with the mules exclusively. Nevertheless, Professor Smawl had her hard eyes on me, and I realized she meant mischief.

The encounter took place just as I, driving the five mules, entered the great mountain gateway, thrilled with anticipation which almost amounted to foreboding. As I was about to set foot across the imaginary frontier which divided the world from the unknown land, Professor Smawl hailed me and I halted until she came up.

“As commander of this expedition,” she said, somewhat out of breath, “I desire to be the first living creature who has ever set foot behind the Graham Glacier. Kindly step aside, young sir!”

“Madam,” said I, rigid with disappointment, “my guide, William Spike, entered that unknown land a year ago.”

“He says he did,” sneered Professor Smawl.

“As you like,” I replied; “but it is scarcely generous to forestall the person whose stupidity gave you the clew to this unexplored region.”

“You mean yourself?” she asked, with a stony stare.

“I do,” said I, firmly.

Her little, hard eyes grew harder, and she clutched her umbrella until the steel ribs crackled.

“Young man,” she said, insolently; “if I could have gotten rid of you I should have done so the day I was appointed president. But Professor Farrago refused to resign unless your position was assured, subject, of course, to your good behavior. Frankly, I don’t like you, and I consider your views on science ridiculous, and if an opportunity presents itself I will be most happy to request your resignation. Kindly collect your mules and follow me.”

Mortified beyond measure, I collected my mules and followed my president into the strange country behind the Hudson Mountains—I who had aspired to lead, compelled to follow in the rear, driving mules.

The journey was monotonous at first, but we shortly ascended a ridge from which we could see, stretching out below us, the wilderness where, save the feet of William Spike, no human feet had passed.

As for me, tingling with enthusiasm, I forgot my chagrin, I forgot the gross injustice, I forgot my mules. “Excelsior!” I cried, running up and down the ridge in uncontrollable excitement at the sublime spectacle of forest, mountain, and valley all set with little lakes.

“Excelsior!” repeated an excited voice at my side, and Professor Van Twiller sprang to the ridge beside me, her eyes bright as stars.

Exalted, inspired by the mysterious beauty of the view, we clasped hands and ran up and down the grassy ridge.

“That will do,” said Professor Smawl, coldly, as we raced about like a pair of distracted kittens. The chilling voice broke the spell; I dropped Professor Van Twiller’s hand and sat down on a bowlder, aching with wrath.

Late that afternoon we halted beside a tiny lake, deep in the unknown wilderness, where purple and scarlet bergamot choked the shores and the spruce-partridge strutted fearlessly under our very feet. Here we pitched our two tents. The afternoon sun slanted through the pines; the lake glittered; acres of golden brake perfumed the forest silence, broken only at rare intervals by the distant thunder of a partridge drumming.

Professor Smawl ate heavily and retired to her tent to lie torpid until evening. William drove the unloaded mules into an intervale full of sun-cured, fragrant grasses; I sat down beside Professor Van Twiller.

The wilderness is electric. Once within the influence of its currents, human beings become positively or negatively charged, violently attracting or repelling each other.

“There is something the matter with this air,” said Professor Van Twiller. “It makes me feel as though I were desperately enamoured of the entire human race.”

She leaned back against a pine, smiling vaguely, and crossing one knee over the other.

Now I am not bold by temperament, and, normally, I fear ladies. Therefore it surprised me to hear myself begin a frivolous causerie, replying to her pretty epigrams with epigrams of my own, advancing to the borderland of badinage, fearlessly conducting her and myself over that delicate frontier to meet upon the terrain of undisguised flirtation.

It was clear that she was out for a holiday. The seriousness and restraints of twenty-two years she had left behind her in the civilized world, and now, with a shrug of her young shoulders, she unloosened her burden of reticence, dignity, and responsibility and let the whole load fall with a discreet thud.

“Even hares go mad in March,” she said, seriously. “I know you intend to flirt with me—and I don’t care. Anyway, there’s nothing else to do, is there?”

“Suppose,” said I, solemnly, “I should take you behind that big tree and attempt to kiss you!”

The prospect did not appear to appall her, so I looked around with that sneaking yet conciliatory caution peculiar to young men who are novices in the art. Before I had satisfied myself that neither William nor the mules were observing us, Professor Van Twiller rose to her feet and took a short step backward.

“Let’s set traps for a dingue,” she said, “will you?”

I looked at the big tree, undecided. “Come on,” she said; “I’ll show you how.” And away we went into the woods, she leading, her kilts flashing through the golden half-light.

Now I had not the faintest notion how to trap the dingue, but Professor Van Twiller asserted that it formerly fed on the tender tips of the spruce, quoting Darwin as her authority.

So we gathered a bushel of spruce-tips, piled them on the bank of a little stream, then built a miniature stockade around the bait, a foot high. I roofed this with hemlock, then laboriously whittled out and adjusted a swinging shutter for the entrance, setting it on springy twigs.

“The dingue, you know, was supposed to live in the water,” she said, kneeling beside me over our trap.

I took her little hand and thanked her for the information.

“Doubtless,” she said, enthusiastically, “a dingue will come out of the lake to-night to feed on our spruce-tips. Then,” she added, “we’ve got him.”

“True!” I said, earnestly, and pressed her fingers very gently.

Her face was turned a little away; I don’t remember what she said; I don’t remember that she said anything. A faint rose-tint stole over her cheek. A few moments later she said: “You must not do that again.”

It was quite late when we strolled back to camp. Long before we came in sight of the twin tents we heard a deep voice bawling our names. It was Professor Smawl, and she pounced upon Dorothy and drove her ignominiously into the tent.

“As for you,” she said, in hollow tones, “you may explain your conduct at once, or place your resignation at my disposal.”

But somehow or other I appeared to be temporarily lost to shame, and I only smiled at my infuriated president, and entered my own tent with a step that was distinctly frolicsome.

“Billy,” said I to William Spike, who regarded me morosely from the depths of the tent, “I’m going out to bag a mammoth to-morrow, so kindly clean my elephant-gun and bring an axe to chop out the tusks.”

That night Professor Smawl complained bitterly of the cooking, but as neither Dorothy nor I knew how to improve it, she revenged herself on us by eating everything on the table and retiring to bed, taking Dorothy with her.

I could not sleep very well; the mosquitoes were intrusive, and Professor Smawl dreamed she was a pack of wolves and yelped in her sleep.

“Bird, ain’t she?” said William, roused from slumber by her weird noises.

Dorothy, much frightened, crawled out of her tent, where her blanket-mate still dreamed dyspeptically, and William and I made her comfortable by the camp-fire.

It takes a pretty girl to look pretty half asleep in a blanket.

“Are you sure you are quite well?” I asked her.

To make sure, I tested her pulse. For an hour it varied more or less, but without alarming either of us. Then she went back to bed and I sat alone by the camp-fire.

Towards midnight I suddenly began to feel that strange, distant vibration that I had once before felt. As before, the vibration grew on the still air, increasing in volume until it became a sound, then died out into silence.

I rose and stole into my tent.

William, white as death, lay in his corner, weeping in his sleep.

I roused him remorselessly, and he sat up scowling, but refused to tell me what he had been dreaming.

“Was it about that third thing you saw—” I began. But he snarled up at me like a startled animal, and I was obliged to go to bed and toss about and speculate.

The next morning it rained. Dorothy and I visited our dingue-trap but found nothing in it. We were inclined, however, to stay out in the rain behind a big tree, but Professor Smawl vetoed that proposition and sent me off to supply the larder with fresh meat.

I returned, mad and wet, with a dozen partridges and a white hare—brown at that season—and William cooked them vilely.

“I can taste the feathers!” said Professor Smawl, indignantly.

“There is no accounting for taste,” I said, with a polite gesture of deprecation; “personally, I find feathers unpalatable.”

“You may hand in your resignation this evening!” cried Professor Smawl, in hollow tones of passion.

I passed her the pancakes with a cheerful smile, and flippantly pressed the hand next me. Unexpectedly it proved to be William’s sticky fist, and Dorothy and I laughed until her tears ran into Professor Smawl’s coffee-cup—an accident which kindled her wrath to red heat, and she requested my resignation five times during the evening.

The next day it rained again, more or less. Professor Smawl complained of the cooking, demanded my resignation, and finally marched out to explore, lugging the reluctant William with her. Dorothy and I sat down behind the largest tree we could find.

I don’t remember what we were saying when a peculiar sound interrupted us, and we listened earnestly.

It was like a bell in the woods, ding-dong! ding-dong! ding-dong!—a low, mellow, golden harmony, coming nearer, then stopping.

I clasped Dorothy in my arms in my excitement.

“It is the note of the dingue!” I whispered, “and that explains its name, handed down from remote ages along with the names of the behemoth and the coney. It was because of its bell-like cry that it was named! Darling!” I cried, forgetting our short acquaintance, “we have made a discovery that the whole world will ring with!”

Hand in hand we tiptoed through the forest to our trap. There was something in it that took fright at our approach and rushed panic-stricken round and round the interior of the trap, uttering its alarm-note, which sounded like the jangling of a whole string of bells.

I seized the strangely beautiful creature; it neither attempted to bite nor scratch, but crouched in my arms, trembling and eying me.

Delighted with the lovely, tame animal, we bore it tenderly back to the camp and placed it on my blanket. Hand in hand we stood before it, awed by the sight of this beast, so long believed to be extinct.

“It is too good to be true,” sighed Dorothy, clasping her white hands under her chin and gazing at the dingue in rapture.

“Yes,” said I, solemnly, “you and I, my child, are face to face with the fabled dingue—Dingus solitarius! Let us continue to gaze at it, reverently, prayerfully, humbly—”

Dorothy yawned—probably with excitement.

We were still mutely adoring the dingue when Professor Smawl burst into the tent at a hand-gallop, bawling hoarsely for her kodak and note-book.

Dorothy seized her triumphantly by the arm and pointed at the dingue, which appeared to be frightened to death.

“What!” cried Professor Smawl, scornfully; “that a dingue? Rubbish!”

“Madam,” I said, firmly, “it is a dingue! It’s a monodactyl! See! It has but a single toe!”

“Bosh!” she retorted; “it’s got four!”

“Four!” I repeated, blankly.

“Yes; one on each foot!”

“Of course,” I said; “you didn’t suppose a monodactyl meant a beast with one leg and one toe!”

But she laughed hatefully and declared it was a woodchuck.

We squabbled for a while until I saw the significance of her attitude. The unfortunate woman wished to find a dingue first and be accredited with the discovery.

I lifted the dingue in both hands and shook the creature gently, until the chiming ding-dong of its protestations filled our ears like sweet bells jangled out of tune.

Pale with rage at this final proof of the dingue’s identity, she seized her camera and note-book.

“I haven’t any time to waste over that musical woodchuck!” she shouted, and bounced out of the tent.

“What have you discovered, dear?” cried Dorothy, running after her.

“A mammoth!” bawled Professor Smawl, triumphantly; “and I’m going to photograph him!”

Neither Dorothy nor I believed her. We watched the flight of the infatuated woman in silence.

And now, at last, the tragic shadow falls over my paper as I write. I was never passionately attached to Professor Smawl, yet I would gladly refrain from chronicling the episode that must follow if, as I have hitherto attempted, I succeed in sticking to the unornamented truth.

I have said that neither Dorothy nor I believed her. I don’t know why, unless it was that we had not yet made up our minds to believe that the mammoth still existed on earth. So, when Professor Smawl disappeared in the forest, scuttling through the underbrush like a demoralized hen, we viewed her flight with unconcern. There was a large tree in the neighborhood—a pleasant shelter in case of rain. So we sat down behind it, although the sun was shining fiercely.

It was one of those peaceful afternoons in the wilderness when the whole forest dreams, and the shadows are asleep and every little leaflet takes a nap. Under the still tree-tops the dappled sunlight, motionless, soaked the sod; the forest-flies no longer whirled in circles, but sat sunning their wings on slender twig-tips.

The heat was sweet and spicy; the sun drew out the delicate essence of gum and sap, warming volatile juices until they exhaled through the aromatic bark.

The sun went down into the wilderness; the forest stirred in its sleep; a fish splashed in the lake. The spell was broken. Presently the wind began to rise somewhere far away in the unknown land. I heard it coming, nearer, nearer—a brisk wind that grew heavier and blew harder as it neared us—a gale that swept distant branches—a furious gale that set limbs clashing and cracking, nearer and nearer. Crack! and the gale grew to a hurricane, trampling trees like dead twigs! Crack! Crackle! Crash! Crash!

Was it the wind?

With the roaring in my ears I sprang up, staring into the forest vista, and at the same instant, out of the crashing forest, sped Professor Smawl, skirts tucked up, thin legs flying like bicycle-spokes. I shouted, but the crashing drowned my voice. Then all at once the solid earth began to shake, and with the rush and roar of a tornado a gigantic living thing burst out of the forest before our eyes—a vast shadowy bulk that rocked and rolled along, mowing down trees in its course.

Two great crescents of ivory curved from its head; its back swept through the tossing tree-tops. Once it bellowed like a gun fired from a high bastion.

The apparition passed with the noise of thunder rolling on towards the ends of the earth. Crack! crash! went the trees, the tempest swept away in a rolling volley of reports, distant, more distant, until, long after the tumult had deadened, then ceased, the stunned forest echoed with the fall of mangled branches slowly dropping.

That evening an agitated young couple sat close together in the deserted camp, calling timidly at intervals for Professor Smawl and William Spike. I say timidly, because it is correct; we did not care to have a mammoth respond to our calls. The lurking echoes across the lake answered our cries; the full moon came up over the forest to look at us. We were not much to look at. Dorothy was moistening my shoulder with unfeigned tears, and I, afraid to light the fire, sat hunched up under the common blanket, wildly examining the darkness around us.

Chilled to the spinal marrow, I watched the gray lights whiten in the east. A single bird awoke in the wilderness. I saw the nearer trees looming in the mist, and the silver fog rolling on the lake.

All night long the darkness had vibrated with the strange monotone which I had heard the first night, camping at the gate of the unknown land. My brain seemed to echo that subtle harmony which rings in the auricular labyrinth after sound has ceased.

There are ghosts of sound which return to haunt long after sound is dead. It was these voiceless spectres of a voice long dead that stirred the transparent silence, intoning toneless tones.

I think I make myself clear.

It was an uncanny night; morning whitened the east; gray daylight stole into the woods, blotting the shadows to paler tints. It was nearly mid-day before the sun became visible through the fine-spun web of mist—a pale spot of gilt in the zenith.

By this pallid light I labored to strike the two empty tents, gather up our equipments and pack them on our five mules. Dorothy aided me bravely, whimpering when I spoke of Professor Smawl and William Spike, but abating nothing of her industry until we had the mules loaded and I was ready to drive them, Heaven knows whither.

“Where shall we go?” quavered Dorothy, sitting on a log with the dingue in her lap.

One thing was certain; this mammoth-ridden land was no place for women, and I told her so.

We placed the dingue in a basket and tied it around the leading mule’s neck. Immediately the dingue, alarmed, began dingling like a cow-bell. It acted like a charm on the other mules, and they gravely filed off after their leader, following the bell. Dorothy and I, hand in hand, brought up the rear.

I shall never forget that scene in the forest—the gray arch of the heavens swimming in mist through which the sun peered shiftily, the tall pines wavering through the fog, the preoccupied mules marching single file, the foggy bell-note of the gentle dingue in its swinging basket, and Dorothy, limp kilts dripping with dew, plodding through the white dusk.

We followed the terrible tornado-path which the mammoth had left in its wake, but there were no traces of its human victims—neither one jot of Professor Smawl nor one solitary tittle of William Spike.

And now I would be glad to end this chapter if I could; I would gladly leave myself as I was, there in the misty forest, with an arm encircling the slender body of my little companion, and the mules moving in a monotonous line, and the dingue discreetly jingling—but again that menacing shadow falls across my page, and truth bids me tell all, and I, the slave of accuracy, must remember my vows as the dauntless disciple of truth.

Towards sunset—or that pale parody of sunset which set the forest swimming in a ghastly, colorless haze—the mammoth’s trail of ruin brought us suddenly out of the trees to the shore of a great sheet of water.

It was a desolate spot; northward a chaos of sombre peaks rose, piled up like thunder-clouds along the horizon; east and south the darkening wilderness spread like a pall. Westward, crawling out into the mist from our very feet, the gray waste of water moved under the dull sky, and flat waves slapped the squatting rocks, heavy with slime.

And now I understood why the trail of the mammoth continued straight into the lake, for on either hand black, filthy tamarack swamps lay under ghostly sheets of mist. I strove to creep out into the bog, seeking a footing, but the swamp quaked and the smooth surface trembled like jelly in a bowl. A stick thrust into the slime sank into unknown depths.

Vaguely alarmed, I gained the firm land again and looked around, believing there was no road open but the desolate trail we had traversed. But I was in error; already the leading mule was wading out into the water, and the others, one by one, followed.

How wide the lake might be we could not tell, because the band of fog hung across the water like a curtain. Yet out into this flat, shallow void our mules went steadily, slop! slop! slop! in single file. Already they were growing indistinct in the fog, so I bade Dorothy hasten and take off her shoes and stockings.

She was ready before I was, I having to unlace my shooting-boots, and she stepped out into the water, kilts fluttering, moving her white feet cautiously. In a moment I was beside her, and we waded forward, sounding the shallow water with our poles.

When the water had risen to Dorothy’s knees I hesitated, alarmed. But when we attempted to retrace our steps we could not find the shore again, for the blank mist shrouded everything, and the water deepened at every step.

I halted and listened for the mules. Far away in the fog I heard a dull splashing, receding as I listened. After a while all sound died away, and a slow horror stole over me—a horror that froze the little net-work of veins in every limb. A step to the right and the water rose to my knees; a step to the left and the cold, thin circle of the flood chilled my breast. Suddenly Dorothy screamed, and the next moment a far cry answered—a far, sweet cry that seemed to come from the sky, like the rushing harmony of the world’s swift winds. Then the curtain of fog before us lighted up from behind; shadows moved on the misty screen, outlines of trees and grassy shores, and tiny birds flying. Thrown on the vapory curtain, in silhouette, a man and a woman passed under the lovely trees, arms about each other’s necks; near them the shadows of five mules grazed peacefully; a dingue gambolled close by.

“It is a mirage!” I muttered, but my voice made no sound. Slowly the light behind the fog died out; the vapor around us turned to rose, then dissolved, while mile on mile of a limitless sea spread away till, like a quick line pencilled at a stroke, the horizon cut sky and sea in half, and before us lay an ocean from which towered a mountain of snow—or a gigantic berg of milky ice—for it was moving.

“Good Heavens,” I shrieked; “it is alive!”

At the sound of my crazed cry the mountain of snow became a pillar, towering to the clouds, and a wave of golden glory drenched the figure to its knees! Figure? Yes—for a colossal arm shot across the sky, then curved back in exquisite grace to a head of awful beauty—a woman’s head, with eyes like the blue lake of heaven—ay, a woman’s splendid form, upright from the sky to the earth, knee-deep in the sea. The evening clouds drifted across her brow; her shimmering hair lighted the world beneath with sunset. Then, shading her white brow with one hand, she bent, and with the other hand dipped in the sea, she sent a wave rolling at us. Straight out of the horizon it sped—a ripple that grew to a wave, then to a furious breaker which caught us up in a whirl of foam, bearing us onward, faster, faster, swiftly flying through leagues of spray until consciousness ceased and all was blank.

Yet ere my senses fled I heard again that strange cry—that sweet, thrilling harmony rushing out over the foaming waters, filling earth and sky with its soundless vibrations.

And I knew it was the hail of the Spirit of the North warning us back to life again.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Looking back, now, over the days that passed before we staggered into the Hudson Bay outpost at Gravel Cove, I am inclined to believe that neither Dorothy nor I were clothed entirely in our proper minds—or, if we were, our minds, no doubt, must have been in the same condition as our clothing. I remember shooting ptarmigan, and that we ate them; flashes of memory recall the steady downpour of rain through the endless twilight of shaggy forests; dim days on the foggy tundra, mud-holes from which the wild ducks rose in thousands; then the stunted hemlocks, then the forest again. And I do not even recall the moment when, at last, stumbling into the smooth path left by the Graham Glacier, we crawled through the mountain-wall, out of the unknown land, and once more into a world protected by the Lord Almighty.

A hunting-party of Elbon Indians brought us in to the post, and everybody was most kind—that I remember, just before going into several weeks of unpleasant delirium mercifully mitigated with unconsciousness.

Curiously enough, Professor Van Twiller was not very much battered, physically, for I had carried her for days, pickaback. But the awful experience had produced a shock which resulted in a nervous condition that lasted so long after she returned to New York that the wealthy and eminent specialist who attended her insisted upon taking her to the Riviera and marrying her. I sometimes wonder—but, as I have said, such reflections have no place in these austere pages.

However, anybody, I fancy, is at liberty to speculate upon the fate of the late Professor Smawl and William Spike, and upon the mules and the gentle dingue. Personally, I am convinced that the suggestive silhouettes I saw on that ghastly curtain of fog were cast by beatified beings in some earthly paradise—a mirage of bliss of which we caught but the colorless shadow-shapes floating ’twixt sea and sky.

At all events, neither Professor Smawl nor her William Spike ever returned; no exploring expedition has found a trace of mule or lady, of William or the dingue. The new expedition to be organized by Barnard College may penetrate still farther. I suppose that, when the time comes, I shall be expected to volunteer. But Professor Van Twiller is married, and William and Professor Smawl ought to be, and altogether, considering the mammoth and that gigantic and splendid apparition that bent from the zenith to the ocean and sent a tidal-wave rolling from the palm of one white hand—I say, taking all these various matters under consideration, I think I shall decide to remain in New York and continue writing for the scientific periodicals. Besides, the mortifying experience at the Paris Exposition has dampened even my perennially youthful enthusiasm. And as for the late expedition to Florida, Heaven knows I am ready to repeat it—nay, I am already forming a plan for the rescue—but though I am prepared to encounter any danger for the sake of my beloved superior, Professor Farrago, I do not feel inclined to commit indiscretions in order to pry into secrets which, as I regard it, concern Professor Smawl and William Spike alone.

But all this is, in a measure, premature. What I now have to relate is the recital of an eye-witness to that most astonishing scandal which occurred during the recent exposition in Paris.

IX

[Is the Ux Extinct?]

When the delegates were appointed to the International Scientific Congress at the Paris Exposition of 1900, how little did anybody imagine that the great conference would end in the most gigantic scandal that ever stirred two continents?

Yet, had it not been for the pair of American newspapers published in Paris, this scandal would never have been aired, for the continental press is so well muzzled that when it bites its teeth merely meet in the empty atmosphere with a discreet snap.

But to the Yankee nothing excepting the Monroe Doctrine is sacred, and the unsopped watch-dogs of the press bite right and left, unmuzzled. The biter bites—it is his profession—and that ends the affair; the bitee is bitten, and, in the deplorable argot of the hour, “it is up to him.”

So now that the scandal has been well aired and hung out to dry in the teeth of decency and the four winds, and as all the details have been cheerfully and grossly exaggerated, it is, perhaps, the proper moment for the truth to be written by the only person whose knowledge of all the facts in the affair entitles him to speak for himself as well as for those honorable ladies and gentlemen whose names and titles have been so mercilessly criticised.

These, then, are the simple facts:

The International Scientific Congress, now adjourned sine die, met at nine o’clock in the morning, May 3, 1900, in the Tasmanian Pavilion of the Paris Exposition. There were present the most famous scientists of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.

His Royal Highness the Crown-Prince of Monaco presided.

It is not necessary, now, to repeat the details of that preliminary meeting. It is sufficient to say that committees representing the various known sciences were named and appointed by the Prince of Monaco, who had been unanimously elected permanent chairman of the conference. It is the composition of a single committee that concerns us now, and that committee, representing the science which treats of bird life, was made up as follows:

Chairman—His Royal Highness the Crown-Prince of Monaco. Members—Sir Peter Grebe, Great Britain; Baron de Becasse, France; his Royal Highness King Christian, of Finland; the Countess d’Alzette, of Belgium; and I, from the United States, representing the Smithsonian Institution and the Bronx Park Zoological Society of New York.

This, then, was the composition of that now notorious ornithological committee, a modest, earnest, self-effacing little band of workers, bound together—in the beginning—by those ties of mutual respect and esteem which unite all laborers in the vineyard of science.

From the first meeting of our committee, science, the great leveller, left no artificial barriers of rank or title standing between us. We were enthusiasts in our love for ornithology; we found new inspiration in the democracy of our common interests.

As for me, I chatted with my fellows, feeling no restraint myself and perceiving none. The King of Finland and I discussed his latest monograph on the speckled titmouse, and I was glad to agree with the King in all his theories concerning the nesting habits of that important bird.

Sir Peter Grebe, a large, red gentleman in tweeds, read us some notes he had made on the domestic hen and her reasons for running ahead of a horse and wagon instead of stepping aside to let the disturbing vehicle pass.

The Crown-Prince of Monaco took issue with Sir Peter; so did the Baron de Becasse; and we were entertained by a friendly and marvellously interesting three-cornered dispute, shared in by three of the most profound thinkers of the century.

I shall never forget the brilliancy of that argument, nor the modest, good-humored retorts which gave us all a glimpse into depths of erudition which impressed us profoundly and set the seal on the bonds which held us so closely together.

Alas, that the seal should ever have been broken! Alas, that the glittering apple of discord should have been flung into our midst!—no, not flung, but gently rolled under our noses by the gloved fingers of the lovely Countess d’Alzette.

“Messieurs,” said the fair Countess, when all present, excepting she and I, had touched upon or indicated the subjects which they had prepared to present to the congress—“messieurs mes confrères, I have been requested by our distinguished chairman, the Crown-Prince of Monaco, to submit to your judgment the subject which, by favor of the King of the Belgians, I have prepared to present to the International Scientific Congress.”

She made a pretty courtesy as she named her own sovereign, and we all rose out of respect to that most austere and moral ruler the King of Belgium.

“But,” she said, with a charming smile of depreciation, “I am very, very much afraid that the subject which I have chosen may not meet with your approval, gentlemen.”

She stood there in her dainty Parisian gown and bonnet, shaking her pretty head uncertainly, a smile on her lips, her small, gloved fingers interlocked.

“Oh, I know how dreadful it would be if this great congress should be compelled to listen to any hoax like that which Monsieur de Rougemont imposed on the British Royal Society,” she said, gravely; “and because the subject of my paper is as strange as the strangest phenomenon alleged to have been noted by Monsieur de Rougemont, I hesitate—”

She glanced at the silent listeners around her. Sir Peter’s red face had hardened; the King of Finland frowned slightly; the Crown-Prince of Monaco and Baron de Becasse wore anxious smiles. But when her violet eyes met mine I gave her a glance of encouragement, and that glance, I am forced to confess, was not dictated by scientific approval, but by something that never entirely dries up in the mustiest and dustiest of savants—the old Adam implanted in us all.

Now, I knew perfectly well what her subject must be; so did every man present. For it was no secret that his Majesty of Belgium had been swindled by some natives in Tasmania, and had paid a very large sum of money for a skin of that gigantic bird, the ux, which has been so often reported to exist among the inaccessible peaks of the Tasmanian Mountains. Needless, perhaps, to say that the skin proved a fraud, being nothing more than a Barnum contrivance made up out of the skins of a dozen ostriches and cassowaries, and most cleverly put together by Chinese workmen; at least, such was the report made on it by Sir Peter Grebe, who had been sent by the British Society to Antwerp to examine the acquisition. Needless, also, perhaps, to say that King Leopold, of Belgium, stoutly maintained that the skin of the ux was genuine from beak to claw.

For six months there had been a most serious difference of opinion among European ornithologists concerning the famous ux in the Antwerp Museum; and this difference had promised to result in an open quarrel between a few Belgian savants on one side and-all Europe and Great Britain on the other.

Scientists have a deep—rooted horror of anything that touches on charlatanism; the taint of trickery not only alarms them, but drives them away from any suspicious subject, and usually ruins, scientifically speaking, the person who has introduced the subject for discussion.

Therefore, it took no little courage for the Countess d’Alzette to touch, with her dainty gloves, a subject which every scientist in Europe, with scarcely an exception, had pronounced fraudulent and unworthy of investigation. And to bring it before the great International Congress required more courage still; for the person who could face, in executive session, the most brilliant intellects in the world, and openly profess faith in a Barnumized bird skin, either had no scientific reputation to lose or was possessed of a bravery far above that of the savants who composed the audience.

Now, when the pretty Countess caught a flash of encouragement in my glance she turned rosy with gratification and surprise. Clearly, she had not expected to find a single ally in the entire congress. Her quick smile of gratitude touched me, and made me ashamed, too, for I had encouraged her out of the pure love of mischief, hoping to hear the whole matter threshed before the congress and so have it settled once for all. It was a thoughtless thing to do on my part. I should have remembered the consequences to the Countess if it were proven that she had been championing a fraud. The ruffled dignity of the congress would never forgive her; her scientific career would practically be at an end, because her theories and observations could no longer command respect or even the attention of those who knew that she herself had once been deceived by a palpable fraud.

I looked at her guiltily, already ashamed of myself for encouraging her to her destruction. How lovely and innocent she appeared, standing there reading her notes in a low, clear voice, fresh as a child’s, with now and then a delicious upward sweep of her long, dark lashes.

With a start I came to my senses and bestowed a pinch on myself. This was neither the time nor the place to sentimentalize over a girlish beauty whose small, Parisian head was crammed full of foolish, brave theories concerning an imposition which her aged sovereign had been unable to detect.

I saw the gathering frown on the King of Finland’s dark face; I saw Sir Peter Grebe grow redder and redder, and press his thick lips together to control the angry “Bosh!” which need not have been uttered to have been understood. The Baron de Becasse wore a painfully neutral smile, which froze his face into a quaint gargoyle; the Crown-Prince of Monaco looked at his polished fingernails with a startled yet abstracted resignation. Clearly the young Countess had not a sympathizer in the committee.

Something—perhaps it was the latent chivalry which exists imbedded in us all, perhaps it was pity, perhaps a glimmering dawn of belief in the ux skin—set my thoughts working very quickly.

The Countess d’Alzette finished her notes, then glanced around with a deprecating smile, which died out on her lips when she perceived the silent and stony hostility of her fellow-scientists. A quick expression of alarm came into her lovely eyes. Would they vote against giving her a hearing before the congress? It required a unanimous vote to reject a subject. She turned her eyes on me.

I rose, red as fire, my head humming with a chaos of ideas all disordered and vague, yet whirling along in a single, resistless current. I had come to the congress prepared to deliver a monograph on the great auk; but now the subject went overboard as the birds themselves had, and I found myself pleading with the committee to give the Countess a hearing on the ux.

“Why not?” I exclaimed, warmly. “It is established beyond question that the ux does exist in Tasmania. Wallace saw several uxen, through his telescope, walking about upon the inaccessible heights of the Tasmanian Mountains. Darwin acknowledged that the bird exists; Professor Farrago has published a pamphlet containing an accumulation of all data bearing upon the ux. Why should not Madame la Comtesse be heard by the entire congress?”

I looked at Sir Peter Grebe.

“Have you seen this alleged bird skin in the Antwerp Museum?” he asked, perspiring with indignation.

“Yes, I have,” said I. “It has been patched up, but how are we to know that the skin did not require patching? I have not found that ostrich skin has been used. It is true that the Tasmanians may have shot the bird to pieces and mended the skin with bits of cassowary hide here and there. But the greater part of the skin, and the beak and claws, are, in my estimation, well worth the serious attention of savants. To pronounce them fraudulent is, in my opinion, rash and premature.”

I mopped my brow; I was in for it now. I had thrown in my reputation with the reputation of the Countess.

The displeasure and astonishment of my confrères was unmistakable. In the midst of a strained silence I moved that a vote be taken upon the advisability of a hearing before the congress on the subject of the ux. After a pause the young Countess, pale and determined, seconded my motion. The result of the balloting was a foregone conclusion; the Countess had one vote—she herself refraining from voting—and the subject was entered on the committee-book as acceptable and a date set for the hearing before the International Congress.

The effect of this vote on our little committee was most marked. Constraint took the place of cordiality, polite reserve replaced that guileless and open-hearted courtesy with which our proceedings had begun.

With icy politeness, the Crown-Prince of Monaco asked me to state the subject of the paper I proposed to read before the congress, and I replied quietly that, as I was partly responsible for advocating the discussion of the ux, I proposed to associate myself with the Countess d’Alzette in that matter—if Madame la Comtesse would accept the offer of a brother savant.

“Indeed I will,” she said, impulsively, her blue eyes soft with gratitude.

“Very well,” observed Sir Peter Grebe, swallowing his indignation and waddling off towards the door; “I shall resign my position on this committee—yes, I will, I tell you!”—as the King of Finland laid a fatherly hand on Sir Peter’s sleeve—“I’ll not be made responsible for this damn—”

He choked, sputtered, then bowed to the horrified Countess, asking pardon, and declaring that he yielded to nobody in respect for the gentler sex. And he retired with the Baron de Becasse.

But out in the hallway I heard him explode. “Confound it! This is no place for petticoats, Baron! And as for that Yankee ornithologist, he’s hung himself with the Countess’s corset—string—yes, he has! Don’t tell me, Baron! The young idiot was all right until the Countess looked at him, I tell you. Gad! how she crumpled him up with those blue eyes of hers! What the devil do women come into such committees for? Eh? It’s an outrage, I tell you! Why, the whole world will jeer at us if we sit and listen to her monograph on that fraudulent bird!”

The young Countess, who was writing near the window, could not have heard this outburst; but I heard it, and so did King Christian and the Crown-Prince of Monaco.

“Lord,” thought I, “the Countess and I are in the frying-pan this time. I’ll do what I can to keep us both out of the fire.”

When the King and the Crown-Prince had made their adieux to the Countess, and she had responded, pale and serious, they came over to where I was standing, looking out on the Seine.

“Though we must differ from you,” said the King, kindly, “we wish you all success in this dangerous undertaking.”

I thanked him.

“You are a young man to risk a reputation already established,” remarked the Crown-Prince, then added: “You are braver than I. Ridicule is a barrier to all knowledge, and, though we know that, we seekers after truth always bring up short at that barrier and dismount, not daring to put our hobbies to the fence.”

“One can but come a cropper,” said I.

“And risk staking our hobbies? No, no, that would make us ridiculous; and ridicule kills in Europe.”

“It’s somewhat deadly in America, too,” I said, smiling.

“The more honor to you,” said the Crown-Prince, gravely.

“Oh, I am not the only one,” I answered, lightly. “There is my confrère, Professor Hyssop, who studies apparitions and braves a contempt and ridicule which none of us would dare challenge. We Yankees are learning slowly. Some day we will find the lost key to the future while Europe is sneering at those who are trying to pick the lock.”

When King Christian, of Finland, and the Crown-Prince of Monaco had taken their hats and sticks and departed, I glanced across the room at the young Countess, who was now working rapidly on a type-writer, apparently quite oblivious of my presence.

I looked out of the window again, and my gaze wandered over the exposition grounds. Gilt and scarlet and azure the palaces rose in every direction, under a wilderness of fluttering flags. Towers, minarets, turrets, golden spires cut the blue sky; in the west the gaunt Eiffel Tower sprawled across the glittering Esplanade; behind it rose the solid golden dome of the Emperor’s tomb, gilded once more by the Almighty’s sun, to amuse the living rabble while the dead slumbered in his imperial crypt, himself now but a relic for the amusement of the people whom he had despised. O tempora! O mores! O Napoleon!

Down under my window, in the asphalted court, the King of Finland was entering his beautiful victoria. An adjutant, wearing a cocked hat and brilliant uniform, mounted the box beside the green-and-gold coachman; the two postilions straightened up in their saddles; the four horses danced. Then, when the Crown-Prince of Monaco had taken a seat beside the King, the carriage rolled away, and far down the quay I watched it until the flutter of the green-and-white plumes in the adjutant’s cocked hat was all I could see of vanishing royalty.

I was still musing there by the window, listening to the click and ringing of the type-writer, when I suddenly became aware that the clicking had ceased, and, turning, I saw the young Countess standing beside me.

“Thank you for your chivalrous impulse to help me,” she said, frankly, holding out her bare hand.

I bent over it.

“I had not realized how desperate my case was,” she said, with a smile. “I supposed that they would at least give me a hearing. How can I thank you for your brave vote in my favor?”

“By giving me your confidence in this matter,” said I, gravely. “If we are to win, we must work together and work hard, madame. We are entering a struggle, not only to prove the genuineness of a bird skin and the existence of a bird which neither of us has ever seen, but also a struggle which will either make us famous forever or render it impossible for either of us ever again to face a scientific audience.”

“I know it,” she said, quietly “And I understand all the better how gallant a gentleman I have had the fortune to enlist in my cause. Believe me, had I not absolute confidence in my ability to prove the existence of the ux I should not, selfish as I am, have accepted your chivalrous offer to stand or fall with me.”

The subtle emotion in her voice touched a responsive chord in me. I looked at her earnestly; she raised her beautiful eyes to mine.

“Will you help me?” she asked.

Would I help her? Faith, I’d pass the balance of my life turning flip-flaps to please her. I did not attempt to undeceive myself; I realized that the lightning had struck me—that I was desperately in love with the young Countess from the tip of her bonnet to the toe of her small, polished shoe. I was curiously cool about it, too, although my heart gave a thump that nigh choked me, and I felt myself going red from temple to chin.

If the Countess d’Alzette noticed it she gave no sign, unless the pink tint under her eyes, deepening, was a subtle signal of understanding to the signal in my eyes.

“Suppose,” she said, “that I failed, before the congress, to prove my theory? Suppose my investigations resulted in the exposure of a fraud and my name was held up to ridicule before all Europe? What would become of you, monsieur?”

I was silent.

“You are already celebrated as the discoverer of the mammoth and the great auk,” she persisted. “You are young, enthusiastic, renowned, and you have a future before you that anybody in the world might envy.”

I said nothing.

“And yet,” she said, softly, “you risk all because you will not leave a young woman friendless among her confrères. It is not wise, monsieur; it is gallant and generous and impulsive, but it is not wisdom. Don Quixote rides no more in Europe, my friend.”

“He stays at home—seventy million of him—in America,” said I.

After a moment she said, “I believe you, monsieur.”

“It is true enough,” I said, with a laugh. “We are the only people who tilt at windmills these days—we and our cousins, the British, who taught us.”

I bowed gayly, and added:

“With your colors to wear, I shall have the honor of breaking a lance against the biggest windmill in the world.”

“You mean the Citadel of Science,” she said, smiling.

“And its rock-ribbed respectability,” I replied.

She looked at me thoughtfully, rolling and unrolling the scroll in her hands. Then she sighed, smiled, and brightened, handing me the scroll.

“Read it carefully,” she said; “it is an outline of the policy I suggest that we follow. You will be surprised at some of the statements. Yet every word is the truth. And, monsieur, your reward for the devotion you have offered will be no greater than you deserve, when you find yourself doubly famous for our joint monograph on the ux. Without your vote in the committee I should have been denied a hearing, even though I produced proofs to support my theory. I appreciate that; I do most truly appreciate the courage which prompted you to defend a woman at the risk of your own ruin. Come to me this evening at nine. I hold for you in store a surprise and pleasure which you do not dream of.”

“Ah, but I do,” I said, slowly, under the spell of her delicate beauty and enthusiasm.

“How can you?” she said, laughing. “You don’t know what awaits you at nine this evening?”

“You,” I said, fascinated.

The color swept her face; she dropped me a deep courtesy.

“At nine, then,” she said. “No. 8 Rue d’Alouette.”

I bowed, took my hat, gloves, and stick, and attended her to her carriage below.

Long after the blue-and-black victoria had whirled away down the crowded quay I stood looking after it, mazed in the web of that ancient enchantment whose spell fell over the first man in Eden, and whose sorcery shall not fail till the last man returns his soul.

X

I lunched at my lodgings on the Quai Malthus, and I had but little appetite, having fed upon such an unexpected variety of emotions during the morning.

Now, although I was already heels over head in love, I do not believe that loss of appetite was the result of that alone. I was slowly beginning to realize what my recent attitude might cost me, not only in an utter collapse of my scientific career, and the consequent material ruin which was likely to follow, but in the loss of all my friends at home. The Zoological Society of Bronx Park and the Smithsonian Institution of Washington had sent me as their trusted delegate, leaving it entirely to me to choose the subject on which I was to speak before the International Congress. What, then, would be their attitude when they learned that I had chosen to uphold the dangerous theory of the existence of the ux.

Would they repudiate me and send another delegate to replace me? Would they merely wash their hands of me and let me go to my own destruction?

“I will know soon enough,” thought I, “for this morning’s proceedings will have been cabled to New York ere now, and read at the breakfast-tables of every old, moss-grown naturalist in America before I see the Countess d’Alzette this evening.” And I drew from my pocket the roll of paper which she had given me, and, lighting a cigar, lay back in my chair to read it.

The manuscript had been beautifully type-written, and I had no trouble in following her brief, clear account of the circumstances under which the notorious ux-skin had been obtained. As for the story itself, it was somewhat fishy, but I manfully swallowed my growing nervousness and comforted myself with the belief of Darwin in the existence of the ux, and the subsequent testimony of Wallace, who simply stated what he had seen through his telescope, and then left it to others to identify the enormous birds he described as he had observed them stalking about on the snowy peaks of the Tasmanian Alps.

My own knowledge of the ux was confined to a single circumstance. When, in 1897, I had gone to Tasmania with Professor Farrago, to make a report on the availability of the so-called “Tasmanian devil,” as a substitute for the mongoose in the West Indies, I of course heard a great deal of talk among the natives concerning the birds which they affirmed haunted the summits of the mountains.

Our time in Tasmania was too limited to admit of an exploration then. But although we were perfectly aware that the summits of the Tasmanian Alps are inaccessible, we certainly should have attempted to gain them had not the time set for our departure arrived before we had completed the investigation for which we were sent.

One relic, however, I carried away with me. It was a single greenish bronzed feather, found high up in the mountains by a native, and sold to me for a somewhat large sum of money.

Darwin believed the ux to be covered with greenish plumage; Wallace was too far away to observe the color of the great birds; but all the natives of Tasmania unite in affirming that the plumage of the ux is green.

It was not only the color of this feather that made me an eager purchaser, it was the extraordinary length and size. I knew of no living bird large enough to wear such a feather. As for the color, that might have been tampered with before I bought it, and, indeed, testing it later, I found on the fronds traces of sulphate of copper. But the same thing has been found in the feathers of certain birds whose color is metallic green, and it has been proven that such birds pick up and swallow shining bits of copper pyrites.

Why should not the ux do the same thing?

Still, my only reason for believing in the existence of the bird was this single feather. I had easily proved that it belonged to no known species of bird. I also proved it to be similar to the tail-feathers of the ux-skin in Antwerp. But the feathers on the Antwerp specimen were gray, and the longest of them was but three feet in length, while my huge, bronze-green feather measured eleven feet from tip to tip.

One might account for it supposing the Antwerp skin to be that of a young bird, or of a moulting bird, or perhaps of a different sex from the bird whose feather I had secured.

Still, these ideas were not proven. Nothing concerning the birds had been proven. I had but a single fact to lean on, and that was that the feather I possessed could not have belonged to any known species of bird. Nobody but myself knew of the existence of this feather. And now I meant to cable to Bronx Park for it, and to place this evidence at the disposal of the beautiful Countess d’Alzette.

My cigar had gone out, as I sat musing, and I relighted it and resumed my reading of the type-written notes, lazily, even a trifle sceptically, for all the evidence that she had been able to collect to substantiate her theory of the existence of the ux was not half as important as the evidence I was to produce in the shape of that enormous green feather.

I came to the last paragraph, smoking serenely, and leaning back comfortably, one leg crossed over the other. Then, suddenly, my attention became riveted on the words under my eyes. Could I have read them aright? Could I believe what I read in ever-growing astonishment which culminated in an excitement that stirred the very hair on my head?

“The ux exists. There is no longer room for doubt. Ocular proof I can now offer in the shape of five living eggs of this gigantic bird. All measures have been taken to hatch these eggs; they are now in the vast incubator. It is my plan to have them hatch, one by one, under the very eyes of the International Congress. It will be the greatest triumph that science has witnessed since the discovery of the New World.

[Signed] “Susanne d’Alzette.”

“Either,” I cried out, in uncontrollable excitement—“either that girl is mad or she is the cleverest woman on earth.”

After a moment I added:

“In either event I am going to marry her.”

XI

That evening, a few minutes before nine o’clock, I descended from a cab in front of No. 8 Rue d’Alouette, and was ushered into a pretty reception-room by an irreproachable servant, who disappeared directly with my card.

In a few moments the young Countess came in, exquisite in her silvery dinner-gown, eyes bright, white arms extended in a charming, impulsive welcome. The touch of her silky fingers thrilled me; I was dumb under the enchantment of her beauty; and I think she understood my silence, for her blue eyes became troubled and the happy parting of her lips changed to a pensive curve.

Presently I began to tell her about my bronzed-green feather; at my first word she looked up brightly, almost gratefully, I fancied; and in another moment we were deep in eager discussion of the subject which had first drawn us together.

What evidence I possessed to sustain our theory concerning the existence of the ux I hastened to reveal; then, heart beating excitedly, I asked her about the eggs and where they were at present, and whether she believed it possible to bring them to Paris—all these questions in the same breath—which brought a happy light into her eyes and a delicious ripple of laughter to her lips.

“Why, of course it is possible to bring the eggs here,” she cried. “Am I sure? Parbleu! The eggs are already here, monsieur!”

“Here!” I exclaimed. “In Paris?”

“In Paris? Mais oui; and in my own house—this very house, monsieur. Come, you shall behold them with your own eyes!”

Her eyes were brilliant with excitement; impulsively she stretched out her rosy hand. I took it; and she led me quickly back through the drawing-room, through the dining-room, across the butler’s pantry, and into a long, dark hallway. We were almost running now—I keeping tight hold of her soft little hand, she, raising her gown a trifle, hurrying down the hallway, silken petticoats rustling like a silk banner in the wind. A turn to the right brought us to the cellar-stairs; down we hastened, and then across the cemented floor towards a long, glass-fronted shelf, pierced with steam-pipes.

“A match,” she whispered, breathlessly.

I struck a wax match and touched it to the gas-burner overhead.

Never, never can I forget what that flood of gas-light revealed. In a row stood five large, glass-mounted incubators; behind the glass doors lay, in dormant majesty, five enormous eggs. The eggs were pale-green—lighter, somewhat, than robins’ eggs, but not as pale as herons’ eggs. Each egg appeared to be larger than a large hogs-head, and was partly embedded in bales of cotton-wool.

Five little silver thermometers inside the glass doors indicated a temperature of 95° Fahrenheit. I noticed that there was an automatic arrangement connected with the pipes which regulated the temperature.

I was too deeply moved for words. Speech seemed superfluous as we stood there, hand in hand, contemplating those gigantic, pale-green eggs.

There is something in a silent egg which moves one’s deeper emotions—something solemn in its embryotic inertia, something awesome in its featureless immobility.

I know of nothing on earth which is so totally lacking in expression as an egg. The great desert Sphinx, brooding through its veil of sand, has not that tremendous and meaningless dignity which wraps the colorless oval effort of a single domestic hen.

I held the hand of the young Countess very tightly. Her fingers closed slightly.

Then and there, in the solemn presence of those emotionless eggs, I placed my arm around her supple waist and kissed her.

She said nothing. Presently she stooped to observe the thermometer. Naturally, it registered 95° Fahrenheit.

“Susanne,” I said, softly.

“Oh, we must go up-stairs,” she whispered, breathlessly; and, picking up her silken skirts, she fled up the cellar-stairs.

I turned out the gas, with that instinct of economy which early wastefulness has implanted in me, and followed the Countess Suzanne through the suite of rooms and into the small reception-hall where she had first received me.

She was sitting on a low divan, head bent, slowly turning a sapphire ring on her finger, round and round.

I looked at her romantically, and then—

“Please don’t,” she said.

The correct reply to this is:

“Why not?”—very tenderly spoken.

“Because,” she replied, which was also the correct and regular answer.

“Suzanne,” I said, slowly and passionately.

She turned the sapphire ring on her finger. Presently she tired of this, so I lifted her passive hand very gently and continued turning the sapphire ring on her finger, slowly, to harmonize with the cadence of our unspoken thoughts.

Towards midnight I went home, walking with great care through a new street in Paris, paved exclusively with rose-colored blocks of air.

XII

At nine o’clock in the evening, July 31, 1900, the International Congress was to assemble in the great lecture-hall of the Belgian Scientific Pavilion, which adjourned the Tasmanian Pavilion, to hear the Countess Suzanne d’Alzette read her paper on the ux.

That morning the Countess and I, with five furniture vans, had transported the five great incubators to the platform of the lecture-hall, and had engaged an army of plumbers and gas-fitters to make the steam-heating connections necessary to maintain in the incubators a temperature of 100° Fahrenheit.

A heavy green curtain hid the stage from the body of the lecture-hall. Behind this curtain the five enormous eggs reposed, each in its incubator.

The Countess Suzanne was excited and calm by turns, her cheeks were pink, her lips scarlet, her eyes bright as blue planets at midnight.

Without faltering she rehearsed her discourse before me, reading from her type-written manuscript in a clear voice, in which I could scarcely discern a tremor. Then we went through the dumb show of exhibiting the uxen eggs to a frantically applauding audience; she responded to countless supposititious encores, I leading her out repeatedly before the green curtain to face the great, damp, darkened auditorium.

Then, in response to repeated imaginary recalls, she rehearsed the extemporaneous speech, thanking the distinguished audience for their patience in listening to an unknown confrère, and confessing her obligations to me (here I appeared and bowed in self-abasement) for my faith in her and my aid in securing for her a public hearing before the most highly educated audience in the world.

After that we retired behind the curtain to sit on an empty box and eat sandwiches and watch the last lingering plumbers pasting up the steam connections with a pot of molten lead.

The plumbers were Americans, brought to Paris to make repairs on the American buildings during the exposition, and we conversed with them affably as they pottered about, plumber-like, poking under the flooring with lighted candles, rubbing their thumbs up and down musty old pipes, and prying up planks in dark corners.

They informed us that they were union men and that they hoped we were too. And I replied that union was certainly my ultimate purpose, at which the young Countess smiled dreamily at vacancy.

We did not dare leave the incubators. The plumbers lingered on, hour after hour, while we sat and watched the little silver thermometers, and waited.

It was time for the Countess Suzanne to dress, and still the plumbers had not finished; so I sent a messenger for her maid, to bring her trunk to the lecture-hall, and I despatched another messenger to my lodgings for my evening clothes and fresh linen.

There were several dressing-rooms off the stage. Here, about six o’clock, the Countess retired with her maid, to dress, leaving me to watch the plumbers and the thermometers.

When the Countess Suzanne returned, radiant and lovely in an evening gown of black lace, I gave her the roses I had brought for her and hurried off to dress in my turn, leaving her to watch the thermometers.

I was not absent more than half an hour, but when I returned I found the Countess anxiously conversing with the plumbers and pointing despairingly at the thermometers, which now registered only 95°.

“You must keep up the temperature!” I said. “Those eggs are due to hatch within a few hours. What’s the trouble with the heat?”

The plumber did not know, but thought the connections were defective.

“But that’s why we called you in!” exclaimed the Countess. “Can’t you fix things securely?”

“Oh, we’ll fix things, lady,” replied the plumber, condescendingly, and he ambled away to rub his thumb up and down a pipe.

As we alone were unable to move and handle the enormous eggs, the Countess, whose sweet character was a stranger to vindictiveness or petty resentment, had written to the members of the ornithological committee, revealing the marvellous fortune which had crowned her efforts in the search for evidence to sustain her theory concerning the ux, and inviting these gentlemen to aid her in displaying the great eggs to the assembled congress.

This she had done the night previous. Every one of the gentlemen invited had come post-haste to her “hotel,” to view the eggs with their own sceptical and astonished eyes; and the fair young Countess and I tasted our first triumph in her cellar, whither we conducted Sir Peter Grebe, the Crown-Prince of Monaco, Baron de Becasse, and his Majesty King Christian of Finland.

Scepticism and incredulity gave place to excitement and unbounded enthusiasm. The old King embraced the Countess; Baron de Becasse attempted to kiss me; Sir Peter Grebe made a handsome apology for his folly and vowed that he would do open penance for his sins. The poor Crown-Prince, who was of a nervous temperament, sat on the cellar-stairs and wept like a child.

His grief at his own pig-headedness touched us all profoundly.

So it happened that these gentlemen were coming to-night to give their aid to us in moving the priceless eggs, and lend their countenance and enthusiastic support to the young Countess in her maiden effort.

Sir Peter Grebe arrived first, all covered with orders and decorations, and greeted us affectionately, calling the Countess the “sweetest lass in France,” and me his undutiful Yankee cousin who had landed feet foremost at the expense of the British Empire.

The King of Finland, the Crown-Prince, and Baron de Becasse arrived together, a composite mass of medals, sashes, and academy palms. To see them moving boxes about, straightening chairs, and pulling out rugs reminded me of those golden-embroidered gentlemen who run out into the arena and roll up carpets after the acrobats have finished their turn in the Nouveau Cirque.

I was aiding the King of Finland to move a heavy keg of nails, when the Countess called out to me in alarm, saying that the thermometers had dropped to 80° Fahrenheit.

I spoke sharply to the plumbers, who were standing in a circle behind the dressing-rooms; but they answered sullenly that they could do no more work that day.

Indignant and alarmed, I ordered them to come out to the stage, and, after some hesitation, they filed out, a sulky, silent lot of workmen, with their tools already gathered up and tied in their kits. At once I noticed that a new man had appeared among them—a red-faced, stocky man wearing a frock-coat and a shiny silk hat.

“Who is the master-workman here?” I asked.

“I am,” said a man in blue overalls.

“Well,” said I, “why don’t you fix those steam-fittings?”

There was a silence. The man in the silk hat smirked.

“Well?” said I.

“Come, come, that’s all right,” said the man in the silk hat. “These men know their business without you tellin’ them.”

“Who are you?” I demanded, sharply.

“Oh, I’m just a walkin’ delegate,” he replied, with a sneer. “There’s a strike in New York and I come over here to tie this here exposition up. See?”

“You mean to say you won’t let these men finish their work?” I asked, thunderstruck.

“That’s about it, young man,” he said, coolly.

Furious, I glanced at my watch, then at the thermometers, which now registered only 75°. Already I could hear the first-comers of the audience arriving in the body of the hall. Already a stage-hand was turning up the footlights and dragging chairs and tables hither and thither.

“What will you take to stay and attend to those steam-pipes?” I demanded, desperately.

“It can’t be done nohow,” observed the man in the silk hat. “That New York strike is good for a month yet.” Then, turning to the workmen, he nodded and, to my horror, the whole gang filed out after him, turning deaf ears to my entreaties and threats.

There was a deathly silence, then Sir Peter exploded into a vivid shower of words. The Countess, pale as a ghost, gave me a heart-breaking look. The Crown-Prince wept.

“Great Heaven!” I cried; “the thermometers have fallen to 70°!”

The King of Finland sat down on a chair and pressed his hands over his eyes. Baron de Becasse ran round and round, uttering subdued and plaintive screams; Sir Peter swore steadily.

“Gentlemen,” I cried, desperately, “we must save those eggs! They are on the very eve of hatching! Who will volunteer?”

“To do what?” moaned the Crown-Prince.

“I’ll show you,” I exclaimed, running to the incubators and beckoning to the Baron to aid me.

In a moment we had rolled out the great egg, made a nest on the stage floor with the bales of cotton-wool, and placed the egg in it. One after another we rolled out the remaining eggs, building for each its nest of cotton; and at last the five enormous eggs lay there in a row behind the green curtain.

“Now,” said I, excitedly, to the King, “you must get up on that egg and try to keep it warm.”

The King began to protest, but I would take no denial, and presently his Majesty was perched up on the great egg, gazing foolishly about at the others, who were now all climbing up on their allotted eggs.

“Great Heaven!” muttered the King, as Sir Peter settled down comfortably on his egg, “I am willing to give life and fortune for the sake of science, but I can’t bear to hatch out eggs like a bird!”

The Crown-Prince was now sitting patiently beside the Baron de Becasse.

“I feel in my bones,” he murmured, “that I’m about to hatch something. Can’t you hear a tapping on the shell of your egg, Baron?”

“Parbleu!” replied the Baron. “The shell is moving under me.”

It certainly was; for, the next moment, the Baron fell into his egg with a crash and a muffled shriek, and floundered out, dripping, yellow as a canary.

“N’importe!” he cried, excitedly. “Allons! Save the eggs! Hurrah! Vive la science!” And he scrambled up on the fourth egg and sat there, arms folded, sublime courage transfiguring him from head to foot.

We all gave him a cheer, which was hushed as the stage-manager ran in, warning us that the audience was already assembled and in place.

“You’re not going to raise the curtain while we’re sitting, are you?” demanded the King of Finland, anxiously.

“No, no,” I said; “sit tight, your Majesty. Courage, gentlemen! Our vindication is at hand!”

The Countess glanced at me with startled eyes; I took her hand, saluted it respectfully, and then quietly led her before the curtain, facing an ocean of upturned faces across the flaring footlights.

She stood a moment to acknowledge the somewhat ragged applause, a calm smile on her lips. All her courage had returned; I saw that at once.

Very quietly she touched her lips to the eau-sucrée, laid her manuscript on the table, raised her beautiful head, and began:

“That the ux is a living bird I am here before you to prove—”

A sharp report behind the curtain drowned her voice. She paled; the audience rose amid cries of excitement.

“What was it?” she asked, faintly.

“Sir Peter has hatched out his egg,” I whispered. “Hark! There goes another egg!” And I ran behind the curtain.

Such a scene as I beheld was never dreamed of on land or sea. Two enormous young uxen, all over gigantic pin-feathers, were wandering stupidly about. Mounted on one was Sir Peter Grebe, eyes starting from his apoplectic visage; on the other, clinging to the bird’s neck, hung the Baron de Becasse.

Before I could move, the two remaining eggs burst, and a pair of huge, scrawny fledglings rose among the débris, bearing off on their backs the King and Crown-Prince.

“Help!” said the King of Finland, faintly. “I’m falling off!”

I sprang to his aid, but tripped on the curtain-spring. The next instant the green curtain shot up, and there, revealed to that vast and distinguished audience, roamed four enormous chicks, bearing on their backs the most respected and exclusive aristocracy of Europe.

The Countess Suzanne turned with a little shriek of horror, then sat down in her chair, laid her lovely head on the table, and very quietly fainted away, unconscious of the frantic cheers which went roaring to the roof.

•      •      •      •      •      •

This, then, is the true history of the famous exposition scandal. And, as I have said, had it not been for the presence in that audience of two American reporters nobody would have known what all the world now knows—nobody would have read of the marvellous feats of bareback riding indulged in by the King of Finland—nobody would have read how Sir Peter Grebe steered his mount safely past the footlights only to come to grief over the prompter’s box.

But this is scandal. And, as for the charming Countess Suzanne d’Alzette, the public has heard all that it is entitled to hear, and much that it is not entitled to hear.

However, on second thoughts, perhaps the public is entitled to hear a little more. I will therefore say this much—the shock of astonishment which stunned me when the curtain flew up, revealing the King-bestridden uxen, was nothing to the awful blow which smote me when the Count d’Alzette leaped from the orchestra, over the footlights, and bore away with him the fainting form of his wife, the lovely Countess d’Alzette.

I sometimes wonder—but, as I have repeatedly observed, this dull and pedantic narrative of fact is no vehicle for sentimental soliloquy. It is, then, merely sufficient to say that I took the earliest steamer for kinder shores, spurred on to haste by a venomous cable-gram from the Smithsonian, repudiating me, and by another from Bronx Park, ordering me to spend the winter in some inexpensive, poisonous, and unobtrusive spot, and make a collection of isopods. The island of Java appeared to me to be as poisonously unobtrusive and inexpensive a region as I had ever heard of; a steamer sailed from Antwerp for Batavia in twenty-four hours. Therefore, as I say, I took the night-train for Brussels, and the steamer from Antwerp the following evening.

Of my uneventful voyage, of the happy and successful quest, there is little to relate. The Javanese are frolicsome and hospitable. There was a girl there with features that were as delicate as though chiselled out of palest amber; and I remember she wore a most wonderful jewelled, helmet-like head-dress, and jingling bangles on her ankles, and when she danced she made most graceful and poetic gestures with her supple wrists—but that has nothing to do with isopods, absolutely nothing.

Letters from home came occasionally. Professor Farrago had returned to the Bronx and had been re-elected to the high office he had so nobly held when I first became associated with him.

Through his kindness and by his advice I remained for several years in the Far East, until a letter from him arrived recalling me and also announcing his own hurried and sudden departure for Florida. He also mentioned my promotion to the office of subcurator of department; so I started on my homeward voyage very much pleased with the world, and arrived in New York on April 1, 1904, ready for a rest to which I believed myself entitled. And the first thing that they handed me was a letter from Professor Farrago, summoning me South.

XIII

[What Is the Sphyx?]

The letter that started me—I was going to say startled me, but only imaginative people are startled—the letter, then, that started me from Bronx Park to the South I print without the permission of my superior, Professor Farrago. I have not obtained his permission, for the somewhat exciting reason that nobody knows where he is. Publicity being now recognized as the annihilator of mysteries, a benevolent purpose alone inspires me to publish a letter so strange, so pathetically remarkable, in view of what has recently occurred.

As I say, I had only just returned from Java with a valuable collection of undescribed isopods—an order of edriophthalmous crustaceans with seven free thoracic somites furnished with fourteen legs—and I beg my reader’s pardon, but my reader will see the necessity for the author’s absolute accuracy in insisting on detail, because the story that follows is a dangerous story for a scientist to tell, in view of the vast amount of nonsense and fiction in circulation masquerading as stories of scientific adventure.

I was, therefore, anticipating a delightful summer’s work with pen and microscope, when on April 1st I received the following extraordinary letter from Professor Farrago:

In Camp, Little Sprite Lake,
Everglades, Florida,
March 15, 1902.

My Dear Mr. Gilland,—On receipt of this communication you will immediately secure for me the following articles:

One complete outfit of woman’s clothing.
One camera.
One light steel cage, large enough for you to stand in.
One stenographer (male sex).
One five-pound steel tank, with siphon and hose attachment.
One rifle and ammunition.
Three ounces rosium oxyde.
One ounce chlorate strontium.

You will then, within twenty-four hours, set out with the stenographer and the supplies mentioned and join me in camp on Little Sprite Lake. This order is formal and admits of no delay. You will appreciate the necessity of absolute and unquestioning obedience when I tell you that I am practically on the brink of the most astonishing discovery recorded in natural history since Monsieur Zani discovered the purple-spotted zoombok in Nyanza; and that I depend upon you and your zeal and fidelity for success.

I dare not, lest my letter fall into unscrupulous hands, convey to you more than a hint of what lies before us in these uncharted solitudes of the Everglades.

You must read between the lines when I say that because one can see through a sheet of glass, the glass is none the less solid and palpable. One can see through it—if that is also seeing it; but one can nevertheless hold it and feel it and receive from it sensations of cold or heat according to its temperature.

Certain jellyfish are absolutely transparent when in the water, and one can only know of their presence by accidental contact, not by sight.

Have you ever thought that possibly there might exist larger and more highly organized creatures transparent to eyesight, yet palpable to touch?

Little Sprite Lake is the jumping-off place; beyond lie the Everglades, the outskirts of which are haunted by the Seminoles, the interior of which have never been visited by man, as far as we know.

As you are aware, no general survey of Florida has yet been made; there exist no maps of the Everglades south of Okeechobee; even Little Sprite Lake is but a vague blot on our maps. We know, of course, that south of the eleven thousand square miles of fresh water which is called Lake Okeechobee the Everglades form a vast, delta-like projection of thousands and thousands of square miles. Darkest Africa is no longer a mystery; but the Everglades to-day remain the sombre secret of our continent. And, to-day, this unknown expanse of swamps, barrens, forests, and lagoons is greater than in the days of De Soto, because the entire region has been slowly rising.

All this, my dear sir, you already know, and I ask your indulgence for recalling the facts to your memory. I do it for this reason—the search for what I am seeking may lead us to utter destruction; and therefore my formal orders to you should be modified to this extent:—do you volunteer? If you volunteer, my orders remain; if not, turn this letter over to Mr. Kingsley, who will find for me the companion I require.

In the event of your coming, you must break your journey at False Cape and ask for an old man named Slunk. He will give you a packet; you will give him a dollar, and drive on to Cape Canaveral, and you will do what is to be done there. From there to Fort Kissimmee, to Okeechobee, traversing the lake to the Rita River, where I have marked the trail to Little Sprite.

At Little Sprite I shall await you; beyond that point a merciful Providence alone can know what awaits us.

Yours fraternally,

Farrago.

P.S.—I think that you had better make your will, and suggest the same idea to the stenographer who is to accompany you.

F.

And that was the letter I received while seated comfortably on the floor of my work-room, surrounded by innocent isopods, all patiently awaiting scientific investigation.

And this is what I did: Within twenty-four hours I had assembled the supplies required—the cage, the woman’s clothing, tank, arms and ammunition, and the chemicals; I had secured accommodations, for that evening, on the Florida, Volusia, and Fort Lauderdale Railway as far as Citron City; and I had been interviewing stenographers all day long, the result of an innocently worded advertisement in the daily newspapers.

It was now very close to the time when I must summon a cab and drive to the ferry; and yet I was still shy one stenographer.

I had seen scores; they simply would not listen to the proposition. “Why does a gentleman in the backwoods of Florida want a stenographer?” they demanded; and as I had not the faintest idea, I could only say so. I think the majority interviewed concluded I had escaped from a State institution.

As the time for departure approached I became desperate, urging and beseeching applicants to accompany me; but neither sympathy for my instant need nor desire for salary moved them.

I waited until the last moment, hoping against hope. Then, with a groan of despair, I seized luggage and raincoat, made for the door and flung it open, only to find myself face to face with an attractive young girl, apparently on the point of pressing the electric button.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have a train to catch.”

She was noticeably attractive in her storm-coat and pretty hat, and I really was sorry—so sorry that I added:

“I have about twenty-seven seconds to place at your service before I go.”

“Twenty will be sufficient,” she replied, pleasantly. “I saw your advertisement for a stenographer—”

“We require a man,” I interposed, hastily.

“Have you engaged him?”

“N-no.”

We looked at each other.

“You wouldn’t accept, anyway,” I began.

“How do you know?”

“You wouldn’t leave town, would you?”

“Yes, if you required it.”

“What? Go to Florida?”

“Y-yes—if I must.”

“But think of the alligators! Think of the snakes—big, bitey snakes!”

“Gracious!” she exclaimed, eyes growing bigger.

“Indians, too!—unreconciled, sulky Seminoles! Fevers! Mud-puddles! Spiders! And only fifty dollars a week—”

“I—I’ll go,” she stammered.

“Go?” I repeated, grimly; “then you’ve exactly two and three-quarter seconds left for preparations.”

Instinctively she raised her little gloved hand and patted her hair. “I’m ready,” she said, unsteadily.

“One extra second to make your will,” I added, stunned by her self-possession.

“I—I have nothing to leave—nobody to leave it to,” she said, smiling; “I am ready.”

I took that extra second myself for a lightning course in reflection upon effects and consequences.

“It’s silly, it’s probably murder,” I said, “but you’re engaged! Now we must run for it!”

And that is how I came to engage the services of Miss Helen Barrison as stenographer.

XIV

At noon on the second day I disembarked from the train at Citron City with all paraphernalia—cage, chemicals, arsenal, and stenographer; an accumulation of very dusty impedimenta—all but the stenographer. By three o’clock our hotel livery-rig was speeding along the beach at False Cape towards the tall lighthouse looming above the dunes.

The abode of a gentleman named Slunk was my goal. I sat brooding in the rickety carriage, still dazed by the rapidity of my flight from New York; the stenographer sat beside me, blue eyes bright with excitement, fair hair blowing in the sea-wind.

Our railway companionship had been of the slightest, also absolutely formal; for I was too absorbed in conjecturing the meaning of this journey to be more than absent-mindedly civil; and she, I fancy, had had time for repentance and perhaps for a little fright, though I could discover traces of neither.

I remember she left the train at some city or other where we were held for an hour; and out of the car-window I saw her returning with a brand-new grip sack.

She must have bought clothes, for she continued to remain cool and fresh in her summer shirt-waists and short outing skirt; and she looked immaculate now, sitting there beside me, the trace of a smile curving her red mouth.

“I’m looking for a personage named Slunk,” I observed.

After a moment’s silent consideration of the Atlantic Ocean she said, “When do my duties begin, Mr. Gilland?”

“The Lord alone knows,” I replied, grimly. “Are you repenting of your bargain?”

“I am quite happy,” she said, serenely.

Remorse smote me that I had consented to engage this frail, pink-and-ivory biped for an enterprise which lay outside the suburbs of Manhattan. I glanced guiltily at my victim; she sat there, the incarnation of New York piquancy—a translated denizen of the metropolis—a slender spirit of the back offices of sky-scrapers. Why had I lured her hither?—here where the heavy, lavender-tinted breakers thundered on a lost coast; here where above the dune-jungles vultures soared, and snowy-headed eagles, hulking along the sands, tore dead fish and yelped at us as we passed.

Strange waters, strange skies—a strange, lost land aquiver under an exotic sun; and there she sat with her wise eyes of a child, unconcerned, watching the world in perfect confidence.

“May I pay a little compliment to your pluck?” I asked, amused.

“Certainly,” she said, smiling as the maid of Manhattan alone knows how to smile—shyly, inquiringly—with a lingering hint of laughter in the curled lips’ corners. Then her sensitive features fell a trifle. “Not pluck,” she said, “but necessity; I had no chance to choose, no time to wait. My last dollar, Mr. Gilland, is in my purse!”

With a gay little gesture she drew it from her shirt-front, then, smiling, sat turning it over and over in her lap.

The sun fell on her hands, gilding the smooth skin with the first tint of sunburn. Under the corners of her eyes above the rounded cheeks a pink stain lay like the first ripening flush on a wild strawberry. That, too, was the mark left by the caress of wind and sun. I had had no idea she was so pretty.

“I think we’ll enjoy this adventure,” I said; “don’t you?”

“I try to make the best of things,” she said, gazing off into the horizon haze. “Look,” she added; “is that a man?”

A spot far away on the beach caught my eye. At first I thought it was a pelican—and small wonder, too, for the dumpy, waddling, goose-necked individual who loomed up resembled a heavy bottomed bird more than a human being.

“Do you suppose that could be Mr. Slunk?” asked the stenographer, as our vehicle drew nearer.

He looked as though his name ought to be Slunk; he was digging coquina clams, and he dug with a pecking motion like a water-turkey mastering a mullet too big for it.

His name was Slunk; he admitted it when I accused him. Our negro driver drew rein, and I descended to the sand and gazed on Mr. Slunk.

He was, as I have said, not impressive, even with the tremendous background of sky and ocean.

“I’ve come something over a thousand miles to see you,” I said, reluctant to admit that I had come as far to see such a specimen of human architecture.

A weather-beaten grin stretched the skin that covered his face, and he shoved a hairy paw into the pockets of his overalls, digging deeply into profound depths. First he brought to light a twist of South Carolina tobacco, which he leisurely inserted in his mouth—not, apparently, for pleasure, but merely to get rid of it.

The second object excavated from the overalls was a small packet addressed to me. This he handed to me; I gravely handed him a silver dollar; he went back to his clam-digging, and I entered the carriage and drove on. All had been carried out according to the letter of my instructions so far, and my spirits brightened.

“If you don’t mind I’ll read my instructions,” I said, in high good-humor.

“Pray do not hesitate,” she said, smiling in sympathy.

So I opened the little packet and read:

Drive to Cape Canaveral along the beach. You will find a gang of men at work on a government breakwater. The superintendent is Mr. Rowan. Show him this letter.

Farrago.

Rather disappointed—for I had been expecting to find in the packet some key to the interesting mystery which had sent Professor Farrago into the Everglades—I thrust the missive into my pocket and resumed a study of the immediate landscape. It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing—some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows slanted continually across our road.

“I detest a buzzard,” I said, aloud.

“I thought they were crows,” she confessed.

“Carrion-crows—yes.

‘The carrion-crows

Sing, Caw! caw!’

—only they don’t,” I added, my song putting me in good-humor once more. And I glanced askance at the pretty stenographer.

“It is a pleasure to be employed by agreeable people,” she said, innocently.

“Oh, I can be much more agreeable than that,” I said.

“Is Professor Farrago—amusing?” she asked.

“Well—oh, certainly—but not in—in the way I am.”

Suddenly it flashed upon me that my superior was a confirmed hater of unmarried women. I had clean forgotten it; and now the full import of what I had done scared me silent.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Miss Barrison.

“No—not yet,” I said, ominously.

How on earth could I have overlooked that well-known fact. The hurry and anxiety, the stress of instant preparation and departure, had clean driven it from my absent-minded head.

Jogging on over the sand, I sat silent, cudgelling my brains for a solution of the disastrous predicament I had gotten into. I pictured the astonished rage of my superior—my probable dismissal from employment—perhaps the general overturning and smash-up of the entire expedition.

A distant, dark object on the beach concentrated my distracted thoughts; it must be the breakwater at Cape Canaveral. And it was the breakwater, swarming with negro workmen, who were swinging great blocks of coquina into cemented beds, singing and whistling at their labor.

I forgot my predicament when I saw a thin white man in sun-helmet and khaki directing the work from the beach; and as our horses plodded up, I stepped out and hailed him by name.

“Yes, my name is Rowan,” he said, instantly, turning to meet me. His sharp, clear eyes included the vehicle and the stenographer, and he lifted his helmet, then looked squarely at me.

“My name is Gilland,” I said, dropping my voice and stepping nearer. “I have just come from Bronx Park, New York.”

He bowed, waiting for something more from me; so I presented my credentials.

His formal manner changed at once. “Come over here and let us talk a bit,” he said, cordially—then hesitated, glancing at Miss Barrison—“if your wife would excuse us—”

The pretty stenographer colored, and I dryly set Mr. Rowan right—which appeared to disturb him more than his mistake.

“Pardon me, Mr. Gilland, but you do not propose to take this young girl into the Everglades, do you?”

“That’s what I had proposed to do,” I said, brusquely.

Perfectly aware that I resented his inquiry, he cast a perplexed and troubled glance at her, then slowly led the way to a great block of sun-warmed coquina, where he sat down, motioning me to do the same.

“I see,” he said, “that you don’t know just where you are going or just what you are expected to do.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Well, I’ll tell you, then. You are going into the devil’s own country to look for something that I fled five hundred miles to avoid.”

“Is that so?” I said, uneasily.

“That is so, Mr. Gilland.”

“Oh! And what is this object that I am to look for and from which you fled five hundred miles?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what you ran away from?”

“No, sir. Perhaps if I had known I should have run a thousand miles.”

We eyed one another.

“You think, then, that I’d better send Miss Barrison back to New York?” I asked.

“I certainly do. It may be murder to take her.”

“Then I’ll do it!” I said, nervously. “Back she goes from the first railroad station.”

In a flash the thought came to me that here was a way to avoid the wrath of Professor Farrago—and a good excuse, too. He might forgive my not bringing a man as stenographer in view of my limited time; he never would forgive my presenting him with a woman.

“She must go back,” I repeated; and it rather surprised me to find myself already anticipating loneliness—something that never in all my travels had I experienced before.

“By the first train,” I added, firmly, disliking Mr. Rowan without any reason except that he had suddenly deprived me of my stenographer.

“What I have to tell you,” he began, lighting a cigarette, the mate to which I declined, “is this: Three years ago, before I entered this contracting business, I was in the government employ as officer in the Coast Survey. Our duties took us into Florida waters; we were months at a time working on shore.”

He pulled thoughtfully at his cigarette and blew a light cloud into the air.

“I had leave for a month once; and like an ass I prepared to spend it in a hunting-trip among the Everglades.”

He crossed his lean legs and gazed meditatively at his cigarette.

“I believe,” he went on, “that we penetrated the Everglades farther than any white man who ever lived to return. There’s nothing very dismal about the Everglades—the greater part, I mean. You get high and low hummock, marshes, creeks, lakes, and all that. If you get lost, you’re a goner. If you acquire fever, you’re as well off as the seraphim—and not a whit better. There are the usual animals there—bears (little black fellows) lynxes, deer, panthers, alligators, and a few stray crocodiles. As for snakes, of course they’re there, moccasins a-plenty, some rattlers, but, after all, not as many snakes as one finds in Alabama, or even northern Florida and Georgia.

“The Seminoles won’t help you—won’t even talk to you. They’re a sullen pack—but not murderous, as far as I know. Beyond their inner limits lie the unknown regions.”

He bit the wet end from his cigarette.

“I went there,” he said; “I came out as soon as I could.”

“Why?”

“Well—for one thing, my companion died of fright.”

“Fright? What at?”

“Well, there’s something in there.”

“What?”

He fixed a penetrating gaze on me. “I don’t know, Mr. Gilland.”

“Did you see anything to frighten you?” I insisted.

“No, but I felt something.” He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the sand viciously. “To cut it short,” he said, “I am most unwillingly led to believe that there are—creatures—of some sort in the Everglades—living creatures quite as large as you or I—and that they are perfectly transparent—as transparent as a colorless jellyfish.”

Instantly the veiled import of Professor Farrago’s letter was made clear to me. He, too, believed that.

“It embarrasses me like the devil to say such a thing,” continued Rowan, digging in the sand with his spurred heels. “It seems so—so like a whopping lie—it seems so childish and ridiculous—so cursed cheap! But I fled; and there you are. I might add,” he said, indifferently, “that I have the ordinary portion of courage allotted to normal men.”

“But what do you believe these—these animals to be?” I asked, fascinated.

“I don’t know.” An obstinate look came into his eyes. “I don’t know, and I absolutely refuse to speculate for the benefit of anybody. I wouldn’t do it for my friend Professor Farrago; and I’m not going to do it for you,” he ended, laughing a rather grim laugh that somehow jarred me into realizing the amazing import of his story. For I did not doubt it, strange as it was—fantastic, incredible though it sounded in the ears of a scientist.

What it was that carried conviction I do not know—perhaps the fact that my superior credited it; perhaps the manner of narration. Told in quiet, commonplace phrases, by an exceedingly practical and unimaginative young man who was plainly embarrassed in the telling, the story rang out like a shout in a cañon, startling because of the absolute lack of emphasis employed in the telling.

“Professor Farrago asked me to speak of this to no one except the man who should come to his assistance. He desired the first chance of clearing this—this rather perplexing matter. No doubt he didn’t want exploring parties prowling about him,” added Rowan, smiling. “But there’s no fear of that, I fancy. I never expect to tell that story again to anybody; I shouldn’t have told him, only somehow it’s worried me for three years, and though I was deadly afraid of ridicule, I finally made up my mind that science ought to have a hack at it.

“When I was in New York last winter I summoned up courage and wrote Professor Farrago. He came to see me at the Holland House that same evening; I told him as much as I ever shall tell anybody. That is all, Mr. Gilland.”

For a long time I sat silent, musing over the strange words. After a while I asked him whether Professor Farrago was supplied with provisions; and he said he was; that a great store of staples and tins of concentrated rations had been carried in as far as Little Sprite Lake; that Professor Farrago was now there alone, having insisted upon dismissing all those he had employed.

“There was no practical use for a guide,” added Rowan, “because no cracker, no Indian, and no guide knows the region beyond the Seminole country.”

I rose, thanking him and offering my hand. He took it and shook it in manly fashion, saying: “I consider Professor Farrago a very brave man; I may say the same of any man who volunteers to accompany him. Good-bye, Mr. Gilland; I most earnestly wish for your success. Professor Farrago left this letter for you.”

And that was all. I climbed back into the rickety carriage, carrying my unopened letter; the negro driver cracked his whip and whistled, and the horses trotted inland over a fine shell road which was to lead us across Verbena Junction to Citron City. Half an hour later we crossed the tracks at Verbena and turned into a broad marl road. This aroused me from my deep and speculative reverie, and after a few moments I asked Miss Barrison’s indulgence and read the letter from Professor Farrago which Mr. Rowan had given me:

Dear Mr. Gilland,—You now know all I dared not write, fearing to bring a swarm of explorers about my ears in case the letter was lost, and found by unscrupulous meddlers. If you still are willing to volunteer, knowing all that I know, join me as soon as possible. If family considerations deter you from taking what perhaps is an insane risk, I shall not expect you to join me. In that event, return to New York immediately and send Kingsley.

Yours,

F.

“What the deuce is the matter with him!” I exclaimed, irritably. “I’ll take any chances Kingsley does!”

Miss Barrison looked up in surprise.

“Miss Barrison,” I said, plunging into the subject headfirst, “I’m extremely sorry, but I have news that forces me to believe the journey too dangerous for you to attempt, so I think that it would be much better—” The consternation in her pretty face checked me.

“I’m awfully sorry,” I muttered, appalled by her silence.

“But—but you engaged me!”

“I know it—I should not have done it. I only—”

“But you did engage me, didn’t you?”

“I believe that I did—er—oh, of course—”

“But a verbal contract is binding between honorable people, isn’t it, Mr. Gilland?”

“Yes, but—”

“And ours was a verbal contract; and in consideration you paid me my first week’s salary, and I bought shirt-waists and a short skirt and three changes of—and tooth-brushes and—”

“I know, I know,” I groaned. “But I’ll fix all that.”

“You can’t if you break your contract.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she said, flushing up, “I should not accept.”

“You don’t understand—”

“Really I do. You are going into a dangerous country and you’re afraid I’ll be frightened.”

“It’s something like that.”

“Tell me what are the dangers?”

“Alligators, big, bitey snakes—”

“Oh, you’ve said all that before!”

“Seminoles—”

“And that too. What else is there? Did the young man in the sun-helmet tell you of something worse?”

“Yes—much worse! Something so dreadfully horrible that—”

“What?”

“I am not at liberty to tell you, Miss Barrison,” I said, striving to appear shocked.

“It would not make any difference anyway,” she observed, calmly. “I’m not afraid of anything in the world.”

“Yes, you are!” I said. “Listen to me; I’d be awfully glad to have you go—I—I really had no idea how I’d miss you—miss such pleasant companionship. But it is not possible—” The recollection of Professor Farrago’s aversion suddenly returned. “No, no,” I said, “it can’t be done. I’m most unhappy over this mistake of mine; please don’t look as though you were ready to cry!”

“Don’t discharge me, Mr. Gilland,” she said.

“I’m a brute to do it, but I must; I was a bigger brute to engage you, but I did. Don’t—please don’t look at me that way, Miss Barrison! As a matter of fact, I’m tender-hearted and I can’t endure it.”

“If you only knew what I had been through you wouldn’t send me away,” she said, in a low voice. “It took my last penny to clothe myself and pay for the last lesson at the college of stenography. I—I lived on almost nothing for weeks; every respectable place was filled; I walked and walked and walked, and nobody wanted me—they all required people with experience—and how can I have experience until I begin, Mr. Gilland? I was perfectly desperate when I went to see you, knowing that you had advertised for a man—” The slightest break in her clear voice scared me.

“I’m not going to cry,” she said, striving to smile. “If I must go, I will go. I—I didn’t mean to say all this—but—but I’ve been so—so discouraged;—and you were not very cross with me—”

Smitten with remorse, I picked up her hand and fell to patting it violently, trying to think of something to say. The exercise did not appear to stimulate my wits.

“Then—then I’m to go with you?” she asked.

“I will see,” I said, weakly, “but I fear there’s trouble ahead for this expedition.”

“I fear there is,” she agreed, in a cheerful voice. “You have a rifle and a cage in your luggage. Are you going to trap Indians and have me report their language?”

“No, I’m not going to trap Indians,” I said, sharply. “They may trap us—but that’s a detail. What I want to say to you is this: Professor Farrago detests unmarried women, and I forgot it when I engaged you.”

“Oh, is that all?” she asked, laughing.

“Not all, but enough to cost me my position.”

“How absurd! Why, there are millions of things we might do!—millions!”

“What’s one of them?” I inquired.

“Why, we might pretend to be married!” Her frank and absolutely innocent delight in this suggestion was refreshing, but troubling.

“We would have to be demonstrative to make that story go,” I said.

“Why? Well-bred people are not demonstrative in public,” she retorted, turning a trifle pink.

“No, but in private—”

“I think there is no necessity for carrying a pleasantry into our private life,” she said, in a perfectly amiable voice. “Anyway, if Professor Farrago’s feelings are to be spared, no sacrifice on the part of a mere girl could be too great,” she added, gayly; “I will wear men’s clothes if you wish.”

“You may have to anyhow in the jungle,” I said; “and as it’s not an uncommon thing these days, nobody would ever take you for anything except what you are—a very wilful and plucky and persistent and—”

“And what, Mr. Gilland?”

“And attractive,” I muttered.

“Thank you, Mr. Gilland.”

“You’re welcome,” I snapped. The near whistle of a locomotive warned us, and I rose in the carriage, looking out across the sand-hills.

“That is probably our train,” observed the pretty stenographer.

“Our train!”

“Yes; isn’t it?”

“Then you insist—”

“Ah, no, Mr. Gilland; I only trust implicitly in my employer.”

“We’ll wait till we get to Citron City,” I said, weakly; “then it will be time enough to discuss the situation, won’t it?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said, smiling; but she knew, and I already feared, that the situation no longer admitted of discussion. In a few moments more we emerged, without warning, from the scrub-crested sand-hills into the single white street of Citron City, where China-trees hung heavy with bloom, and magnolias, already set with perfumed candelabra, spread soft, checkered shadows over the marl.

The train lay at the station, oceans of heavy, black smoke lazily flowing from the locomotive; negroes were hoisting empty fruit-crates aboard the baggage-car, through the door of which I caught a glimpse of my steel cage and remaining paraphernalia, all securely crated.

“Telegram hyah foh Mistuh Gilland,” remarked the operator, lounging at his window as we descended from our dusty vehicle. He had not addressed himself to anybody in particular, but I said that I was Mr. Gilland, and he produced the envelope. “Toted in from Okeechobee?” he inquired, listlessly.

“Probably; it’s signed ‘Farrago,’ isn’t it?”

“It’s foh yoh, suh, I reckon,” said the operator, handing it out with a yawn. Then he removed his hat and fanned his head, which was perfectly bald.

I opened the yellow envelope. “Get me a good dog with points,” was the laconic message; and it irritated me to receive such idiotic instructions at such a time and in such a place. A good dog? Where the mischief could I find a dog in a town consisting of ten houses and a water-tank? I said as much to the bald-headed operator, who smiled wearily and replaced his hat: “Dawg? They’s moh houn’-dawgs in Citron City than they’s wood-ticks to keep them busy. I reckon a dollah ‘ll do a heap foh you, suh.”

“Could you get me a dog for a dollar?” I asked;—“one with points?”

“Points? I sholy can, suh;—plenty of points. What kind of dawg do yoh requiah, suh?—live dawg? daid dawg? houn’-dawg? raid-dawg? hawg-dawg? coon-dawg?—”

The locomotive emitted a long, lazy, softly modulated and thoroughly Southern toot. I handed the operator a silver dollar, and he presently emerged from his office and slouched off up the street, while I walked with Miss Barrison to the station platform, where I resumed the discussion of her future movements.

“You are very young to take such a risk,” I said, gravely. “Had I not better buy your ticket back to New York? The north-bound train meets this one. I suppose we are waiting for it now—” I stopped, conscious of her impatience.

Her face flushed brightly: “Yes; I think it best. I have embarrassed you too long already—”

“Don’t say that!” I muttered. “I—I—shall be deadly bored without you.”

“I am not an entertainer, only a stenographer,” she said, curtly. “Please get me my ticket, Mr. Gilland.”

She gazed at me from the car-platform; the locomotive tooted two drawling toots.

“It is for your sake,” I said, avoiding her gaze as the far-off whistle of the north-bound express came floating out of the blue distance.

She did not answer; I fished out my watch, regarding it in silence, listening to the hum of the approaching train, which ought presently to bear her away into the North, where nothing could menace her except the brilliant pitfalls of a Christian civilization. But I stood there, temporizing, unable to utter a word as her train shot by us with a rush, slower, slower, and finally stopped, with a long-drawn sigh from the air-brakes.

At that instant the telegraph-operator appeared, carrying a dog by the scruff of the neck—a sad-eyed, ewe-necked dog, from the four corners of which dangled enormous, cushion-like paws. He yelped when he beheld me. Miss Barrison leaned down from the car-platform and took the animal into her arms, uttering a suppressed exclamation of pity as she lifted him.

“You have your hands full,” she said to me; “I’ll take him into the car for you.”

She mounted the steps; I followed with the valises, striving to get a good view of my acquisition over her shoulder.

“That isn’t the kind of dog I wanted!” I repeated again and again, inspecting the animal as it sprawled on the floor of the car at the edge of Miss Barrison’s skirt. “That dog is all voice and feet and emotion! What makes it stick up its paws like that? I don’t want that dog and I’m not going to identify myself with it! Where’s the operator—”

I turned towards the car-window; the operator’s bald head was visible on a line with the sill, and I made motions at him. He bowed with courtly grace, as though I were thanking him.

“I’m not!” I cried, shaking my head. “I wanted a dog with points—not the kind of points that stick up all over this dog. Take him away!”

The operator’s head appeared to be gliding out of my range of vision; then the windows of the north-bound train slid past, faster and faster. A melancholy grace-note from the dog, a jolt, and I turned around, appalled.

“This train is going,” I stammered, “and you are on it!”

Miss Barrison sprang up and started towards the door, and I sped after her.

“I can jump,” she said, breathlessly, edging out to the platform; “please let me! There is time yet—if you only wouldn’t hold me—so tight—”

A few moments later we walked slowly back together through the car and took seats facing one another.

Between us sat the hound-dog, a prey to melancholy unutterable.

XV

It was on Sunday when I awoke to the realization that I had quitted civilization and was afloat on an unfamiliar body of water in an open boat containing—

One light steel cage,

One rifle and ammunition,

One stenographer,

Three ounces rosium oxide,

One hound-dog,

Two valises—

A playful wave slopped over the bow and I lost count; but the pretty stenographer made the inventory, while I resumed the oars, and the dog punctured the primeval silence with staccato yelps.

A few minutes later everything and everybody was accounted for; the sky was blue and the palms waved, and several species of dicky-birds tuned up as I pulled with powerful strokes out into the sunny waters of Little Sprite Lake, now within a few miles of my journey’s end.

From ponds hidden in the marshes herons rose in lazily laborious flight, flapping low across the water; high in the cypress yellow-eyed ospreys bent crested heads to watch our progress; sun-baked alligators, lying heavily in the shoreward sedge, slid open, glassy eyes as we passed.

“Even the ‘gators make eyes at you,” I said, resting on my oars.

We were on terms of badinage.

“Who was it who shed crocodile tears at the prospect of shipping me North?” she inquired.

“Speaking of tears,” I observed, “somebody is likely to shed a number when Professor Farrago is picked up.”

“Pooh!” she said, and snapped her pretty, sun-tanned fingers; and I resumed the oars in time to avoid shipwreck on a large mud-bar.

She reclined in the stern, serenely occupied with the view, now and then caressing the discouraged dog, now and then patting her hair where the wind had loosened a bright strand.

“If Professor Farrago didn’t expect a woman stenographer,” she said, abruptly, “why did he instruct you to bring a complete outfit of woman’s clothing?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tartly.

“But you bought them. Are they for a young woman or an old woman?”

“I don’t know; I sent a messenger to a department store. I don’t know what he bought.”

“Didn’t you look them over?”

“No. Why? I should have been no wiser. I fancy they’re all right, because the bill was eighteen hundred dollars—”

The pretty stenographer sat up abruptly.

“Is that much?” I asked, uneasily. “I’ve always heard women’s clothing was expensive. Wasn’t it enough? I told the boy to order the best;—Professor Farrago always requires the very best scientific instruments, and—I listed the clothes as scientific accessories—that being the object of this expedition—What are you laughing at?”

When it pleased her to recover her gravity she announced her desire to inspect and repack the clothing; but I refused.

“They’re for Professor Farrago,” I said. “I don’t know what he wants of them. I don’t suppose he intends to wear ’em and caper about the jungle, but they’re his. I got them because he told me to. I bought a cage, too, to fit myself, but I don’t suppose he means to put me in it. Perhaps,” I added, “he may invite you into it.”

“Let me refold the gowns,” she pleaded, persuasively. “What does a clumsy man know about packing such clothing as that? If you don’t, they’ll be ruined. It’s a shame to drag those boxes about through mud and water!”

So we made a landing, and lifted out and unlocked the boxes. All I could see inside were mounds of lace and ribbons, and with a vague idea that Miss Barrison needed no assistance I returned to the boat and sat down to smoke until she was ready.

When she summoned me her face was flushed and her eyes bright.

“Those are certainly the most beautiful things!” she said, softly. “Why, it is like a bride’s trousseau—absolutely complete—all except the bridal gown—”

“Isn’t there a dress there?” I exclaimed, in alarm.

“No—not a day-dress.”

“Night-dresses!” I shrieked. “He doesn’t want women’s night-dresses! He’s a bachelor! Good Heavens! I’ve done it this time!”

“But—but who is to wear them?” she asked.

“How do I know? I don’t know anything; I can only presume that he doesn’t intend to open a department store in the Everglades. And if any lady is to wear garments in his vicinity, I assume that those garments are to be anything except diaphanous!… Please take your seat in the boat, Miss Barrison. I want to row and think.”

I had had my fill of exercise and thought when, about four o’clock in the afternoon, Miss Barrison directed my attention to a point of palms jutting out into the water about a mile to the southward.

“That’s Farrago!” I exclaimed, catching sight of a United States flag floating majestically from a bamboo-pole. “Give me the megaphone, if you please.”

She handed me the instrument; I hailed the shore; and presently a man appeared under the palms at the water’s edge.

“Hello!” I roared, trying to inject cheerfulness into the hollow bellow. “How are you, professor?”

The answer came distinctly across the water:

“Who is that with you?”

My lips were buried in the megaphone; I strove to speak; I only produced a ghastly, chuckling sound.

“Of course you expect to tell the truth,” observed the pretty stenographer, quietly.

I removed my lips from the megaphone and looked around at her. She returned my gaze with a disturbing smile.

“I want to mitigate the blow,” I said, hoarsely. “Tell me how.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, sweetly.

“Well, I do!” I fairly barked, and seizing the megaphone again, I set it to my lips and roared, “My fiancée!”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Miss Barrison, in consternation, “I thought you were going to tell the truth!”

“Don’t do that or you’ll upset us,” I snapped—“I’m telling the truth; I’ve engaged myself to you; I did it mentally before I bellowed.”

“But—”

“You know as well as I do what engagements mean,” I said, picking up the oars and digging them deep in the blue water.

She assented uncertainly.

A few minutes more of vigorous rowing brought us to a muddy landing under a cluster of tall palmettos, where a gasoline launch lay. Professor Farrago came down to the shore as I landed, and I walked ahead to meet him. He was the maddest man I ever saw. But I was his match, for I was desperate.

“What the devil—” he began, under his breath.

“Nonsense!” I said, deliberately. “An engaged woman is practically married already, because marriages are made in heaven.”

“Good Lord!” he gasped, “are you mad, Gilland? I sent for a stenographer—”

“Miss Barrison is a stenographer,” I said, calmly; and before he could recover I had presented him, and left them face to face, washing my hands of the whole affair.

Unloading the boat and carrying the luggage up under the palms, I heard her saying:

“No, I am not in the least afraid of snakes, and I am quite ready to begin my duties.”

And he: “Mr. Gilland is a young man who—er—lacks practical experience.”

And she: “Mr. Gilland has been most thoughtful for my comfort. The journey has been perfectly heavenly.”

And he, clumsily: “Ahem!—the—er—celestial aspect of your journey has—er—doubtless been colored by—er—the prospect of your—er—approaching nuptials—”

She, hastily: “Oh, I do not think so, professor.”

“Idiot!” I muttered, dragging the dog to the shore, where his yelps brought the professor hurrying.

“Is that the dog?” he inquired, adjusting his spectacles.

“That’s the dog,” I said. “He’s full of points, you see?”

“Oh,” mused the professor; “I thought he was full of—” He hesitated, inspecting the animal, who, nose to the ground, stood investigating a smell of some sort.

“See,” I said, with enthusiasm, “he’s found a scent; he’s trailing it already! Now he’s rolling on it!”

“He’s rolling on one of our concentrated food lozenges,” said the professor, dryly. “Tie him up, Mr. Gilland, and ask Mrs. Gilland to come up to camp. Your room is ready.”

“Rooms,” I corrected; “she isn’t Mrs. Gilland yet,” I added, with a forced smile.

“But you’re practically married,” observed the professor, “as you pointed out to me. And if she’s practically Mrs. Gilland, why not say so?”

“Don’t, all the same,” I snarled.

“But marriages are made in—”

I cast a desperate eye upon him.

From that moment, whenever we were alone together, he made a target of me. I never had supposed him humorously vindictive; he was, and his apparently innocent mistakes almost turned my hair gray.

But to Miss Barrison he was kind and courteous, and for a time over-serious. Observing him, I could never detect the slightest symptom of dislike for her sex—a failing which common rumor had always credited him with to the verge of absolute rudeness.

On the contrary, it was perfectly plain to anybody that he liked her. There was in his manner towards her a mixture of business formality and the deferential attitude of a gentleman.

We were seated, just before sunset, outside of the hut built of palmetto logs, when Professor Farrago, addressing us both, began the explanation of our future duties.

Miss Barrison, it appeared, was to note everything said by himself, making several shorthand copies by evening. In other words, she was to report every scrap of conversation she heard while in the Everglades. And she nodded intelligently as he finished, and drew pad and pencil from the pocket of her walking-skirt, jotting down his instructions as a beginning. I could see that he was pleased.

“The reason I do this,” he said, “is because I do not wish to hide anything that transpires while we are on this expedition. Only the most scrupulously minute record can satisfy me; no details are too small to merit record; I demand and I court from my fellow-scientists and from the public the fullest investigation.”

He smiled slightly, turning towards me.

“You know, Mr. Gilland, how dangerous to the reputation of a scientific man is any line of investigation into the unusual. If a man once is even suspected of charlatanism, of sensationalism, of turning his attention to any phenomena not strictly within the proper pale of scientific investigation, that man is doomed to ridicule; his profession disowns him; he becomes a man without honor, without authority. Is it not so?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Therefore,” he resumed, thoughtfully, “as I do most firmly believe in the course I am now pursuing, whether I succeed or fail I desire a true and minute record made, hiding nothing of what may be said or done. A stenographer alone can give this to the world, while I can only supplement it with a description of events—if I live to transcribe them.”

Sunk in profound reverie he sat there silent under the great, smooth palm-tree—a venerable figure in his yellow dressing-gown and carpet slippers. Seated side by side, we waited, a trifle awed. I could hear the soft breathing of the pretty stenographer beside me.

“First of all,” said Professor Farrago, looking up, “I must be able to trust those who are here to aid me.”

“I—I will be faithful,” said the girl, in a low voice.

“I do not doubt you, my child,” he said; “nor you, Gilland. And so I am going to tell you this much now—more, I hope, later.”

And he sat up straight, lifting an impressive forefinger.

“Mr. Rowan, lately an officer of our Coast Survey, wrote me a letter from the Holland House in New York—a letter so strange that, on reading it, I immediately repaired to his hotel, where for hours we talked together.

“The result of that conference is this expedition.

“I have now been here two months, and I am satisfied of certain facts. First, there do exist in this unexplored wilderness certain forms of life which are solid and palpable, but transparent and practically invisible. Second, these living creatures belong to the animal kingdom, are warm-blooded vertebrates, possess powers of locomotion, but whether that of flight I am not certain. Third, they appear to possess such senses as we enjoy—smell, touch, sight, hearing, and no doubt the sense of taste. Fourth, their skin is smooth to the touch, and the temperature of the epidermis appears to approximate that of a normal human being. Fifth and last, whether bipeds or quadrupeds I do not know, though all evidence appears to confirm my theory that they walk erect. One pair of their limbs appear to terminate in a sort of foot—like a delicately shaped human foot, except that there appear to be no toes. The other pair of limbs terminate in something that, from the single instance I experienced, seemed to resemble soft but firm antennae or, perhaps, digitated palpi—”

“Feelers!” I blurted out.

“I don’t know, but I think so. Once, when I was standing in the forest, perfectly aware that creatures I could not see had stealthily surrounded me, the tension was brought to a crisis when over my face, from cheek to chin, stole a soft something, brushing the skin as delicately as a child’s fingers might brush it.”

“Good Lord!” I breathed.

A care-worn smile crept into his eyes. “A test for nerves, you think, Mr. Gilland? I agree with you. Nobody fears what anybody can see.”

There came the slightest movement beside me.

“Are you trembling?” I asked, turning.

“I was writing,” she replied, steadily. “Did my elbow touch you?”

“By-the-way,” said Professor Farrago, “I fear I forgot to congratulate you upon your choice of a stenographer, Mr. Gilland.”

A rosy light stole over her pale face.

“Am I to record that too?” she asked, raising her blue eyes.

“Certainly,” he replied, gravely.

“But, professor,” I began, a prey to increasing excitement, “do you propose to attempt the capture of one of these animals?”

“That is what the cage is for,” he said. “I supposed you had guessed that.”

“I had,” murmured the pretty stenographer.

“I do not doubt it,” said Professor Farrago, gravely.

“What are the chemicals for—and the tank and hose attachment?”

“Think, Mr. Gilland.”

“I can’t; I’m almost stunned by what you tell me.”

He laughed. “The rosium oxide and salts of strontium are to be dumped into the tank together. They’ll effervesce, of course.”

“Of course,” I muttered.

“And I can throw a rose-colored spray over any object by the hose attachment, can’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I tried it on a transparent jelly-fish and it became perfectly visible and of a beautiful rose-color: and I tried it on rock-crystal, and on glass, and on pure gelatine, and all became suffused with a delicate pink glow, which lasted for hours or minutes according to the substance…. Now you understand, don’t you?”

“Yes; you want to see what sort of creature you have to deal with.”

“Exactly; so when I’ve trapped it I am going to spray it.” He turned half humorously towards the stenographer: “I fancy you understood long before Mr. Gilland did.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, with a sidelong lifting of the heavy lashes; and I caught the color of her eyes for a second.

“You see how Miss Barrison spares your feelings,” observed Professor Farrago, dryly. “She owes you little gratitude for bringing her here, yet she proves a generous victim.”

“Oh, I am very grateful for this rarest of chances!” she said, shyly. “To be among the first in the world to discover such wonders ought to make me very grateful to the man who gave me the opportunity.”

“Do you mean Mr. Gilland?” asked the professor, laughing.

I had never before seen Professor Farrago laugh such a care-free laugh; I had never suspected him of harboring even an embryo of the social graces. Dry as dust, sapless as steel, precise as the magnetic needle, he had hitherto been to me the mummified embodiment of science militant. Now, in the guise of a perfectly human and genial old gentleman, I scarcely recognized my superior of the Bronx Park society. And as a woman-hater he was a miserable failure.

“Heavens,” I thought to myself, “am I becoming jealous of my revered professor’s social success with a stray stenographer?” I felt mean, and I probably looked it, and I was glad that telepathy did not permit Miss Barrison to record my secret and unworthy ruminations.

The professor was saying: “These transparent creatures break off berries and fruits and branches; I have seen a flower, too, plucked from its stem by invisible digits and borne swiftly through the forest—only the flower visible, apparently speeding through the air and out of sight among the thickets.

“I have found the footprints that I described to you, usually on the edge of a stream or in the soft loam along some forest lake or lost lagoon.

“Again and again I have been conscious in the forest that unseen eyes were fixed on me, that unseen shapes were following me. Never but that one time did these invisible creatures close in around me and venture to touch me.

“They may be weak; their structure may be frail, and they may be incapable of violence or harm, but the depth of the footprints indicates a weight of at least one hundred and thirty pounds, and it certainly requires some muscular strength to break off a branch of wild guavas.”

He bent his noble head, thoughtfully regarding the design on his slippers.

“What was the rifle for?” I asked.

“Defence, not aggression,” he said, simply.

“And the camera?”

“A camera record is necessary in these days of bad artists.”

I hesitated, glancing at Miss Barrison. She was still writing, her pretty head bent over the pad in her lap.

“And the clothing?” I asked, carelessly.

“Did you get it?” he demanded.

“Of course—” I glanced at Miss Barrison. “There’s no use writing down everything, is there?”

“Everything must be recorded,” said Professor Farrago, inflexibly. “What clothing did you buy?”

“I forgot the gown,” I said, getting red about the ears.

“Forgot the gown!” he repeated.

“Yes—one kind of gown—the day kind. I—I got the other kind.”

He was annoyed; so was I. After a moment he got up, and crossing to the log cabin, opened one of the boxes of apparel.

“Is it what you wanted?” I inquired.

“Y-es, I presume so,” he replied, visibly perplexed.

“It’s the best to be had,” said I.

“That’s quite right,” he said, musingly. “We use only the best of everything at Bronx Park. It is traditional with us, you know.”

Curiosity pushed me. “Well, what on earth is it for?” I broke out.

He looked at me gravely over the tops of his spectacles—a striking and inspiring figure in his yellow flannel dressing-gown and slippers.

“I shall tell you some day—perhaps,” he said, mildly. “Good-night, Miss Barrison; good-night, Mr. Gilland. You will find extra blankets on your bunk—”

“What!” I cried.

“Bunks,” he said, and shut the door.

XVI

“There is something weird about this whole proceeding,” I observed to the pretty stenographer next morning.

“These pies will be weird if you don’t stop talking to me,” she said, opening the doors of Professor Farrago’s portable camping-oven and peeping in at the fragrant pastry.

The professor had gone off somewhere into the woods early that morning. As he was not in the habit of talking to himself, the services of Miss Barrison were not required. Before he started, however, he came to her with a request for a dozen pies, the construction of which he asked if she understood. She had been to cooking-school in more prosperous days, and she mentioned it; so at his earnest solicitation she undertook to bake for him twelve apple-pies; and she was now attempting it, assisted by advice from me.

“Are they burned?” I asked, sniffing the air.

“No, they are not burned, Mr. Gilland, but my finger is,” she retorted, stepping back to examine the damage.

I offered sympathy and witch-hazel, but she would have none of my offerings, and presently returned to her pies.

“We can’t eat all that pastry,” I protested.

“Professor Farrago said they were not for us to eat,” she said, dusting each pie with powdered sugar.

“Well, what are they for? The dog? Or are they simply objets d’art to adorn the shanty—”

“You annoy me,” she said.

“The pies annoy me; won’t you tell me what they’re for?”

“I have a pretty fair idea what they’re for,” she observed, tossing her head. “Haven’t you?”

“No. What?”

“These pies are for bait.”

“To bait hooks with?” I exclaimed.

“Hooks! No, you silly man. They’re for baiting the cage. He means to trap these transparent creatures in a cage baited with pie.”

She laughed scornfully; inserted the burned tip of her finger in her mouth and stood looking at me defiantly like a flushed and bright-eyed school-girl.

“You think you’re teasing me,” she said; “but you do not realize what a singularly slow-minded young man you are.”

I stopped laughing. “How did you come to the conclusion that pies were to be used for such a purpose?” I asked.

“I deduce,” she observed, with an airy wave of her disengaged hand.

“Your deductions are weird—like everything else in this vicinity. Pies to catch invisible monsters? Pooh!”

“You’re not particularly complimentary, are you?” she said.

“Not particularly; but I could be, with you for my inspiration. I could even be enthusiastic—”

“About my pies?”

“No—about your eyes.”

“You are very frivolous—for a scientist,” she said, scornfully; “please subdue your enthusiasm and bring me some wood. This fire is almost out.”

When I had brought the wood, she presented me with a pail of hot water and pointed at the dishes on the breakfast-table.

“Never!” I cried, revolted.

“Then I suppose I must do them—”

She looked pensively at her scorched finger-tip, and, pursing up her red lips, blew a gentle breath to cool it.

“I’ll do the dishes,” I said.

Splashing and slushing the cups and saucers about in the hot water, I reflected upon the events of the last few days. The dog, stupefied by unwonted abundance of food, lay in the sunshine, sleeping the sleep of repletion; the pretty stenographer, all rosy from her culinary exertions, was removing the pies and setting them in neat rows to cool.

“There,” she said, with a sigh; “now I will dry the dishes for you…. You didn’t mention the fact, when you engaged me, that I was also expected to do general housework.”

“I didn’t engage you,” I said, maliciously; “you engaged me, you know.”

She regarded me disdainfully, nose uptilted.

“How thoroughly disagreeable you can be!” she said. “Dry your own dishes. I’m going for a stroll.”

“May I join—”

“You may not! I shall go so far that you cannot possibly discover me.”

I watched her forestward progress; she sauntered for about thirty yards along the lake and presently sat down in plain sight under a huge live-oak.

A few moments later I had completed my task as general bottle-washer, and I cast about for something to occupy me.

First I approached and politely caressed the satiated dog. He woke up, regarded me with dully meditative eyes, yawned, and went to sleep again. Never a flop of tail to indicate gratitude for blandishments, never the faintest symptom of canine appreciation.

Chilled by my reception, I moused about for a while, poking into boxes and bundles; then raised my head and inspected the landscape. Through the vista of trees the pink shirt-waist of the pretty stenographer glimmered like a rose blooming in the wilderness.

From whatever point I viewed the prospect that pink spot seemed to intrude; I turned my back and examined the jungle, but there it was repeated in a hundred pink blossoms among the massed thickets; I looked up into the tree-tops, where pink mosses spotted the palms; I looked out over the lake, and I saw it in my mind’s eye pinker than ever. It was certainly a case of pink-eye.

“I’ll go for a stroll, too; it’s a free country,” I muttered.

After I had strolled in a complete circle I found myself within three feet of a pink shirt-waist.

“I beg your pardon,” I said; “I had no inten—”

“I thought you were never coming,” she said, amiably.

“How is your finger?” I asked.

She held it up. I took it gingerly; it was smooth and faintly rosy at the tip.

“Does it hurt?” I inquired.

“Dreadfully. Your hands feel so cool—”

After a silence she said, “Thank you, that has cooled the burning.”

“I am determined,” said I, “to expel the fire from your finger if it takes hours and hours.” And I seated myself with that intention.

For a while she talked, making innocent observations concerning the tropical foliage surrounding us. Then silence crept in between us, accentuated by the brooding stillness of the forest.

“I am afraid your hands are growing tired,” she said, considerately.

I denied it.

Through the vista of palms we could see the lake, blue as a violet, sparkling with silvery sunshine. In the intense quiet the splash of leaping mullet sounded distinctly.

Once a tall crane stalked into view among the sedges; once an unseen alligator shook the silence with his deep, hollow roaring. Then the stillness of the wilderness grew more intense.

We had been sitting there for a long while without exchanging a word, dreamily watching the ripple of the azure water, when all at once there came a scurrying patter of feet through the forest, and, looking up, I beheld the hound-dog, tail between his legs, bearing down on us at lightning speed. I rose instantly.

“What is the matter with the dog?” cried the pretty stenographer. “Is he going mad, Mr. Gilland?”

“Something has scared him,” I exclaimed, as the dog, eyes like lighted candles, rushed frantically between my legs and buried his head in Miss Barrison’s lap.

“Poor doggy!” she said, smoothing the collapsed pup; “poor, p-oor little beast! Did anything scare him? Tell aunty all about it.”

When a dog flees without yelping he’s a badly frightened creature. I instinctively started back towards the camp whence the beast had fled, and before I had taken a dozen steps Miss Barrison was beside me, carrying the dog in her arms.

“I’ve an idea,” she said, under her breath.

“What?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the camp.

“It’s this: I’ll wager that we find those pies gone!”

“Pies gone?” I repeated, perplexed; “what makes you think—”

“They are gone!” she exclaimed. “Look!”

I gaped stupidly at the rough pine table where the pies had stood in three neat rows of four each. And then, in a moment, the purport of this robbery flashed upon my senses.

“The transparent creatures!” I gasped.

“Hush!” she whispered, clinging to the trembling dog in her arms.

I listened. I could hear nothing, see nothing, yet slowly I became convinced of the presence of something unseen—something in the forest close by, watching us out of invisible eyes.

A chill, settling along my spine, crept upward to my scalp, until every separate hair wiggled to the roots. Miss Barrison was pale, but perfectly calm and self-possessed.

“Let us go indoors,” I said, as steadily as I could.

“Very well,” she replied.

I held the door open; she entered with the dog; I followed, closing and barring the door, and then took my station at the window, rifle in hand.

There was not a sound in the forest. Miss Barrison laid the dog on the floor and quietly picked up her pad and pencil. Presently she was deep in a report of the phenomena, her pencil flying, leaf after leaf from the pad fluttering to the floor.

Nor did I at the window change my position of scared alertness, until I was aware of her hand gently touching my elbow to attract my attention, and her soft voice at my ear—

“You don’t suppose by any chance that the dog ate those pies?”

I collected my tumultuous thoughts and turned to stare at the dog.

“Twelve pies, twelve inches each in diameter,” she reflected, musingly. “One dog, twenty inches in diameter. How many times will the pies go into the dog? Let me see.” She made a few figures on her pad, thought awhile, produced a tape-measure from her pocket, and, kneeling down, measured the dog.

“No,” she said, looking up at me, “he couldn’t contain them.”

Inspired by her coolness and perfect composure, I set the rifle in the corner and opened the door. Sunlight fell in bars through the quiet woods; nothing stirred on land or water save the great, yellow-striped butterflies that fluttered and soared and floated above the flowering thickets bordering the jungle.

The heat became intense; Miss Barrison went to her room to change her gown for a lighter one; I sat down under a live-oak, eyes and ears strained for any sign of our invisible neighbors.

When she emerged in the lightest and filmiest of summer gowns, she brought the camera with her; and for a while we took pictures of each other, until we had used up all but one film.

Desiring to possess a picture of Miss Barrison and myself seated together, I tied a string to the shutter-lever and attached the other end of the string to the dog, who had resumed his interrupted slumbers. At my whistle he jumped up nervously, snapping the lever, and the picture was taken.

With such innocent and harmless pastime we whiled away the afternoon. She made twelve more apple-pies. I mounted guard over them. And we were just beginning to feel a trifle uneasy about Professor Farrago, when he appeared, tramping sturdily through the forest, green umbrella and butterfly-net under one arm, shot-gun and cyanide-jar under the other, and his breast all criss-crossed with straps, from which dangled field-glasses, collecting-boxes, and botanizing-tins—an inspiring figure indeed—the embodied symbol of science indomitable, triumphant!

We hailed him with three guilty cheers; the dog woke up with a perfunctory bark—the first sound I had heard from him since he yelped his disapproval of me on the lagoon.

Miss Barrison produced three bowls full of boiling water and dropped three pellets of concentrated soup-meat into them, while I prepared coffee. And in a few moments our simple dinner was ready—the red ants had been dusted from the biscuits, the spiders chased off the baked beans, the scorpions shaken from the napkins, and we sat down at the rough, improvised table under the palms.

The professor gave us a brief but modest account of his short tour of exploration. He had brought back a new species of orchid, several undescribed beetles, and a pocketful of coontie seed. He appeared, however, to be tired and singularly depressed, and presently we learned why.

It seemed that he had gone straight to that section of the forest where he had hitherto always found signs of the transparent and invisible creatures which he had determined to capture, and he had not found a single trace of them.

“It alarms me,” he said, gravely. “If they have deserted this region, it might take a lifetime to locate them again in this wilderness.”

Then, very quietly, sinking her voice instinctively, as though the unseen might be at our very elbows listening, Miss Barrison recounted the curious adventure which had befallen the dog and the first batch of apple-pies.

With visible and increasing excitement the professor listened until the very end. Then he struck the table with clinched fist—a resounding blow which set the concentrated soup dancing in the bowls and scattered the biscuits and the industrious red ants in every direction.

“Eureka!” he whispered. “Miss Barrison, your deduction was not only perfectly reasonable, but brilliant. You are right; the pies are for that very purpose. I conceived the idea when I first came here. Again and again the pies that my guide made out of dried apples disappeared in a most astonishing and mysterious manner when left to cool. At length I determined to watch them every second; and did so, with the result that late one afternoon I was amazed to see a pie slowly rise from the table and move swiftly away through the air about four feet above the ground, finally disappearing into a tangle of jasmine and grape-vine.

“The apparently automatic flight of that pie solved the problem; these transparent creatures cannot resist that delicacy. Therefore I decided to bait the cage for them this very night—Look! What’s the matter with that dog?”

The dog suddenly bounded into the air, alighted on all fours, ears, eyes, and muzzle concentrated on a point directly behind us.

“Good gracious! The pies!” faltered Miss Barrison, half rising from her seat; but the dog rushed madly into her skirts, scrambling for protection, and she fell back almost into my arms.

Clasping her tightly, I looked over my shoulder; the last pie was snatched from the table before my eyes and I saw it borne swiftly away by something unseen, straight into the deepening shadows of the forest.

The professor was singularly calm, even slightly ironical, as he turned to me, saying:

“Perhaps if you relinquish Miss Barrison she may be able to free herself from that dog.”

I did so immediately, and she deposited the cowering dog in my arms. Her face had suddenly become pink.

I passed the dog on to Professor Farrago, dumping it viciously into his lap—a proceeding which struck me as resembling a pastime of extreme youth known as “button, button, who’s got the button?”

The professor examined the animal gravely, feeling its pulse, counting its respirations, and finally inserting a tentative finger in an attempt to examine its tongue. The dog bit him.

“Ouch! It’s a clear case of fright,” he said, gravely. “I wanted a dog to aid me in trailing these remarkable creatures, but I think this dog of yours is useless, Gilland.”

“It’s given us warning of the creatures’ presence twice already,” I argued.

“Poor little thing,” said Miss Barrison, softly; “I don’t know why, but I love that dog…. He has eyes like yours, Mr. Gilland—”

Exasperated, I rose from the table. “He’s got eyes like holes burned in a blanket!” I said. “And if ever a flicker of intelligence lighted them I have failed to observe it.”

The professor regarded me dreamily. “We ought to have more pies,” he observed. “Perhaps if you carried the oven into the shanty—”

“Certainly,” said Miss Barrison; “we can lock the door while I make twelve more pies.”

I carried the portable camping-oven into the cabin, connected the patent asbestos chimney-pipes, and lighted the fire. And in a few minutes Miss Barrison, sleeves rolled up and pink apron pinned under her chin, was busily engaged in rolling pie-crust, while Professor Farrago measured out spices and set the dried apples to soak.

The swift Southern twilight had already veiled the forest as I stepped out of the cabin to smoke a cigar and promenade a bit and cogitate. A last trace of color lingering in the west faded out as I looked; the gray glimmer deepened into darkness, through which the white lake vapors floated in thin, wavering strata across the water.

For a while the frog’s symphony dominated all other sounds, then lagoon and forest and cypress branch awoke; and through the steadily sustained tumult of woodland voices I could hear the dry bark of the fox-squirrel, the whistle of the raccoon, ducks softly quacking or whimpering as they prepared for sleep among the reeds, the soft booming of bitterns, the clattering gossip of the heronry, the Southern whippoorwill’s incessant call.

At regular intervals the howling note of a lone heron echoed the strident screech of a crimson-crested crane; the horned owl’s savage hunting-cry haunted the night, now near, now floating from infinite distances.

And after a while I became aware of a nearer sound, low-pitched but ceaseless—the hum of thousands of lesser living creatures blending to a steady monotone.

Then the theatrical moon came up through filmy draperies of waving Spanish moss thin as cobwebs; and far in the wilderness a cougar fell a-crying and coughing like a little child with a bad cold.

I went in after that. Miss Barrison was sitting before the oven, knees gathered in her clasped hands, languidly studying the fire. She looked up as I appeared, opened the oven-doors, sniffed the aroma, and resumed her attitude of contented indifference.

“Where is the professor?” I asked.

“He has retired. He’s been talking in his sleep at moments.”

“Better take it down; that’s what you’re here for,” I observed, closing and holding the outside door. “Ugh! there’s a chill in the air. The dew is pelting down from the pines like a steady fall of rain.”

“You will get fever if you roam about at night,” she said. “Mercy! your coat is soaking. Sit here by the fire.”

So I pulled up a bench and sat down beside her like the traditional spider.

“Miss Muffitt,” I said, “don’t let me frighten you away—”

“I was going anyhow—”

“Please don’t.”

“Why?” she demanded, reseating herself.

“Because I like to sit beside you,” I said, truthfully.

“Your avowal is startling and not to be substantiated by facts,” she remarked, resting her chin on one hand and gazing into the fire.

“You mean because I went for a stroll by moonlight? I did that because you always seem to make fun of me as soon as the professor joins us.”

“Make fun of you? You surely don’t expect me to make eyes at you!”

There was a silence; I toasted my shins, thoughtfully.

“How is your burned finger?” I asked.

She lifted it for my inspection, and I began a protracted examination.

“What would you prescribe?” she inquired, with an absent-minded glance at the professor’s closed door.

“I don’t know; perhaps a slight but firm pressure of the finger-tips—”

“You tried that this afternoon.”

“But the dog interrupted us—”

“Interrupted you. Besides—”

“What?”

“I don’t think you ought to,” she said.

Sitting there before the oven, side by side, hand innocently clasped in hand, we heard the drumming of the dew on the roof, the night-wind stirring the palms, the muffled snoring of the professor, the faint whisper and crackle of the fire.

A single candle burned brightly, piling our shadows together on the wall behind us; moonlight silvered the window-panes, over which crawled multitudes of soft-winged moths, attracted by the candle within.

“See their tiny eyes glow!” she whispered. “How their wings quiver! And all for a candle-flame! Alas! alas! fire is the undoing of us all.”

She leaned forward, resting as though buried in reverie. After a while she extended one foot a trifle and, with the point of her shoe, carefully unlatched the oven-door. As it swung outward a delicious fragrance filled the room.

“They’re done,” she said, withdrawing her hand from mine. “Help me to lift them out.”

Together we arranged the delicious pastry in rows on the bench to cool. I opened the door for a few minutes, then closed and bolted it again.

“Do you suppose those transparent creatures will smell the odor and come around the cabin?” she suggested, wiping her fingers on her handkerchief.

I walked to the window uneasily. Outside the pane the moths crawled, some brilliant in scarlet and tan-color set with black, some snow-white with black tracings on their wings, and bodies peacock-blue edged with orange. The scientist in me was aroused; I called her to the window, and she came and leaned against the sill, nose pressed to the glass.

“I don’t suppose you know that the antennae of that silvery-winged moth are distinctly pectinate,” I said.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I took my degree as D.E. at Barnard College.”

“What!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “You’ve been through Barnard? You are a Doctor of Entomology?”

“It was my undoing,” she said. “The department was abolished the year I graduated. There was no similar vacancy, even in the Smithsonian.”

She shrugged her shoulders, eyes fixed on the moths. “I had to make my own living. I chose stenography as the quickest road to self-sustenance.”

She looked up, a flush on her cheeks.

“I suppose you took me for an inferior?” she said. “But do you suppose I’d flirt with you if I was?”

She pressed her face to the pane again, murmuring that exquisite poem of Andrew Lang:

“Spooning is innocuous and needn’t have a sequel,

But recollect, if spoon you must, spoon only with your equal.”

Standing there, watching the moths, we became rather silent—I don’t know why.

The fire in the range had gone out; the candle-flame, flaring above a saucer of melted wax, sank lower and lower.

Suddenly, as though disturbed by something inside, the moths all left the window-pane, darting off in the darkness.

“That’s curious,” I said.

“What’s curious?” she asked, opening her eyes languidly. “Good gracious! Was that a bat that beat on the window?”

“I saw nothing,” I said, disturbed. “Listen!”

A soft sound against the glass, as though invisible fingers were feeling the pane—a gentle rubbing—then a tap-tap, all but inaudible.

“Is it a bird? Can you see?” she whispered.

The candle-flame behind us flashed and expired. Moonlight flooded the pane. The sounds continued, but there was nothing there.

We understood now what it was that so gently rubbed and patted the glass outside. With one accord we noiselessly gathered up the pies and carried them into my room.

Then she walked to the door of her room, turned, held out her hand, and whispering, “Good-night! A demain, monsieur!” slipped into her room and softly closed the door.

And all night long I lay in troubled slumber beside the pies, a rifle resting on the blankets beside me, a revolver under my pillow. And I dreamed of moths with brilliant eyes and vast silvery wings harnessed to a balloon in which Miss Barrison and I sat, arms around each other, eating slice after slice of apple-pie.

XVII

[The Thermosaurus]

Dawn came—the dawn of a day that I am destined never to forget. Long, rosy streamers of light broke through the forest, shaking, quivering, like unstable beams from celestial search-lights. Mist floated upward from marsh and lake; and through it the spectral palms loomed, drooping fronds embroidered with dew.

For a while the ringing outburst of bird music dominated all; but it soon ceased with dropping notes from the crimson cardinals repeated in lengthening minor intervals; and then the spell of silence returned, broken only by the faint splash of mullet, mocking the sun with sinuous, silver flashes.

“Good-morning,” said a low voice from the door as I stood encouraging the camp-fire with splinter wood and dead palmetto fans.

Fresh and sweet from her toilet as a dew-drenched rose, Miss Barrison stood there sniffing the morning air daintily, thoroughly.

“Too much perfume,” she said—“too much like ylang-ylang in a department-store. Central Park smells sweeter on an April morning.”

“Are you criticising the wild jasmine?” I asked.

“I’m criticising an exotic smell. Am I not permitted to comment on the tropics?”

Fishing out a cedar log from the lumber-stack, I fell to chopping it vigorously. The axe-strokes made a cheerful racket through the woods.

“Did you hear anything last night after you retired?” I asked.

“Something was at my window—something that thumped softly and seemed to be feeling all over the glass. To tell you the truth, I was silly enough to remain dressed all night.”

“You don’t look it,” I said.

“Oh, when daylight came I had a chance,” she added, laughing.

“All the same,” said I, leaning on the axe and watching her, “you are about the coolest and pluckiest woman I ever knew.”

“We were all in the same fix,” she said, modestly.

“No, we were not. Now I’ll tell you the truth—my hair stood up the greater part of the night. You are looking upon a poltroon, Miss Barrison.”

“Then there was something at your window, too?”

“Something? A dozen! They were monkeying with the sashes and panes all night long, and I imagined that I could hear them breathing—as though from effort of intense eagerness. Ouch! I came as near losing my nerve as I care to. I came within an ace of hurling those cursed pies through the window at them. I’d bolt to-day if I wasn’t afraid to play the coward.”

“Most people are brave for that reason,” she said.

The dog, who had slept under my bunk, and who had contributed to my entertainment by sighing and moaning all night, now appeared ready for business—business in his case being the operation of feeding. I presented him with a concentrated tablet, which he cautiously investigated and then rolled on.

“Nice testimonial for the people who concocted it,” I said, in disgust. “I wish I had an egg.”

“There are some concentrated egg tablets in the shanty,” said Miss Barrison; but the idea was not attractive.

“I refuse to fry a pill for breakfast,” I said, sullenly, and set the coffee-pot on the coals.

In spite of the dewy beauty of the morning, breakfast was not a cheerful function. Professor Farrago appeared, clad in sun-helmet and khaki. I had seldom seen him depressed; but he was now, and his very efforts to disguise it only emphasized his visible anxiety.

His preparations for the day, too, had an ominous aspect to me. He gave his orders and we obeyed, instinctively suppressing questions. First, he and I transported all personal luggage of the company to the big electric launch—Miss Barrison’s effects, his, and my own. His private papers, the stenographic reports, and all memoranda were tied up together and carried aboard.

Then, to my surprise, two weeks’ concentrated rations for two and mineral water sufficient for the same period were stowed away aboard the launch. Several times he asked me whether I knew how to run the boat, and I assured him that I did.

In a short time nothing was left ashore except the bare furnishings of the cabin, the female wearing-apparel, the steel cage and chemicals which I had brought, and the twelve apple-pies—the latter under lock and key in my room.

As the preparations came to an end, the professor’s gentle melancholy seemed to deepen. Once I ventured to ask him if he was indisposed, and he replied that he had never felt in better physical condition.

Presently he bade me fetch the pies; and I brought them, and, at a sign from him, placed them inside the steel cage, closing and locking the door.

“I believe,” he said, glancing from Miss Barrison to me, and from me to the dog—“I believe that we are ready to start.”

He went to the cabin and locked the door on the outside, pocketing the key.

Then he backed up to the steel cage, stooped and lifted his end as I lifted mine, and together we started off through the forest, bearing the cage between us as porters carry a heavy piece of luggage.

Miss Barrison came next, carrying the trousseau, the tank, hose, and chemicals; and the dog followed her—probably not from affection for us, but because he was afraid to be left alone.

We walked in silence, the professor and I keeping an instinctive lookout for snakes; but we encountered nothing of that sort. On every side, touching our shoulders, crowded the closely woven and impenetrable tangle of the jungle; and we threaded it along a narrow path which he, no doubt, had cut, for the machete marks were still fresh, and the blazes on hickory, live-oak, and palm were all wet with dripping sap, and swarming with eager, brilliant butterflies.

At times across our course flowed shallow, rapid streams of water, clear as crystal, and most alluring to the thirsty.

“There’s fever in every drop,” said the professor, as I mentioned my thirst; “take the bottled water if you mean to stay a little longer.”

“Stay where?” I asked.

“On earth,” he replied, tersely; and we marched on.

The beauty of the tropics is marred somewhat for me; under all the fresh splendor of color death lurks in brilliant tints. Where painted fruit hangs temptingly, where great, silky blossoms exhale alluring scent, where the elaps coils inlaid with scarlet, black, and saffron, where in the shadow of a palmetto frond a succession of velvety black diamonds mark the rattler’s swollen length, there death is; and his invisible consort, horror, creeps where the snake whose mouth is lined with white creeps—where the tarantula squats, hairy, motionless; where a bit of living enamel fringed with orange undulates along a mossy log.

Thinking of these things, and watchful lest, unawares, terror unfold from some blossoming and leafy covert, I scarcely noticed the beauty of the glade we had entered—a long oval, cross-barred with sunshine which fell on hedges of scrub-palmetto, chin high, interlaced with golden blossoms of the jasmine. And all around, like pillars supporting a high green canopy above a throne, towered the silvery stems of palms fretted with pale, rose-tinted lichens and hung with draperies of grape-vine.

“This is the place,” said Professor Farrago.

His quiet, passionless voice sounded strange to me; his words seemed strange, too, each one heavily weighted with hidden meaning.

We set the cage on the ground; he unlocked and opened the steel-barred door, and, kneeling, carefully arranged the pies along the centre of the cage.

“I have a curious presentiment,” he said, “that I shall not come out of this experiment unscathed.”

“Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, say that!” I broke out, my nerves on edge again.

“Why not?” he asked, surprised. “I am not afraid.”

“Not afraid to die?” I demanded, exasperated.

“Who spoke of dying?” he inquired, mildly. “What I said was that I do not expect to come out of this affair unscathed.”

I did not comprehend his meaning, but I understood the reproof conveyed.

He closed and locked the cage door again and came towards us, balancing the key across the palm of his hand.

Miss Barrison had seated herself on the leaves; I stood back as the professor sat down beside her; then, at a gesture from him, took the place he indicated on his left.

“Before we begin,” he said, calmly, “there are several things you ought to know and which I have not yet told you. The first concerns the feminine wearing apparel which Mr. Gilland brought me.”

He turned to Miss Barrison and asked her whether she had brought a complete outfit, and she opened the bundle on her knees and handed it to him.

“I cannot,” he said, “delicately explain in so many words what use I expect to make of this apparel. Nor do I yet know whether I shall have any use at all for it. That can only be a theoretical speculation until, within a few more hours, my theory is proven or disproven—and,” he said, suddenly turning on me, “my theory concerning these invisible creatures is the most extraordinary and audacious theory ever entertained by man since Columbus presumed that there must lie somewhere a hidden continent which nobody had ever seen.”

He passed his hand over his protruding forehead, lost for a moment in deepest reflection. Then, “Have you ever heard of the Sphyx?” he asked.

“It seems to me that Ponce de Leon wrote of something—” I began, hesitating.

“Yes, the famous lines in the third volume which have set so many wise men guessing. You recall them:

“‘And there, alas! within sound of the Fountain of Youth whose waters tint the skin till the whole body glows softly like the petal of a rose—there, alas! in the new world already blooming, The Eternal Enigma I beheld, in the flesh living; yet it faded even as I looked, although I swear it lived and breathed. This is the Sphyx.’”

A silence; then I said, “Those lines are meaningless to me.”

“Not to me,” said Miss Barrison, softly.

The professor looked at her. “Ah, child! Ever subtler, ever surer—the Eternal Enigma is no enigma to you.”

“What is the Sphyx?” I asked.

“Have you read De Soto? Or Goya?”

“Yes, both. I remember now that De Soto records the Syachas legend of the Sphyx—something about a goddess—”

“Not a goddess,” said Miss Barrison, her lips touched with a smile.

“Sometimes,” said the professor, gently. “And Goya said:

“‘It has come to my ears while in the lands of the Syachas that the Sphyx surely lives, as bolder and more curious men than I may, God willing, prove to the world hereafter.’”

“But what is the Sphyx?” I insisted.

“For centuries wise men and savants have asked each other that question. I have answered it for myself; I am now to prove it, I trust.”

His face darkened, and again and again he stroked his heavy brow.

“If anything occurs,” he said, taking my hand in his left and Miss Barrison’s hand in his right, “promise me to obey my wishes. Will you?”

“Yes,” we said, together.

“If I lose my life, or—or disappear, promise me on your honor to get to the electric launch as soon as possible and make all speed northward, placing my private papers, the reports of Miss Barrison, and your own reports in the hands of the authorities in Bronx Park. Don’t attempt to aid me; don’t delay to search for me. Do you promise?”

“Yes,” we breathed together.

He looked at us solemnly. “If you fail me, you betray me,” he said.

We swore obedience.

“Then let us begin,” he said, and he rose and went to the steel cage. Unlocking the door, he flung it wide and stepped inside, leaving the cage door open.

“The moment a single pie is disturbed,” he said to me, “I shall close the steel door from the inside, and you and Miss Barrison will then dump the rosium oxide and the strontium into the tank, clap on the lid, turn the nozzle of the hose on the cage, and spray it thoroughly. Whatever is invisible in the cage will become visible and of a faint rose color. And when the trapped creature becomes visible, hold yourselves ready to aid me as long as I am able to give you orders. After that either all will go well or all will go otherwise, and you must run for the launch.” He seated himself in the cage near the open door.

I placed the steel tank near the cage, uncoiled the hose attachment, unscrewed the top, and dumped in the salts of strontium. Miss Barrison unwrapped the bottle of rosium oxide and loosened the cork. We examined this pearl-and-pink powder and shook it up so that it might run out quickly. Then Miss Barrison sat down, and presently became absorbed in a stenographic report of the proceedings up to date.

When Miss Barrison finished her report she handed me the bundle of papers. I stowed them away in my wallet, and we sat down together beside the tank.

Inside the cage Professor Farrago was seated, his spectacled eyes fixed on the row of pies. For a while, although realizing perfectly that our quarry was transparent and invisible, we unconsciously strained our eyes in quest of something stirring in the forest.

“I should think,” said I, in a low voice, “that the odor of the pies might draw at least one out of the odd dozen that came rubbing up against my window last night.”

“Hush! Listen!” she breathed. But we heard nothing save the snoring of the overfed dog at our feet.

“He’ll give us ample notice by butting into Miss Barrison’s skirts,” I observed. “No need of our watching, professor.”

The professor nodded. Presently he removed his spectacles and lay back against the bars, closing his eyes.

At first the forest silence seemed cheerful there in the flecked sunlight. The spotted wood-gnats gyrated merrily, chased by dragonflies; the shy wood-birds hopped from branch to twig, peering at us in friendly inquiry; a lithe, gray squirrel, plumy tail undulating, rambled serenely around the cage, sniffing at the pastry within.

Suddenly, without apparent reason, the squirrel sprang to a tree-trunk, hung a moment on the bark, quivering all over, then dashed away into the jungle.

“Why did he act like that?” whispered Miss Barrison. And, after a moment: “How still it is! Where have the birds gone?”

In the ominous silence the dog began to whimper in his sleep and his hind legs kicked convulsively.

“He’s dreaming—” I began.

The words were almost driven down my throat by the dog, who, without a yelp of warning, hurled himself at Miss Barrison and alighted on my chest, fore paws around my neck.

I cast him scornfully from me, but he scrambled back, digging like a mole to get under us.

“The transparent creatures!” whispered Miss Barrison. “Look! See that pie move!”

I sprang to my feet just as the professor, jamming on his spectacles, leaned forward and slammed the cage door.

“I’ve got one!” he shouted, frantically. “There’s one in the cage! Turn on that hose!”

“Wait a second,” said Miss Barrison, calmly, uncorking the bottle and pouring a pearly stream of rosium oxide into the tank. “Quick! It’s fizzing! Screw on the top!”

In a second I had screwed the top fast, seized the hose, and directed a hissing cloud of vapor through the cage bars.

For a moment nothing was heard save the whistling rush of the perfumed spray escaping; a delicious odor of roses filled the air. Then, slowly, there in the sunshine, a misty something grew in the cage—a glistening, pearl-tinted phantom, imperceptibly taking shape in space—vague at first as a shred of lake vapor, then lengthening, rounding into flowing form, clearer, clearer.

“The Sphyx!” gasped the professor. “In the name of Heaven, play that hose!”

As he spoke the treacherous hose burst. A showery pillar of rose-colored vapor enveloped everything. Through the thickening fog for one brief instant a human form appeared like magic—a woman’s form, flawless, exquisite as a statue, pure as marble. Then the swimming vapor buried it, cage, pies, and all.

We ran frantically around, the cage in the obscurity, appealing for instructions and feeling for the bars. Once the professor’s muffled voice was heard demanding the wearing apparel, and I groped about and found it and stuffed it through the bars of the cage.

“Do you need help?” I shouted. There was no response. Staring around through the thickening vapor of rosium rolling in clouds from the overturned tank, I heard Miss Barrison’s voice calling:

“I can’t move! A transparent lady is holding me!”

Blindly I rushed about, arms outstretched, and the next moment struck the door of the cage so hard that the impact almost knocked me senseless. Clutching it to steady myself, it suddenly flew open. A rush of partly visible creatures passed me like a burst of pink flames, and in the midst, borne swiftly away on the crest of the outrush, the professor passed like a bolt shot from a catapult; and his last cry came wafted back to me from the forest as I swayed there, drunk with the stupefying perfume: “Don’t worry! I’m all right!”

I staggered out into the clearer air towards a figure seen dimly through swirling vapor.

“Are you hurt?” I stammered, clasping Miss Barrison in my arms.

“No—oh no,” she said, wringing her hands. “But the professor! I saw him! I could not scream; I could not move! They had him!”

“I saw him too,” I groaned. “There was not one trace of terror on his face. He was actually smiling.”

Overcome at the sublime courage of the man, we wept in each other’s arms.

•      •      •      •      •      •

True to our promise to Professor Farrago, we made the best of our way northward; and it was not a difficult journey by any means, the voyage in the launch across Okeechobee being perfectly simple and the trail to the nearest railroad station but a few easy miles from the landing-place.

Shocking as had been our experience, dreadful as was the calamity which had not only robbed me of a life-long friend, but had also bereaved the entire scientific world, I could not seem to feel that desperate and hopeless grief which the natural decease of a close friend might warrant. No; there remained a vague expectancy which so dominated my sorrow that at moments I became hopeful—nay, sanguine, that I should one day again behold my beloved superior in the flesh. There was something so happy in his last smile, something so artlessly pleased, that I was certain no fear of impending dissolution worried him as he disappeared into the uncharted depth of the unknown Everglades.

I think Miss Barrison agreed with me, too. She appeared to be more or less dazed, which was, of course, quite natural; and during our return voyage across Okeechobee and through the lagoons and forests beyond she was very silent.

When we reached the railroad at Portulacca, a thrifty lemon-growing ranch on the Volusia and Chinkapin Railway, the first thing I did was to present my dog to the station-agent—but I was obliged to give him five dollars before he consented to accept the dog.

However, Miss Barrison interviewed the station-master’s wife, a kindly, pitiful soul, who promised to be a good mistress to the creature. We both felt better after that was off our minds; we felt better still when the north-bound train rolled leisurely into the white glare of Portulacca, and presently rolled out again, quite as leisurely, bound, thank Heaven, for that abused aggregation of sinful boroughs called New York.

Except for one young man whom I encountered in the smoker, we had the train to ourselves, a circumstance which, curiously enough, appeared to increase Miss Barrison’s depression, and my own as a natural sequence. The circumstances of the taking off of Professor Farrago appeared to engross her thoughts so completely that it made me uneasy during our trip out from Little Sprite—in fact it was growing plainer to me every hour that in her brief acquaintance with that distinguished scientist she had become personally attached to him to an extent that began to worry me. Her personal indignation at the caged Sphyx flared out at unexpected intervals, and there could be no doubt that her unhappiness and resentment were becoming morbid.

I spent an hour or two in the smoking compartment, tenanted only by a single passenger and myself. He was an agreeable young man, although, in the natural acquaintanceship that we struck up, I regretted to learn that he was a writer of popular fiction, returning from Fort Worth, where he had been for the sole purpose of composing a poem on Florida.

I have always, in common with other mentally balanced savants, despised writers of fiction. All scientists harbor a natural antipathy to romance in any form, and that antipathy becomes a deep horror if fiction dares to deal flippantly with the exact sciences, or if some degraded intellect assumes the warrantless liberty of using natural history as the vehicle for silly tales.

Never but once had I been tempted to romance in any form; never but once had sentiment interfered with a passionless transfer of scientific notes to the sanctuary of the unvarnished note-book or the cloister of the juiceless monograph. Nor have I the slightest approach to that superficial and doubtful quality known as literary skill. Once, however, as I sat alone in the middle of the floor, classifying my isopods, I was not only astonished but totally unprepared to find myself repeating aloud a verse that I myself had unconsciously fashioned:

“An isopod

Is a work of God.”

Never before in all my life had I made a rhyme; and it worried me for weeks, ringing in my brain day and night, confusing me, interfering with my thoughts.

I said as much to the young man, who only laughed good-naturedly and replied that it was the Creator’s purpose to limit certain intellects, nobody knows why, and that it was apparent that mine had not escaped.

“There’s one thing, however,” he said, “that might be of some interest to you and come within the circumscribed scope of your intelligence.”

“And what is that?” I asked, tartly.

“A scientific experience of mine,” he said, with a careless laugh. “It’s so much stranger than fiction that even Professor Bruce Stoddard, of Columbia, hesitated to credit it.”

I looked at the young fellow suspiciously. His bland smile disarmed me, but I did not invite him to relate his experience, although he apparently needed only that encouragement to begin.

“Now, if I could tell it exactly as it occurred,” he observed, “and a stenographer could take it down, word for word, exactly as I relate it—”

“It would give me great pleasure to do so,” said a quiet voice at the door. We rose at once, removing the cigars from our lips; but Miss Barrison bade us continue smoking, and at a gesture from her we resumed our seats after she had installed herself by the window.

“Really,” she said, looking coldly at me, “I couldn’t endure the solitude any longer. Isn’t there anything to do on this tiresome train?”

“If you had your pad and pencil,” I began, maliciously, “you might take down a matter of interest—”

She looked frankly at the young man, who laughed in that pleasant, good-tempered manner of his, and offered to tell us of his alleged scientific experience if we thought it might amuse us sufficiently to vary the dull monotony of the journey north.

“Is it fiction?” I asked, point-blank.

“It is absolute truth,” he replied.

I rose and went off to find pad and pencil. When I returned Miss Barrison was laughing at a story which the young man had just finished.

“But,” he ended, gravely, “I have practically decided to renounce fiction as a means of livelihood and confine myself to simple, uninteresting statistics and facts.”

“I am very glad to hear you say that,” I exclaimed, warmly. He bowed, looked at Miss Barrison, and asked her when he might begin his story.

“Whenever you are ready,” replied Miss Barrison, smiling in a manner which I had not observed since the disappearance of Professor Farrago. I’ll admit that the young fellow was superficially attractive.

[The Thermosaurus]

Well, then, (he began, modestly) having no technical ability concerning the affair in question, and having no knowledge of either comparative anatomy or zoology, I am perhaps unfitted to tell this story. But the story is true; the episode occurred under my own eyes—within a few hours’ sail of the Battery. And as I was one of the first persons to verify what has long been a theory among scientists, and, moreover, as the result of Professor Holroyd’s discovery is to be placed on exhibition in Madison Square Garden on the 20th of next month, I have decided to tell you, as simply as I am able, exactly what occurred.

I first told the story on April 1, 1903, to the editors of the North American Review, The Popular Science Monthly, the Scientific American, Nature, Outing, and the Fossiliferous Magazine. All these gentlemen rejected it; some curtly informing me that fiction had no place in their columns. When I attempted to explain that it was not fiction, the editors of these periodicals either maintained a contemptuous silence, or bluntly notified me that my literary services and opinions were not desired. But finally, when several publishers offered to take the story as fiction, I cut short all negotiations and decided to publish it myself. Where I am known at all, it is my misfortune to be known as a writer of fiction. This makes it impossible for me to receive a hearing from a scientific audience. I regret it bitterly, because now, when it is too late, I am prepared to prove certain scientific matters of interest, and to produce the proofs. In this case, however, I am fortunate, for nobody can dispute the existence of a thing when the bodily proof is exhibited as evidence.

This is the story; and if I tell it as I write fiction, it is because I do not know how to tell it otherwise.

I was walking along the beach below Pine Inlet, on the south shore of Long Island. The railroad and telegraph station is at West Oyster Bay. Everybody who has travelled on the Long Island Railroad knows the station, but few, perhaps, know Pine Inlet. Duck-shooters, of course, are familiar with it; but as there are no hotels there, and nothing to see except salt meadow, salt creek, and a strip of dune and sand, the summer-squatting public may probably be unaware of its existence. The local name for the place is Pine Inlet; the maps give its name as Sand Point, I believe, but anybody at West Oyster Bay can direct you to it. Captain McPeek, who keeps the West Oyster Bay House, drives duck-shooters there in winter. It lies five miles southeast from West Oyster Bay.

I had walked over that afternoon from Captain McPeek’s. There was a reason for my going to Pine Inlet—it embarrasses me to explain it, but the truth is I meditated writing an ode to the ocean. It was out of the question to write it in West Oyster Bay, with the whistle of locomotives in my ears. I knew that Pine Inlet was one of the loneliest places on the Atlantic coast; it is out of sight of everything except leagues of gray ocean. Rarely one might make out fishing-smacks drifting across the horizon. Summer squatters never visited it; sportsmen shunned it, except in winter. Therefore, as I was about to do a bit of poetry, I thought that Pine Inlet was the spot for the deed. So I went there.

As I was strolling along the beach, biting my pencil reflectively, tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the surf, a thought occurred to me—how unpleasant it would be if I suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility flitted across my mind, I rounded a bleak sand-dune.

A girl stood directly in my path.

She stared at me as though I had just crawled up out of the sea to bite her. I don’t know what my own expression resembled, but I have been given to understand it was idiotic.

Now I perceived, after a few moments, that the young lady was frightened, and I knew I ought to say something civil. So I said, “Are there any mosquitoes here?”

“No,” she replied, with a slight quiver in her voice; “I have only seen one, and it was biting somebody else.”

The conversation seemed so futile, and the young lady appeared to be more nervous than before. I had an impulse to say, “Do not run; I have breakfasted,” for she seemed to be meditating a flight into the breakers. What I did say was: “I did not know anybody was here. I do not intend to intrude. I come from Captain McPeek’s, and I am writing an ode to the ocean.” After I had said this it seemed to ring in my ears like, “I come from Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James.”

I glanced timidly at her.

“She’s thinking of the same thing,” said I to myself.

However, the young lady seemed to be a trifle reassured. I noticed she drew a sigh of relief and looked at my shoes. She looked so long that it made me suspicious, and I also examined my shoes. They seemed to be in a fair state of repair.

“I—I am sorry,” she said, “but would you mind not walking on the beach?”

This was sudden. I had intended to retire and leave the beach to her, but I did not fancy being driven away so abruptly.

“Dear me!” she cried, “you don’t understand. I do not—I would not think for a moment of asking you to leave Pine Inlet. I merely ventured to request you to walk on the dunes. I am so afraid that your footprints may obliterate the impressions that my father is studying.”

“Oh!” said I, looking about me as though I had been caught in the middle of a flower-bed; “really I did not notice any impressions. Impressions of what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, smiling a little at my awkward pose. “If you step this way in a straight line you can do no damage.”

I did as she bade me. I suppose my movements resembled the gait of a wet peacock. Possibly they recalled the delicate manoeuvres of the kangaroo. Anyway, she laughed.

This seriously annoyed me. I had been at a disadvantage; I walk well enough when let alone.

“You can scarcely expect,” said I, “that a man absorbed in his own ideas could notice impressions on the sand. I trust I have obliterated nothing.”

As I said this I looked back at the long line of footprints stretching away in prospective across the sand. They were my own. How large they looked! Was that what she was laughing at?

“I wish to explain,” she said gravely, looking at the point of her parasol. “I am very sorry to be obliged to warn you—to ask you to forego the pleasure of strolling on a beach that does not belong to me. Perhaps,” she continued, in sudden alarm, “perhaps this beach belongs to you?”

“The beach? Oh, no,” I said.

“But—but you were going to write poems about it?”

“Only one—and that does not necessitate owning the beach. I have observed,” said I frankly, “that the people who own nothing write many poems about it.”

She looked at me seriously.

“I write many poems,” I added.

She laughed doubtfully.

“Would you rather I went away?” I asked, politely. “My family is respectable,” I added; and I told her my name.

“Oh! Then you wrote Culled Cowslips and Faded Fig-Leaves and you imitate Maeterlinck, and you—Oh, I know lots of people that you know;” she cried, with every symptom of relief; “and you know my brother.”

“I am the author,” said I, coldly, “of Culled Cowslips, but Faded Fig-Leaves was an earlier work, which I no longer recognize, and I should be grateful to you if you would be kind enough to deny that I ever imitated Maeterlinck. Possibly,” I added, “he imitates me.”

She was very quiet, and I saw she was sorry.

“Never mind,” I said magnanimously, “you probably are not familiar with sporting goods. If I knew your name I should ask permission to present myself.”

“Why, I am Daisy Holroyd,” she said.

“What! Jack Holroyd’s little sister?”

“Little!” she cried.

“I didn’t mean that,” said I. “You know that your brother and I were great friends in Paris——”

“I know,” she said significantly.

“Ahem! Of course,” I said, “Jack and I were inseparable——”

“Except when shut in separate cells,” said Miss Holroyd coldly.

This unfeeling allusion to the unfortunate termination of a Latin-Quarter celebration hurt me.

“The police,” said I, “were too officious.”

“So Jack says,” replied Miss Holroyd demurely.

We had unconsciously moved on along the sand hills, side by side, as we spoke.

“To think,” I repeated, “that I should meet Jack’s little——”

“Please,” she said, “you are only three years my senior.”

She opened the sunshade and tipped it over one shoulder. It was white, and had spots and posies on it.

“Jack sends us every new book you write,” she observed. “I do not approve of some things you write.”

“Modern school,” I mumbled.

“That is no excuse,” she said severely; “Anthony Trollope didn’t do it.”

The foam spume from the breakers was drifting across the dunes, and the little tip-up snipe ran along the beach and teetered and whistled and spread their white-barred wings for a low, straight flight across the shingle, only to tip and skeep and sail on again. The salt sea wind whistled and curled through the crested waves, blowing in perfumed puffs across thickets of sweet bay and cedar. As we passed through the crackling juicy-stemmed marsh weed myriads of fiddler crabs raised their fore-claws in warning and backed away, rustling, through the reeds, aggressive, protesting.

“Like millions of pigmy Ajaxes defying the lightning,” I said.

Miss Holroyd laughed.

“Now I never imagined that authors were clever except in print,” she said.

She was a most extraordinary girl.

“I suppose,” she observed after a moment’s silence—“I suppose I am taking you to my father.”

“Delighted!” I mumbled. “H’m! I had the honour of meeting Professor Holroyd in Paris.”

“Yes; he bailed you and Jack out,” said Miss Holroyd serenely.

The silence was too painful to last.

“Captain McPeek is an interesting man,” I said. I spoke more loudly than I intended; I may have been nervous.

“Yes,” said Daisy Holroyd, “but he has a most singular hotel clerk.”

“You mean Mr. Frisby?”

“I do.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “Mr. Frisby is queer. He was once a bill-poster.”

“I know it!” exclaimed Daisy Holroyd, with some heat. “He ruins landscapes whenever he has an opportunity. Do you know that he has a passion for bill-posting? He has; he posts bills for the pure pleasure of it, just as you play golf, or tennis, or squash.”

“But he’s a hotel clerk now,” I said; “nobody employs him to post bills.”

“I know it! He does it all by himself for the pure pleasure of it. Papa has engaged him to come down here for two weeks, and I dread it,” said the girl.

What Professor Holroyd might want of Frisby I had not the faintest notion. I suppose Miss Holroyd noticed the bewilderment in my face, for she laughed, and nodded her head twice.

“Not only Mr. Frisby, but Captain McPeek also,” she said.

“You don’t mean to say that Captain McPeek is going to close his hotel!” I exclaimed.

My trunk was there. It contained guarantees of my respectability.

“Oh, no; his wife will keep it open,” replied the girl. “Look! you can see papa now. He’s digging.”

“Where?” I blurted out.

I remembered Professor Holroyd as a prim, spectacled gentleman, with close-cut, snowy beard and a clerical allure. The man I saw digging wore green goggles, a jersey, a battered sou’wester, and hip-boots of rubber. He was delving in the muck of the salt meadow, his face streaming with perspiration, his boots and jersey splashed with unpleasant-looking mud. He glanced up as we approached, shading his eyes with a sunburned hand.

“Papa, dear,” said Miss Holroyd, “here is Jack’s friend, whom you bailed out of Mazas.”

The introduction was startling. I turned crimson with mortification. The professor was very decent about it; he called me by name at once. Then he looked at his spade. It was clear he considered me a nuisance and wished to go on with his digging.

“I suppose,” he said, “you are still writing?”

“A little,” I replied, trying not to speak sarcastically. My output had rivaled that of “The Duchess”—in quantity, I mean.

“I seldom read—fiction,” he said, looking restlessly at the hole in the ground.

Miss Holroyd came to my rescue.

“That was a charming story you wrote last,” she said. “Papa should read it—you should, papa; it’s all about a fossil.”

We both looked narrowly at Miss Holroyd. Her smile was guileless.

“Fossils!” repeated the professor. “Do you care for fossils?”

“Very much,” said I

Now I am not perfectly sure what my object was in lying. I looked at Daisy Holroyd’s dark-fringed eyes. They were very grave.

“Fossils,” said I, “are my hobby.”

I think Miss Holroyd winced a little at this. I did not care. I went on:

“I have seldom had the opportunity to study the subject, but, as a boy, I collected flint arrow-heads——”

“Flint arrow-heads!” said the professor coldly.

“Yes; they were the nearest things to fossils obtainable,” I replied, marvelling at my own mendacity.

The professor looked into the hole. I also looked. I could see nothing in it. “He’s digging for fossils,” thought I to myself.

“Perhaps,” said the professor cautiously, “you might wish to aid me in a little research—that is to say, if you have an inclination for fossils.” The double-entendre was not lost upon me.

“I have read all your books so eagerly,” said I, “that to join you, to be of service to you in any research, however difficult and trying, would be an honour and a privilege that I never dared to hope for.”

“That,” thought I to myself, “will do its own work.”

But the professor was still suspicious. How could he help it, when he remembered Jack’s escapades, in which my name was always blended! Doubtless he was satisfied that my influence on Jack was evil. The contrary was the case, too.

“Fossils,” he said, worrying the edges of the excavation with his spade, “fossils are not things to be lightly considered.”

“No, indeed!” I protested.

“Fossils are the most interesting as well as puzzling things in the world,” said he.

“They are!” I cried enthusiastically.

“But I am not looking for fossils,” observed the professor mildly.

This was a facer. I looked at Daisy Holroyd. She bit her lip and fixed her eyes on the sea. Her eyes were wonderful eyes.

“Did you think I was digging for fossils in a salt meadow?” queried the professor. “You can have read very little about the subject. I am digging for something quite different.”

I was silent. I knew that my face was a trifle flushed. I longed to say, “Well, what the devil are you digging for?” but I only stared into the hole as though hypnotized.

“Captain McPeek and Frisby ought to be here,” he said, looking first at Daisy and then across the meadows.

I ached to ask him why he had subpoenaed Captain McPeek and Frisby.

“They are coming,” said Daisy, shading her eyes. “Do you see the speck on the meadows?”

“It may be a mud hen,” said the professor.

“Miss Holroyd is right,” I said. “A wagon and team and two men are coming from the north. There is a dog beside the wagon—it’s that miserable yellow dog of Frisby’s.”

“Good gracious!” cried the professor, “you don’t mean to tell me that you see all that at such a distance?”

“Why not?” I said.

“I see nothing,” he insisted.

“You will see that I’m right, presently,” I laughed.

The professor removed his blue goggles and rubbed them, glancing obliquely at me.

“Haven’t you heard what extraordinary eyesight duck shooters have?” said his daughter, looking back at her father. “Jack says that they can tell exactly what kind of a duck is flying before most people could see anything at all in the sky.”

“It’s true,” I said; “it comes to anybody, I fancy, who has had practice.”

The professor regarded me with a new interest. There was inspiration in his eyes. He turned toward the ocean. For a long time he stared at the tossing waves on the beach, then he looked far out to where the horizon met the sea.

“Are there any ducks out there?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” said I, scanning the sea, “there are.”

He produced a pair of binoculars from his coat-tail pocket, adjusted them, and raised them to his eyes.

“H’m! What sort of ducks?”

I looked more carefully, holding both hands over my forehead.

“Surf ducks—scoters and widgeon. There is one bufflehead among them—no, two; the rest are coots,” I replied.

“This,” cried the professor, “is most astonishing. I have good eyes, but I can’t see a blessed thing without these binoculars!”

“It’s not extraordinary,” said I; “the surf ducks and coots any novice might recognise; the widgeon and buffleheads I should not have been able to name unless they had risen from the water. It is easy to tell any duck when it is flying, even though it looks no bigger than a black pin-point.”

But the professor insisted that it was marvellous, and he said that I might render him invaluable service if I would consent to come and camp at Pine Inlet for a few weeks.

I looked at his daughter, but she turned her back—not exactly in disdain either. Her back was beautifully moulded. Her gown fitted also.

“Camp out here?” I repeated, pretending to be unpleasantly surprised.

“I do not think he would care to,” said Miss Holroyd, without turning.

I had not expected that.

“Above all things,” said I, in a clear, pleasant voice, “I like to camp out.”

She said nothing.

“It is not exactly camping,” said the professor. “Come, you shall see our conservatory. Daisy, come, dear! you must put on a heavier frock; it is getting toward sundown.”

At that moment, over a near dune, two horses’ heads appeared, followed by two human heads, then a wagon, then a yellow dog.

I turned triumphantly to the professor.

“You are the very man I want,” he muttered; “the very man—the very man.”

I looked at Daisy Holroyd. She returned my glance with a defiant little smile.

“Waal,” said Captain McPeek, driving up, “here we be! Git out, Frisby.”

Frisby, fat, nervous, and sentimental, hopped out of the cart.

“Come!” said the professor, impatiently moving across the dunes. I walked with Daisy Holroyd. McPeek and Frisby followed. The yellow dog walked by himself.

XVIII

The sun was dipping into the sea as we trudged across the meadows towards a high, dome-shaped dune covered with cedars and thickets of sweet bay. I saw no sign of habitation among the sand-hills. Far as the eye could reach, nothing broke the gray line of sea and sky save the squat dunes crowned with stunted cedars.

Then, as we rounded the base of the dune, we almost walked into the door of a house. My amazement amused Miss Holroyd, and I noticed also a touch of malice in her pretty eyes. But she said nothing, following her father into the house, with the slightest possible gesture to me. Was it invitation or was it menace?

The house was merely a light wooden frame, covered with some waterproof stuff that looked like a mixture of rubber and tar. Over this—in fact, over the whole roof—was pitched an awning of heavy sail-cloth. I noticed that the house was anchored to the sand by chains, already rusted red. But this one-storied house was not the only building nestling in the south shelter of the big dune. A hundred feet away stood another structure—long, low, also built of wood. It had rows on rows of round port-holes on every side. The ports were fitted with heavy glass, hinged to swing open if necessary. A single, big double door occupied the front.

Behind this long, low building was still another, a mere shed. Smoke rose from the sheet-iron chimney. There was somebody moving about inside the open door.

As I stood gaping at this mushroom hamlet the professor appeared at the door and asked me to enter. I stepped in at once.

The house was much larger than I had imagined. A straight hallway ran through the centre from east to west. On either side of this hallway were rooms, the doors swinging wide open. I counted three doors on each side; the three on the south appeared to be bedrooms.

The professor ushered me into a room on the north side, where I found Captain McPeek and Frisby sitting at a table, upon which were drawings and sketches of articulated animals and fishes.

“You see, McPeek,” said the professor, “we only wanted one more man, and I think I’ve got him.—Haven’t I?” turning eagerly to me.

“Why, yes,” I said, laughing; “this is delightful. Am I invited to stay here?”

“Your bedroom is the third on the south side; everything is ready. McPeek, you can bring his trunk to-morrow, can’t you?” demanded the professor.

The red-faced captain nodded, and shifted a quid.

“Then it’s all settled,” said the professor, and he drew a sigh of satisfaction. “You see,” he said, turning to me, “I was at my wit’s end to know whom to trust. I never thought of you. Jack’s out in China, and I didn’t dare trust anybody in my own profession. All you care about is writing verses and stories, isn’t it?”

“I like to shoot,” I replied mildly.

“Just the thing!” he cried, beaming at us all in turn. “Now I can see no reason why we should not progress rapidly. McPeek, you and Frisby must get those boxes up here before dark. Dinner will be ready before you have finished unloading. Dick, you will wish to go to your room first.”

My name isn’t Dick, but he spoke so kindly, and beamed upon me in such a fatherly manner, that I let it go. I had occasion to correct him afterwards, several times, but he always forgot the next minute. He calls me Dick to this day.

It was dark when Professor Holroyd, his daughter, and I sat down to dinner. The room was the same in which I had noticed the drawings of beast and bird, but the round table had been extended into an oval, and neatly spread with dainty linen and silver.

A fresh-cheeked Swedish girl appeared from a farther room, bearing the soup. The professor ladled it out, still beaming.

“Now, this is very delightful!—isn’t it, Daisy?” he said.

“Very,” said Miss Holroyd, with the faintest tinge of irony.

“Very,” I repeated heartily; but I looked at my soup when I said it.

“I suppose,” said the professor, nodding mysteriously at his daughter, “that Dick knows nothing of what we’re about down here?”

“I suppose,” said Miss Holroyd, “that he thinks we are digging for fossils.”

I looked at my plate. She might have spared me that.

“Well, well,” said her father, smiling to himself, “he shall know everything by morning. You’ll be astonished, Dick, my boy.”

“His name isn’t Dick,” corrected Daisy.

The professor said, “Isn’t it?” in an absent-minded way, and relapsed into contemplation of my necktie.

I asked Miss Holroyd a few questions about Jack, and was informed that he had given up law and entered the consular service—as what, I did not dare ask, for I know what our consular service is.

“In China,” said Daisy.

“Choo Choo is the name of the city,” added her father proudly; “it’s the terminus of the new trans-Siberian railway.”

“It’s on the Pong Ping,” said Daisy.

“He’s vice-consul,” added the professor, triumphantly.

“He’ll make a good one,” I observed. I knew Jack. I pitied his consul.

So we chatted on about my old playmate, until Freda, the red-cheeked maid, brought coffee, and the professor lighted a cigar, with a little bow to his daughter.

“Of course, you don’t smoke,” she said to me, with a glimmer of malice in her eyes.

“He mustn’t,” interposed the professor hastily; “it will make his hand tremble.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said I, laughing; “but my hand will shake if I don’t smoke. Are you going to employ me as a draughtsman?”

“You’ll know to-morrow,” he chuckled, with a mysterious smile at his daughter.—“Daisy, give him my best cigars; put the box here on the table. We can’t afford to have his hand tremble.”

Miss Holroyd rose and crossed the hallway to her father’s room, returning presently with a box of promising-looking cigars.

“I don’t think he knows what is good for him,” she said. “He should smoke only one every day.”

It was hard to bear. I am not vindictive, but I decided to treasure up a few of Miss Holroyd’s gentle taunts. My intimacy with her brother was certainly a disadvantage to me now. Jack had apparently been talking too much, and his sister appeared to be thoroughly acquainted with my past. It was a disadvantage. I remembered her vaguely as a girl with long braids, who used to come on Sundays with her father and take tea with us in our rooms. Then she went to Germany to school, and Jack and I employed our Sunday evenings otherwise. It is true that I regarded her weekly visits as a species of infliction, but I did not think I ever showed it.

“It is strange,” said I, “that you did not recognise me at once, Miss Holroyd. Have I changed so greatly in five years?”

“You wore a pointed French beard in Paris,” she said—“a very downy one. And you never stayed to tea but twice, and then you only spoke once.”

“Oh!” said I blankly. “What did I say?”

“You asked me if I liked plums,” said Daisy, bursting into an irresistible ripple of laughter.

I saw that I must have made the same sort of an ass of myself that most boys of eighteen do.

It was too bad. I never thought about the future in those days. Who could have imagined that little Daisy Holroyd would have grown up into this bewildering young lady? It was really too bad. Presently the professor retired to his room, carrying with him an armful of drawings, and bidding us not to sit up late. When he closed his door Miss Holroyd turned to me.

“Papa will work over those drawings until midnight,” she said, with a despairing smile.

“It isn’t good for him,” I said. “What are the drawings?”

“You may know to-morrow,” she answered, leaning forward on the table and shading her face with one hand. “Tell me about yourself and Jack in Paris.”

I looked at her suspiciously.

“What! There isn’t much to tell. We studied. Jack went to the law school, and I attended—er—oh, all sorts of schools.”

“Did you? Surely you gave yourself a little recreation occasionally?”

“Occasionally,” I nodded.

“I am afraid you and Jack studied too hard.”

“That may be,” said I, looking meek.

“Especially about fossils.”

I couldn’t stand that.

“Miss Holroyd,” I said, “I do care for fossils. You may think that I am a humbug, but I have a perfect mania for fossils—now.”

“Since when?”

“About an hour ago,” I said airily. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that she had flushed up. It pleased me.

“You will soon tire of the experiment,” she said with a dangerous smile.

“Oh, I may,” I replied indifferently.

She drew back. The movement was scarcely perceptible, but I noticed it, and she knew I did.

The atmosphere was vaguely hostile. One feels such mental conditions and changes instantly. I picked up a chess-board, opened it, set up the pieces with elaborate care, and began to move, first the white, then the black. Miss Holroyd watched me coldly at first, but after a dozen moves she became interested and leaned a shade nearer. I moved a black pawn forward.

“Why do you do that?” said Daisy.

“Because,” said I, “the white queen threatens the pawn.”

“It was an aggressive move,” she insisted.

“Purely defensive,” I said. “If her white highness will let the pawn alone, the pawn will let the queen alone.”

Miss Holroyd rested her chin on her wrist and gazed steadily at the board. She was flushing furiously, but she held her ground.

“If the white queen doesn’t block that pawn, the pawn may become dangerous,” she said coldly.

I laughed, and closed up the board with a snap.

“True,” I said, “it might even take the queen.” After a moment’s silence I asked, “What would you do in that case, Miss Holroyd?”

“I should resign,” she said serenely; then realizing what she had said, she lost her self-possession for a second, and cried: “No, indeed! I should fight to the bitter end! I mean——”

“What?” I asked, lingering over my revenge.

“I mean,” she said slowly, “that your black pawn would never have the chance—never! I should take it immediately.”

“I believe you would,” said I, smiling; “so we’ll call the game yours, and—the pawn captured.”

“I don’t want it,” she exclaimed. “A pawn is worthless.”

“Except when it’s in the king row.”

“Chess is most interesting,” she observed, sedately. She had completely recovered her self-possession. Still I saw that she now had a certain respect for my defensive powers. It was very soothing to me.

“You know,” said I, gravely, “that I am fonder of Jack than of anybody. That’s the reason we never write each other, except to borrow things. I am afraid that when I was a young cub in France I was not an attractive personality.”

“On the contrary,” said Daisy, smiling, “I thought you were very big and very perfect. I had illusions. I wept often when I went home and remembered that you never took the trouble to speak to me but once.”

“I was a cub,” I said—“not selfish and brutal, but I didn’t understand school-girls. I never had any sisters, and I didn’t know what to say to very young girls. If I had imagined that you felt hurt—”

“Oh, I did—five years ago. Afterwards I laughed at the whole thing.”

“Laughed?” I repeated, vaguely disappointed.

“Why, of course. I was very easily hurt when I was a child. I think I have outgrown it.”

The soft curve of her sensitive mouth contradicted her.

“Will you forgive me now?” I asked.

“Yes. I had forgotten the whole thing until I met you an hour or so ago.”

There was something that had a ring not entirely genuine in this speech. I noticed it, but forgot it the next moment.

Presently she rose, touched her hair with the tip of one finger, and walked to the door.

“Good-night,” she said.

“Good-night,” said I, opening the door for her to pass.

XIX

The sea was a sheet of silver tinged with pink. The tremendous arch of the sky was all shimmering and glimmering with the promise of the sun. Already the mist above, flecked with clustered clouds, flushed with rose color and dull gold. I heard the low splash of the waves breaking and curling across the beach. A wandering breeze, fresh and fragrant, blew the curtains of my window. There was the scent of sweet bay in the room, and everywhere the subtle, nameless perfume of the sea.

When at last I stood upon the shore, the air and sea were all a-glimmer in a rosy light, deepening to crimson in the zenith. Along the beach I saw a little cove, shelving and all a-shine, where shallow waves washed with a mellow sound. Fine as dusted gold the shingle glowed, and the thin film of water rose, receded, crept up again a little higher, and again flowed back, with the low hiss of snowy foam and gilded bubbles breaking.

I stood a little while quiet, my eyes upon the water, the invitation of the ocean in my ears, vague and sweet as the murmur of a shell. Then I looked at my bathing-suit and towels.

“In we go!” said I, aloud. A second later the prophecy was fulfilled.

I swam far out to sea, and as I swam the waters all around me turned to gold. The sun had risen.

There is a fragrance in the sea at dawn that none can name. Whitethorn a-bloom in May, sedges a-sway, and scented rushes rustling in an inland wind recall the sea to me—I can’t say why.

Far out at sea I raised myself, swung around, dived, and set out again for shore, striking strong strokes until the necked foam flew. And when at last I shot through the breakers, I laughed aloud and sprang upon the beach, breathless and happy. Then from the ocean came another cry, clear, joyous, and a white arm rose in the air.

She came drifting in with the waves like a white sea-sprite, laughing at me, and I plunged into the breakers again to join her.

Side by side we swam along the coast, just outside the breakers, until in the next cove we saw the flutter of her maid’s cap-strings.

“I will beat you to breakfast!” she cried, as I rested, watching her glide up along the beach.

“Done!” said I—“for a sea-shell!”

“Done!” she called, across the water.

I made good speed along the shore, and I was not long in dressing, but when I entered the dining-room she was there, demure, smiling, exquisite in her cool, white frock.

“The sea-shell is yours,” said I. “I hope I can find one with a pearl in it.”

The professor hurried in before she could reply. He greeted me very cordially, but there was an abstracted air about him, and he called me Dick until I recognized that remonstrance was useless. He was not long over his coffee and rolls.

“McPeek and Frisby will return with the last load, including your trunk, by early afternoon,” he said, rising and picking up his bundle of drawings. “I haven’t time to explain to you what we are doing, Dick, but Daisy will take you about and instruct you. She will give you the rifle standing in my room—it’s a good Winchester. I have sent for an ‘Express’ for you, big enough to knock over any elephant in India. Daisy, take him through the sheds and tell him everything. Luncheon is at noon. Do you usually take luncheon, Dick?”

“When I am permitted,” I smiled.

“Well,” said the professor, doubtfully, “you mustn’t come back here for it. Freda can take you what you want. Is your hand unsteady after eating?”

“Why, papa!” said Daisy. “Do you intend to starve him?”

We all laughed.

The professor tucked his drawings into a capacious pocket, pulled his sea-boots up to his hips, seized a spade, and left, nodding to us as though he were thinking of something else.

We went to the door and watched him across the salt meadows until the distant sand-dune hid him.

“Come,” said Daisy Holroyd, “I am going to take you to the shop.”

She put on a broad-brimmed straw hat, a distractingly pretty combination of filmy cool stuffs, and led the way to the long, low structure that I had noticed the evening before.

The interior was lighted by the numberless little port-holes, and I could see everything plainly. I acknowledge I was nonplussed by what I did see.

In the centre of the shed, which must have been at least a hundred feet long, stood what I thought at first was the skeleton of an enormous whale. After a moment’s silent contemplation of the thing I saw that it could not be a whale, for the frames of two gigantic, batlike wings rose from each shoulder. Also I noticed that the animal possessed legs—four of them—with most unpleasant-looking webbed claws fully eight feet long. The bony framework of the head, too, resembled something between a crocodile and a monstrous snapping-turtle. The walls of the shanty were hung with drawings and blue prints. A man dressed in white linen was tinkering with the vertebrae of the lizard-like tail.

“Where on earth did such a reptile come from?” I asked at length.

“Oh, it’s not real!” said Daisy, scornfully; “it’s papier-maché.”

“I see,” said I; “a stage prop.”

“A what?” asked Daisy, in hurt astonishment.

“Why, a—a sort of Siegfried dragon—a what’s-his-name—er, Pfafner, or Peffer, or—”

“If my father heard you say such things he would dislike you,” said Daisy. She looked grieved, and moved towards the door. I apologized—for what, I knew not—and we became reconciled. She ran into her father’s room and brought me the rifle, a very good Winchester. She also gave me a cartridge-belt, full.

“Now,” she smiled, “I shall take you to your observatory, and when we arrive you are to begin your duty at once.”

“And that duty?” I ventured, shouldering the rifle.

“That duty is to watch the ocean. I shall then explain the whole affair—but you mustn’t look at me while I speak; you must watch the sea.”

“This,” said I, “is hardship. I had rather go without the luncheon.”

I do not think she was offended at my speech; still she frowned for almost three seconds.

We passed through acres of sweet bay and spear grass, sometimes skirting thickets of twisted cedars, sometimes walking in the full glare of the morning sun, sinking into shifting sand where sun-scorched shells crackled under our feet, and sun-browned sea-weed glistened, bronzed and iridescent. Then, as we climbed a little hill, the sea-wind freshened in our faces, and lo! the ocean lay below us, far-stretching as the eye could reach, glittering, magnificent.

Daisy sat down flat on the sand. It takes a clever girl to do that and retain the respectful deference due her from men. It takes a graceful girl to accomplish it triumphantly when a man is looking.

“You must sit beside me,” she said—as though it would prove irksome to me.

“Now,” she continued, “you must watch the water while I am talking.”

I nodded.

“Why don’t you do it, then?” she asked.

I succeeded in wrenching my head towards the ocean, although I felt sure it would swing gradually round again in spite of me.

“To begin with,” said Daisy Holroyd, “there’s a thing in that ocean that would astonish you if you saw it. Turn your head!”

“I am,” I said, meekly.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes—er—a thing in the ocean that’s going to astonish me.” Visions of mermaids rose before me.

“The thing,” said Daisy, “is a thermosaurus!”

I nodded vaguely, as though anticipating a delightful introduction to a nautical friend.

“You don’t seem astonished,” she said, reproachfully.

“Why should I be?” I asked.

“Please turn your eyes towards the water. Suppose a thermosaurus should look out of the waves!”

“Well,” said I, “in that case the pleasure would be mutual.”

She frowned and bit her upper lip.

“Do you know what a thermosaurus is?” she asked.

“If I am to guess,” said I, “I guess it’s a jelly-fish.”

“It’s that big, ugly, horrible creature that I showed you in the shed!” cried Daisy, impatiently.

“Eh!” I stammered.

“Not papier-maché, either,” she continued, excitedly; “it’s a real one.”

This was pleasant news. I glanced instinctively at my rifle and then at the ocean.

“Well,” said I at last, “it strikes me that you and I resemble a pair of Andromedas waiting to be swallowed. This rifle won’t stop a beast, a live beast, like that Nibelungen dragon of yours.”

“Yes, it will,” she said; “it’s not an ordinary rifle.”

Then, for the first time, I noticed, just below the magazine, a cylindrical attachment that was strange to me.

“Now, if you will watch the sea very carefully, and will promise not to look at me,” said Daisy, “I will try to explain.”

She did not wait for me to promise, but went on eagerly, a sparkle of excitement in her blue eyes:

“You know, of all the fossil remains of the great batlike and lizard-like creatures that inhabited the earth ages and ages ago, the bones of the gigantic saurians are the most interesting. I think they used to splash about the water and fly over the land during the carboniferous period; anyway, it doesn’t matter. Of course you have seen pictures of reconstructed creatures such as the ichthyosaurus, the plesiosaurus, the anthracosaurus, and the thermosaurus?”

I nodded, trying to keep my eyes from hers.

“And you know that the remains of the thermosaurus were first discovered and reconstructed by papa?”

“Yes,” said I. There was no use in saying no.

“I am glad you do. Now, papa has proved that this creature lived entirely in the Gulf Stream, emerging for occasional flights across an ocean or two. Can you imagine how he proved it?”

“No,” said I, resolutely pointing my nose at the ocean.

“He proved it by a minute examination of the microscopical shells found among the ribs of the thermosaurus. These shells contained little creatures that live only in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. They were the food of the thermosaurus.”

“It was rather slender rations for a thing like that, wasn’t it? Did he ever swallow bigger food—er—men?”

“Oh yes. Tons of fossil bones from prehistoric men are also found in the interior of the thermosaurus.”

“Then,” said I, “you, at least, had better go back to Captain McPeek’s—”

“Please turn around; don’t be so foolish. I didn’t say there was a live thermosaurus in the water, did I?”

“Isn’t there?”

“Why, no!”

My relief was genuine, but I thought of the rifle and looked suspiciously out to sea.

“What’s the Winchester for?” I asked.

“Listen, and I will explain. Papa has found out—how, I do not exactly understand—that there is in the waters of the Gulf Stream the body of a thermosaurus. The creature must have been alive within a year or so. The impenetrable scale-armor that covers its body has, as far as papa knows, prevented its disintegration. We know that it is there still, or was there within a few months. Papa has reports and sworn depositions from steamer captains and seamen from a dozen different vessels, all corroborating one another in essential details. These stories, of course, get into the newspapers—sea-serpent stories—but papa knows that they confirm his theory that the huge body of this reptile is swinging along somewhere in the Gulf Stream.”

She opened her sunshade and held it over her. I noticed that she deigned to give me the benefit of about one-eighth of it.

“Your duty with that rifle is this: if we are fortunate enough to see the body of the thermosaurus come floating by, you are to take good aim and fire—fire rapidly every bullet in the magazine; then reload and fire again, and reload and fire as long as you have any cartridges left.”

“A self-feeding Maxim is what I should have,” I said, with gentle sarcasm. “Well, and suppose I make a sieve of this big lizard?”

“Do you see these rings in the sand?” she asked.

Sure enough, somebody had driven heavy piles deep into the sand all around us, and to the tops of these piles were attached steel rings, half buried under the spear-grass. We sat almost exactly in the centre of a circle of these rings.

“The reason is this,” said Daisy; “every bullet in your cartridges is steel-tipped and armor-piercing. To the base of each bullet is attached a thin wire of pallium. Pallium is that new metal, a thread of which, drawn out into finest wire, will hold a ton of iron suspended. Every bullet is fitted with minute coils of miles of this wire. When the bullet leaves the rifle it spins out this wire as a shot from a life-saver’s mortar spins out and carries the life-line to a wrecked ship. The end of each coil of wire is attached to that cylinder under the magazine of your rifle. As soon as the shell is automatically ejected this wire flies out also. A bit of scarlet tape is fixed to the end, so that it will be easy to pick up. There is also a snap-clasp on the end, and this clasp fits those rings that you see in the sand. Now, when you begin firing, it is my duty to run and pick up the wire ends and attach them to the rings. Then, you see, we have the body of the thermosaurus full of bullets, every bullet anchored to the shore by tiny wires, each of which could easily hold a ton’s strain.”

I looked at her in amazement.

“Then,” she added, calmly, “we have captured the thermosaurus.”

“Your father,” said I, at length, “must have spent years of labor over this preparation.”

“It is the work of a lifetime,” she said, simply.

My face, I suppose, showed my misgivings.

“It must not fail,” she added.

“But—but we are nowhere near the Gulf Stream,” I ventured.

Her face brightened, and she frankly held the sunshade over us both.

“Ah, you don’t know,” she said, “what else papa has discovered. Would you believe that he has found a loop in the Gulf Stream—a genuine loop—that swings in here just outside of the breakers below? It is true! Everybody on Long Island knows that there is a warm current off the coast, but nobody imagined it was merely a sort of backwater from the Gulf Stream that formed a great circular mill-race around the cone of a subterranean volcano, and rejoined the Gulf Stream off Cape Albatross. But it is! That is why papa bought a yacht three years ago and sailed about for two years so mysteriously. Oh, I did want to go with him so much!”

“This,” said I, “is most astonishing.”

She leaned enthusiastically towards me, her lovely face aglow.

“Isn’t it?” she said; “and to think that you and papa and I are the only people in the whole world who know this!”

To be included in such a triology was very delightful.

“Papa is writing the whole thing—I mean about the currents. He also has in preparation sixteen volumes on the thermosaurus. He said this morning that he was going to ask you to write the story first for some scientific magazine. He is certain that Professor Bruce Stoddard, of Columbia, will write the pamphlets necessary. This will give papa time to attend to the sixteen-volume work, which he expects to finish in three years.”

“Let us first,” said I, laughing, “catch our thermosaurus.”

“We must not fail,” she said, wistfully.

“We shall not fail,” I said, “for I promise to sit on this sand-hill as long as I live—until a thermosaurus appears—if that is your wish, Miss Holroyd.”

Our eyes met for an instant. She did not chide me, either, for not looking at the ocean. Her eyes were bluer, anyway.

“I suppose,” she said, bending her head and absently pouring sand between her fingers—“I suppose you think me a blue-stocking, or something odious?”

“Not exactly,” I said. There was an emphasis in my voice that made her color. After a moment she laid the sunshade down, still open.

“May I hold it?” I asked.

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

The ocean had turned a deep marine blue, verging on purple, that heralded a scorching afternoon. The wind died away; the odor of cedar and sweet-bay hung heavy in the air.

In the sand at our feet an iridescent flower-beetle crawled, its metallic green-and-blue wings burning like a spark. Great gnats, with filmy, glittering wings, danced aimlessly above the young golden-rod; burnished crickets, inquisitive, timid, ran from under chips of driftwood, waved their antennae at us, and ran back again. One by one the marbled tiger-beetles tumbled at our feet, dazed from the exertion of an aërial flight, then scrambled and ran a little way, or darted into the wire grass, where great, brilliant spiders eyed them askance from their gossamer hammocks.

Far out at sea the white gulls floated and drifted on the water, or sailed up into the air to flap lazily for a moment and settle back among the waves. Strings of black surf-ducks passed, their strong wings tipping the surface of the water; single wandering coots whirled from the breakers into lonely flight towards the horizon.

We lay and watched the little ring-necks running along the water’s edge, now backing away from the incoming tide, now boldly wading after the undertow. The harmony of silence, the deep perfume, the mystery of waiting for that something that all await—what is it? love? death? or only the miracle of another morrow?—troubled me with vague restlessness. As sunlight casts shadows, happiness, too, throws a shadow, an the shadow is sadness.

And so the morning wore away until Freda came with a cool-looking hamper. Then delicious cold fowl and lettuce sandwiches and champagne cup set our tongues wagging as only very young tongues can wag. Daisy went back with Freda after luncheon, leaving me a case of cigars, with a bantering smile. I dozed, half awake, keeping a partly closed eye on the ocean, where a faint gray streak showed plainly amid the azure water all around. That was the Gulf Stream loop.

About four o’clock Frisby appeared with a bamboo shelter-tent, for which I was unaffectedly grateful.

After he had erected it over me he stopped to chat a bit, but the conversation bored me, for he could talk of nothing but bill-posting.

“You wouldn’t ruin the landscape here, would you?” I asked.

“Ruin it!” repeated Frisby, nervously. “It’s ruined now; there ain’t a place to stick a bill.”

“The snipe stick bills—in the sand,” I said, flippantly.

There was no humor about Frisby. “Do they?” he asked.

I moved with a certain impatience.

“Bills,” said Frisby, “give spice an’ variety to nature. They break the monotony of the everlastin’ green and what-you-may-call-its.”

I glared at him.

“Bills,” he continued, “are not easy to stick, lemme tell you, sir. Sign-paintin’s a soft snap when it comes to bill-stickin’. Now, I guess I’ve stuck more bills onto New York State than ennybody.”

“Have you?” I said, angrily.

“Yes, siree! I always pick out the purtiest spots—kinder filled chuck full of woods and brooks and things; then I h’ist my paste-pot onto a rock, and I slather that rock with gum, and whoop she goes!”

“Whoop what goes?”

“The bill. I paste her onto the rock, with one swipe of the brush for the edges and a back-handed swipe for the finish—except when a bill is folded in two halves.”

“And what do you do then?” I asked, disgusted.

“Swipe twice,” said Frisby, with enthusiasm.

“And you don’t think it injures the landscape?”

“Injures it!” he exclaimed, convinced that I was attempting to joke.

I looked wearily out to sea. He also looked at the water and sighed sentimentally.

“Floatin’ buoys with bills onto ’em is a idea of mine,” he observed. “That damn ocean is monotonous, ain’t it?”

I don’t know what I might have done to Frisby—the rifle was so convenient—if his mean yellow dog had not waddled up at this juncture.

“Hi, Davy, sic ’em!” said Frisby, expectorating upon a clam-shell and hurling it seaward. The cur watched the flight of the shell apathetically, then squatted in the sand and looked at his master.

“Kinder lost his spirit,” said Frisby, “ain’t he? I once stuck a bill onto Davy, an’ it come off, an’ the paste sorter sickened him. He was hell on rats—once!”

After a moment or two Frisby took himself off, whistling cheerfully to Davy, who followed him when he was ready. The rifle burned in my fingers.

It was nearly six o’clock when the professor appeared, spade on shoulder, boots smeared with mud.

“Well,” he said, “nothing to report, Dick, my boy?”

“Nothing, professor.”

He wiped his shining face with his handkerchief and stared at the water.

“My calculations lead me to believe,” he said, “that our prize may be due any day now. This theory I base upon the result of the report from the last sea-captain I saw. I cannot understand why some of these captains did not take the carcass in tow. They all say that they tried, but that the body sank before they could come within half a mile. The truth is, probably, that they did not stir a foot from their course to examine the thing.”

“Have you ever cruised about for it?” I ventured.

“For two years,” he said, grimly. “It’s no use; it’s accident when a ship falls in with it. One captain reports it a thousand miles from where the last skipper spoke it, and always in the Gulf Stream. They think it is a different specimen every time, and the papers are teeming with sea-serpent fol-de-rol.”

“Are you sure,” I asked, “that it will swing into the coast on this Gulf Stream loop?”

“I think I may say that it is certain to do so. I experimented with a dead right-whale. You may have heard of its coming ashore here last summer.”

“I think I did,” said I, with a faint smile. The thing had poisoned the air for miles around.

“But,” I continued, “suppose it comes in the night?”

He laughed.

“There I am lucky. Every night this month, and every day, too, the current of the loop runs inland so far that even a porpoise would strand for at least twelve hours. Longer than that I have not experimented with, but I know that the shore trend of the loop runs across a long spur of the submerged volcanic mountain, and that anything heavier than a porpoise would scrape the bottom and be carried so slowly that at least twelve hours must elapse before the carcass could float again into deep water. There are chances of its stranding indefinitely, too, but I don’t care to take those chances. That is why I have stationed you here, Dick.”

He glanced again at the water, smiling to himself.

“There is another question I want to ask,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not!” he said, warmly.

“What are you digging for?”

“Why, simply for exercise. The doctor told me I was killing myself with my sedentary habits, so I decided to dig. I don’t know a better exercise. Do you?”

“I suppose not,” I murmured, rather red in the face. I wondered whether he’d mention fossils.

“Did Daisy tell you why we are making our papier-maché thermosaurus?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“We constructed that from measurements I took from the fossil remains of the thermosaurus in the Metropolitan Museum. Professor Bruce Stoddard made the drawings. We set it up here, all ready to receive the skin of the carcass that I am expecting.”

We had started towards home, walking slowly across the darkening dunes, shoulder to shoulder. The sand was deep, and walking was not easy.

“I wish,” said I at last, “that I knew why Miss Holroyd asked me not to walk on the beach. It’s much less fatiguing.”

“That,” said the professor, “is a matter that I intend to discuss with you to-night.” He spoke gravely, almost sadly. I felt that something of unparalleled importance was soon to be revealed. So I kept very quiet, watching the ocean out of the corners of my eyes.

XX

Dinner was ended. Daisy Holroyd lighted her father’s pipe for him, and insisted on my smoking as much as I pleased. Then she sat down, and folded her hands like a good little girl, waiting for her father to make the revelation which I felt in my bones must be something out of the ordinary.

The professor smoked for a while, gazing meditatively at his daughter; then, fixing his gray eyes on me, he said:

“Have you ever heard of the kree—that Australian bird, half parrot, half hawk, that destroys so many sheep in New South Wales?”

I nodded.

“The kree kills a sheep by alighting on its back and tearing away the flesh with its hooked beak until a vital part is reached. You know that? Well, it has been discovered that the kree had prehistoric prototypes. These birds were enormous creatures, who preyed upon mammoths and mastodons, and even upon the great saurians. It has been conclusively proved that a few saurians have been killed by the ancestors of the kree, but the favorite food of these birds was undoubtedly the thermosaurus. It is believed that the birds attacked the eyes of the thermosaurus, and when, as was its habit, the mammoth creature turned on its back to claw them, they fell upon the thinner scales of its stomach armor and finally killed it. This, of course, is a theory, but we have almost absolute proofs of its correctness. Now, these two birds are known among scientists as the ekaf-bird and the ool-yllik. The names are Australian, in which country most of their remains have been unearthed. They lived during the Carboniferous period. Now, it is not generally known, but the fact is, that in 1801 Captain Ransom, of the British exploring vessel Gull, purchased from the natives of Tasmania the skin of an ekaf-bird that could not have been killed more than twenty-four hours previous to its sale. I saw this skin in the British Museum. It was labelled, ‘Unknown bird, probably extinct.’ It took me exactly a week to satisfy myself that it was actually the skin of an ekaf-bird. But that is not all, Dick,” continued the professor, excitedly. “In 1854 Admiral Stuart, of our own navy, saw the carcass of a strange, gigantic bird floating along the southern coast of Australia. Sharks were after it, and before a boat could be lowered these miserable fish got it. But the good old admiral secured a few feathers and sent them to the Smithsonian. I saw them. They were not even labelled, but I knew that they were feathers from the ekaf-bird or its near relative, the ool-yllik.”

I had grown so interested that I had leaned far across the table. Daisy, too, bent forward. It was only when the professor paused for a moment that I noticed how close together our heads were—Daisy’s and mine. I don’t think she realized it. She did not move.

“Now comes the important part of this long discourse,” said the professor, smiling at our eagerness. “Ever since the carcass of our derelict thermosaurus was first noticed, every captain who has seen it has also reported the presence of one or more gigantic birds in the neighborhood. These birds, at a great distance, appeared to be hovering over the carcass, but on the approach of a vessel they disappeared. Even in mid-ocean they were observed. When I heard about it I was puzzled. A month later I was satisfied that neither the ekaf-bird nor the ool-yllik was extinct. Last Monday I knew that I was right. I found forty-eight distinct impressions of the huge, seven-toed claw of the ekaf-bird on the beach here at Pine Inlet. You may imagine my excitement. I succeeded in digging up enough wet sand around one of these impressions to preserve its form. I managed to get it into a soap-box, and now it is there in my shop. The tide rose too rapidly for me to save the other footprints.”

I shuddered at the possibility of a clumsy misstep on my part obliterating the impression of an ool-yllik.

“That is the reason that my daughter warned you off the beach,” he said, mildly.

“Hanging would have been too good for the vandal who destroyed such priceless prizes,” I cried out, in self-reproach.

Daisy Holroyd turned a flushed face to mine and impulsively laid her hand on my sleeve.

“How could you know?” she said.

“It’s all right now,” said her father, emphasizing each word with a gentle tap of his pipe-bowl on the table-edge; “don’t be hard on yourself, Dick. You’ll do yeoman’s service yet.”

It was nearly midnight, and still we chatted on about the thermosaurus, the ekaf-bird, and the ool-yllik, eagerly discussing the probability of the great reptile’s carcass being in the vicinity. That alone seemed to explain the presence of these prehistoric birds at Pine Inlet.

“Do they ever attack human beings?” I asked.

The professor looked startled.

“Gracious!” he exclaimed, “I never thought of that. And Daisy running about out-of-doors! Dear me! It takes a scientist to be an unnatural parent!”

His alarm was half real, half assumed; but, all the same, he glanced gravely at us both, shaking his handsome head, absorbed in thought. Daisy herself looked a little doubtful. As for me, my sensations were distinctly queer.

“It is true,” said the professor, frowning at the wall, “that human remains have been found associated with the bones of the ekaf-bird—I don’t know how intimately. It is a matter to be taken into most serious consideration.”

“The problem can be solved,” said I, “in several ways. One is, to keep Miss Holroyd in the house—”

“I shall not stay in,” cried Daisy, indignantly.

We all laughed, and her father assured her that she should not be abused.

“Even if I did stay in,” she said, “one of these birds might alight on Master Dick.”

She looked saucily at me as she spoke, but turned crimson when her father observed, quietly, “You don’t seem to think of me, Daisy!”

“Of course I do,” she said, getting up and putting both arms around her father’s neck; “but Dick—as—as you call him—is so helpless and timid.”

My blissful smile froze on my lips.

“Timid!” I repeated.

She came back to the table, making me a mocking reverence.

“Do you think I am to be laughed at with impunity?” she said.

“What are your other plans, Dick?” asked the professor. “Daisy, let him alone, you little tease!”

“One is, to haul a lot of cast-iron boilers along the dunes,” I said. “If these birds come when the carcass floats in, and if they seem disposed to trouble us, we could crawl into the boilers and be safe.”

“Why, that is really brilliant!” cried Daisy.

“Be quiet, my child. Dick, the plan is sound and sensible and perfectly practical. McPeek and Frisby shall go for a dozen loads of boilers to-morrow.”

“It will spoil the beauty of the landscape,” said Daisy, with a taunting nod to me.

“And Frisby will probably attempt to cover them with bill-posters,” I added, laughing.

“That,” said Daisy, “I shall prevent, even at the cost of his life.” And she stood up, looking very determined.

“Children, children,” protested the professor, “go to bed—you bother me.”

Then I turned deliberately to Miss Holroyd.

“Good-night, Daisy,” I said.

“Good-night, Dick,” she said, very gently.

XXI

The week passed quickly for me, leaving but few definite impressions. As I look back to it now I can see the long stretch of beach burning in the fierce sunlight, the endless meadows, with the glimmer of water in the distance, the dunes, the twisted cedars, the leagues of scintillating ocean, rocking, rocking, always rocking. In the starlit nights the curlew came in from the sand-bars by twos and threes; I could hear their querulous call as I lay in bed thinking. All day long the little ring-necks whistled from the shore. The plover answered them from distant, lonely inland pools. The great white gulls drifted like feathers upon the sea.

One morning towards the end of the week, I, strolling along the dunes, came upon Frisby. He was bill-posting. I caught him red-handed.

“This,” said I, “must stop. Do you understand, Mr. Frisby?”

He stepped back from his work, laying his head on one side, considering first me, then the bill that he had pasted on one of our big boilers.

“Don’t you like the color?” he asked. “It goes well on them black boilers.”

“Color! No, I don’t like the color, either. Can’t you understand that there are some people in the world who object to seeing patent-medicine advertisements scattered over a landscape?”

“Hey?” he said, perplexed.

“Will you kindly remove that advertisement?” I persisted.

“Too late,” said Frisby; “it’s sot.”

I was too disgusted to speak, but my disgust turned to anger when I perceived that, as far as the eye could reach, our boilers, lying from three to four hundred feet apart, were ablaze with yellow-and-red posters extolling the “Eureka Liver Pill Company.”

“It don’t cost ’em nothin’,” said Frisby, cheerfully; “I done it fur the fun of it. Purty, ain’t it?”

“They are Professor Holroyd’s boilers,” I said, subduing a desire to beat Frisby with my telescope. “Wait until Miss Holroyd sees this work.”

“Don’t she like yeller and red?” he demanded, anxiously.

“You’ll find out,” said I.

Frisby gaped at his handiwork and then at his yellow dog. After a moment he mechanically spat on a clam-shell and requested Davy to “sic” it.

“Can’t you comprehend that you have ruined our pleasure in the landscape?” I asked, more mildly.

“I’ve got some green bills,” said Frisby; “I kin stick ’em over the yeller ones—”

“Confound it,” said I, “it isn’t the color!”

“Then,” observed Frisby, “you don’t like them pills. I’ve got some bills of the ‘Cropper Automobile’ and a few of ‘Bagley, the Gents’ Tailor’—”

“Frisby,” said I, “use them all—paste the whole collection over your dog and yourself—then walk off the cliff.”

He sullenly unfolded a green poster, swabbed the boiler with paste, laid the upper section of the bill upon it, and plastered the whole bill down with a thwack of his brush. As I walked away I heard him muttering.

Next day Daisy was so horrified that I promised to give Frisby an ultimatum. I found him with Freda, gazing sentimentally at his work, and I sent him back to the shop in a hurry, telling Freda at the same time that she could spend her leisure in providing Mr. Frisby with sand, soap, and a scrubbing-brush. Then I walked on to my post of observation.

I watched until sunset. Daisy came with her father to hear my report, but there was nothing to tell, and we three walked slowly back to the house.

In the evenings the professor worked on his volumes, the click of his type-writer sounding faintly behind his closed door. Daisy and I played chess sometimes; sometimes we played hearts. I don’t remember that we ever finished a game of either—we talked too much.

Our discussions covered every topic of interest: we argued upon politics; we skimmed over literature and music; we settled international differences; we spoke vaguely of human brotherhood. I say we slighted no subject of interest—I am wrong; we never spoke of love.

Now, love is a matter of interest to ten people out of ten. Why it was that it did not appear to interest us is as interesting a question as love itself. We were young, alert, enthusiastic, inquiring. We eagerly absorbed theories concerning any curious phenomena in nature, as intellectual cocktails to stimulate discussion. And yet we did not discuss love. I do not say that we avoided it. No; the subject was too completely ignored for even that. And yet we found it very difficult to pass an hour separated. The professor noticed this, and laughed at us. We were not even embarrassed.

Sunday passed in pious contemplation of the ocean. Daisy read a little in her prayer-book, and the professor threw a cloth over his type-writer and strolled up and down the sands. He may have been lost in devout abstraction; he may have been looking for footprints. As for me, my mind was very serene, and I was more than happy. Daisy read to me a little for my soul’s sake, and the professor came up and said something cheerful. He also examined the magazine of my Winchester.

That night, too, Daisy took her guitar to the sands and sang one or two Basque hymns. Unlike us, the Basques do not take their pleasures sadly. One of their pleasures is evidently religion.

The big moon came up over the dunes and stared at the sea until the surface of every wave trembled with radiance. A sudden stillness fell across the world; the wind died out; the foam ran noiselessly across the beach; the cricket’s rune was stilled.

I leaned back, dropping one hand upon the sand. It touched another hand, soft and cool.

After a while the other hand moved slightly, and I found that my own had closed above it. Presently one finger stirred a little—only a little—for our fingers were interlocked.

On the shore the foam-froth bubbled and winked and glimmered in the moonlight. A star fell from the zenith, showering the night with incandescent dust.

If our fingers lay interlaced beside us, her eyes were calm and serene as always, wide open, fixed upon the depths of a dark sky. And when her father rose and spoke to us, she did not withdraw her hand.

“Is it late?” she asked, dreamily.

“It is midnight, little daughter.”

I stood up, still holding her hand, and aided her to rise. And when, at the door, I said good-night, she turned and looked at me for a little while in silence, then passed into her room slowly, with head still turned towards me.

All night long I dreamed of her; and when the east whitened, I sprang up, the thunder of the ocean in my ears, the strong sea-wind blowing into the open window.

“She’s asleep,” I thought, and I leaned from the window and peered out into the east.

The sea called to me, tossing its thousand arms; the soaring gulls, dipping, rising, wheeling above the sandbar, screamed and clamored for a playmate. I slipped into my bathing-suit, dropped from the window upon the soft sand, and in a moment had plunged head foremost into the surf, swimming beneath the waves towards the open sea.

Under the tossing ocean the voice of the waters was in my ears—a low, sweet voice, intimate, mysterious. Through singing foam and broad, green, glassy depths, by whispering sandy channels a-trail with sea-weed, and on, on, out into the vague, cool sea, I sped, rising to the top, sinking, gliding. Then at last I flung myself out of water, hands raised, and the clamor of the gulls filled my ears.

As I lay, breathing fast, drifting on the sea, far out beyond the gulls I saw a flash of white, and an arm was lifted, signalling me.

“Daisy!” I called.

A clear hail came across the water, distinct on the sea-wind, and at the same instant we raised our hands and moved towards each other.

How we laughed as we met in the sea! The white dawn came up out of the depths, the zenith turned to rose and ashes.

And with the dawn came the wind—a great sea-wind, fresh, aromatic, that hurled our voices back into our throats and lifted the sheeted spray above our heads. Every wave, crowned with mist, caught us in a cool embrace, cradled us, and slipped away, only to leave us to another wave, higher, stronger, crested with opalescent glory, breathing incense.

We turned together up the coast, swimming lightly side by side, but our words were caught up by the winds and whirled into the sky.

We looked up at the driving clouds; we looked out upon the pallid waste of waters, but it was into each other’s eyes we looked, wondering, wistful, questioning the reason of sky and sea And there in each other’s eyes we read the mystery, and we knew that earth and sky and sea were created for us alone.

Drifting on by distant sands and dunes, her white fingers touching mine, we spoke, keying our tones to the wind’s vast harmony. And we spoke of love.

Gray and wide as the limitless span of the sky and the sea, the winds gathered from the world’s ends to bear us on; but they were not familiar winds; for now, along the coast, the breakers curled and showed a million fangs, and the ocean stirred to its depths, uneasy, ominous, and the menace of its murmur drew us closer as we moved.

Where the dull thunder and the tossing spray warned us from sunken reefs, we heard the harsh challenges of gulls; where the pallid surf twisted in yellow coils of spume above the bar, the singing sands murmured of treachery and secrets of lost souls agasp in the throes of silent undertows.

But there was a little stretch of beach glimmering through the mountains of water, and towards this we turned, side by side. Around us the water grew warmer; the breath of the following waves moistened our cheeks; the water itself grew gray and strange about us.

“We have come too far,” I said; but she only answered:

“Faster, faster! I am afraid!” The water was almost hot now; its aromatic odor filled our lungs.

“The Gulf loop!” I muttered. “Daisy, shall I help you?”

“No. Swim—close by me! Oh-h! Dick—”

Her startled cry was echoed by another—a shrill scream, unutterably horrible—and a great bird flapped from the beach, splashing and beating its pinions across the water with a thundering noise.

Out across the waves it blundered, rising little by little from the water, and now, to my horror, I saw another monstrous bird swinging in the air above it, squealing as it turned on its vast wings. Before I could speak we touched the beach, and I half lifted her to the shore.

“Quick!” I repeated. “We must not wait.”

Her eyes were dark with fear, but she rested a hand on my shoulder, and we crept up among the dune-grasses and sank down by the point of sand where the rough shelter stood, surrounded by the iron-ringed piles.

She lay there, breathing fast and deep, dripping with spray. I had no power of speech left, but when I rose wearily to my knees and looked out upon the water my blood ran cold. Above the ocean, on the breast of the roaring wind, three enormous birds sailed, turning and wheeling among one another; and below, drifting with the gray stream of the Gulf loop, a colossal bulk lay half submerged—a gigantic lizard, floating belly upward.

Then Daisy crept kneeling to my side and touched me, trembling from head to foot.

“I know,” I muttered. “I must run back for the rifle.”

“And—and leave me?”

I took her by the hand, and we dragged ourselves through the wire-grass to the open end of a boiler lying in the sand.

She crept in on her hands and knees, and called to me to follow.

“You are safe now,” I cried. “I must go back for the rifle.”

“The birds may—may attack you.”

“If they do I can get into one of the other boilers,” I said. “Daisy, you must not venture out until I come back. You won’t, will you?”

“No-o,” she whispered, doubtfully.

“Then—good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” she answered, but her voice was very small and still.

“Good-bye,” I said again. I was kneeling at the mouth of the big iron tunnel; it was dark inside and I could not see her, but, before I was conscious of it, her arms were around my neck and we had kissed each other.

I don’t remember how I went away. When I came to my proper senses I was swimming along the coast at full speed, and over my head wheeled one of the birds, screaming at every turn.

The intoxication of that innocent embrace, the close impress of her arms around my neck, gave me a strength and recklessness that neither fear nor fatigue could subdue. The bird above me did not even frighten me. I watched it over my shoulder, swimming strongly, with the tide now aiding me, now stemming my course; but I saw the shore passing quickly, and my strength increased, and I shouted when I came in sight of the house, and scrambled up on the sand, dripping and excited. There was nobody in sight, and I gave a last glance up into the air where the bird wheeled, still screeching, and hastened into the house. Freda stared at me in amazement as I seized the rifle and shouted for the professor.

“He has just gone to town, with Captain McPeek in his wagon,” stammered Freda.

“What!” I cried. “Does he know where his daughter is?”

“Miss Holroyd is asleep—not?” gasped Freda.

“Where’s Frisby?” I cried, impatiently.

“Yimmie?” quavered Freda.

“Yes, Jimmie; isn’t there anybody here? Good Heavens! where’s that man in the shop?”

“He also iss gone,” said Freda, shedding tears, “to buy papier-maché. Yimmie, he iss gone to post bills.”

I waited to hear no more, but swung my rifle over my shoulder, and, hanging the cartridge-belt across my chest, hurried out and up the beach. The bird was not in sight.

I had been running for perhaps a minute when, far up on the dunes, I saw a yellow dog rush madly through a clump of sweet-bay, and at the same moment a bird soared past, rose, and hung hovering just above the thicket. Suddenly the bird swooped; there was a shriek and a yelp from the cur, but the bird gripped it in one claw and beat its wings upon the sand, striving to rise. Then I saw Frisby—paste, bucket, and brush raised—fall upon the bird, yelling lustily. The fierce creature relaxed its talons, and the dog rushed on, squeaking with terror. The bird turned on Frisby and sent him sprawling on his face, a sticky mass of paste and sand. But this did not end the struggle. The bird, croaking horridly, flew at the prostrate bill-poster, and the sand whirled into a pillar above its terrible wings. Scarcely knowing what I was about, I raised my rifle and fired twice. A scream echoed each shot, and the bird rose heavily in a shower of sand; but two bullets were embedded in that mass of foul feathers, and I saw the wires and scarlet tape uncoiling on the sand at my feet. In an instant I seized them and passed the ends around a cedar-tree, hooking the clasps tight. Then I cast one swift glance upward, where the bird wheeled, screeching, anchored like a kite to the pallium wires; and I hurried on across the dunes, the shells cutting my feet and the bushes tearing my wet swimming-suit, until I dripped with blood from shoulder to ankle. Out in the ocean the carcass of the thermosaurus floated, claws outspread, belly glistening in the gray light, and over him circled two birds. As I reached the shelter I knelt and fired into the mass of scales, and at my first shot a horrible thing occurred—the lizard-like head writhed, the slitted yellow eyes sliding open from the film that covered them. A shudder passed across the undulating body, the great scaled belly heaved, and one leg feebly clawed at the air.

The thing was still alive!

Crushing back the horror that almost paralyzed my hands, I planted shot after shot into the quivering reptile, while it writhed and clawed, striving to turn over and dive; and at each shot the black blood spurted in long, slim jets across the water. And now Daisy was at my side, pale and determined, swiftly clasping each tape-marked wire to the iron rings in the circle around us. Twice I filled the magazine from my belt, and twice I poured streams of steel-tipped bullets into the scaled mass, twisting and shuddering on the sea. Suddenly the birds steered towards us. I felt the wind from their vast wings. I saw the feathers erect, vibrating. I saw the spread claws outstretched, and I struck furiously at them, crying to Daisy to run into the iron shelter. Backing, swinging my clubbed rifle, I retreated, but I tripped across one of the taut pallium wires, and in an instant the hideous birds were on me, and the bone in my forearm snapped like a pipe-stem at a blow from their wings. Twice I struggled to my knees, blinded with blood, confused, almost fainting; then I fell again, rolling into the mouth of the iron boiler.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When I struggled back to consciousness Daisy knelt silently beside me, while Captain McPeek and Professor Holroyd bound up my shattered arm, talking excitedly. The pain made me faint and dizzy. I tried to speak and could not. At last they got me to my feet and into the wagon, and Daisy came, too, and crouched beside me, wrapped in oilskins to her eyes. Fatigue, lack of food, and excitement had combined with wounds and broken bones to extinguish the last atom of strength in my body; but my mind was clear enough to understand that the trouble was over and the thermosaurus safe.

I heard McPeek say that one of the birds that I had anchored to a cedar-tree had torn loose from the bullets and had winged its way heavily out to sea. The professor answered: “Yes, the ekaf-bird; the others were ool-ylliks. I’d have given my right arm to have secured them.” Then for a time I heard no more; but the jolting of the wagon over the dunes roused me to keenest pain, and I held out my right hand to Daisy. She clasped it in both of hers, and kissed it again and again.

•      •      •      •      •      •

There is little more to add, I think. Professor Bruce Stoddard’s scientific pamphlet will be published soon, to be followed by Professor Holroyd’s sixteen volumes. In a few days the stuffed and mounted thermosaurus will be placed on free public exhibition in the arena of Madison Square Garden, the only building in the city large enough to contain the body of this immense winged reptile.

The young man hesitated, looking long and earnestly at Miss Barrison.

“Did you marry her?” she asked, softly.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” said the young man, earnestly—“you wouldn’t believe it, after all that happened, if I should tell you that she married Professor Bruce Stoddard, of Columbia—would you?”

“Yes, I would,” said Miss Barrison. “You never can tell what a girl will do.”

“That story of yours,” I said, “is to me the most wonderful and valuable contribution to nature study that it has ever been my fortune to listen to. You are fitted to write; it is your sacred mission to produce. Are you going to?”

“I am writing,” said the young man, quietly, “a nature book. Sir Peter Grebe’s magnificent monograph on the speckled titmouse inspired me. But nature study is not what I have chosen as my life’s mission.”

He looked dreamily across at Miss Barrison. “No, not natural phenomena,” he repeated, “but unnatural phenomena. What Professor Hyssop has done for Columbia, I shall attempt to do for Harvard. In fact, I have already accepted the chair of Psychical Phenomena at Cambridge.”

I gazed upon him with intense respect.

“A personal experience revealed to me my life’s work,” he, went on, thoughtfully stroking his blond mustache. “If Miss Barrison would care to hear it—”

“Please tell it,” she said, sweetly.

“I shall have to relate it clothed in that artificial garb known as literary style,” he explained, deprecatingly.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, “I never noticed any style at all in your story of the thermosaurus.”

He smiled gratefully, and passed his hand over his face; a far-away expression came into his eyes, and he slowly began, hesitating, as though talking to himself:

XXII

[The Pythagoreans]

It was high noon in the city of Antwerp. From slender steeples floated the mellow music of the Flemish bells, and in the spire of the great cathedral across the square the cracked chimes clashed discords until my ears ached.

When the fiend in the cathedral had jerked the last tuneless clang from the chimes, I removed my fingers from my ears and sat down at one of the iron tables in the court. A waiter, with his face shaved blue, brought me a bottle of Rhine wine, a tumbler of cracked ice, and a siphon.

“Does monsieur desire anything else?” he inquired.

“Yes—the head of the cathedral bell-ringer; bring it with vinegar and potatoes,” I said, bitterly. Then I began to ponder on my great-aunt and the Crimson Diamond.

The white walls of the Hôtel St. Antoine rose in a rectangle around the sunny court, casting long shadows across the basin of the fountain. The strip of blue overhead was cloudless. Sparrows twittered under the eaves the yellow awnings fluttered, the flowers swayed in the summer breeze, and the jet of the fountain splashed among the water-plants. On the sunny side of the piazza the tables were vacant; on the shady side I was lazily aware that the tables behind me were occupied, but I was indifferent as to their occupants, partly because I shunned all tourists, partly because I was thinking of my great-aunt.

Most old ladies are eccentric, but there is a limit, and my great-aunt had overstepped it. I had believed her to be wealthy—she died bankrupt. Still, I knew there was one thing she did possess, and that was the famous Crimson Diamond. Now, of course, you know who my great-aunt was.

Excepting the Koh-i-noor and the Regent, this enormous and unique stone was, as everybody knows, the most valuable gem in existence. Any ordinary person would have placed that diamond in a safe-deposit. My great-aunt did nothing of the kind. She kept it in a small velvet bag, which she carried about her neck. She never took it off, but wore it dangling openly on her heavy silk gown.

In this same bag she also carried dried catnip-leaves, of which she was inordinately fond. Nobody but myself, her only living relative, knew that the Crimson Diamond lay among the sprigs of catnip in the little velvet bag.

“Harold,” she would say, “do you think I’m a fool? If I place the Crimson Diamond in any safe-deposit vault in New York, somebody will steal it, sooner or later.” Then she would nibble a sprig of catnip and peer cunningly at me. I loathed the odor of catnip and she knew it. I also loathed cats. This also she knew, and of course surrounded herself with a dozen. Poor old lady! One day she was found dead in her bed in her apartments at the Waldorf. The doctor said she died from natural causes. The only other occupant of her sleeping-room was a cat. The cat fled when we broke open the door, and I heard that she was received and cherished by some eccentric people in a neighboring apartment.

Now, although my great-aunt’s death was due to purely natural causes, there was one very startling and disagreeable feature of the case. The velvet bag containing the Crimson Diamond had disappeared. Every inch of the apartment was searched, the floors torn up, the walls dismantled, but the Crimson Diamond had vanished. Chief of Police Conlon detailed four of his best men on the case, and, as I had nothing better to do, I enrolled myself as a volunteer. I also offered $25,000 reward for the recovery of the gem. All New York was agog.

The case seemed hopeless enough, although there were five of us after the thief. McFarlane was in London, and had been for a month, but Scotland Yard could give him no help, and the last I heard of him he was roaming through Surrey after a man with a white spot in his hair. Harrison had gone to Paris. He kept writing me that clews were plenty and the scent hot, but as Dennet, in Berlin, and Clancy, in Vienna, wrote me the same thing, I began to doubt these gentlemen’s ability.

“You say,” I answered Harrison, “that the fellow is a Frenchman, and that he is now concealed in Paris; but Dennet writes me by the same mail that the thief is undoubtedly a German, and was seen yesterday in Berlin. To-day I received a letter from Clancy, assuring me that Vienna holds the culprit, and that he is an Austrian from Trieste. Now, for Heaven’s sake,” I ended, “let me alone and stop writing me letters until you have something to write about.”

The night-clerk at the Waldorf had furnished us with our first clew. On the night of my aunt’s death he had seen a tall, grave-faced man hurriedly leave the hotel. As the man passed the desk he removed his hat and mopped his forehead, and the night-clerk noticed that in the middle of his head there was a patch of hair as white as snow.

We worked this clew for all it was worth, and, a month later, I received a cable despatch from Paris, saying that a man answering to the description of the Waldorf suspect had offered an enormous crimson diamond for sale to a jeweller in the Palais Royal. Unfortunately the fellow took fright and disappeared before the jeweller could send for the police, and since that time McFarlane in London, Harrison in Paris, Dennet in Berlin, and Clancy in Vienna had been chasing men with white patches on their hair until no gray-headed patriarch in Europe was free from suspicion. I myself had sleuthed it through England, France, Holland, and Belgium, and now I found myself in Antwerp at the Hôtel St. Antoine, without a clew that promised anything except another outrage on some respectable white-haired citizen. The case seemed hopeless enough, unless the thief tried again to sell the gem. Here was our only hope, for, unless he cut the stone into smaller ones, he had no more chance of selling it than he would have had if he had stolen the Venus of Milo and peddled her about the Rue de Seine. Even were he to cut up the stone, no respectable gem collector or jeweller would buy a crimson diamond without first notifying me; for although a few red stones are known to collectors, the color of the Crimson Diamond was absolutely unique, and there was little probability of an honest mistake.

Thinking of all these things, I sat sipping my Rhine wine in the shadow of the yellow awnings. A large white cat came sauntering by and stopped in front of me to perform her toilet, until I wished she would go away. After a while she sat up, licked her whiskers, yawned once or twice, and was about to stroll on, when, catching sight of me, she stopped short and looked me squarely in the face. I returned the attention with a scowl, because I wished to discourage any advances towards social intercourse which she might contemplate; but after a while her steady gaze disconcerted me, and I turned to my Rhine wine. A few minutes later I looked up again. The cat was still eying me.

“Now what the devil is the matter with the animal,” I muttered; “does she recognize in me a relative?”

“Perhaps,” observed a man at the next table.

“What do you mean by that?” I demanded.

“What I say,” replied the man at the next table.

I looked him full in the face. He was old and bald and appeared weak-minded. His age protected his impudence. I turned my back on him. Then my eyes fell on the cat again. She was still gazing earnestly at me.

Disgusted that she should take such pointed public notice of me, I wondered whether other people saw it; I wondered whether there was anything peculiar in my own personal appearance. How hard the creature stared! It was most embarrassing.

“What has got into that cat?” I thought. “It’s sheer impudence. It’s an intrusion, and I won’t stand it!” The cat did not move. I tried to stare her out of countenance. It was useless. There was aggressive inquiry in her yellow eyes. A sensation of uneasiness began to steal over me—a sensation of embarrassment not unmixed with awe. All cats looked alike to me, and yet there was something about this one that bothered me—something that I could not explain to myself, but which began to occupy me.

She looked familiar—this Antwerp cat. An odd sense of having seen her before, of having been well acquainted with her in former years, slowly settled in my mind, and, although I could never remember the time when I had not detested cats, I was almost convinced that my relations with this Antwerp tabby had once been intimate if not cordial. I looked more closely at the animal. Then an idea struck me—an idea which persisted and took definite shape in spite of me. I strove to escape from it, to evade it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks—a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless—useless to try to put it from me—this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane—it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct resemblance to my great-aunt!

I gazed at her in horror. What enormous eyes the creature had!

“Blood is thicker than water,” said the man at the next table.

“What does he mean by that?” I muttered, angrily, swallowing a tumbler of Rhine wine and seltzer. But I did not turn. What was the use?

“Chattering old imbecile,” I added to myself, and struck a match, for my cigar was out; but, as I raised the match to relight it, I encountered the cat’s eyes again. I could not enjoy my cigar with the animal staring at me, but I was justly indignant, and I did not intend to be routed. “The idea! Forced to leave for a cat!” I sneered. “We will see who will be the one to go!” I tried to give her a jet of seltzer from the siphon, but the bottle was too nearly empty to carry far. Then I attempted to lure her nearer, calling her in French, German, and English, but she did not stir. I did not know the Flemish for “cat.”

“She’s got a name, and won’t come,” I thought. “Now, what under the sun can I call her?”

“Aunty,” suggested the man at the next table.

I sat perfectly still. Could that man have answered my thoughts?—for I had not spoken aloud. Of course not—it was a coincidence—but a very disgusting one.

“Aunty,” I repeated, mechanically, “aunty, aunty—good gracious, how horribly human that cat looks!” Then, somehow or other, Shakespeare’s words crept into my head and I found myself repeating: “The soul of my grandam might haply inhabit a bird; the soul of—nonsense!” I growled—‘it isn’t printed correctly! One might possibly say, speaking in poetical metaphor, that the soul of a bird might haply inhabit one’s grandam—’ I stopped short, flushing painfully. “What awful rot!” I murmured, and lighted another cigar. The cat was still staring; the cigar went out. I grew more and more nervous. “What rot!” I repeated. “Pythagoras must have been an ass, but I do believe there are plenty of asses alive to-day who swallow that sort of thing.”

“Who knows?” sighed the man at the next table, and I sprang to my feet and wheeled about. But I only caught a glimpse of a pair of frayed coat-tails and a bald head vanishing into the dining-room. I sat down again, thoroughly indignant. A moment later the cat got up and went away.

XXIII

Daylight was fading in the city of Antwerp. Down into the sea sank the sun, tinting the vast horizon with flakes of crimson, and touching with rich deep undertones the tossing waters of the Scheldt. Its glow fell like a rosy mantle over red-tiled roofs and meadows; and through the haze the spires of twenty churches pierced the air like sharp, gilded flames. To the west and south the green plains, over which the Spanish armies tramped so long ago, stretched away until they met the sky; the enchantment of the after-glow had turned old Antwerp into fairy-land; and sea and sky and plain were beautiful and vague as the night-mists floating in the moats below.

Along the sea-wall from the Rubens Gate all Antwerp strolled, and chattered, and flirted, and sipped their Flemish wines from slender Flemish glasses, or gossiped over krugs of foaming beer.

From the Scheldt came the cries of sailors, the creaking of cordage, and the puff! puff! of the ferry-boats. On the bastions of the fortress opposite, a bugler was standing. Twice the mellow notes of the bugle came faintly over the water, then a great gun thundered from the ramparts, and the Belgian flag fluttered along the lanyards to the ground.

I leaned listlessly on the sea-wall and looked down at the Scheldt below. A battery of artillery was embarking for the fortress. The tublike transport lay hissing and whistling in the slip, and the stamping of horses, the rumbling of gun and caisson, and the sharp cries of the officers came plainly to the ear.

When the last caisson was aboard and stowed, and the last trooper had sprung jingling to the deck, the transport puffed out into the Scheldt, and I turned away through the throng of promenaders; and found a little table on the terrace, just outside of the pretty café. And as I sat down I became aware of a girl at the next table—a girl all in white—the most ravishingly and distractingly pretty girl that I had ever seen. In the agitation of the moment I forgot my name, my fortune, my aunt, and the Crimson Diamond—all these I forgot in a purely human impulse to see clearly; and to that end I removed my monocle from my left eye. Some moments later I came to myself and feebly replaced it. It was too late; the mischief was done. I was not aware at first of the exact state of my feelings—for I had never been in love more than three or four times in all my life—but I did know that at her request I would have been proud to stand on my head, or turn a flip-flap into the Scheldt.

I did not stare at her, but I managed to see her most of the time when her eyes were in another direction. I found myself drinking something which a waiter brought, presumably upon an order which I did not remember having given. Later I noticed that it was a loathsome drink which the Belgians call “American grog,” but I swallowed it and lighted a cigarette. As the fragrant cloud rose in the air, a voice, which I recognized with a chill, broke, into my dream of enchantment. Could he have been there all the while—there sitting beside that vision in white? His hat was off, and the ocean-breezes whispered about his bald head. His frayed coat-tails were folded carefully over his knees, and between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he balanced a bad cigar. He looked at me in a mildly cheerful way, and said, “I know now.”

“Know what?” I asked, thinking it better to humor him, for I was convinced that he was mad.

“I know why cats bite.”

This was startling. I hadn’t an idea what to say.

“I know why,” he repeated; “can you guess why?” There was a covert tone of triumph in his voice and he smiled encouragement. “Come, try and guess,” he urged.

I told him that I was unequal to problems.

“Listen, young man,” he continued, folding his coat-tails closely about his legs—‘try to reason it out: why should cats bite? Don’t you know? I do.”

He looked at me anxiously.

“You take no interest in this problem?” he demanded.

“Oh yes.”

“Then why do you not ask me why?” he said, looking vaguely disappointed.

“Well,” I said, in desperation, “why do cats bite?—hang it all!” I thought, “it’s like a burned-cork show, and I’m Mr. Bones and he’s Tambo!”

Then he smiled gently. “Young man,” he said, “cats bite because they feed on catnip. I have reasoned it out.”

I stared at him in blank astonishment. Was this benevolent-looking old party poking fun at me? Was he paying me up for the morning’s snub? Was he a malignant and revengeful old party, or was he merely feeble-minded? Who might he be? What was he doing here in Antwerp—what was he doing now?—for the bald one had turned familiarly to the beautiful girl in white.

“Wilhelmina,” he said, “do you feel chilly?” The girl shook her head.

“Not in the least, papa.”

“Her father!” I thought—“her father! Thank God she did not say ‘popper’!”

“I have been to the Zoo to-day,” announced the bald one, turning towards me.

“Ah, indeed,” I observed; “er—I trust you enjoyed it.”

“I have been contemplating the apes,” he continued, dreamily. “Yes, contemplating the apes.”

I tried to look interested.

“Yes, the apes,” he murmured, fixing his mild eyes on me. Then he leaned towards me confidentially and whispered, “Can you tell me what a monkey thinks?”

“I cannot,” I replied, sharply.

“Ah,” he sighed, sinking back in his chair, and patting the slender hand of the girl beside him—‘ah, who can tell what a monkey thinks?” His gentle face lulled my suspicions, and I replied, very gravely:

“Who can tell whether they think at all?”

“True, true! Who can tell whether they think at all; and if they do think, ah! who can tell what they think?”

“But,” I began, “if you can’t tell whether they think at all, what’s the use of trying to conjecture what they would think if they did think?”

He raised his hand in deprecation. “Ah, it is exactly that which is of such absorbing interest—exactly that! It is the abstruseness of the proposition which stimulates research—which stirs profoundly the brain of the thinking world. The question is of vital and instant importance. Possibly you have already formed an opinion.”

I admitted that I had thought but little on the subject.

“I doubt,” he continued, swathing his knees in his coat-tails—‘I doubt whether you have given much attention to the subject lately discussed by the Boston Dodo Society of Pythagorean Research.”

“I am not sure,” I said, politely, “that I recall that particular discussion. May I ask what was the question brought up?”

“The Felis domestica question.”

“Ah, that must indeed be interesting! And—er—what may be the Felis do—do—”

“Domestica—not dodo. Felis domestica, the common or garden cat.”

“Indeed,” I murmured.

“You are not listening,” he said.

I only half heard him. I could not turn my eyes from his daughter’s face.

“Cat!” shouted the bald one, and I almost leaped from my chair. “Are you deaf?” he inquired, sympathetically.

“No—oh no!” I replied, coloring with confusion; “you were—pardon me—you were—er—speaking of the dodo. Extraordinary bird that—”

“I was not discussing the dodo,” he sighed. “I was speaking of cats.”

“Of course,” I said.

“The question is,” he continued, twisting his frayed coat-tails into a sort of rope—‘the question is, how are we to ameliorate the present condition and social status of our domestic cats?”

“Feed ’em,” I suggested.

He raised both hands. They were eloquent with patient expostulation. “I mean their spiritual condition,” he said.

I nodded, but my eyes reverted to that exquisite face. She sat silent, her eyes fixed on the waning flecks of color in the western sky.

“Yes,” repeated the bald one, “the spiritual welfare of our domestic cats.”

“Toms and tabbies?” I murmured.

“Exactly,” he said, tying a large knot in his coat-tails.

“You will ruin your coat,” I observed.

“Papa!” exclaimed the girl, turning in dismay, as that gentleman gave a guilty start, “stop it at once!”

He smiled apologetically and made a feeble attempt to conceal his coat-tails.

“My dear,” he said, with gentle deprecation, “I am so absent-minded—I always do it in the heat of argument.”

The girl rose, and, bending over her untidy parent, deftly untied the knot in his flapping coat. When he was disentangled, she sat down and said, with a ghost of a smile, “He is so very absent-minded.”

“Your father is evidently a great student,” I ventured, pleasantly. How I pitied her, tied to this old lunatic!

“Yes, he is a great student,” she said, quietly.

“I am,” he murmured; “that’s what makes me so absent-minded. I often go to bed and forget to sleep.” Then, looking at me, he asked me my name, adding, with a bow, that his name was P. Royal Wyeth, Professor of Pythagorean Research and Abstruse Paradox.

“My first name is Penny—named after Professor Penny, of Harvard,” he said; “but I seldom use my first name in connection with my second, as the combination suggests a household remedy of penetrating odor.”

“My name is Kensett,” I said, “Harold Kensett, of New York.”

“Student?”

“Er—a little.”

“Student of diamonds?”

I smiled. “Oh, I see you know who my great-aunt was,” I said.

“I know her,” he said.

“Ah—perhaps you are unaware that my great-aunt is not now living.”

“I know her,” he repeated, obstinately.

I bowed. What a crank he was!

“What do you study? You don’t fiddle away all your time, do you?” he asked.

Now that was just what I did, but I was not pleased to have Miss Wyeth know it. Although my time was chiefly spent in killing time, I had once, in a fit of energy, succeeded in writing some verses “To a Tomtit,” so I evaded a humiliating confession by saying that I had done a little work in ornithology.

“Good!” cried the professor, beaming all over. “I knew you were a fellow-scientist. Possibly you are a brother-member of the Boston Dodo Society of Pythagorean Research. Are you a dodo?”

I shook my head. “No, I am not a dodo.”

“Only a jay?”

“A—what?” I said, angrily.

“A jay. We call the members of the Junior Ornithological Jay Society of New York, jays, just as we refer to ourselves as dodos. Are you not even a jay?”

“I am not,” I said, watching him suspiciously.

“I must convert you, I see,” said the professor, smiling.

“I’m afraid I do not approve of Pythagorean research,” I began, but the beautiful Miss Wyeth turned to me very seriously, and, looking me frankly in the eyes, said:

“I trust you will be open to conviction.”

“Good Lord!” I thought. “Can she be another lunatic?” I looked at her steadily. What a little beauty she was! She also, then, belonged to the Pythagoreans—a sect I despised. Everybody knows all about the Pythagorean craze, its rise in Boston, its rapid spread, and its subsequent consolidation with mental and Christian science, theosophy, hypnotism, the Salvation Army, the Shakers, the Dunkards, and the mind-cure cult, upon a business basis. I had hitherto regarded all Pythagoreans with the same scornful indifference which I accorded to the faith-curists; being a member of no particular church, I was scarcely prepared to take any of them seriously. Least of all did I approve of the “business basis,” and I looked very much askance indeed at the “Scientific and Religious Trust Company,” duly incorporated and generally known as the Pythagorean Trust, which, consolidating with mind-curists, faith-curists, and other flourishing salvation syndicates, actually claimed a place among ordinary trusts, and at the same time pretended to a control over man’s future life. No, I could never listen—I was ashamed of even entertaining the notion, and I shook my head.

“No, Miss Wyeth, I am afraid I do not care to listen to any reasoning on this subject.”

“Don’t you believe in Pythagoras?” demanded the professor, subduing his excitement with difficulty, and adding another knot to his coat-tails.

“No,” I said, “I do not.”

“How do you know you don’t?” inquired the professor.

“Because,” I said, firmly, “it is nonsense to say that the soul of a human being can inhabit a hen!”

“Put it in a more simplified form!” insisted the professor. “Do you believe that the soul of a hen can inhabit a human being?”

“No, I don’t!”

“Did you ever hear of a hen-pecked man?” cried the professor, his voice ending in a shout.

I nodded, intensely annoyed.

“Will you listen to reason, then?” he continued, eagerly.

“No,” I began, but I caught Miss Wyeth’s blue eyes fixed on mine with an expression so sad, so sweetly appealing, that I faltered.

“Yes, I will listen,” I said, faintly.

“Will you become my pupil?” insisted the professor.

I was shocked to find myself wavering, but my eyes were looking into hers, and I could not disobey what I read there. The longer I looked the greater inclination I felt to waver. I saw that I was going to give in, and, strangest of all, my conscience did not trouble me. I felt it coming—a sort of mild exhilaration took possession of me. For the first time in my life I became reckless—I even gloried in my recklessness.

“Yes, yes,” I cried, leaning eagerly across the table, “I shall be glad—delighted! Will you take me as your pupil?” My single eye-glass fell from its position unheeded. “Take me! Oh, will you take me?” I cried. Instead of answering, the professor blinked rapidly at me for a moment. I imagined his eyes had grown bigger, and were assuming a greenish tinge. The corners of his mouth began to quiver, emitting queer, caressing little noises, and he rapidly added knot after knot to his twitching coat-tails. Suddenly he bent forward across the table until his nose almost touched mine. The pupils of his eyes expanded, the iris assuming a beautiful, changing, golden-green tinge, and his coat-tails switched violently. Then he began to mew.

I strove to rouse myself from my paralysis—I tried to shrink back, for I felt the end of his cold nose touch mine. I could not move. The cry of terror died in my straining throat, my hands tightened convulsively; I was incapable of speech or motion. At the same time my brain became wonderfully clear. I began to remember everything that had ever happened to me—everything that I had ever done or said. I even remembered things that I had neither done nor said; I recalled distinctly much that had never happened. How fresh and strong my memory! The past was like a mirror, crystal clear, and there, in glorious tints and hues, the scenes of my childhood grew and glowed and faded, and gave place to newer and more splendid scenes. For a moment the episode of the cat at the Hôtel St. Antoine flashed across my mind. When it vanished a chilly stupor slowly clouded my brain; the scenes, the memories, the brilliant colors, faded, leaving me enveloped in a gray vapor, through which the two great eyes of the professor twinkled with a murky light. A peculiar longing stirred me—a strange yearning for something, I knew not what—but, oh! how I longed and yearned for it! Slowly this indefinite, incomprehensible longing became a living pain. Ah, how I suffered, and how the vapors seemed to crowd around me! Then, as at a great distance, I heard her voice, sweet, imperative:

“Mew!” she said.

For a moment I seemed to see the interior of my own skull, lighted as by a flash of fire; the rolling eyeballs, veined in scarlet, the glistening muscles quivering along the jaw, the humid masses of the convoluted brain; then awful darkness—a darkness almost tangible—an utter blackness, through which now seemed to creep a thin, silver thread, like a river crawling across a world—like a thought gliding to the brain—like a song, a thin, sharp song which some distant voice was singing—which I was singing.

And I knew that I was mewing!

I threw myself back in my chair and mewed with all my heart. Oh, that heavy load which was lifted from my breast! How good, how satisfying it was to mew! And how I did miaul and yowl!

I gave myself up to it, heart and soul; my whole being thrilled with the passionate outpourings of a spirit freed. My voice trembled in the upper bars of a feline love-song, quavered, descended, swelling again into an intimation that I brooked no rival, and ended with a magnificent crescendo.

I finished, somewhat abashed, and glanced askance at the professor and his daughter, but the one sat nonchalantly disentangling his coat-tails, and the other was apparently absorbed in the distant landscape. Evidently they did not consider me ridiculous. Flushing painfully, I turned in my chair to see how my grewsome solo had affected the people on the terrace. Nobody even looked at me. This, however, gave me little comfort, for, as I began to realize what I had done, my mortification and rage knew no bounds. I was ready to die of shame. What on earth had induced me to mew? I looked wildly about for escape—I would leap up—rush home to bury my burning face in my pillows, and, later, in the friendly cabin of a homeward-bound steamer. I would fly—fly at once! Woe to the man who blocked my way! I started to my feet, but at that moment I caught Miss Wyeth’s eyes fixed on mine.

“Don’t go,” she said.

What in Heaven’s name lay in those blue eyes? I slowly sank back into my chair.

Then the professor spoke: “Wilhelmina, I have just received a despatch.”

“Where from, papa?”

“From India. I’m going at once.”

She nodded her head, without turning her eyes from the sea. “Is it important, papa?”

“I should say so. The cashier of the local trust has compromised an astral body, and has squandered on her all our funds, including a lot of first mortgages on Nirvana. I suppose he’s been dabbling in futures and is short in his accounts. I sha’n’t be gone long.”

“Then, good-night, papa,” she said, kissing him; “try to be back by eleven.” I sat stupidly staring at them.

“Oh, it’s only to Bombay—I sha’n’t go to Thibet to-night—good-night, my dear,” said the professor.

Then a singular thing occurred. The professor had at last succeeded in disentangling his coat-tails, and now, jamming his hat over his ears, and waving his arms with a batlike motion, he climbed upon the seat of his chair and ejaculated the word “Presto!” Then I found my voice.

“Stop him!” I cried, in terror.

“Presto! Presto!” shouted the professor, balancing himself on the edge of his chair and waving his arms majestically, as if preparing for a sudden flight across the Scheldt; and, firmly convinced that he not only meditated it, but was perfectly capable of attempting it, I covered my eyes with my hands.

“Are you ill, Mr. Kensett?” asked the girl, quietly.

I raised my head indignantly. “Not at all, Miss Wyeth, only I’ll bid you good-evening, for this is the nineteenth century, and I’m a Christian.”

“So am I,” she said. “So is my father.”

“The devil he is,” I thought.

Her next words made me jump.

“Please do not be profane, Mr. Kensett.”

How did she know I was profane? I had not spoken a word! Could it be possible she was able to read my thoughts? This was too much, and I rose.

“I have the honor to bid you good-evening,” I began, and reluctantly turned to include the professor, expecting to see that gentleman balancing himself on his chair. The professor’s chair was empty.

“Oh,” said the girl, smiling, “my father has gone.”

“Gone! Where?”

“To—to India, I believe.”

I sank helplessly into my own chair.

“I do not think he will stay very long—he promised to return by eleven,” she said, timidly.

I tried to realize the purport of it all. “Gone to India? Gone! How? On a broomstick? Good Heavens,” I murmured, “am I insane?”

“Perfectly,” she said, “and I am tired; you may take me back to the hotel.”

I scarcely heard her; I was feebly attempting to gather up my numbed wits. Slowly I began to comprehend the situation, to review the startling and humiliating events of the day. At noon, in the court of the Hôtel St. Antoine, I had been annoyed by a man and a cat. I had retired to my own room and had slept until dinner. In the evening I met two tourists on the sea-wall promenade. I had been beguiled into conversation—yes, into intimacy with these two tourists! I had had the intention of embracing the faith of Pythagoras! Then I had mewed like a cat with all the strength of my lungs. Now the male tourist vanishes—and leaves me in charge of the female tourist, alone and at night in a strange city! And now the female tourist proposes that I take her home!

With a remnant of self-possession I groped for my eye-glass, seized it, screwed it firmly into my eye, and looked long and earnestly at the girl. As I looked, my eyes softened, my monacle dropped, and I forgot everything in the beauty and purity of the face before me. My heart began to beat against my stiff, white waistcoat. Had I dared—yes, dared to think of this wondrous little beauty as a female tourist? Her pale, sweet face, turned towards the sea, seemed to cast a spell upon the night. How loud my heart was beating! The yellow moon floated, half dipping in the sea, flooding land and water with enchanted lights. Wind and wave seemed to feel the spell of her eyes, for the breeze died away, the heaving Scheldt tossed noiselessly, and the dark Dutch luggers swung idly on the tide with every sail adroop.

A sudden hush fell over land and water, the voices on the promenade were stilled; little by little the shadowy throng, the terrace, the sea itself vanished, and I only saw her face, shadowed against the moon.

It seemed as if I had drifted miles above the earth, through all space and eternity, and there was naught between me and high heaven but that white face. Ah, how I loved her! I knew it—I never doubted it. Could years of passionate adoration touch her heart—her little heart, now beating so calmly with no thought of love to startle it from its quiet and send it fluttering against the gentle breast? In her lap her clasped hands tightened—her eyelids drooped as though some pleasant thought was passing. I saw the color dye her temples, I saw the blue eyes turn, half frightened, to my own, I saw—and I knew she had read my thoughts. Then we both rose, side by side, and she was weeping softly, yet for my life I dared not speak. She turned away, touching her eyes with a bit of lace, and I sprang to her side and offered her my arm.

“You cannot go back alone,” I said.

She did not take my arm.

“Do you hate me, Miss Wyeth?”

“I am very tired,” she said; “I must go home.”

“You cannot go alone.”

“I do not care to accept your escort.”

“Then—you send me away?”

“No,” she said, in a hard voice. “You can come if you like.” So I humbly attended her to the Hôtel St. Antoine.

XXIV

As we reached the Place Verte and turned into the court of the hotel, the sound of the midnight bells swept over the city, and a horse-car jingled slowly by on its last trip to the railroad station.

We passed the fountain, bubbling and splashing in the moonlit court, and, crossing the square, entered the southern wing of the hotel. At the foot of the stairway she leaned for an instant against the banisters.

“I am afraid we have walked too fast,” I said.

She turned to me coldly. “No—conventionalities must be observed. You were quite right in escaping as soon as possible.”

“But,” I protested, “I assure you—”

She gave a little movement of impatience. “Don’t,” she said, “you tire me—conventionalities tire me. Be satisfied—nobody has seen you.”

“You are cruel,” I said, in a low voice—‘what do you think I care for conventionalities?”

“You care everything—you care what people think, and you try to do what they say is good form. You never did such an original thing in your life as you have just done.”

“You read my thoughts,” I exclaimed, bitterly. “It is not fair—”

“Fair or not, I know what you consider me—ill-bred, common, pleased with any sort of attention. Oh! why should I waste one word—one thought on you?”

“Miss Wyeth—” I began, but she interrupted me.

“Would you dare tell me what you think of me?—Would you dare tell me what you think of my father?”

I was silent. She turned and mounted two steps of the stairway, then faced me again.

“Do you think it was for my own pleasure that I permitted myself to be left alone with you? Do you imagine that I am flattered by your attention?—do you venture to think I ever could be? How dared you think what you did think there on the sea-wall?”

“I cannot help my thoughts!” I replied.

“You turned on me like a tiger when you awoke from your trance. Do you really suppose that you mewed? Are you not aware that my father hypnotized you?”

“No—I did not know it,” I said. The hot blood tingled in my finger-tips, and I looked angrily at her.

“Why do you imagine that I waste my time on you?” she said. “Your vanity has answered that question—now let your intelligence answer it. I am a Pythagorean; I have been chosen to bring in a convert, and you were the convert selected for me by the Mahatmas of the Consolidated Trust Company. I have followed you from New York to Antwerp, as I was bidden, but now my courage fails, and I shrink from fulfilling my mission, knowing you to be the type of man you are. If I could give it up—if I could only go away—never, never again to see you! Ah, I fear they will not permit it!—until my mission is accomplished. Why was I chosen—I, with a woman’s heart and a woman’s pride. I—I hate you!”

“I love you,” I said, slowly.

She paled and looked away.

“Answer me,” I said.

Her wide, blue eyes turned back again, and I held them with mine. At last she slowly drew a long-stemmed rose from the bunch at her belt, turned, and mounted the shadowy staircase. For a moment I thought I saw her pause on the landing above, but the moonlight was uncertain. After waiting for a long time in vain, I moved away, and in going raised my hand to my face, but I stopped short, and my heart stopped too, for a moment. In my hand I held a long-stemmed rose.

With my brain in a whirl I crept across the court and mounted the stairs to my room. Hour after hour I walked the floor, slowly at first, then more rapidly, but it brought no calm to the fierce tumult of my thoughts, and at last I dropped into a chair before the empty fireplace, burying my head in my hands.

Uncertain, shocked, and deadly weary, I tried to think—I strove to bring order out of the chaos in my brain, but I only sat staring at the long-stemmed rose. Slowly I began to take a vague pleasure in its heavy perfume, and once I crushed a leaf between my palms, and, bending over, drank in the fragrance.

Twice my lamp flickered and went out, and twice, treading softly, I crossed the room to relight it. Twice I threw open the door, thinking that I heard some sound without. How close the air was!—how heavy and hot! And what was that strange, subtle odor which had insensibly filled the room? It grew stronger and more penetrating, and I began to dislike it, and to escape it I buried my nose in the half-opened rose. Horror! The odor came from the rose—and the rose itself was no longer a rose—not even a flower now—it was only a bunch of catnip; and I dashed it to the floor and ground it under my heel.

“Mountebank!” I cried, in a rage. My anger grew cold—and I shivered, drawn perforce to the curtained window. Something was there, outside. I could not hear it, for it made no sound, but I knew it was there, watching me. What was it? The damp hair stirred on my head. I touched the heavy curtains. Whatever was outside them sprang up, tore at the window, and then rushed away.

Feeling very shaky, I crept to the window, opened it, and leaned out. The night was calm. I heard the fountain splashing in the moonlight and the sea-winds soughing through the palms. Then I closed the window and turned back into the room; and as I stood there a sudden breeze, which could not have come from without, blew sharply in my face, extinguishing the candle and sending the long curtains bellying out into the room. The lamp on the table flashed and smoked and sputtered; the room was littered with flying papers and catnip leaves. Then the strange wind died away, and somewhere in the night a cat snarled.

I turned desperately to my trunk and flung it open. Into it I threw everything I owned, pell-mell, closed the lid, locked it, and, seizing my mackintosh and travelling-bag, ran down the stairs, crossed the court, and entered the night-office of the hotel. There I called up the sleepy clerk, settled my reckoning, and sent a porter for a cab.

“Now,” I said, “what time does the next train leave?”

“The next train for where?”

“Anywhere!”

The clerk locked the safe, and, carefully keeping the desk between himself and me, motioned the office-boy to look at the time-tables.

“Next train, 2.10. Brussels—Paris,” read the boy.

At that moment the cab rattled up by the curbstone, and I sprang in while the porter tossed my traps on top. Away we bumped over the stony pavement, past street after street lighted dimly by tall gas-lamps, and alley after alley brilliant with the glare of villainous all-night café-concerts, and then, turning, we rumbled past the Circus and the Eldorado, and at last stopped with a jolt before the Brussels station.

I had not a moment to lose. “Paris!” I cried—‘first-class!” and, pocketing the book of coupons, hurried across the platform to where the Brussels train lay. A guard came running up, flung open the door of a first-class carriage, slammed and locked it after I had jumped in, and the long train glided from the arched station out into the starlit morning.

I was all alone in the compartment. The wretched lamp in the roof flickered dimly, scarcely lighting the stuffy box. I could not see to read my time-table, so I wrapped my legs in the travelling-rug and lay back, staring out into the misty morning. Trees, walls, telegraph-poles flashed past, and the cinders drove in showers against the rattling windows. I slept at times, fitfully, and once, springing up, peered sharply at the opposite seat, possessed with the idea that somebody was there.

When the train reached Brussels I was sound asleep, and the guard awoke me with difficulty.

“Breakfast, sir?” he asked.

“Anything,” I sighed, and stepped out to the platform, rubbing my legs and shivering. The other passengers were already breakfasting in the station café, and I joined them and managed to swallow a cup of coffee and a roll.

The morning broke gray and cloudy, and I bundled myself into my mackintosh for a tramp along the platform. Up and down I stamped, puffing a cigar, and digging my hands deep in my pockets, while the other passengers huddled into the warmer compartments of the train or stood watching the luggage being lifted into the forward mail-carriage. The wait was very long; the hands of the great clock pointed to six, and still the train lay motionless along the platform. I approached a guard and asked him whether anything was wrong.

“Accident on the line,” he replied; “monsieur had better go to his compartment and try to sleep, for we may be delayed until noon.”

I followed the guard’s advice, and, crawling into my corner, wrapped myself in the rug and lay back watching the rain-drops spattering along the window-sill. At noon the train had not moved, and I lunched in the compartment. At four o’clock in the afternoon the station-master came hurrying along the platform, crying, “Montez! montez! messieurs, s’il vous plaît”—and the train steamed out of the station and whirled away through the flat, treeless Belgian plains. At times I dozed, but the shaking of the car always awoke me, and I would sit blinking out at the endless stretch of plain, until a sudden flurry of rain blotted the landscape from my eyes. At last a long, shrill whistle from the engine, a jolt, a series of bumps, and an apparition of red trousers and bayonets warned me that we had arrived at the French frontier. I turned out with the others, and opened my valise for inspection, but the customs officials merely chalked it, without examination, and I hurried back to my compartment amid the shouting of guards and the clanging of station bells. Again I found that I was alone in the compartment, so I smoked a cigarette, thanked Heaven, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

How long I slept I do not know, but when I awoke the train was roaring through a tunnel. When again it flashed out into the open country I peered through the grimy, rain-stained window and saw that the storm had ceased and stars were twinkling in the sky. I stretched my legs, yawned, pushed my travelling-cap back from my forehead, and, stumbling to my feet, walked up and down the compartment until my cramped muscles were relieved. Then I sat down again, and, lighting a cigar, puffed great rings and clouds of fragrant smoke across the aisle.

The train was flying; the cars lurched and shook, and the windows rattled accompaniment to the creaking panels. The smoke from my cigar dimmed the lamp in the ceiling and hid the opposite seat from view. How it curled and writhed in the corners, now eddying upward, now floating across the aisle like a veil! I lounged back in my cushioned seat, watching it with interest. What queer shapes it took! How thick it was becoming!—how strangely luminous! Now it had filled the whole compartment, puff after puff crowding upward, waving, wavering, clouding the windows, and blotting the lamp from sight. It was most interesting. I had never before smoked such a cigar. What an extraordinary brand! I examined the end, flicking the ashes away. The cigar was out. Fumbling for a match to relight it, my eyes fell on the drifting smoke-curtain which swayed across the corner opposite. It seemed almost tangible. How like a real curtain it hung, gray, impenetrable! A man might hide behind it. Then an idea came into my head, and it persisted until my uneasiness amounted to a vague terror. I tried to fight it off—I strove to resist—but the conviction slowly settled upon me that something was behind that smoke-veil—something which had entered the compartment while I slept.

“It can’t be,” I muttered, my eyes fixed on the misty drapery; “the train has not stopped.”

The car creaked and trembled. I sprang to my feet and swept my arm through the veil of smoke. Then my hair rose on my head. For my hand touched another hand, and my eyes had met two other eyes.

I heard a voice in the gloom, low and sweet, calling me by name; I saw the eyes again, tender and blue; soft fingers touched my own.

“Are you afraid?” she said.

My heart began to beat again, and my face warmed with returning blood.

“It is only I,” she said, gently.

I seemed to hear my own voice speaking as if at a great distance, “You here—alone?”

“How cruel of you!” she faltered; “I am not alone.” At the same instant my eyes fell upon the professor, calmly seated by the farther window. His hands were thrust into the folds of a corded and tasselled dressing-gown, from beneath which peeped two enormous feet encased in carpet slippers. Upon his head towered a yellow night-cap. He did not pay the slightest attention to either me or his daughter, and, except for the lighted cigar which he kept shifting between his lips, he might have been taken for a wax dummy.

Then I began to speak, feebly, hesitating like a child.

“How did you come into this compartment? You—you do not possess wings, I suppose? You could not have been here all the time. Will you explain—explain to me? See, I ask you very humbly, for I do not understand. This is the nineteenth century, and these things don’t fit in. I’m wearing a Dunlap hat—I’ve got a copy of the New York Herald in my bag—President Roosevelt is alive, and everything is so very unromantic in the world! Is this real magic? Perhaps I’m filled with hallucinations. Perhaps I’m asleep and dreaming. Perhaps you are not really here—nor I—nor anybody, nor anything!”

The train plunged into a tunnel, and when again it dashed out from the other end the cold wind blew furiously in my face from the farther window. It was wide open; the professor was gone.

“Papa has changed to another compartment,” she said, quietly. “I think perhaps you were beginning to bore him.”

Her eyes met mine and she smiled.

“Are you very much bewildered?”

I looked at her in silence. She sat very quietly, her hands clasped above her knee, her curly hair glittering to her girdle. A long robe, almost silvery in the twilight, clung to her young figure; her bare feet were thrust deep into a pair of shimmering Eastern slippers.

“When you fled,” she sighed, “I was asleep and there was no time to lose. I barely had a moment to go to Bombay, to find papa, and return in time to join you. This is an East-Indian costume.”

Still I was silent.

“Are you shocked?” she asked, simply.

“No,” I replied, in a dull voice, “I’m past that.”

“You are very rude,” she said, with the tears starting to her eyes.

“I do not mean to be. I only wish to go away—away somewhere and find out what my name is.”

“Your name is Harold Kensett.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, eagerly.

“Yes—what troubles you?”

“Is everything plain to you? Are you a sort of prophet and second-sight medium? Is nothing hidden from you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she faltered. My head ached and I clasped it in my hand.

A sudden change came over her. “I am human—believe me!” she said, with piteous eagerness. “Indeed, I do not seem strange to those who understand. You wonder, because you left me at midnight in Antwerp and you wake to find me here. If, because I find myself reincarnated, endowed with senses and capabilities which few at present possess—if I am so made, why should it seem strange? It is all so natural to me. If I appear to you—”

“Appear?”

“Yes—”

“Wilhelmina!” I cried; “can you vanish?”

“Yes,” she murmured; “does it seem to you unmaidenly?”

“Great Heaven!” I groaned.

“Don’t!” she cried, with tears in her voice—‘oh, please don’t! Help me to bear it! If you only knew how awful it is to be different from other girls—how mortifying it is to me to be able to vanish—oh, how I hate and detest it all!”

“Don’t cry,” I said, looking at her pityingly.

“Oh, dear me!” she sobbed. “You shudder at the sight of me because I can vanish.”

“I don’t!” I cried.

“Yes, you do! You abhor me—you shrink away! Oh, why did I ever see you?—why did you ever come into my life?—what have I done in ages past, that now, reborn, I suffer cruelly—cruelly?”

“What do you mean?” I whispered. My voice trembled with happiness.

“I?—nothing; but you think me a fabled monster.”

“Wilhelmina—my sweet Wilhelmina,” I said, “I don’t think you a fabled monster. I love you; see—see—I am at your feet; listen to me, my darling—”

She turned her blue eyes to mine. I saw tears sparkling on the curved lashes.

“Wilhelmina, I love you,” I said again.

Slowly she raised her hands to my head and held it a moment, looking at me strangely. Then her face grew nearer to my own, her glittering hair fell over my shoulders, her lips rested on mine.

In that long, sweet kiss the beating of her heart answered mine, and I learned a thousand truths, wonderful, mysterious, splendid; but when our lips fell apart, the memory of what I learned departed also.

“It was so very simple and beautiful,” she sighed, “and I—I never saw it. But the Mahatmas knew—ah, they knew that my mission could only be accomplished through love.”

“And it is,” I whispered, “for you shall teach me—me, your husband.”

“And—and you will not be impatient? You will try to believe?”

“I will believe what you tell me, my sweetheart.”

“Even about—cats?”

Before I could reply the farther window opened and a yellow night-cap, followed by the professor, entered from somewhere without. Wilhelmina sank back on her sofa, but the professor needed not to be told, and we both knew he was already busily reading our thoughts.

For a moment there was dead silence—long enough for the professor to grasp the full significance of what had passed. Then he uttered a single exclamation, “Oh!”

After a while, however, he looked at me for the first time that evening, saying, “Congratulate you, Mr. Kensett, I’m sure,” tied several knots in the cord of his dressing-gown, lighted a cigar, and paid no further attention to either of us. Some moments later he opened the window again and disappeared. I looked across the aisle at Wilhelmina.

“You may come over beside me,” she said, shyly.

XXV

It was nearly ten o’clock and our train was rapidly approaching Paris. We passed village after village wrapped in mist, station after station hung with twinkling red and blue and yellow lanterns, then sped on again with the echo of the switch-bells ringing in our ears.

When at length the train slowed up and stopped, I opened the window and looked out upon a long, wet platform, shining under the electric lights.

A guard came running by, throwing open the doors of each compartment, and crying, “Paris next! Tickets, if you please.”

I handed him my book of coupons, from which he tore several and handed it back. Then he lifted his lantern and peered into the compartment, saying, “Is monsieur alone?”

I turned to Wilhelmina.

“He wants your ticket—give it to me.”

“What’s that?” demanded the guard.

I looked anxiously at Wilhelmina.

“If your father has the tickets—” I began, but was interrupted by the guard, who snapped:

“Monsieur will give himself the trouble to remember that I do not understand English.”

“Keep quiet!” I said, sharply, in French. “I am not speaking to you.”

The guard stared stupidly at me, then, at my luggage, and finally, entering the car, knelt down and peered under the seats. Presently he got up, very red in the face, and went out slamming the door. He had not paid the slightest attention to Wilhelmina, but I distinctly heard him say, “Only Englishmen and idiots talk to themselves!”

“Wilhelmina,” I faltered, “do you mean to say that that guard could not see you?”

She began to look so serious again that I merely added, “Never mind, I don’t care whether you are invisible or not, dearest.”

“I am not invisible to you,” she said; “why should you care?”

A great noise of bells and whistles drowned our voices, and, amid the whirring of switch-bells, the hissing of steam, and the cries of “Paris! All out!” our train glided into the station.

It was the professor who opened the door of our carriage. There he stood, calmly adjusting his yellow night-cap and drawing his dressing-gown closer with the corded tassels.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“On the engine.”

“In the engine, I suppose you mean,” I said.

“No, I don’t; I mean on the engine—on the pilot. It was very refreshing. Where are we going now?”

“Do you know Paris?” asked Wilhelmina, turning to me.

“Yes. I think your father had better take you to the Hôtel Normandie on the Rue de l’Échelle—”

“But you must stay there, too!”

“Of course—if you wish—”

She laughed nervously.

“Don’t you see that my father and I could not take rooms—now? You must engage three rooms for yourself.”

“Why?” I asked, stupidly.

“Oh, dear—why, because we are invisible.”

I tried to repress a shudder. The professor gave Wilhelmina his arm, and, as I studied his ensemble, I thanked Heaven that he was invisible.

At the gate of the station I hailed a four-seated cab, and we rattled away through the stony streets, brilliant with gas-jets, and in a few moments rolled smoothly across the Avenue de l’Opéra, turned into the Rue de l’Échelle, and stopped. A bright little page, all over buttons, came out, took my luggage, and preceded us into the hallway.

I, with Wilhelmina on my arm and the professor shuffling along beside me, walked over to the desk.

“Room?” said the clerk. “We have a very desirable room on the second, fronting the Rue St. Honoré—”

“But we—that is, I want three rooms—three separate rooms!” I said.

The clerk scratched his chin. “Monsieur is expecting friends?”

“Say yes,” whispered Wilhelmina, with a suspicion of laughter in her voice.

“Yes,” I repeated, feebly.

“Gentlemen, of course?” said the clerk, looking at me narrowly.

“One lady.”

“Married, of course?”

“What’s that to you?” I said, sharply. “What do you mean by speaking to us—”

“Us!”

“I mean to me,” I said, badly rattled; “give me the rooms and let me get to bed, will you?”

“Monsieur will remember,” said the clerk, coldly, “that this is an old and respectable hotel.”

“I know it,” I said, smothering my rage.

The clerk eyed me suspiciously.

“Front!” he called, with irritating deliberation. “Show this gentleman to apartment ten.”

“How many rooms are there!” I demanded.

“Three sleeping-rooms and a parlor.”

“I will take it,” I said, with composure.

“On probation,” muttered the clerk, insolently.

Swallowing the insult, I followed the bell-boy up the stairs, keeping between him and Wilhelmina, for I dreaded to see him walk through her as if she were thin air. A trim maid rose to meet us and conducted us through a hallway into a large apartment. She threw open all the bedroom-doors and said, “Will monsieur have the goodness to choose?”

“Which will you take,” I began, turning to Wilhelmina.

“I? Monsieur!” cried the startled maid.

That completely upset me. “Here,” I muttered, slipping some silver into her hand; “now, for the love of Heaven, run away!”

When she had vanished with a doubtful “Merci, monsieur!” I handed the professor the keys and asked him to settle the thing with Wilhelmina.

Wilhelmina took the corner room, the professor rambled into the next one, and I said good-night and crept wearily into my own chamber. I sat down and tried to think. A great feeling of fatigue weighted my spirits.

“I can think better with my clothes off,” I said, and slipped the coat from my shoulders. How tired I was! “I can think better in bed,” I muttered, flinging my cravat on the dresser and tossing my shirt-studs after it. I was certainly very tired. “Now,” I yawned, grasping the pillow and drawing it under my head—‘now I can think a bit.” But before my head fell on the pillow sleep closed my eyes.

I began to dream at once. It seemed as though my eyes were wide open and the professor was standing beside my bed.

“Young man,” he said, “you’ve won my daughter and you must pay the piper!”

“What piper?” I said.

“The Pied Piper of Hamelin, I don’t think,” replied the professor, vulgarly, and before I could realize what he was doing he had drawn a reed pipe from his dressing-gown and was playing a strangely annoying air. Then an awful thing occurred. Cats began to troop into the room, cats by the hundred—toms and tabbies, gray, yellow, Maltese, Persian, Manx—all purring and all marching round and round, rubbing against the furniture, the professor, and even against me. I struggled with the nightmare.

“Take them away!” I tried to gasp.

“Nonsense!” he said; “here is an old friend.”

I saw the white tabby cat of the Hôtel St. Antoine.

“An old friend,” he repeated, and played a dismal melody on his reed.

I saw Wilhelmina enter the room, lift the white tabby in her arms, and bring her to my side.

“Shake hands with him,” she commanded.

To my horror the tabby deliberately extended a paw and tapped me on the knuckles.

“Oh!” I cried, in agony; “this is a horrible dream! Why, oh, why can’t I wake!”

“Yes,” she said, dropping the cat, “it is partly a dream, but some of it is real. Remember what I say, my darling; you are to go to-morrow morning and meet the twelve-o’clock train from Antwerp at the Gare du Nord. Papa and I are coming to Paris on that train. Don’t you know that we are not really here now, you silly boy? Good-night, then. I shall be very glad to see you.”

I saw her glide from the room, followed by the professor, playing a gay quick-step, to which the cats danced two and two.

“Good-night, sir,” said each cat as it passed my bed; and I dreamed no more.

When I awoke, the room, the bed had vanished; I was in the street, walking rapidly; the sun shone down on the broad, white pavements of Paris, and the streams of busy life flowed past me on either side. How swiftly I was walking! Where the devil was I going? Surely I had business somewhere that needed immediate attention. I tried to remember when I had awakened, but I could not. I wondered where I had dressed myself; I had apparently taken great pains with my toilet, for I was immaculate, monocle and all, even down to a long-stemmed rose nestling in my button-hole. I knew Paris and recognized the streets through which I was hurrying. Where could I be going? What was my hurry? I glanced at my watch and found I had not a moment to lose. Then, as the bells of the city rang out mid-day, I hastened into the railroad station on the Rue Lafayette and walked out to the platform. And as I looked down the glittering track, around the distant curve shot a locomotive followed by a long line of cars. Nearer and nearer it came, while the station-gongs sounded and the switch-bells began ringing all along the track.

“Antwerp express!” cried the sous-chef de gare, and as the train slipped along the tiled platform I sprang upon the steps of a first-class carriage and threw open the door.

“How do you do, Mr. Kensett?” said Wilhelmina Wyeth, springing lightly to the platform. “Really it is very nice of you to come to the train.” At the same moment a bald, mild-eyed gentleman emerged from the depths of the same compartment, carrying a large, covered basket.

“How are you, Kensett?” he said. “Glad to see you again. Rather warm in that compartment—no, I will not trust this basket to an expressman; give Wilhelmina your arm and I’ll follow. We go to the Normandie, I believe?”

All the morning I had Wilhelmina to myself, and at dinner I sat beside her, with the professor opposite. The latter was cheerful enough, but he nearly ruined my appetite, for he smelled strongly of catnip. After dinner he became restless and fidgeted about in his chair until coffee was brought, and we went up to the parlor of our apartment. Here his restlessness increased to such an extent that I ventured to ask him if he was in good health.

“It’s that basket—the covered basket which I have in the next room,” he said.

“What’s the trouble with the basket?” I asked.

“The basket’s all right—but the contents worry me.”

“May I inquire what the contents are?” I ventured.

The professor rose.

“Yes,” he said, “you may inquire of my daughter.” He left the room, but reappeared shortly, carrying a saucer of milk.

I watched him enter the next room, which was mine.

“What on earth is he taking that into my room for?” I asked Wilhelmina. “I don’t keep cats.”

“But you will,” she said.

“I? Never!”

“You will if I ask you to.”

“But—but you won’t ask me.”

“But I do.”

“Wilhelmina!”

“Harold!”

“I detest cats.”

“You must not.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You will when I ask it. Have I not given myself to you? Will you not make a little sacrifice for me?”

“I don’t understand—”

“Would you refuse my first request?”

“No,” I said, miserably, “I will keep dozens of cats—”

“I do not ask that; I only wish you to keep one.”

“Was that what your father had in that basket?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Yes, the basket came from Antwerp.”

“What! The white Antwerp cat!” I cried.

“Yes.”

“And you ask me to keep that cat? Oh, Wilhelmina!”

“Listen!” she said. “I have a long story to tell you; come nearer, close to me. You say you love me?”

I bent and kissed her.

“Then I shall put you to the proof,” she murmured.

“Prove me!”

“Listen. That cat is the same cat that ran out of the apartment in the Waldorf when your great-aunt ceased to exist—in human shape. My father and myself, having received word from the Mahatmas of the Trust Company, sheltered and cherished the cat. We were ordered by the Mahatmas to convert you. The task was appalling—but there is no such thing as refusing a command, and we laid our plans. That man with a white spot in his hair was my father—”

“What! Your father is bald.”

“He wore a wig then. The white spot came from dropping chemicals on the wig while experimenting with a substance which you could not comprehend.”

“Then—then that clew was useless; but who could have taken the Crimson Diamond? And who was the man with the white spot on his head who tried to sell the stone in Paris?”

“That was my father.”

“He—he—st—took the Crimson Diamond!” I cried, aghast.

“Yes and no. That was only a paste stone that he had in Paris. It was to draw you over here. He had the real Crimson Diamond also.”

“Your father?”

“Yes. He has it in the next room now. Can you not see how it disappeared, Harold? Why, the cat swallowed it!”

“Do you mean to say that the white tabby swallowed the Crimson Diamond?”

“By mistake. She tried to get it out of the velvet bag, and, as the bag was also full of catnip, she could not resist a mouthful, and unfortunately just then you broke in the door and so startled the cat that she swallowed the Crimson Diamond.”

There was a painful pause. At last I said:

“Wilhelmina, as you are able to vanish, I suppose you also are able to converse with cats.”

“I am,” she replied, trying to keep back the tears of mortification.

“And that cat told you this?”

“She did.”

“And my Crimson Diamond is inside that cat?”

“It is.”

“Then,” said I, firmly, “I am going to chloroform the cat.”

“Harold!” she cried, in terror, “that cat is your great-aunt!”

I don’t know to this day how I stood the shock of that announcement, or how I managed to listen while Wilhelmina tried to explain the transmigration theory, but it was all Chinese to me. I only knew that I was a blood relation of a cat, and the thought nearly drove me mad.

“Try, my darling, try to love her,” whispered Wilhelmina; “she must be very precious to you—”

“Yes, with my diamond inside her,” I replied, faintly.

“You must not neglect her,” said Wilhelmina.

“Oh no, I’ll always have my eye on her—I mean I will surround her with luxury—er, milk and bones and catnip and books—er—does she read?”

“Not the books that human beings read. Now, go and speak to your aunt, Harold.”

“Eh! How the deuce—”

“Go; for my sake try to be cordial.”

She rose and led me unresistingly to the door of my room.

“Good Heavens!” I groaned; “this is awful.”

“Courage, my darling!” she whispered. “Be brave for love of me.”

I drew her to me and kissed her. Beads of cold perspiration started in the roots of my hair, but I clenched my teeth and entered the room alone. The room was dark and I stood silent, not knowing where to turn, fearful lest I step on my aunt! Then, through the dreary silence, I called, “Aunty!”

A faint noise broke upon my ear, and my heart grew sick, but I strode into the darkness, calling, hoarsely:

“Aunt Tabby! It is your nephew!”

Again the faint sound. Something was stirring there among the shadows—a shape moving softly along the wall, a shade which glided by me, paused, wavered, and darted under the bed. Then I threw myself on the floor, profoundly moved, begging, imploring my aunt to come to me.

“Aunty! Aunty!” I murmured. “Your nephew is waiting to take you to his heart!”

At last I saw my great-aunt’s eyes shining in the dark.

The young man’s voice grew hushed and solemn, and he lifted his hand in silence:

“Close the door. That meeting is not for the eyes of the world! Close the door upon that sacred scene where great-aunt and nephew are united at last.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

A long pause followed; deep emotion was visible in Miss Barrison’s sensitive face. She said:

“Then—you are married?”

“No,” replied Mr. Kensett, in a mortified voice.

“Why not?” I asked, amazed.

“Because,” he said, “although my fiancée was prepared to accept a cat as her great-aunt, she could not endure the complications that followed.”

“What complications?” inquired Miss Barrison.

The young man sighed profoundly, shaking his head.

“My great-aunt had kittens,” he said, softly.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The tremendous scientific importance of these experiences excited me beyond measure. The simplicity of the narrative, the elaborate attention to corroborative detail, all bore irresistible testimony to the truth of these accounts of phenomena vitally important to the entire world of science.

We all dined together that night—a little earnest company of knowledge-seekers in the vast wilderness of the unexplored; and we lingered long in the dining-car, propounding questions, advancing theories, speculating upon possibilities of most intense interest. Never before had I known a man whose relatives were cats and kittens, but he did not appear to share my enthusiasm in the matter.

“You see,” he said, looking at Miss Barrison, “it may be interesting from a purely scientific point of view, but it has already proved a bar to my marrying.”

“Were the kittens black?” I inquired.

“No,” he said, “my aunt drew the color-line, I am proud to say.”

“I don’t see,” said Miss Barrison, “why the fact that your great-aunt is a cat should prevent you from marrying.”

“It wouldn’t prevent me!” said the young man, quickly.

“Nor me,” mused Miss Barrison—“if I were really in love.”

Meanwhile I had been very busy thinking about Professor Farrago, and, coming to an interesting theory, advanced it.

“If,” I began, “he marries one of those transparent ladies, what about the children?”

“Some would be, no doubt, transparent,” said Kensett.

“They might be only translucent,” suggested Miss Barrison.

“Or partially opaque,” I ventured. “But it’s a risky marriage—not to be able to see what one’s wife is about—”

“That is a silly reflection on women,” said Miss Barrison, quietly. “Besides, a girl need not be transparent to conceal what she’s doing.”

This observation seemed to end our postprandial and tripartite conference; Miss Barrison retired to her stateroom presently; after a last cigar, smoked almost in silence, the young man and I bade each other a civil good-night and retired to our respective berths.

I think it was at Richmond, Virginia, that I was awakened by the negro porter shaking me very gently and repeating, in a pleasant, monotonous voice: “Teleg’am foh you, suh! Teleg’am foh Mistuh Gilland, suh. Done call you ’lev’m times sense breakfass, suh! Las’ call foh luncheon, suh. Teleg’am foh—”

“Heavens!” I muttered, sitting up in my bunk, “is it as late as that! Where are we?” I slid up the window-shade and sat blinking at a flood of sunshine.

“Telegram?” I said, yawning and rubbing my eyes. “Let me have it. All right, I’ll be out presently. Shut that curtain! I don’t want the entire car to criticise my pink pajamas!”

“Ain’ nobody in de cyar, ’scusin yo’se’f, suh,” grinned the porter, retiring.

I heard him, but did not comprehend, sitting there sleepily unfolding the scrawled telegram. Suddenly my eyes flew wide open; I scanned the despatch with stunned incredulity:

ATLANTA, GEORGIA.

WE COULDN’T HELP IT. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. MARRIED THIS MORNING IN ATLANTA. WILDLY HAPPY. FORGIVE. WIRE BLESSING.

(Signed)

HAROLD KENSETT
HELEN BARRISON KENSETT

“Porter!” I shouted. “Porter! Help!”

There was no response.

“Oh, Lord!” I groaned, and rolled over, burying my head in the blankets; for I understood at last that Science, the most jealous, most exacting of mistresses, could never brook a rival.

THE END

THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS

(1906)

TO MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM A. HALL

CONTENTS:

… Epigraph

**  ch. 1–6:  The Imaginary Ideal
ch. 7–10:  The Seal of Solomon Cipher
**  ch. 11–16:  The Marble Man
ch. 17–20:  Samaris
**  ch. 21–24:  The “Carden Girl”

** = general fiction

Note: These chapter titles were assigned for this ebook; they do not exist in the original book.—ecm

MAIN ToC     INDEX

~ ~ ~ ~

For the harmony of the world, like that of a harp, is made up of discords.

—Heraclitus.

THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS

CHAPTER I

[The Imaginary Ideal]

He was thirty-three, agreeable to look at, equipped with as much culture and intelligence as is tolerated east of Fifth Avenue and west of Madison. He had a couple of elaborate rooms at the Lenox Club, a larger income than seemed to be good for him, and no profession. It follows that he was a pessimist before breakfast. Besides, it’s a bad thing for a man at thirty-three to come to the conclusion that he has seen all the most attractive girls in the world and that they have been vastly overrated. So, when a club servant with gilt buttons on his coat tails knocked at the door, the invitation to enter was not very cordial. He of the buttons knocked again to take the edge off before he entered; then opened the door and unburdened himself as follows:

“Mr. Gatewood, sir, Mr. Kerns’s compliments, and wishes to know if ’e may ’ave ’is coffee served at your tyble, sir.”

Gatewood, before the mirror, gave a vicious twist to his tie, inserted a pearl scarf pin, and regarded the effect with gloomy approval.

“Say to Mr. Kerns that I am—flattered,” he replied morosely; “and tell Henry I want him.”

“’Enry, sir? Yes, sir.”

The servant left; one of the sleek club valets came in, softly sidling.

“Henry!”

“Sir?”

“I’ll wear a white waistcoat, if you don’t object.”

The valet laid out half a dozen.

“Which one do you usually wear when I’m away, Henry? Which is your favorite?”

“Sir?”

“Pick it out and don’t look injured, and don’t roll up your eyes. I merely desire to borrow it for one day.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And, Henry, hereafter always help yourself to my best cigars. Those I smoke may injure you. I’ve attempted to conceal the keys, but you will, of course, eventually discover them under that loose tile on the hearth.”

“Yes, sir; thanky’, sir,” returned the valet gravely.

“And—Henry!”

“Sir?” with martyred dignity.

“When you are tired of searching for my olivine and opal pin, just find it, for a change. I’d like to wear that pin for a day or two if it would not inconvenience you.”

“Very good, sir; I will ’unt it hup, sir.”

Gatewood put on his coat, took hat and gloves from the unabashed valet, and sauntered down to the sunny breakfast room, where he found Kerns inspecting a morning paper and leisurely consuming grapefruit with a cocktail on the side.

“Hullo,” observed Kerns briefly.

“I’m not on the telephone,” snapped Gatewood.

“I beg your pardon; how are you, dear friend?”

“I don’t know how I am,” retorted Gatewood irritably; “how the devil should a man know how he is?”

“Everything going to the bowwows, as usual, dear friend?”

“As usual. Oh, read your paper, Tommy! You know well enough I’m not one of those tail-wagging imbeciles who wakes up in the morning singing like a half-witted lark. Why should I, with this taste in my mouth, and the laundress using vitriol, and Henry sneering at my cigars?” He yawned and cast his eyes toward the ceiling. “Besides, there’s too much gilt all over this club! There’s too much everywhere. Half the world is stucco, the rest rococo. Where’s that Martini I bid for?”

Kerns, undisturbed, applied himself to cocoa and toasted muffins. Grapefruit and an amber-tinted accessory were brought for the other and sampled without mirth. However, a little later Gatewood said: “Well, are you going to read your paper all day?”

“What you need,” said Kerns, laying the paper aside, “is a job—any old kind would do, dear friend.”

“I don’t want to make any more money.”

“I don’t want you to. I mean a job where you’d lose a lot and be scared into thanking Heaven for carfare. You’re a nice object for the breakfast table!”

“Bridge. I will be amiable enough by noon time.”

“Yes, you’re endurable by noon time, as a rule. When you’re forty you may be tolerated after five o’clock; when you’re fifty your wife and children might even venture to emerge from the cellar after dinner—”

“Wife!”

“I said wife,” replied Kerns, as he calmly watched his man.

He had managed it well, so far, and he was wise enough not to overdo it. An interval of silence was what the situation required.

“I wish I had a wife,” muttered Gatewood after a long pause.

“Oh, haven’t you said that every day for five years? Wife! Look at the willing assortment of dreams playing Sally Waters around town. Isn’t this borough a bower of beauty—a flowery thicket where the prettiest kind in all the world grow under glass or outdoors? And what do you do? You used to pretend to prowl about inspecting the yearly crop of posies, growling, cynical, dissatisfied; but you’ve even given that up. Now you only point your nose skyward and squall for a mate, and yowl mournfully that you never have seen your ideal. I know you.”

“I never have seen my ideal,” retorted Gatewood sulkily, “but I know she exists—somewhere between heaven and Hoboken.”

“You’re sure, are you?”

“Oh, I’m sure. And, rich or poor, good or bad, she was fashioned for me alone. That’s a theory of mine; you needn’t accept it; in fact, it’s none of your business, Tommy.”

“All the same,” insisted Kerns, “did you ever consider that if your ideal does exist somewhere, it is morally up to you to find her?”

“Haven’t I inspected every débutante for ten years? You don’t expect me to advertise for an ideal, do you—object, matrimony?”

Kerns regarded him intently. “Now, I’m going to make a vivid suggestion, Jack. In fact, that’s why I subjected myself to the ordeal of breakfasting with you. It’s none of my business, as you so kindly put it, but—shall I suggest something?”

“Go ahead,” replied Gatewood, tranquilly lighting a cigarette. “I know what you’ll say.”

“No, you don’t. Firstly, you are having such a good time in this world that you don’t really enjoy yourself—isn’t that so?”

“I—well I—well, let it go at that.”

“Secondly, with all your crimes and felonies, you have one decent trait left: you really would like to fall in love. And I suspect you’d even marry.”

“There are grounds,” said Gatewood guardedly, “for your suspicions. Et après?”

“Good. Then there’s a way! I know—”

“Oh, don’t tell me you ‘know a girl,’ or anything like that!” began Gatewood sullenly. “I’ve heard that before, and I won’t meet her.”

“I don’t want you to; I don’t know anybody. All I desire to say is this: I do know a way. The other day I noticed a sign on Fifth Avenue:

KEEN & CO.
TRACERS OF LOST PERSONS

It was a most extraordinary sign; and having a little unemployed imagination I began to speculate on how Keen & Co. might operate, and I wondered a little, too, that, the conditions of life in this city could enable a firm to make a living by devoting itself exclusively to the business of hunting up missing people.”

Kerns paused, partly to light a cigarette, partly for diplomatic reasons.

“What has all this to do with me?” inquired Gatewood curiously; and diplomacy scored one.

“Why not try Keen & Co.?”

“Try them? Why? I haven’t lost anybody, have I?”

“You haven’t, precisely lost anybody, but the fact remains that you can’t find somebody,” returned Kerns coolly. “Why not employ Keen & Co. to look for her?”

“Look for whom, in Heaven’s name?”

“Your ideal.”

“Look for—for my ideal! Kerns, you’re crazy. How the mischief can anybody hunt for somebody who doesn’t exist?”

“You say that she does exist.”

“But I can’t prove it, man.”

“You don’t have to; it’s up to Keen & Co. to prove it. That’s why you employ them.”

“What wild nonsense you talk! Keen & Co. might, perhaps, be able to trace the concrete, but how are they going to trace and find the abstract?”

“She isn’t abstract; she is a lovely, healthy, and youthful concrete object—if, as you say, she does exist.”

“How can I prove she exists?”

“You don’t have to; they do that.”

“Look here,” said Gatewood almost angrily, “do you suppose that if I were ass enough to go to these people and tell them that I wanted to find my ideal—”

“Don’t tell them that!”

“But how—”

“There is no necessity for going into such trivial details. All you need say is: ‘I am very anxious to find a young lady’—and then describe her as minutely as you please. Then, when they locate a girl of that description they’ll notify you; you will go, judge for yourself whether she is the one woman on earth—and, if disappointed, you need only shake your head and murmur: ‘Not the same!’ And it’s for them to find another.”

“I won’t do it!” said Gatewood hotly.

“Why not? At least, it would be amusing. You haven’t many mental resources, and it might occupy you for a week or two.”

Gatewood glared.

“You have a pleasant way of putting things this morning, haven’t you?”

“I don’t want to be pleasant: I want to jar you. Don’t I care enough about you to breakfast with you? Then I’ve a right to be pleasantly unpleasant. I can’t bear to watch your mental and spiritual dissolution—a man like you, with all your latent ability and capacity for being nobody in particular—which is the sort of man this nation needs. Do you want to turn into a club-window gazer like Van Bronk? Do you want to become another Courtlandt Allerton and go rocking down the avenue—a grimacing, tailor-made sepulcher?—the pompous obsequies of a dead intellect?—a funeral on two wavering legs, carrying the corpse of all that should be deathless in a man? Why, Jack, I’d rather see you in bankruptcy—I’d rather see you trying to lead a double life in a single flat on seven dollars and a half a week—I’d almost rather see you every day at breakfast than have it come to that!

“Wake up and get jocund with life! Why, you could have all good citizens stung to death if you chose. It isn’t that I want you to make money; but I want you to worry over somebody besides yourself—not in Wall Street—a pool and its money are soon parted. But in your own home, where a beautiful wife and seven angel children have you dippy and close to the ropes; where the housekeeper gets a rake off, and the cook is red-headed and comes from Sligo, and the butler’s cousin will bear watching, and the chauffeur is a Frenchman, and the coachman’s uncle is a Harlem vet, and every scullion in the establishment lies, drinks, steals, and supports twenty satiated relatives at your expense. That would mean the making of you; for, after all, Jack, you are no genius—you’re a plain, non-partisan, uninspired, clean-built, wholesome citizen, thank God!—the sort whose unimaginative mission is to pitch in with eighty-odd millions of us and, like the busy coral creatures, multiply with all your might, and make this little old Republic the greatest, biggest, finest article that an overworked world has ever yet put up!… Now you can call for help if you choose.”

Gatewood’s breath returned slowly. In an intimacy of many years he had never suspected that sort of thing from Kerns. That is why, no doubt, the opinions expressed by Kerns stirred him to an astonishment too innocent to harbor anger or chagrin.

And when Kerns stood up with an unembarrassed laugh, saying, “I’m going to the office; see you this evening?” Gatewood replied rather vacantly: “Oh, yes; I’m dining here. Good-by, Tommy.”

Kerns glanced at his watch, lingering. “Was there anything you wished to ask me, Jack?” he inquired guilelessly.

“Ask you? No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh; I had an idea you might care to know where Keen & Co. were to be found.”

“That,” said Gatewood firmly, “is foolish.”

“I’ll write the address for you, anyway,” rejoined Kerns, scribbling it and handing the card to his friend.

Then he went down the stairs, several at a time, eased in conscience, satisfied that he had done his duty by a friend he cared enough for to breakfast with.

“Of course,” he ruminated as he crawled into a hansom and lay back buried in meditation—“of course there may be nothing in this Keen & Co. business. But it will stir him up and set him thinking; and the longer Keen & Co. take to hunt up an imaginary lady that doesn’t exist, the more anxious and impatient poor old Jack Gatewood will become, until he’ll catch the fever and go cantering about with that one fixed idea in his head. And,” added Kerns softly, “no New Yorker in his right mind can go galloping through these five boroughs very long before he’s roped, tied, and marked by the ‘only girl in the world’—the only girl—if you don’t care to turn around and look at another million girls precisely like her. O Lord!—precisely like her!”

Here was a nice exhorter to incite others to matrimony.

CHAPTER II

Meanwhile, Gatewood was walking along Fifth Avenue, more or less soothed by the May sunshine. First, he went to his hatters, looked at straw hats, didn’t like them, protested, and bought one, wishing he had strength of mind enough to wear it home. But he hadn’t. Then he entered the huge white marble palace of his jeweler, left his watch to be regulated, caught a glimpse of a girl whose hair and neck resembled the hair and neck of his ideal, sidled around until he discovered that she was chewing gum, and backed off, with a bitter smile, into the avenue once more.

Every day for years he had had glimpses of girls whose hair, hands, figures, eyes, hats, carriage, resembled the features required by his ideal; there always was something wrong somewhere. And, as he strolled moodily, a curious feeling of despair seized him—something that, even in his most sentimental moments, even amid the most unexpected disappointment, he had never before experienced.

“I do want to love somebody!” he found himself saying half aloud; “I want to marry; I—” He turned to look after three pretty children with their maids—“I want several like those—several!—seven—ten—I don’t care how many! I want a house to worry me, just as Tommy described it; I want to see the same girl across the breakfast table—or she can sip her cocoa in bed if she desires—” A slow, modest blush stole over his features; it was one of the nicest things he ever did. Glancing up, he beheld across the way a white sign, ornamented with strenuous crimson lettering:

KEEN & CO.
TRACERS OF LOST PERSONS

The moment he discovered it, he realized he had been covertly hunting for it; he also realized that he was going to climb the stairs. He hadn’t quite decided what he meant to do after that; nor was his mind clear on the matter when he found himself opening a door of opaque glass on which was printed in red:

KEEN & CO.

He was neither embarrassed nor nervous when he found himself in a big carpeted anteroom where a negro attendant bowed him to a seat and took his card; and he looked calmly around to see what was to be seen.

Several people occupied easy chairs in various parts of the room—an old woman very neatly dressed, clutching in her withered hand a photograph which she studied and studied with tear-dimmed eyes; a young man wearing last year’s most fashionable styles in everything except his features: and soap could have aided him there; two policemen, helmets resting on their knees; and, last of all, a rather thin child of twelve, staring open-mouthed at everybody, a bundle of soiled clothing under one arm. Through an open door he saw a dozen young women garbed in black, with white cuffs and collars, all rattling away steadily at typewriters. Every now and then, from some hidden office, a bell rang decisively, and one of the girls would rise from her machine and pass noiselessly out of sight to obey the summons. From time to time, too, the negro servant with marvelous manners would usher somebody through the room where the typewriters were rattling, into the unseen office. First the old woman went—shakily, clutching her photograph; then the thin child with the bundle, staring at everything; then the two fat policemen, in portentous single file, helmets in their white-gloved hands, oiled hair glistening.

Gatewood’s turn was approaching; he waited without any definite emotion, watching newcomers enter to take the places of those who had been summoned. He hadn’t the slightest idea of what he was to say; nor did it worry him. A curious sense of impending good fortune left him pleasantly tranquil; he picked up, from the silver tray on the table at his elbow, one of the firm’s business cards, and scanned it with interest:

KEEN & CO.
TRACERS OF LOST PERSONS

Keen & Co. are prepared to locate the whereabouts of anybody on earth. No charges will be made unless the person searched for is found.

Blanks on application.

WESTREL KEEN, Manager.

“Mistuh Keen will see you, suh,” came a persuasive voice at his elbow; and he rose and followed the softly moving colored servant out of the room, through a labyrinth of demure young women at their typewriters, then sharply to the right and into a big, handsomely furnished office, where a sleepy-looking elderly gentleman rose from an armchair and bowed. There could not be the slightest doubt that he was a gentleman; every movement, every sound he uttered, settled the fact.

“Mr. Keen?”

“Mr. Gatewood?”—with a quiet certainty which had its charm. “This is very good of you.”

Gatewood sat down and looked at his host. Then he said: “I’m searching for somebody, Mr. Keen, whom you are not likely to find.”

“I doubt it,” said Keen pleasantly.

Gatewood smiled. “If,” he said, “you will undertake to find the person I cannot find, I must ask you to accept a retainer.”

“We don’t require retainers,” replied Keen. “Unless we find the person sought for, we make no charges, Mr. Gatewood.”

“I must ask you to do so in my case. It is not fair that you should undertake it on other terms. I desire to make a special arrangement with you. Do you mind?”

“What arrangement had you contemplated?” inquired Keen, amused.

“Only this: charge me in advance exactly what you would charge if successful. And, on the other hand, do not ask me for detailed information—I mean, do not insist on any information that I decline to give. Do you mind taking up such an extraordinary and unbusinesslike proposition, Mr. Keen?”

The Tracer of Lost Persons looked up sharply:

“About how much information do you decline to give, Mr. Gatewood?”

“About enough to incriminate and degrade,” replied the young man, laughing.

The elderly gentleman sat silent, apparently buried in meditation. Once or twice his pleasant steel-gray eyes wandered over Gatewood as an expert, a connoisseur, glances at a picture and assimilates its history, its value, its artistic merit, its every detail in one practiced glance.

“I think we may take up this matter for you, Mr. Gatewood,” he said, smiling his singularly agreeable smile.

“But—but you would first desire to know something about me—would you not?”

Keen looked at him: “You will not mistake me—you will consider it entirely inoffensive—if I say that I know something about you, Mr. Gatewood?”

“About me? How can you? Of course, there is the social register and the club lists and all that—”

“And many, many sources of information which are necessary in such a business as this, Mr. Gatewood. It is a necessity for us to be almost as well informed as our clients’ own lawyers. I could pay you no sincerer compliment than to undertake your case. I am half inclined to do so even without a retainer. Mind, I haven’t yet said that I will take it.”

“I prefer to regulate any possible indebtedness in advance,” said Gatewood.

“As you wish,” replied the older man, smiling. “In that case, suppose you draw your check—” (he handed Gatewood a fountain pen as the young man fished a check-book from his pocket)—“your check for—well, say for $5,000, to the order of Keen & Co.”

Gatewood met his eye without wincing; he was in for it now; and he was always perfectly game. He had brought it upon himself; it was his own proposition. Not that he would have for a moment considered the sum as high—or any sum exorbitant—if there had been a chance of success; one cannot compare and weigh such matters. But how could there be any chance for success?

As he slowly smoothed out the check and stub, pen poised, Keen was saying: “Of course, we should succeed sooner or later—if we took up your case. We might succeed to-morrow—to-day. That would mean a large profit for us. But we might not succeed to-day, or next month, or even next year. That would leave us little or no profit; and, as it is our custom to go on until we do succeed, no matter how long it may require, you see, Mr. Gatewood, I should be taking all sorts of chances. It might even cost us double your retainer before we found her—”

“Her? How did—why do you say ‘her’?”

“Am I wrong?” asked Keen, smiling.

“No—you are right.”

The Tracer of Lost Persons sank into abstraction again. Gatewood waited, hoping that his case might be declined, yet ready to face any music started at his own request.

“She is young,” mused Keen aloud, “very beautiful and accomplished. Is she wealthy?” He looked up mildly.

Gatewood said: “I don’t know—the truth is I don’t care—” And stopped.

“O-ho!” mused Keen slowly. “I—think—I understand. Am I wrong, Mr. Gatewood, in surmising that this young lady whom you seek is, in your eyes, very—I may say ideally gifted?”

“She is my ideal,” replied the young man, coloring.

“Exactly. And—her general allure?”

“Charming!”

“Exactly; but to be a trifle more precise—if you could give me a sketch, an idea, a mere outline delicately tinted, now. Is she more blond than brunette?”

“Yes—but her eyes are brown. I—I insist on that.”

“Why should you not? You know her; I don’t,” said Keen, laughing. “I merely wished to form a mental picture…. You say her hair is—is—”

“It’s full of sunny color; that’s all I can say.”

“Exactly—I see. A rare and lovely combination with brown eyes and creamy skin, Mr. Gatewood. I fancy she might be, perhaps, an inch or two under your height?”

“Just about that. Her hands should be—are beautiful—”

“Exactly. The ensemble is most vividly portrayed, Mr. Gatewood; and—you have intimated that her lack of fortune—er—we might almost say her pecuniary distress—is more than compensated for by her accomplishments, character, and very unusual beauty…. Did I so understand you, Mr. Gatewood?”

“That’s what I meant, anyhow,” he said, flushing up.

“You did mean it?”

“I did: I do.”

“Then we take your case, Mr. Gatewood…. No haste about the check, my dear sir—pray consider us at your service.”

But Gatewood doggedly filled in the check and handed it to the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“I wish you happiness,” said the older man in a low voice. “The lady you describe exists; it is for us to discover her.”

“Thank you,” stammered Gatewood, astounded.

Keen touched an electric button; a moment later a young girl entered the room.

“Miss Southerland, Mr. Gatewood. Will you be kind enough to take Mr. Gatewood’s dictation in Room 19?”

For a second Gatewood stared—as though in the young girl before him the ghost of his ideal had risen to confront him—only for a second; then he bowed, matching her perfect acknowledgment of his presence by a bearing and courtesy which must have been inbred to be so faultless.

And he followed her to Room 19.

What had Keen meant by saying, “The lady you describe exists!” Did this remarkable elderly gentleman suspect that it was to be a hunt for an ideal? Had he deliberately entered into such a bargain? Impossible!

His disturbed thoughts reverted to the terms of the bargain, the entire enterprise, the figures on his check. His own amazing imbecility appalled him. What idiocy! What sudden madness had seized him to entangle himself in such unheard-of negotiations! True, he had played bridge until dawn the night before, but, on awaking, he had discovered no perceptible hold-over. It must have been sheer weakness of intellect that permitted him to be dominated by the suggestions of Kerns. And now the game was on: the jack declared, cards dealt, and his ante was up. Had he openers?

Room 19, duly labeled with its number on the opaque glass door, contained a desk, a table and typewriter, several comfortable chairs, and a window opening on Fifth Avenue, through which the eastern sun poured a stream of glory, washing curtain, walls, and ceiling with palest gold.

And all this time, preoccupied with new impressions and his own growing chagrin, he watched the girl who conducted him with all the unconscious assurance and grace of a young chatelaine passing through her own domain under escort of a distinguished guest.

When they had entered Room 19, she half turned, but he forestalled her and closed the door, and she passed before him with a perceptible inclination of her finely modeled head, seating herself at the desk by the open window. He took an armchair at her elbow and removed his gloves, looking at her expectantly.

CHAPTER III

“This is a list of particular and general questions for you to answer, Mr. Gatewood,” she said, handing him a long slip of printed matter. “The replies to such questions as you are able or willing to answer you may dictate to me.” The beauty of her modulated voice was scarcely a surprise—no woman who moved and carried herself as did this tall young girl in black and white could reasonably be expected to speak with less distinction—yet the charm of her voice, from the moment her lips unclosed, so engrossed him that the purport of her speech escaped him.

“Would you mind saying it once more?” he asked.

She did so; he attempted to concentrate his attention, and succeeded sufficiently to look as though some vestige of intellect remained in him. He saw her pick up a pad and pencil; the contour and grace of two deliciously fashioned hands arrested his mental process once more.

“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily; “what were you saying, Miss Southerland?”

“Nothing, Mr. Gatewood. I did not speak.” And he realized, hazily, that she had not spoken—that it was the subtle eloquence of her youth and loveliness that had appealed like a sudden voice—a sound faintly exquisite echoing his own thought of her.

Troubled, he looked at the slip of paper in his hand; it was headed:

SPECIAL DESCRIPTION BLANK
(Form K)

And he read it as carefully as he was able to—the curious little clamor of his pulses, the dazed sense of elation, almost of expectation, distracting his attention all the time.

“I wish you would read it to me,” he said; “that would give me time to think up answers.”

“If you wish,” she assented pleasantly, swinging around toward him in her desk chair. Then she crossed one knee over the other to support the pad, and, bending above it, lifted her brown eyes. She could have done nothing in the world more distracting at that moment.

“What is the sex of the person you desire to find, Mr. Gatewood?”

“Her sex? I—well, I fancy it is feminine.”

She wrote after “Sex” the words “She is probably feminine”; looked at him absently, glanced at what she had written, flushed a little, rubbed out the “she is probably,” wondering why a moment’s mental wandering should have committed her to absurdity.

“Married?” she asked with emphasis.

“No,” he replied, startled; then, vexed, “I beg your pardon—you mean to ask if she is married!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean you, Mr. Gatewood; it’s the next question, you see”—she held out the blank toward him. “Is the person you are looking for married?”

“Oh, no; she isn’t married, either—at least—trust—not—because if she is I don’t want to find her!” he ended, entangled in an explanation which threatened to involve him deeper than he desired. And, looking up, he saw the beautiful brown eyes regarding him steadily. They reverted to the paper at once, and the white fingers set the pencil flying.

“He trusts that she is unmarried, but if she is (underlined) married he doesn’t want to find her,” she wrote.

“That,” she explained, “goes under the head of ‘General Remarks’ at the bottom of the page”—she held it out, pointing with her pencil. He nodded, staring at her slender hand.

“Age?” she continued, setting the pad firmly on her rounded, yielding knee and looking up at him.

“Age? Well, I—as a matter of fact, I could only venture a surmise. You know,” he said earnestly, “how difficult it is to guess ages, don’t you, Miss Southerland?”

“How old do you think she is? Could you not hazard a guess—judging, say, from her appearance?”

“I have no data—no experience to guide me.” He was becoming involved again. “Would you, for practice, permit me first to guess your age, Miss Southerland?”

“Why—yes—if you think that might help you to guess hers.”

So he leaned back in his armchair and considered her a very long time—having a respectable excuse to do so. Twenty times he forgot he was looking at her for any purpose except that of disinterested delight, and twenty times he remembered with a guilty wince that it was a matter of business.

“Perhaps I had better tell you,” she suggested, her color rising a little under his scrutiny.

“Is it eighteen? Just her age!”

“Twenty-one, Mr. Gatewood—and you said you didn’t know her age.”

“I have just remembered that I thought it might be eighteen; but I dare say I was shy three years in her case, too. You may put it down at twenty-one.”

For the slightest fraction of a second the brown eyes rested on his, the pencil hovered in hesitation. Then the eyes fell, and the moving fingers wrote.

“Did you write ‘twenty-one’?” he inquired carelessly.

“I did not, Mr. Gatewood.”

“What did you write?”

“I wrote: ‘He doesn’t appear to know much about her age.’”

“But I do know—”

“You said—” They looked at one another earnestly.

“The next question,” she continued with composure, “is: ‘Date and place of birth?’ Can you answer any part of that question?”

“I trust I may be able to—some day…. What are you writing?”

“I’m writing: ‘He trusts he may be able to, some day.’ Wasn’t that what you said?”

“Yes, I did say that. I—I’m not perfectly sure what I meant by it.”

She passed to the next question:

“Height?”

“About five feet six,” he said, fascinated gaze on her.

“Hair?”

“More gold than brown—full of—er—gleams—” She looked up quickly; his eyes reverted to the window rather suddenly. He had been looking at her hair.

“Complexion?” she continued after a shade of hesitation.

“It’s a sort of delicious mixture—bisque, tinted with a pinkish bloom—ivory and rose—” He was explaining volubly, when she began to shake her head, timing each shake to his words.

“Really, Mr. Gatewood, I think you are hopelessly vague on that point—unless you desire to convey the impression that she is speckled.”

“Speckled!” he repeated, horrified. “Why, I am describing a woman who is my ideal of beauty—”

But she had already gone to the next question:

“Teeth?”

“P-p-perfect p-p-pearls!” he stammered. The laughing red mouth closed like a flower at dusk, veiling the sparkle of her teeth.

Was he trying to be impertinent? Was he deliberately describing her? He did not look like that sort of man; yet why was he watching her so closely, so curiously at every question? Why did he look at her teeth when she laughed?

“Eyes?” Her own dared him to continue what, coincidence or not, was plainly a description of herself.

“B-b-b—” He grew suddenly timorous, hesitating, pretending to a perplexity which was really a healthy scare. For she was frowning.

“Curious I can’t think of the color of her eyes,” he said; “is—isn’t it?”

She coldly inspected her pad and made a correction; but all she did was to rub out a comma and put another in its place. Meanwhile, Gatewood, chin in his hand, sat buried in profound thought. “Were they blue?” he murmured to himself aloud, “or were they brown? Blue begins with a b and brown begins with a b. I’m convinced that her eyes began with a b. They were not, therefore, gray or green, because,” he added in a burst of confidence, “it is utterly impossible to spell gray or green with a b!”

Miss Southerland looked slightly astonished.

“All you can recollect, then, is that the color of her eyes began with the letter b?”

“That is absolutely all I can remember; but I think they were—brown.”

“If they were brown they must be brown now,” she observed, looking out of the window.

“That’s true! Isn’t it curious I never thought of that? What are you writing?”

“Brown,” she said, so briefly that it sounded something like a snub.

“Mouth?” inquired the girl, turning a new leaf on her pad.

“Perfect. Write it: there is no other term fit to describe its color, shape, its sensitive beauty, its—What did you write just then?”

“I wrote, ‘Mouth, ordinary.’”

“I don’t want you to! I want—”

“Really, Mr. Gatewood, a rhapsody on a girl’s mouth is proper in poetry, but scarcely germane to the record of a purely business transaction. Please answer the next question tersely, if you don’t mind: ‘Figure?’”

“Oh, I do mind! I can’t! Any poem is much too brief to describe her figure—”

“Shall we say ‘Perfect’?” asked the girl, raising her brown eyes in a glimmering transition from vexation to amusement. For, after all, it could be only a coincidence that this young man should be describing features peculiar to herself.

“Couldn’t you write, ‘Venus-of-Milo-like’?” he inquired. “That is laconic.”

“I could—if it’s true. But if you mean it for praise—I—don’t think any modern woman would be flattered.”

“I always supposed that she of Milo had an ideal figure,” he said, perplexed.

She wrote, “A good figure.” Then, propping her rounded chin on one lovely white hand, she glanced at the next question:

“Hands?”

“White, beautiful, rose-tipped, slender yet softly and firmly rounded—”

“How can they be soft and firm, too, Mr. Gatewood?” she protested; then, surprising his guilty eyes fixed on her hands, hastily dropped them and sat up straight, level-browed, cold as marble. Was he deliberately being rude to her?

CHAPTER IV

As a matter of fact, he was not. Too poor in imagination to invent, on the spur of the moment, charms and qualities suited to his ideal, he had, at first unconsciously, taken as a model the girl before him; quite unconsciously and innocently at first—then furtively, and with a dawning perception of the almost flawless beauty he was secretly plagiarizing. Aware, now, that something had annoyed her; aware, too, at the same moment that there appeared to be nothing lacking in her to satisfy his imagination of the ideal, he began to turn redder than he had ever turned in all his life.

Several minutes of sixty seconds each ensued before he ventured to stir a finger. And it was only when she bent again very gravely over her pad that he cautiously eased a cramped muscle or two, and drew a breath—a long, noiseless, deep and timid respiration. He realized the enormity of what he had been doing—how close he had come to giving unpardonable offense by drawing a perfect portrait of her as the person he desired to find through the good offices of Keen & Co.

But there was no such person—unless she had a double: for what more could a man desire than the ideal traits he had been able to describe only by using her as his inspiration.

When he ventured to look at her, one glance was enough to convince him that she, too, had noticed the parallel—had been forced to recognize her own features in the portrait he had constructed of an ideal. And she had caught him in absent-minded contemplation of the hands he had been describing. He knew that his face was the face of a guilty man.

“What is the next question?” he stammered, eager to answer it in a manner calculated to allay her suspicions.

“The next question?” She glanced at the list, then with a voice of velvet which belied the eyes, clear as frosty brown pools in November: “The next question requires a description of her feet.”

“Feet! Oh—-they—they’re rather large—why, her feet are enormous, I believe—”

She looked at him as though stunned; suddenly a flood of pink spread, wave on wave, from the white nape of her neck to her hair; she bent low over her pad and wrote something, remaining in that attitude until her face cooled.

“Somehow or other I’ve done it again!” he thought, horrified. “The best thing I can do is to end it and go home.”

In his distress he began to hedge, saying: “Of course, she is rather tall and her feet are in some sort of proportion—in fact, they are perfectly symmetrical feet—”

Never in his life had he encountered a pair of such angrily beautiful eyes. Speech stopped with a dry gulp.

“We now come to ‘General Remarks,’” she said in a voice made absolutely steady and emotionless. “Have you any remarks of that description to offer, Mr. Gatewood?”

“I’m willing to make remarks,” he said, “if I only knew what you wished me to say.”

She mused, eyes on the sunny window, then looked up. “Where did you last see her?”

“Near Fifth Avenue.”

“And what street?”

He named the street.

“Near here?”

“Rather,” he said timidly.

She ruffled the edges of her pad, wrote something and erased it, bit her scarlet upper lip, and frowned.

“Out of doors, of course?”

“No; indoors,” he admitted furtively.

She looked up with a movement almost nervous.

“Do you dare—I mean, care—to be more concise?”

“I would rather not,” he replied in a voice from which he hoped he had expelled the tremors of alarm.

“As you please, Mr. Gatewood. And would you care to answer any of these other questions: Who and what are or were her parents? Give all particulars concerning all her relatives. Is she employed or not? What are her social, financial, and general circumstances? Her character, personal traits, aims, interests, desires? Has she any vices? Any virtues? Talents? Ambitions? Caprices? Fads? Are you in love with her? Is—”

“Yes,” he said, “I am.”

“Is she in love with you?”

“No; she hates me—I’m afraid.”

“Is she in love with anybody?”

“That is a very difficult—”

The girl wrote: “He doesn’t know,” with a satisfaction apparently causeless.

“Is she a relative of yours, Mr. Gatewood?” very sweetly.

“No, Miss Southerland,” very positively.

“You—you desire to marry her—you say?”

“I do. But I didn’t say it.”

She was silent; then:

“What is her name?” in a low voice which started several agreeable thrills chasing one another over him.

“I—I decline to answer,” he stammered.

“On what grounds, Mr. Gatewood?”

He looked her full in the eyes; suddenly he bent forward and gazed at the printed paper from which she had been apparently reading.

“Why, all those questions you are scaring me with are not there!” he exclaimed indignantly. “You are making them up?”

“I—I know, but”—she was flushing furiously—“but they are on the other forms—some of them. Can’t you see you are answering ‘Form K’? That is a special form—”

“But why do you ask me questions that are not on Form K?”

“Because it is my duty to do all I can to secure evidence which may lead to the discovery of the person you desire to find. I—I assure you, Mr, Gatewood, this duty is not—not always agreeable—and some people make it harder still.”

Gatewood looked out of the window. Various emotions—-among them shame, mortification, chagrin—pervaded him, and chased each other along his nervous system, coloring his neck and ears a fiery red for the enlightenment of any observer.

“I—I did not mean to offend you,” said the girl in a low voice—such a gently regretful voice that Gatewood swung around in his chair.

“There is nothing I would not be glad to tell you about the woman I have fallen in love with,” he said. “She is overwhelmingly lovely; and—when I dare—I will tell you her name and where I first saw her—and where I saw her last—if you desire. Shall I?”

“It would be advisable. When will you do this?”

“When I dare.”

“You—you don’t dare—now?”

“No… not now.”

She absently wrote on her pad: “He doesn’t dare tell me now.” Then, with head still bent, she lifted her mischief-making, trouble-breeding brown eyes to his once more.

“I am to come here, of course, to consult you?” he asked dizzily.

“Mr. Keen will receive you—”

“He may be busy.”

“He may be,” she repeated dreamily.

“So—I’ll ask for you.”

“We could write you, Mr. Gatewood.”

He said hastily: “It’s no trouble for me to come; I walk every morning.”

“But there would be no use, I think, in your coming very soon. All I—all Mr. Keen could do for a while would be to report progress—”

“That is all I dare look for: progress—for the present.”

During the time that he remained—which was not very long—neither of them spoke until he arose to take his departure.

“Good-by, Miss Southerland. I hope you may find the person I have been searching for.”

“Good-by, Mr. Gatewood…. I hope we shall;… but I—don’t—know.”

And, as a matter of fact, she did not know; she was rather excited over nothing, apparently; and also somewhat preoccupied with several rather disturbing emotions the species of which she was interested in determining. But to label and catalogue each of these emotions separately required privacy and leisure to think—and she also wished to look very earnestly at the reflection of her own face in the mirror of her own chamber. For it is a trifle exciting—though but an innocent coincidence—to be compared, feature by feature, to a young man’s ideal. As far as that went, she excelled it, too; and, as she stood by the desk, alone, gathering up her notes, she suddenly bent over and lifted the hem of her gown a trifle—sufficient to reassure herself that the dainty pair of shoes she wore, would have baffled the efforts of any Venus ever sculptured. And she was perfectly right.

“Of course,” she thought to herself, “his ideal runaway hasn’t enormous feet. He, too, must have been struck with the similarity between me and his ideal, and when he realized that I also noticed it, he was frightened by my frown into saying that her feet were enormous. How silly!… For I didn’t mean to frighten him…. He frightened me—once or twice—I mean he irritated me—no, interested me, is what I do mean…. Heigho! I wonder why she ran away? I wonder why he can’t find her?… It’s—it’s silly to run away from a man like that…. Heigho!… She doesn’t deserve to be found. There is nothing to be afraid of—nothing to alarm anybody in a man like that.”

So she gathered up her notes and walked slowly out and across to the private office of the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“Come in,” said the Tracer when she knocked. He was using the telephone; she seated herself rather listlessly beside the window, where spring sunshine lay in gilded patches on the rug and spring breezes stirred the curtains. She was a little tired, but there seemed to be no good reason why. Yet, with the soft wind blowing on her cheek, the languor grew; she rested her face on one closed hand, shutting her eyes.

When they opened again it was to meet the fixed gaze of Mr. Keen.

“Oh—I beg your pardon!”

“There is no need of it, child. Be seated. Never mind that report just now.” He paced the length of the room once or twice, hands clasped behind him; then, halting to confront her:

“What sort of a man is this young Gatewood?”

“What sort, Mr. Keen? Why—I think he is the—the sort—that—”

“I see that you don’t think much of him,” said Keen, laughing.

“Oh, indeed I did not mean that at all; I mean that he appeared to be—to be—”

“Rather a cad?”

“Why, no!” she said, flushing up. “He is absolutely well-bred, Mr. Keen.”

“You received no unpleasant impression of him?”

“On the contrary!” she said rather warmly—for it hurt her sense of justice that Keen should so misjudge even a stranger in whom she had no personal interest.

“You think he looks like an honest man?”

“Honest?” She was rosy with annoyance. “Have you any idea that he is dishonest?”

“Have you?”

“Not the slightest,” she said with emphasis.

“Suppose a man should set us hunting for a person who does not exist—on our terms, which are no payment unless successful? Would that be honest?” asked Keen gravely.

“Did—did he do that?”

“No, child.”

“I knew he couldn’t do such a thing!”

“No, he—er—couldn’t, because I wouldn’t allow it—not that he tried to!” added Keen hastily as the indignant brown eyes sparkled ominously. “Really, Miss Southerland, he must be all you say he is, for he has a stanch champion to vouch for him.”

“All I say he is? I haven’t said anything about him!”

Mr. Keen nodded. “Exactly. Let us drop him for a moment…. Are you perfectly well, Miss Southerland?”

“Why, yes.”

“I’m glad of it. You are a trifle pale; you seem to be a little languid…. When do you take your vacation?”

“You suggested May, I believe,” she said wistfully.

The Tracer leaned back in his chair, joining the tips of his fingers reflectively.

“Miss Southerland,” he said, “you have been with us a year. I thought it might interest you to know that I am exceedingly pleased with you.”

She colored charmingly.

“But,” he added, “I’m terribly afraid we’re going to lose you.”

“Why?” she asked, startled.

“However,” he continued, ignoring her half-frightened question with a smile, “I am going to promote you—for faithful and efficient service.”

“O-h!”

“With an agreeable increase of salary, and new duties which will take you into the open air…. You ride?”

“I—I used to before—”

“Exactly; before you were obliged to earn your living. Please have yourself measured for habit and boots this afternoon. I shall arrange for horse, saddle, and groom. You will spend most of your time riding in the Park—for the present.”

“But—Mr. Keen—am I to be one of your agents—a sort of detective?”

Keen regarded her absently, then crossed one leg over the other.

“Read me your notes,” he said with a smile.

She read them, folded them, and he took them from her, thoughtfully regarding her.

“Did you know that your mother and I were children together?” he asked.

“No!” She stared. “Is that why you sent for me that day at the school of stenography?”

“That is why… When I learned that my playmate—your mother—was dead, is it not reasonable to suppose that I should wish her daughter to have a chance?”

Miss Southerland looked at him steadily.

“She was like you—when she married… I never married… Do you wonder that I sent for you, child?”

Nothing but the clock ticking there in the sunny room, and an old man staring into two dimmed brown eyes, and the little breezes at the open window whispering of summers past.

“This young man, Gatewood,” said the Tracer, clearing his voice of its hoarseness—“this young man ought to be all right, if I did not misjudge his father—years ago, child, years ago. And he is all right—” He half turned toward a big letter-file; “his record is clean, so far. The trouble with him is idleness. He ought to marry.”

“Isn’t he trying to?” she asked.

“It looks like it. Miss Southerland, we must find this woman!”

“Yes, but I don’t see how you are going to—on such slight ainformtion—”

“Information! Child, I have all I want—all I could desire.” He laughed, passing his hands over his gray hair. “We are going to find the girl he is in love with before the week ends!”

“Do you really think so?” she exclaimed.

“Yes. But you must do a great deal in this case.”

“I?”

“Exactly.”

“And—and what am I to do?”

“Ride in the Park, child! And if you see Mr. Gatewood, don’t you dare take your eyes off him for one moment. Watch him; observe everything he does. If he should recognize you and speak to you, be as amiable to him as though it were not by my orders.”

“Then—then I am to be a detective!” she faltered.

The Tracer did not appear to hear her. He took up the notes, turned to the telephone, and began to send out a general alarm, reading the description of the person whom Gatewood had described. The vast, intricate and delicate machinery under his control was being set in motion all over the Union.

“Not that I expect to find her outside the borough of Manhattan,” he said, smiling, as he hung up the receiver and turned to her; “but it’s as well to know how many types of that species exist in this Republic, and who they are—in case any other young man comes here raving of brown eyes and ‘gleams’ in the hair.”

Miss Southerland, to her own intense consternation, blushed.

“I think you had better order that habit at once,” said the Tracer carelessly.

“Tell me, Mr. Keen,” she asked tremulously, “am I to spy upon Mr. Gatewood? And report to you?… For I simply cannot bear to do it—”

“Child, you need report nothing unless you desire to. And when there is something to report, it will be about the woman I am searching for. Don’t you understand? I have already located her. You will find her in the Park. And when you are sure she is the right one—and if you care to report it to me—I shall be ready to listen… I am always ready to listen to you.”

“But—I warn you, Mr. Keen, that I have perfect faith in the honor of Mr. Gatewood. I know that I could have nothing unworthy to report.”

“I am sure of it,” said the Tracer of Lost Persons, studying her with eyes that were not quite clear. “Now, I think you had better order that habit… Your mother sat her saddle perfectly… We rode very often—my lost playmate and I.”

He turned, hands clasped behind his back, absently pacing the room, backward, forward, there in the spring sunshine. Nor did he notice her lingering, nor mark her as she stole from the room, brown eyes saddened and thoughtful, wondering, too, that there should be in the world so much room for sorrow.

CHAPTER V

Gatewood, burdened with restlessness and gnawed by curiosity, consumed a week in prowling about the edifice where Keen & Co. carried on an interesting profession.

His first visit resulted merely in a brief interview with Mr. Keen, who smilingly reported progress and suavely bowed him out. He looked about for Miss Southerland as he was leaving, but did not see her.

On his second visit he mustered the adequate courage to ask for her, and experienced a curiously sickly sensation when informed that Miss Southerland was no longer employed in the bureau of statistics, having been promoted to an outside position of great responsibility. His third visit proved anything but satisfactory. He sidled and side-stepped for ten minutes before he dared ask Mr. Keen where Miss Southerland had gone. And when the Tracer replied that, considering the business he had undertaken for Mr. Gatewood, he really could not see why Mr. Gatewood should interest himself concerning the whereabouts of Miss Southerland, the young man had nothing to say, and escaped as soon as possible, enraged at himself, at Mr. Keen, and vaguely holding the entire world guilty of conspiracy.

He had no definite idea of what he wanted, except that his desire to see Miss Southerland again seemed out of all proportion to any reasonable motive for seeing her. Occasional fits of disgust with himself for what he had done were varied with moody hours of speculation. Suppose Mr. Keen did find his ideal? What of it? He no longer wanted to see her. He had no use for her. The savor of the enterprise had gone stale in his mouth; he was by turns worried, restless, melancholy, sulky, uneasy. A vast emptiness pervaded his life. He smoked more and more and ate less and less. He even disliked to see others eat, particularly Kerns.

And one exquisite May morning he came down to breakfast and found the unspeakable Kerns immersed in grapefruit, calm, well balanced, and bland.

“How-de-dee, dear friend?” said that gentleman affably. “Any news from Cupid this beautiful May morning?”

“No; and I don’t want any,” returned Gatewood, sorting his mail with a scowl and waving away his fruit.

“Tut, tut! Lovers must be patient. Dearie will be found some day—”

“Some day,” snarled Gatewood, “I shall destroy you, Tommy.”

“Naughty! Naughty!” reflected Kerns, pensively assaulting the breakfast food. “Lovey must not worry; Dovey shall be found, and all will be joy and gingerbread…. If you throw that orange I’ll run screaming to the governors. Aren’t you ashamed—just because you’re in a love tantrum!”

“One more word and you get it!”

“May I sing as I trifle with this frugal fare, dear friend? My heart is so happy that I should love to warble a few wild notes—”

He paused to watch his badgered victim dispose of a Martini.

“I wonder,” he mused, “if you’d like me to tell you what a cocktail before breakfast does to the lining of your stomach? Would you?”

“No. I suppose it’s what the laundress does to my linen. What do I care?”

“Don’t be a short sport, Jack.”

“Well, I don’t care for the game you put me up against. Do you know what has happened?”

“I really don’t, dear friend. The Tracer of Lost Persons has not found her—has he?”

“He says he has,” retorted Gatewood sullenly, pulling a crumpled telegram from his pocket and casting it upon the table. “I don’t want to see her; I’m not interested. I never saw but one girl in my life who interested me in the slightest; and she’s employed to help in this ridiculous search.”

Kerns, meanwhile, had smoothed out the telegram and was intently perusing it:

JOHN GATEWOOD, LENOX CLUB, FIFTH AVENUE:

PERSON PROBABLY DISCOVERED. CALL HERE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

W. KEEN.

“What do you make of that?” demanded Gatewood hoarsely.

“Make of it? Why, it’s true enough, I fancy. Go and see, and if it’s she, be hers!”

“I won’t! I don’t want to see any ideal! I don’t want to marry. Why do you try to make me marry somebody?”

“Because it’s good for you, dear friend. Otherwise you’ll go to the doggy-dogs. You don’t realize how much worry you are to me.”

“Confound it! Why don’t you marry? Why didn’t I ask you that when you put me up to all this foolishness? What right have you to—”

“Tut, friend! I know there’s no woman alive fit to wed me and spend her life in stealing kisses from me. I have no ideal. You have an ideal.”

“I haven’t!”

“Oh, yes, dear friend, there’s a stub in your check book to prove it. You simply bet $5,000 that your ideal existed. You’ve won. Go and be her joy and sunshine.”

“I’ll put an end to this whole business,” said Gatewood wrathfully, “and I’ll do it now!”

“Bet you that you’re engaged within the week!” said Kerns with a placid smile.

The other swung around savagely: “What will you bet, Tommy? You may have what odds you please. I’ll make you sit up for this.”

“I’ll bet you,” answered Kerns, deliberately, “an entire silver dinner service against a saddle horse for the bride.”

“That’s a fool bet!” snapped Gatewood. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, if you don’t care to—”

“What do I want of a silver service? But, all right; I’ll bet you anything.”

“She’ll want it,” replied Kerns significantly, booking the bet. “I may as well canter out to Tiffany’s this morning, I fancy…. Where are you going, Jack?”

“To see Keen and confess what an ass I’ve been!” returned Gatewood sullenly, striding across the breakfast room to take his hat and gloves from the rack. And out he went, mad all over.

On his way up the avenue he attempted to formulate the humiliating confession which already he shrank from. But it had to be done. He simply could not stand the prospect of being notified month after month that a lady would be on view somewhere. It was like going for a fitting; it was horrible. Besides, what use was it? Within a week or two an enormous and utterly inexplicable emptiness had yawned before him, revealing life as a hollow delusion. He no longer cared.

Immersed in bitter reflection, he climbed the familiar stairway and sent his card to Mr. Keen, and in due time he was ushered into the presence of the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“Mr. Keen,” he began, with a headlong desire to get it over and be done with it, “I may as well tell you how impossible it is for you, or anybody, to find that person I described—”

Mr. Keen raised an expostulatory hand, smiling indulgence.

“It is more than possible, Mr. Gatewood, more than probable; it is almost an accomplished fact. In other words, I think I may venture to congratulate you and say that she is found.”

“Now, how can she be found, when there isn’t—”

“Mr. Gatewood, the magician will always wave his magic wand for you and show you his miracles for the price of admission. But for that price he does not show you how he works his miracles,” said Keen, laughing.

“But I ought to tell you,” persisted Gatewood, “that it is utterly impossible you should find the person I wished to discover, because she—”

“I can only prove that you are wrong,” smiled Keen, rising from his easy chair.

“Mr. Keen,” said the young man earnestly, “I have been more or less of a chump at times. One of those times was when I came here on this errand. All I desire, now, is to let the matter rest as it is. I am satisfied, and you have lost nothing. Nor have you found anything or anybody. You think you have, but you haven’t. I do not wish you to continue the search, or to send me any further reports. I want to forget the whole miserable matter—to be free—to feel myself freed from any obligations to that irritating person I asked you to find.”

The Tracer regarded him very gravely.

“Is that your wish, Mr. Gatewood? I can scarcely credit it.”

“It is. I’ve been a fool; I simply want to stop being one if anybody will permit it.”

“And you decline to attempt to identify the very beautiful person we have discovered to be the individual for whom you asked us to search?”

“I do. She may be beautiful; but I know well enough she can’t compare with—someone.”

“I am sorry,” said Keen thoughtfully. “We take so much pride in these matters. When one of my agents discovered where this person was, I was rather—happy; for I have taken a peculiar personal interest in your case. However—”

“Mr. Keen,” said Gatewood, “if you could understand how ashamed and mortified I am at my own conduct—”

Keen gazed pensively out of the window. “I also am sorry; Miss Southerland was to have received a handsome bonus for her discovery—”

“Miss S-S-S-S-outherland!”

“Exactly; without quite so many S’s,” said Keen, smiling.

“Did she discover that—that person?” exclaimed the young man, startled.

“She thinks she has. I am not sure she is correct; but I am absolutely certain that Miss Southerland could eventually discover the person you were in search of. It seems a little hard on her—just on the eve of success—to lose. But that can’t be helped now.”

Gatewood, more excited and uncomfortable than he had ever been in all his life, watched Keen intently.

“Too bad, too bad,” muttered the Tracer to himself. “The child needs the encouragement. It meant a thousand dollars to her—” He shrugged his shoulders, looked up, and, as though rather surprised to see Gatewood still there, smiled an impersonal smile and offered his hand in adieu. Gatewood winced.

“Could I—I see Miss Southerland?” he asked.

“I am afraid not. She is at this moment following my instructions to—but that cannot interest you now—”

“Yes, it does!—if you don’t mind. Where is she? I—I’ll take a look at the person she discovered; I will, really.”

“Why, it’s only this: I suspected that you might identify a person whom I had reason to believe was to be found every morning riding in the Park. So Miss Southerland has been riding there every day. Yesterday she came here, greatly excited—”

“Yes—yes—go on!”

Keen gazed dreamily at the sunny window. “She thought she had found your—er—the person. So I said you would meet her on the bridle path, near—but that’s of no interest now—”

“Near where?” demanded Gatewood, suppressing inexplicable excitement. And as Keen said nothing: “I’ll go; I want to go, I really do! Can’t—can’t a fellow change his mind? Oh, I know you think I’m a lunatic, and there’s plenty of reason, too!”

Keen studied him calmly. “Yes, plenty of reason, plenty of reason, Mr. Gatewood. But do you suppose you are the only one? I know another who was perfectly sane two weeks ago.”

The young man waited impatiently; the Tracer paced the room, gray head bent, delicate, wrinkled hands clasped loosely behind his bent back.

“You have horses at the Whip and Spur Club,” he said abruptly. “Suppose you ride out and see how close Miss Southerland has come to solving our problem.”

Gatewood seized the offered hand and wrung it with a fervor out of all reason; and it is curious that the Tracer of Lost Persons did not appear to be astonished.

“You’re rather impetuous—like your father,” he said slowly. “I knew him; so I’ve ventured to trust his son—even when I heard how aimlessly he was living his life. Mr. Gatewood! May I ask you something—as an old friend of your father?”

The young man nodded, subdued, perplexed, scarcely understanding.

“It’s only this: If you do find the woman you could love—in the Park—to-day—come back to me some day and let me tell you all those foolish, trite, tiresome things that I should have told a son of mine. I am so old that you will not take offense—you will not mind listening to me, or forgetting the dull, prosy things I say about the curse of idleness, and the habits of cynical thinking, and the perils of vacant-minded indulgence. You will forgive me—and you will forget me. That will be as it should be. Good-by.”

Gatewood, sobered, surprised, descended the stairs and hailed a hansom.

CHAPTER VI

All the way to the Whip and Spur Club he sat buried in a reverie from which, at intervals, he started, aroused by the heavy, expectant beating of his own pulses. But what did he expect, in Heaven’s name? Not the discovery of a woman who had never existed. Yet his excitement and impatience grew as he watched the saddling of his horse; and when at length he rode out into the sunshine and cantered through the Park entrance, his sense of impending events and his expectancy amounted to a fever which colored his face attractively.

He saw her almost immediately. Her horse was walking slowly in the dappled shadows of the new foliage; she, listless in her saddle, sometimes watching the throngs of riders passing, at moments turning to gaze into the woodland vistas where, over the thickets of flowering shrubbery, orioles and robins sped flashing on tinted wings from shadow to sun, from sun to shadow. But she looked up as he drew bridle and wheeled his mount beside her; and, “Oh!” she said, flushing in recognition.

“I have missed you terribly,” he said quietly.

It was dreamy weather, even for late spring: the scent of lilacs and mock-orange hung heavy as incense along the woods. Their voices unconsciously found the key to harmonize with it all.

She said: “Well, I think I have succeeded. In a few moments she will be passing. I do not know her name; she rides a big roan. She is very beautiful, Mr. Gatewood.”

He said: “I am perfectly certain we shall find her. I doubted it until now. But now I know.”

“Oh-h, but I may be wrong,” she protested.

“No; you cannot be.”

She looked up at him.

“You can have no idea how happy you make me,” he said unsteadily.

“But—I—but I may be all wrong—dreadfully wrong!”

“Y-es; you may be, but I shall not be. For do you know that I have already seen her in the Park?”

“When?” she demanded incredulously, then turned in the saddle, repeating: “Where? Did she pass? How perfectly stupid of me! And was she the—the right one?”

“She is the right one…. Don’t turn: I have seen her. Ride on: I want to say something—if I can.”

“No, no,” she insisted. “I must know whether I was right—”

“You are right—but you don’t know it yet…. Oh, very well, then; we’ll turn if you insist.” And he wheeled his mount as she did, riding at her bridle again.

“How can you take it so coolly—so indifferently?” she said. “Where has that woman—where has she gone?… Never mind; she must turn and pass us sooner or later, for she lives uptown. What are you laughing at, Mr. Gatewood?”—in annoyed surprise.

“I am laughing at myself. Oh, I’m so many kinds of a fool—you can’t think how many, and it’s no use!”

She stared, astonished; he shook his head.

“No, you don’t understand yet. But you will. Listen to me: this very beautiful lady you have discovered is nothing to me!”

“Nothing—to you!” she faltered. Two pink spots of indignation burned in her cheeks. “How—how dare you say that!—after all that has been done—all that you have said. You said you loved her; you did say so—to me!”

“I don’t love her now.”

“But you did!” Tears of pure vexation started; she faced him, eye to eye, thoroughly incensed.

“What sort of man are you?” she said under her breath. “Your friend Mr. Kerns is wrong. You are not worth saving from yourself.”

“Kerns!” he repeated, angry and amazed. “What the deuce has Kerns to do with this affair?”

She stared, then, realizing her indiscretion, bit her lip, and spurred forward. But he put his horse to a gallop, and they pounded along in silence. In a little while she drew bridle and looked around coldly, grave with displeasure.

“Mr. Kerns came to us before you did. He said you would probably come, and he begged us to strain every effort in your behalf, because, he said, your happiness absolutely depended upon our finding for you the woman you were seeking…. And I tried—very hard—and now she’s found. You admit that—and now you say—”

“I say that one of these balmy summer days I’ll assassinate Tommy Kerns!” broke in Gatewood. “What on earth possessed that prince of butters-in to go to Mr. Keen?”

“To save you from yourself!” retorted the girl in a low, exasperated voice. “He did not say what threatened you; he is a good friend for a man to have. But we soon found out what you were—a man well born, well bred, full of brilliant possibility, who was slowly becoming an idle, cynical, self-centered egoist—a man who, lacking the lash of need or the spur of ambition, was degenerating through the sheer uselessness and inanity of his life. And, oh, the pity of it! For Mr. Keen and I have taken a—a curiously personal interest in you—in your case. I say, the pity of it!”

Astounded, dumb under her stinging words, he rode beside her through the brilliant sunshine, wheeled mechanically as she turned her horse, and rode north again.

“And now—now!” she said passionately, “you turn on the woman you loved! Oh, you are not worth it!”

“You are quite right,” he said, turning very white under her scorn. “Almost all you have said is true enough, I fancy. I amount to nothing; I am idle, cynical, selfish. The emptiness of such a life requires a stimulant; even a fool abhors a vacuum. So I drink—not so very much yet—but more than I realize. And it is close enough to a habit to worry me…. Yes, almost all you say is true; Kerns knows it; I know it—now that you have told me. You see, he couldn’t tell me, because I should not have believed him. But I believe you—all you say, except one thing. And that is only a glimmer of decency left in me—not that I make any merit of it. No, it is merely instinctive. For I have not turned on the woman I loved.”

Her face was pale as her level eyes met him:

“You said she was nothing to you…. Look there! Do you see her? Do you see?”

Her voice broke nervously as he swung around to stare at a rider bearing down at a gallop—a woman on a big roan, tearing along through the spring sunshine, passing them with wind-flushed cheeks and dark, incurious eyes, while her powerful horse carried her on, away through the quivering light and shadow of the woodland vista.

“Is that the person?”

“Y-es,” she faltered. “Was I wrong?”

“Quite wrong, Miss Southerland.”

“But—but you said you had seen her here this morning!”

“Yes, I have.”

“Did you speak to her before you met me?”

“No—not before I met you.”

“Then you have not spoken to her. Is she still here in the Park?”

“Yes, she is still here.”

The girl turned on him excitedly: “Do you mean to say that you will not speak to her?”

“I had rather not—”

“And your happiness depends on your speaking?”

“Yes.”

“Then it is cowardly not to speak.”

“Oh, yes, it is cowardly…. If you wish me to speak to her I will. Shall I?”

“Yes… Show her to me.”

“And you think that such a man as I am has a right to speak of love to her?”

“I—we believe it will be your salvation. Mr. Kerns says you must marry her to be happy. Mr. Keen told me yesterday that it only needed a word from the right woman to put you on your mettle…. And—and that is my opinion.”

“Then in charity say that word!” he breathed, bending toward her. “Can’t you see? Can’t you understand? Don’t you know that from the moment I looked into your eyes I loved you?”

“How—how dare you!” she stammered, crimsoning.

“God knows,” he said wistfully. “I am a coward. I don’t know how I dared. Good-by….”

He walked his horse a little way, then launched him into a gallop, tearing on and on, sun, wind, trees swimming, whirling like a vision, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, save the leaden pounding of his pulse and the breathless, terrible tightening in his throat.

When he cleared his eyes and looked around he was quite alone, his horse walking under the trees and breathing heavily.

At first he laughed, and the laugh was not pleasant. Then he said aloud: “It is worth having lived for, after all!”—and was silent. And again: “I could expect nothing; she was perfectly right to side-step a fool…. And such a fool!”

The distant gallop of a horse, dulled on the soft soil, but coming nearer, could not arouse him from the bitter depths he had sunk in; not even when the sound ceased beside him, and horse snorted recognition to horse. It was only when a light touch rested on his arm that he looked up heavily, caught his breath.

“Where is the other—woman?” she gasped.

“There never was any other.”

“You said—”

“I said I loved my ideal. I did not know she existed—until I saw you.”

“Then—then we were searching for—”

“A vision. But it was your face that haunted me…. And I am not worth it, as you say. And I know it,… for you have opened my eyes.”

He drew bridle, forcing a laugh. “I cut a sorry figure in your life; be patient; I am going out of it now.” And he swung his horse. At the same moment she did the same, making a demi-tour and meeting him halfway, confronting him.

“Do you—you mean to ride out of my life without a word?” she asked unsteadily.

“Good-by.” He offered his hand, stirring his horse forward; she leaned lightly over and laid both hands in his. Then, her face surging in color, she lifted her beautiful dark eyes to his as the horses approached, nearer, nearer, until, as they passed, flank brushing flank, her eyes fell, then closed as she swayed toward him, and clung, her young lips crushed to his.

There was nobody to witness it except the birds and squirrels—nobody but a distant mounted policeman, who almost fainted away in his saddle.

Oh, it was awful, awful! Apparently she had been kissed speechless, for she said nothing. The man fool did all the talking, incoherently enough, but evidently satisfactory to her, judging from the way she looked at him, and blushed and blushed, and touched her eyes with a bit of cambric at intervals.

All the policeman heard as they passed him was; “I’m going to give you this horse, and Kerns is to give us our silver; and what do you think, my darling?”

“W-what?”

But they had already passed out of earshot; and in a few moments the shady, sun-flecked bridle path was deserted again save for the birds and squirrels, and a single mounted policeman, rigid, wild eyed, twisting his mustache and breathing hard.

CHAPTER VII

[The Seal of Solomon Cipher]

The news of Gatewood’s fate filled Kerns with a pleasure bordering upon melancholy. It was his work; he had done it; it was good for Gatewood too—time for him to stop his irresponsible cruise through life, lower sail, heave to, set his signals, and turn over matters to this charming pilot.

And now they would come into port together and anchor somewhere east of Fifth Avenue—which, Kerns reflected, was far more proper a place for Gatewood than somewhere east of Suez, where young men so often sail.

And yet, and yet there was something melancholy in the pleasure he experienced. Gatewood was practically lost to him. He knew what might be expected from engaged men and newly married men. Gatewood’s club life was ended—for a while; and there was no other man with whom he cared to embark for those brightly lighted harbors twinkling east of Suez across the metropolitan wastes.

“It’s very generous of me to get him married,” he said frequently to himself, rather sadly. “I did it pretty well, too. It only shows that women have no particular monopoly in the realms of diplomacy and finesse; in fact, if a man really chooses to put his mind to such matters, he can make it no trumps and win out behind a bum ace and a guarded knave.”

He was pleased with himself. He followed Gatewood about explaining how good he had been to him. An enthusiasm for marrying off his friends began to germinate within him; he tried it on Darrell, on Barnes, on Yates, but was turned down and severely stung.

Then one day Harren of the Philippine Scouts turned up at the club, and they held a determined reunion until daylight, and they told each other all about it all and what upper-cuts life had handed out to them since the troopship sailed.

And after the rosy glow had deepened to a more gorgeous hue in the room, and the electric lights had turned into silver pinwheels; and after they had told each other the story of their lives, and the last siphon fizzed impotently when urged beyond its capacity, Kerns arose and extended his hand, and Harren took it. And they executed a song resembling “Auld Lang Syne.”

“Ole man,” said Kerns reproachfully, “there’s one thing you have been deuced careful not to mention, and that is about what happened to you three years ago—”

“Steady!” said Harren; “there is nothing to tell, Tommy.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. I never saw her again. I never shall.”

Kerns looked long and unsteadily upon his friend; then very gravely fumbled in his pocket and drew forth the business card of Westrel Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.

“That,” he said, “will be about all.” And he bestowed the card upon Harren with magnificent condescension.

And about five o’clock the following afternoon Harren found the card among various effects of his, scattered over his dresser.

It took him several days to make up his mind to pay any attention to the card or the suggestion it contained. He scarcely considered it seriously even when, passing along Fifth Avenue one sunny afternoon, he chanced to glance up and see the sign

KEEN & CO.
TRACERS OF LOST PERSONS
staring him in the face.

He continued his stroll, but that evening, upon mere impulse, he sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. Keen.

The next morning’s mail brought a reply and an appointment for an interview on Wednesday week. Harren tossed the letter aside, satisfied to let the matter go, because his leave expired on Tuesday, and the appointment was impossible.

On Sunday, however, the melancholy of the deserted club affected his spirits. A curious desire to see this Tracer of Lost Persons seized him with a persistence unaccountable. He slept poorly, haunted with visions.

On Monday he went to see Mr. Keen. It could do no harm; it was too late to do either harm or good, for his leave expired the next day at noon.

The business of Keen & Co., Tracers of Lost Persons, had grown to enormous proportions; appointments for a personal interview with Mr. Keen were now made a week in advance, so when young Harren sent in his card, the gaily liveried negro servant came back presently, threading his way through the waiting throng with pomp and circumstance, and returned the card to Harren with the date of appointment rewritten in ink across the top. The day named was Wednesday. On Tuesday Harren’s leave expired.

“That won’t do,” said the young man brusquely; “I must see Mr. Keen to-day. I wrote last week for an appointment.”

The liveried negro was polite but obdurate.

“Dis here am de ’pintment, suh,” he explained persuasively.

“But I want to see Mr. Keen at once,” insisted Harren.

“Hit ain’t no use, suh,” said the servant respectfully; “dey’s mi’ions an’ mi’ions ob gemmen jess a-settin’ roun’ an’ waitin’ foh Mistuh Keen. In dis here perfeshion, suh, de fustest gemman dat has a ’pintment is de fustest gemman dat kin see Mistuh Keen. You is a military gemman yohse’f, Cap’m Harren, an’ you is aware dat precedence am de rigger.”

The bronzed young man smiled, glanced at the date of appointment written on his card, which also bore his own name followed by the letters U.S.A., then his amused gray eyes darkened and he glanced leisurely around the room, where a dozen or more assorted people sat waiting their turns to interview Mr. Keen: all sorts and conditions of people—smartly gowned women, an anxious-browed business man or two, a fat German truck driver, his greasy cap on his knees, a surly policeman, and an old Irishwoman, wearing a shawl and an ancient straw bonnet. Harren’s eyes reverted to the negro.

“You will explain to Mr. Keen,” he said, “that I am an army officer on leave, and that I am obliged to start for Manila to-morrow. This is my excuse for asking an immediate interview; and if it’s not a good enough excuse I must cancel this appointment, that is all.”

The negro stood, irresolute, inclined to argue, but something in the steel-gray eyes of the man set him in involuntary motion, and he went away once more with the young man’s message. Harren turned and walked back to his seat. The old woman with the faded shawl was explaining volubly to a handsomely gowned woman beside her that she was looking for her boy, Danny; that her name was Mrs. Regan, and that she washed for the aristocracy of Hunter’s Point at a liberal price per dozen, using no deleterious substances in the suds as Heaven was her witness.

The German truck driver, moved by this confidence, was stirred to begin an endless account of his domestic misfortunes, and old Mrs. Regan, becoming impatient, had already begun to interrupt with an account of Regan’s recent hoisting on the wings of a premature petard, when the dark servant reappeared.

“Mistuh Keen will receive you, suh,” he whispered, leading the way into a large room where dozens of attractive young girls sat very busily engaged at typewriting machines. Door after door they passed, all numbered on the ground-glass panes, then swung to the right, where the servant bowed him into a big, handsomely furnished room flooded with the morning sun. A tall, gray man, faultlessly dressed in a gray frock suit and wearing white spats, turned from the breezy, open window to inspect him; the lean, well groomed, rather lank type of gentleman suggesting a retired colonel of cavalry; unmistakably well bred from the ends of his drooping gray mustache to the last button on his immaculate spats.

“Captain Harren?” he said pleasantly.

“Mr. Keen?”

They bowed. Young Harren drew from his pocket a card. It was the business card of Keen & Co., and, glancing up at Mr. Keen, he read it aloud, carefully:

KEEN & CO.
TRACERS OF LOST PERSONS

Keen & Co. are prepared to locate the whereabouts of anybody on earth. No charges will be made unless the person searched for is found.

Blanks on application.

WESTREL KEEN,
Manager.

Harren raised his clear, gray eyes. “I assume this statement to be correct, Mr. Keen?”

“You may safely assume so,” said Mr. Keen, smiling.

“Does this statement include all that you are prepared to undertake?”

The Tracer of Lost Persons inspected him coolly. “What more is there, Captain Harren? I undertake to find lost people. I even undertake to find the undiscovered ideals of young people who have failed to meet them. What further field would you suggest?” Harren glanced at the card which he held in his gloved hand; then, very slowly, he re-read, “the whereabouts of anybody on earth,” accenting the last two words deliberately as he encountered Keen’s piercing gaze again.

“Well?” asked Mr. Keen laughingly, “is not that sufficient? Our clients could scarcely expect us to invade heaven in our search for the vanished.”

“There are other regions,” said Harren.

“Exactly. Sit down, sir. There is a row of bookcases for your amusement. Please help yourself while I clear decks for action.”

Harren stood fingering the card, his gray eyes lost in retrospection; then he sauntered over to the bookcases, scanning the titles. The Searcher for Lost Persons studied him for a moment or two, turned, and began to pace the room. After a moment or two he touched a bell. A sweet-faced young girl entered; she was gowned in black and wore a white collar, and cuffs turned back over her hands.

“Take this memorandum,” he said. The girl picked up a pencil and pad, and Mr. Keen, still pacing the room, dictated in a quiet voice as he walked to and fro:

“Mrs. Regan’s Danny is doing six months in Butte, Montana. Break it to her as mercifully as possible. He is a bad one. We make no charge. The truck driver, Becker, can find his wife at her mother’s house, Leonia, New Jersey. Tell him to be less pig-headed or she’ll go for good some day. Ten dollars. Mrs. M., No. 36001, can find her missing butler in service at 79 Vine Street, Hartford, Connecticut. She may notify the police whenever she wishes. His portrait is No. 170529, Rogues’ Gallery. Five hundred dollars. Miss K. (No. 3679) may send her letter, care of Cisneros & Co., Rio, where the person she is seeking has gone into the coffee business. If she decides that she really does love him, he’ll come back fast enough. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Mr. W. (No. 3620) must go to the morgue for further information. His repentance is too late; but he can see that there is a decent burial. The charge: one thousand dollars to the Florence Mission. You may add that we possess his full record.”

The Tracer paused and waited for the stenographer to finish. When she looked up: “Who else is waiting?” he asked.

The girl read over the initials and numbers.

“Tell that policeman that Kid Conroy sails on the Carania to-morrow. Fifty dollars. There is nothing definite in the other cases. Report progress and send out a general alarm for the cashier inquired for by No. 3608. You will find details in vol. xxxix under B.”

“Is that all, Mr. Keen?”

“Yes. I’m going to be very busy with”—turning slowly toward Harren—“with Captain Harren, of the Philippine Scouts, until to-morrow—a very complicated case, Miss Borrow, involving cipher codes and photography—”

CHAPTER VIII

Harren started, then walked slowly to the center of the room as the pretty stenographer passed out with a curious level glance at him.

“Why do you say that photography plays a part in my case?” he asked.

“Doesn’t it?”

“Yes. But how—”

“Oh, I only guessed it,” said Keen with a smile. “I made another guess that your case involved a cipher code. Does it?”

“Y-es,” said the young man, astonished, “but I don’t see—”

“It also involves the occult,” observed Keen calmly. “We may need Miss Borrow to help us.”

Almost staggered, Harren stared at the Tracer out of his astonished gray eyes until that gentleman laughed outright and seated himself, motioning Harren to do likewise.

“Don’t be surprised, Captain Harren,” he said. “I suppose you have no conception of our business, no realization of its scope—its network of information bureaus all over the civilized world, its myriad sources of information, the immensity of its delicate machinery, the endless data and the infinitesimal details we have at our command. You, of course, have no idea of the number of people of every sort and condition who are in our employ, of the ceaseless yet inoffensive surveillance we maintain. For example, when your letter came last week I called up the person who has charge of the army list. There you were, Kenneth Harren, Captain Philippine Scouts, with the date of your graduation from West Point. Then I called up a certain department devoted to personal detail, and in five minutes I knew your entire history. I then touched another electric button, and in a minute I had before me the date of your arrival in New York, your present address, and”—he looked up quizzically at Harren—“and several items of general information, such as your peculiar use of your camera, and the list of books on Psychical Phenomena and Cryptograms which you have been buying—”

Harren flushed up. “Do you mean to say that I have been spied upon, Mr. Keen?”

“No more than anybody else who comes to us as a client. There was nothing offensive in the surveillance.” He shrugged his shoulders and made a deprecating gesture. “Ours is a business, my dear sir, like any other. We, of course, are obliged to know about people who call on us. Last week you wrote me, and I immediately set every wheel in motion; in other words, I had you under observation from the day I received your letter to this very moment.”

“You learned much concerning me?” asked Harren quietly.

“Exactly, my dear sir.”

“But,” continued Harren with a touch of malice, “you didn’t learn that my leave is up to-morrow, did you?”

“Yes, I learned that, too.”

“Then why did you give me an appointment for the day after to-morrow?” demanded the young man bluntly.

The Tracer looked him squarely in the eye. “Your leave is to be extended,” he said.

“What?”

“Exactly. It has been extended one week.”

“How do you know that?”

“You applied for extension, did you not?”

“Yes,” said Harren, turning red, “but I don’t see how you knew that I—”

“By cable?”

“Y-yes.”

“There’s a cablegram in your rooms at this very moment,” said the Tracer carelessly. “You have the extension you desired. And now, Captain Harren,” with a singularly pleasant smile, “what can I do to help you to a pursuit of that true happiness which is guaranteed for all good citizens under our Constitution?”

Captain Harren crossed his long legs, dropping one knee over the other, and deliberately surveyed his interrogator.

“I really have no right to come to you,” he said slowly. “Your prospectus distinctly states that Keen & Co. undertake to find live people, and I don’t know whether the person I am seeking is alive or—or—”

His steady voice faltered; the Tracer watched him curiously.

“Of course, that is important,” he said. “If she is dead—”

“She!”

“Didn’t you say ‘she,’ Captain?”

“No, I did not.”

“I beg your pardon, then, for anticipating you,” said the Tracer carelessly.

“Anticipating? How do you know it is not a man I am in search of?” demanded Harren.

“Captain Harren, you are unmarried and have no son; you have no father, no brother, no sister. Therefore I infer—several things—for example, that you are in love.”

“I? In love?”

“Desperately, Captain.”

“Your inferences seem to satisfy you, at least,” said Harren almost sullenly, “but they don’t satisfy me—clever as they appear to be.”

“Exactly. Then you are not in love?”

“I don’t know whether I am or not.”

“I do,” said the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“Then you know more than I,” retorted Harren sharply.

“But that is my business—to know more than you do,” returned Mr. Keen patiently. “Else why are you here to consult me?” And as Harren made no reply: “I have seen thousands and thousands of people in love. I have reduced the superficial muscular phenomena and facial symptomatic aspect of such people to an exact science founded upon a schedule approximating the Bertillon system of records. And,” he added, smiling, “out of the twenty-seven known vocal variations your voice betrays twenty-five unmistakable symptoms; and out of the sixteen reflex muscular symptoms your face has furnished six, your hands three, your limbs and feet six. Then there are other superficial symptoms—”

“Good heavens!” broke in Harren; “how can you prove a man to be in love when he himself doesn’t know whether he is or not? If a man isn’t in love no Bertillon system can make him so; and if a man doesn’t know whether or not he is in love, who can tell him the truth?”

“I can,” said the Tracer calmly.

“What! When I tell you I myself don’t know?”

“That,” said the Tracer, smiling, “is the final and convincing symptom. You don’t know. I know because you don’t know. That is the easiest way to be sure that you are in love, Captain Harren, because you always are when you are not sure. You’d know if you were not in love. Now, my dear sir, you may lay your case confidently before me.”

Harren, unconvinced, sat frowning and biting his lip and twisting his short, crisp mustache which the tropical sun had turned straw color and curly.

“I feel like a fool to tell you,” he said. “I’m not an imaginative man, Mr. Keen; I’m not fanciful, not sentimental. I’m perfectly healthy, perfectly normal—a very busy man in my profession, with no time and no inclination to fall in love.”

“Just the sort of man who does it,” commented Keen. “Continue.”

Harren fidgeted about in his chair, looked out of the window, squinted at the ceiling, then straightened up, folding his arms with sudden determination.

“I’d rather be boloed than tell you,” he said. “Perhaps, after all, I am a lunatic; perhaps I’ve had a touch of the Luzon sun and don’t know it.”

“I’ll be the judge,” said the Tracer, smiling.

“Very well, sir. Then I’ll begin by telling you that I’ve seen a ghost.”

“There are such things,” observed Keen quietly.

“Oh, I don’t mean one of those fabled sheeted creatures that float about at night; I mean a phantom—a real phantom—in the sunlight—standing before my very eyes in broad day!… Now do you feel inclined to go on with my case, Mr. Keen?”

“Certainly,” replied the Tracer gravely. “Please continue, Captain Harren.”

“All right, then. Here’s the beginning of it: Three years ago, here in New York, drifting along Fifth Avenue with the crowd, I looked up to encounter the most wonderful pair of eyes that I ever beheld—that any living man ever beheld! The most—wonderfully—beautiful—”

He sat so long immersed in retrospection that the Tracer said: “I am listening, Captain,” and the Captain woke up with a start.

“What was I saying? How far had I proceeded?”

“Only to the eyes.”

“Oh, I see! The eyes were dark, sir, dark and lovely beyond any power of description. The hair was also dark—very soft and thick and—er—wavy and dark. The face was extremely youthful, and ornamental to the uttermost verges of a beauty so exquisite that, were I to attempt to formulate for you its individual attractions, I should, I fear, transgress the strictly rigid bounds of that reticence which becomes a gentleman in complete possession of his senses.”

“Exactly,” mused the Tracer.

“Also,” continued Captain Harren, with growing animation, “to attempt to describe her figure would be utterly useless, because I am a practical man and not a poet, nor do I read poetry or indulge in futile novels or romances of any description. Therefore I can only add that it was a figure, a poise, absolutely faultless, youthful, beautiful, erect, wholesome, gracious, graceful, charmingly buoyant and—well, I cannot describe her figure, and I shall not try.”

“Exactly; don’t try.”

“No,” said Harren mournfully, “it is useless”; and he relapsed into enchanted retrospection.

“Who was she?” asked Mr. Keen softly.

“I don’t know.”

“You never again saw her?”

“Mr. Keen, I—I am not ill-bred, but I simply could not help following her. She was so b-b-beautiful that it hurt; and I only wanted to look at her; I didn’t mind being hurt. So I walked on and on, and sometimes I’d pass her and sometimes I’d let her pass me, and when she wasn’t looking I’d look—not offensively, but just because I couldn’t help it. And all the time my senses were humming like a top and my heart kept jumping to get into my throat, and I hadn’t a notion where I was going or what time it was or what day of the week. She didn’t see me; she didn’t dream that I was looking at her; she didn’t know me from any of the thousand silk-hatted, frock-coated men who passed and repassed her on Fifth Avenue. And when she went into St. Berold’s Church, I went, too, and I stood where I could see her and where she couldn’t see me. It was like a touch of the Luzon sun, Mr. Keen. And then she came out and got into a Fifth Avenue stage, and I got in, too. And whenever she looked away I looked at her—without the slightest offense, Mr. Keen, until, once, she caught my eye—”

He passed an unsteady hand over his forehead.

“For a moment we looked full at one another,” he continued. “I got red, sir; I felt it, and I couldn’t look away. And when I turned color like a blooming beet, she began to turn pink like a rosebud, and she looked full into my eyes with such a wonderful purity, such exquisite innocence, that I—I never felt so near—er—heaven in my life! No, sir, not even when they ambushed us at Manoa Wells—but that’s another thing—only it is part of this business.”

He tightened his clasped hands over his knee until the knuckles whitened.

“That’s my story, Mr. Keen,” he said crisply.

“All of it?”

Harren looked at the floor, then at Keen: “No, not all. You’ll think me a lunatic if I tell you all.”

“Oh, you saw her again?”

“N-never! That is—”

“Never?”

“Not in—in the flesh.”

“Oh, in dreams?”

Harren stirred uneasily. “I don’t know what you call them. I have seen her since—in the sunlight, in the open, in my quarters in Manila, standing there perfectly distinct, looking at me with such strange, beautiful eyes—”

“Go on,” said the Tracer, nodding.

“What else is there to say?” muttered Harren.

“You saw her—or a phantom which resembled her. Did she speak?”

“No.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“N-no. Once I held out my—my arms.”

“What happened?”

“She wasn’t there,” said Harren simply.

“She vanished?”

“No—I don’t know. I—I didn’t see her any more.”

“Didn’t she fade?”

“No. I can’t explain. She—there was only myself in the room.”

“How many times has she appeared to you?”

“A great many times.”

“In your room?”

“Yes. And in the road under a vertical sun; in the forest, in the paddy fields. I have seen her passing through the hallway of a friend’s house—turning on the stair to look back at me! I saw her standing just back of the firing-line at Manoa Wells when we were preparing to rush the forts, and it scared me so that I jumped forward to draw her back. But—she wasn’t there, Mr. Keen….

“On the transport she stood facing me on deck one moonlit evening for five minutes. I saw her in ’Frisco; she sat in the Pullman twice between Denver and this city. Twice in my room at the Vice-Regent she has sat opposite me at midday, so clear, so beautiful, so real that—that I could scarcely believe she was only a—a—” He hesitated.

“The apparition of her own subconscious self,” said the Tracer quietly. “Science has been forced to admit such things, and, as you know, we are on the verge of understanding the alphabet of some of the unknown forces which we must some day reckon with.”

Harren, tense, a trifle pale, gazed at him earnestly.

“Do you believe in such things?”

“How can I avoid believing?” said the Tracer. “Every day, in my profession, we have proof of the existence of forces for which we have as yet no explanation—or, at best, a very crude one. I have had case after case of premonition; case after case of dual and even multiple personality; case after case where apparitions played a vital part in the plot which was brought to me to investigate. I’ll tell you this, Captain: I, personally, never saw an apparition, never was obsessed by premonitions, never received any communications from the outer void. But I have had to do with those who undoubtedly did. Therefore I listen with all seriousness and respect to what you tell me.”

“Suppose,” said Harren, growing suddenly red, “that I should tell you I have succeeded in photographing this phantom.”

The Tracer sat silent. He was astounded, but, he did not betray it.

“You have that photograph, Captain Harren?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“In my rooms.”

“You wish me to see it?”

Harren hesitated. “I—there is—seems to be—something almost sacred to me in that photograph…. You understand me, do you not? Yet, if it will help you in finding her—”

“Oh,” said the Tracer in guileless astonishment, “you desire to find this young lady. Why?”

Harren stared. “Why? Why do I want to find her? Man, I—I can’t live without her!”

“I thought you were not certain whether you really could be in love.”

The hot color in the Captain’s bronzed cheeks mounted to his hair.

“Exactly,” purred the Tracer, looking out of the window. “Suppose we walk around to your rooms after luncheon. Shall we?”

Harren picked up his hat and gloves, hesitating, lingering on the threshold. “You don’t think she is—ah—dead?” he asked unsteadily.

“No,” said Mr. Keen, “I don’t.”

“Because,” said Harren wistfully, “her apparition is so superbly healthy and—and glowing with youth and life—”

“That is probably what sent it half the world over to confront you,” said the Tracer gravely; “youth and life aglow with spiritual health. I think, Captain, that she has been seeing you, too, during these three years, but probably only in her dreams—memories of your encounters with her subconscious self floating over continents and oceans in a quest of which her waking intelligence is innocently unaware.”

The Captain colored like a schoolboy, lingering at the door, hat in hand. Then he straightened up to the full height of his slim but powerful figure.

“At three?” he inquired bluntly.

“At three o’clock in your room, Hotel Vice-Regent. Good morning, Captain.”

“Good morning,” said Harren dreamily, and walked away, head bent, gray eyes lost in retrospection, and on his lean, bronzed, attractive face an afterglow of color wholly becoming.

CHAPTER IX

When the Tracer of Lost Persons entered Captain Harren’s room at the Hotel Vice-Regent that afternoon he found the young man standing at a center table, pencil in hand, studying a sheet of paper which was covered with letters and figures.

The two men eyed one another in silence for a moment, then Harren pointed grimly to the confusion of letters and figures covering dozens of scattered sheets lying on the table.

“That’s part of my madness,” he said with a short laugh. “Can you make anything of such lunatic work?”

The Tracer picked up a sheet of paper covered with letters of the alphabet and Roman and Arabic numerals. He dropped it presently and picked up another comparatively blank sheet, on which were the following figures:

He studied it for a while, then glanced interrogatively at Harren.

“It’s nothing,” said Harren. “I’ve been groping for three years—but it’s no use. That’s lunatics’ work.” He wheeled squarely on his heels, looking straight at the Tracer. “Do you think I’ve had a touch of the sun?”

“No,” said Mr. Keen, drawing a chair to the table. “Saner men than you or I have spent a lifetime over this so-called Seal of Solomon.” He laid his finger on the two symbols—

Then, looking across the table at Harren: “What,” he asked, “has the Seal of Solomon to do with your case?”

“She—” muttered Harren, and fell silent.

The Tracer waited; Harren said nothing.

“Where is the photograph?”

Harren unlocked a drawer in the table, hesitated, looked strangely at the Tracer.

“Mr. Keen,” he said, “there is nothing on earth I hold more sacred than this. There is only one thing in the world that could justify me in showing it to a living soul—my—my desire to find—her—”

“No,” said Keen coolly, “that is not enough to justify you—the mere desire to find the living original of this apparition. Nothing could justify your showing it unless you love her.”

Harren held the picture tightly, staring full at the Tracer. A dull flush mounted to his forehead, and very slowly he laid the picture before the Tracer of Lost Persons.

Minute after minute sped while the Tracer bent above the photograph, his finely modeled features absolutely devoid of expression. Harren had drawn his chair beside him, and now sat leaning forward, bronzed cheek resting in his hand, staring fixedly at the picture.

“When was this—this photograph taken?” asked the Tracer quietly.

“The day after I arrived in New York. I was here, alone, smoking my pipe and glancing over the evening paper just before dressing for dinner. It was growing rather dark in the room; I had not turned on the electric light. My camera lay on the table—there it is!—that kodak. I had taken a few snapshots on shipboard; there was one film left.”

He leaned more heavily on his elbow, eyes fixed upon the picture.

“It was almost dark,” he repeated. “I laid aside the evening paper and stood up, thinking about dressing for dinner, when my eyes happened to fall on the camera. It occurred to me that I might as well unload it, let the unused film go, and send the roll to be developed and printed; and I picked up the camera—”

“Yes,” said the Tracer softly.

“I picked it up and was starting toward the window where there remained enough daylight to see by—”

The Tracer nodded gently.

“Then I saw her!” said Harren under his breath.

“Where?”

“There—standing by that window. You can see the window and curtain in the photograph.”

The Tracer gazed intently at the picture.

“She looked at me,” said Harren, steadying his voice. “She was as real as you are, and she stood there, smiling faintly, her dark, lovely eyes meeting mine.”

“Did you speak?”

“No.”

“How long did she remain there?”

“I don’t know—time seemed to stop—the world—everything grew still…. Then, little by little, something began to stir under my stunned senses—that germ of misgiving, that dreadful doubt of my own sanity…. I scarcely knew what I was doing when I took the photograph; besides, it had grown quite dark, and I could scarcely see her.” He drew himself erect with a nervous movement. “How on earth could I have obtained that photograph of her in the darkness?” he demanded.

“N-rays,” said the Tracer coolly. “It has been done in France.”

“Yes, from living people, but—”

“What the N-ray is in living organisms, we must call, for lack of a better term, the subaura in the phantom.”

They bent over the photograph together. Presently the Tracer said: “She is very, very beautiful?”

Harren’s dry lips unclosed, but he uttered no sound.

“She is beautiful, is she not?” repeated the Tracer, turning to look at the young man.

“Can you not see she is?” he asked impatiently.

“No,” said the Tracer.

Harren stared at him.

“Captain Harren,” continued the Tracer, “I can see nothing upon this bit of paper that resembles in the remotest degree a human face or figure.”

Harren turned white.

“Not that I doubt that you can see it,” pursued the Tracer calmly. “I simply repeat that I see absolutely nothing on this paper except a part of a curtain, a window pane, and—and—”

“What! for God’s sake!” cried Harren hoarsely.

“I don’t know yet. Wait; let me study it.”

“Can you not see her face, her eyes? Don’t you see that exquisite slim figure standing there by the curtain?” demanded Harren, laying his shaking finger on the photograph. “Why, man, it is as clear, as clean-cut, as distinct as though the picture had been taken in sunlight! Do you mean to say that there is nothing there—that I am crazy?”

“No. Wait.”

“Wait! How can I wait when you sit staring at her picture and telling me that you can’t see it, but that it is doubtless there? Are you deceiving me, Mr. Keen? Are you trying to humor me, trying to be kind to me, knowing all the while that I’m crazy—”

“Wait, man! You are no more crazy than I am. I tell you that I can see something on the window pane—”

He suddenly sprang up and walked to the window, leaning close and examining the glass. Harren followed and laid his hand lightly over the pane.

“Do you see any marks on the glass?” demanded Keen.

Harren shook his head.

“Have you a magnifying glass?” asked the Tracer.

Harren pointed back to the table, and they returned to the photograph, the Tracer bending over it and examining it through the glass.

“All I see,” he said, still studying the photograph, “is a corner of a curtain and a window on which certain figures seem to have been cut…. Look, Captain Harren, can you see them?”

“I see some marks—some squares.”

“You can’t see anything written on that pane—as though cut by a diamond?”

“Nothing distinct.”

“But you see her?”

“Perfectly.”

“In minute detail?”

“Yes.”

The Tracer thought a moment: “Does she wear a ring?”

“Yes; can’t you see?”

“Draw it for me.”

They seated themselves side by side, and Harren drew a rough sketch of the ring which he insisted was so plainly visible on her hand:

“Oh,” observed the Tracer, “she wears the Seal of Solomon on her ring.”

Harren looked up at him. “That symbol has haunted me persistently for three years,” he said. “I have found it everywhere—on articles that I buy, on house furniture, on the belts of dead ladrones, on the hilts of daggers, on the funnels of steamers, on the headstalls of horses. If they put a laundry mark on my linen it’s certain to be this! If I buy a box of matches the sign is on it. Why, I’ve even seen it on the brilliant wings of tropical insects. It’s got on my nerves. I dream about it.”

“And you buy books about it and try to work out its mystical meaning?” suggested the Tracer, smiling.

But Harren’s gray eyes were serious. He said: “She never comes to me without that symbol somewhere about her…. I told you she never spoke to me. That is true; yet once, in a vivid dream of her, she did speak. I—I was almost ashamed to tell you of that.”

“Tell me.”

“A—a dream? Do you wish to know what I dreamed?”

“Yes—if it was a dream.”

“It was. I was asleep on the deck of the Mindinao, dead tired after a fruitless hike. I dreamed she came toward me through a young woodland all lighted by the sun, and in her hands she held masses of that wild flower we call Solomon’s Seal. And she said—in the voice I know must be like hers: ‘If you could only read! If you would only understand the message I send you! It is everywhere on earth for you to read, if you only would!’

“I said: ‘Is the message in the seal? Is that the key to it?’

“She nodded, laughing, burying her face in the flowers, and said:

“‘Perhaps I can write it more plainly for you some day; I will try very, very hard.’

“And after that she went away—not swiftly—for I saw her at moments far away in the woods; but I must have confused her with the glimmering shafts of sunlight, and in a little while the woodland grew dark and I woke with the racket of a Colt’s automatic in my ears.”

He passed his sun-bronzed hand over his face, hesitated, then leaned over the photograph once more, which the Tracer was studying intently through the magnifying glass.

“There is something on that window in the photograph which I’m going to copy,” he said. “Please shove a pad and pencil toward me.”

Still examining the photograph through the glass which he held in his right hand, Mr. Keen picked up the pencil and, feeling for the pad, began very slowly to form the following series of symbols:

“What on earth are you doing?” muttered Captain Harren, twisting his short mustache in perplexity.

“I am copying what I see through this magnifying glass written on the window pane in the photograph,” said the Tracer calmly. “Can’t you see those marks?”

“I—I do now; I never noticed them before particularly—only that there were scratches there.”

When at length the Tracer had finished his work he sat, chin on hand, examining it in silence. Presently he turned toward Harren, smiling.

“Well?” inquired the younger man impatiently; “do those scratches representing Solomon’s Seal mean anything?”

“It’s the strangest cipher I ever encountered,” said Mr. Keen—“the strangest I ever heard of. I have seen hundreds of ciphers—hundreds—secret codes of the State Department, secret military codes, elaborate Oriental ciphers, symbols used in commercial transactions, symbols used by criminals and every species of malefactor. And every one of them can be solved with time and patience and a little knowledge of the subject. But this”—he sat looking at it with eyes half closed—“this is too simple.”

“Simple!”

“Very. It’s so simple that it’s baffling.”

“Do you mean to say you are going to be able to find a meaning in squares and crosses?”

“I—I don’t believe it is going to be so very difficult to translate them.”

“Great guns!” said the Captain. “Do you mean to say that you can ultimately translate that cipher?”

The Tracer smiled. “Let’s examine it for repetitions first. Here we have this symbol

repeated five times. It’s likely to be the letter E. I think—” His voice ceased; for a quarter of an hour he pored over the symbols, pencil in hand, checking off some, substituting a letter here and there.

“No,” he said; “the usual doesn’t work in this case. It’s an absurdly simple cipher. I have a notion that numbers play a part in it—you see where these crossed squares are bracketed—those must be numbers requiring two figures—”

He fell silent again, and for another quarter of an hour he remained motionless, immersed in the problem before him, Harren frowning at the paper over his shoulder.

CHAPTER X

“Come!” said the Tracer suddenly; “this won’t do. There are too few symbols to give us a key; too few repetitions to furnish us with any key basis. Come, Captain, let us use our intellects; let us talk it over with that paper lying there between us. It’s a simple cipher—a childishly simple one if we use our wits. Now, sir, what I see repeated before us on this sheet of paper is merely one of the forms of a symbol known as Solomon’s Seal. The symbol is, as we see, repeated a great many times. Every seal

has been dotted or crossed on some one of the lines composing it; some seals are coupled with brackets and armatures.”

“What of it?” inquired Harren vacantly.

“Well, sir, in the first place, that symbol is supposed to represent the spiritual and material, as you know. What else do you know about it?”

“Nothing. I bought a book about it, but made nothing of it.”

“Isn’t it supposed,” asked Mr. Keen, “to contain within itself the nine numerals, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and even the zero symbol?”

“I believe so.”

“Exactly. Here’s the seal—

Now I’ll mark the one, two, and three by crossing the lines, like this:

one, two, three,

Now, eliminating all lines not crossed there remains:

the one, the two, the three,

And here is the entire series:

and the zero—”

A sudden excitement stirred Harren; he leaned over the paper, gazing earnestly at the cipher; the Tracer rose and glanced around the room as though in search of something.

“Is there a telephone here?” he asked.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t give this up just yet,” exclaimed Harren. “These things mean numbers; don’t you see? Look at that!” pointing to a linked pair of seals,

“That means the number nineteen! You can form it by using only the crossed lines of the seal.

Don’t you see, Mr. Keen?”

“Yes, Captain Harren, the cipher is, as you say, very plain; quite as easy to read as so much handwriting. That is why I wish to use your telephone—at once, if you please.”

“It’s in my bedroom; you don’t mind if I go on working out this cipher while you’re telephoning?”

“Not in the least,” said the Tracer blandly. He walked into the Captain’s bedroom, closing the door behind him; then he stepped over to the telephone, unhooked the receiver, and called up his own headquarters.

“Hello. This is Mr. Keen. I want to speak to Miss Borrow.”

In a few moments Miss Borrow answered: “I am here, Mr. Keen.”

“Good. Look up the name Inwood. Try New York first—Edith Inwood is the name. Look sharp, please; I am holding the wire.”

He held it for ten full minutes; then Miss Borrow’s low voice called him over the wire.

“Go ahead,” said the Tracer quietly.

“There is only one Edith Inwood in New York, Mr. Keen—Miss Edith Inwood, graduate of Barnard, 1902—left an orphan 1903 and obliged to support herself—became an assistant to Professor Boggs of the Museum of Inscriptions. Is considered an authority upon Arabian cryptograms. Has written a monograph on the Herati symbol—a short treatise on the Swastika. She is twenty-four years of age. Do you require further details?”

“No,” said the Tracer; “please ring off.”

Then he called up General Information. “I want the Museum of Inscriptions. Get me their number, please.” After a moment: “Is this the Museum of Inscriptions?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Is Professor Boggs there?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Is this Professor Boggs?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Could you find time to decipher an inscription for me at once?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Of course I know you are extremely busy, but have you no assistant who could do it?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“What did you say her name is? Miss Inwood?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Oh! And will the young lady translate the inscription at once if I send a copy of it to her by messenger?”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

“Thank you very much, Professor. I will send a messenger to Miss Inwood with a copy of the inscription. Good-by.”

He hung up the receiver, turned thoughtfully, opened the door again, and walked into the sunlit living room.

“Look here!” cried the Captain in a high state of excitement. “I’ve got a lot of numbers out of it already.”

“Wonderful!” murmured the Tracer, looking over the young man’s broad shoulders at a sheet of paper bearing these numbers:

9—14—5—22—5—18—19—1—23—25—15—21—2—21—20—15—14—3—5—9—12—15—22—5—25—15—21—5—4—9—20—8—9—14—23—15—15—4.

“Marvelous!” repeated the Tracer, smiling. “Now what do you suppose those numbers can stand for?”

“Letters!” announced the Captain triumphantly. “Take the number nine, for example. The ninth letter in the alphabet is I! Mr. Keen, suppose we try writing down the letters according to that system!”

“Suppose we do,” agreed the Tracer gravely.

So, counting under his breath, the young man set down the letters in the following order, not attempting to group them into words:

I N E V E R S A W Y O U B U T O N C E
I L O V E Y O U E D I T H I N W O O D

Then he leaned back, excited, triumphant.

“There you are!” he said; “only, of course, it makes no sense.” He examined it in silence, and gradually a hopeless expression effaced the animation. “How the deuce am I going to separate that mass of letters into words?” he muttered.

“This way,” said the Tracer, smilingly taking the pencil from his fingers, and he wrote:
I—NEVER—SAW—YOU—BUT—ONCE. I—LOVE—YOU. EDITH INWOOD.

Then he laid the pencil on the table and walked to the window.

Once or twice he fancied that he heard incoherent sounds behind him. And after a while he turned, retracing his steps leisurely. Captain Harren, extremely pink, stood tugging at his short mustache and studying the papers on the desk.

“Well?” inquired the Tracer, amused.

The young man pointed to the translation with unsteady finger. “W-what on earth does that mean?” he demanded shakily. “Who is Edith Inwood? W-what on earth does that cryptogram mean on the window pane in the photograph? How did it come there? It isn’t on my window pane, you see!”

The Tracer said quietly: “That is not a photograph of your window.”

“What!”

“No, Captain. Here! Look at it closely through this glass. There are sixteen small panes in that sash; now count the panes in your window—eight! Besides, look at that curtain. It is made of some figured stuff like chintz. Now, look at your own curtain yonder! It is of plain velour.”

“But—but I took that photograph! She stood there—there by that very window!”

The Tracer leaned over the photograph, examining it through the glass. And, studying it, he said: “Do you still see her in this photograph, Captain Harren?”

“Certainly. Can you not see her?”

“No,” murmured the Tracer, “but I see the window which she really stood by when her phantom came here seeking you. And that is sufficient. Come, Captain Harren, we are going out together.”

The Captain looked at him earnestly; something in Mr. Keen’s eyes seemed to fascinate him.

“You think that—that it’s likely we are g-going to see—her!” he faltered.

“If I were you,” mused the Tracer of Lost Persons, joining the tips of his lean fingers meditatively—“If I were you I should wear a silk hat and a frock coat. It’s—it’s afternoon, anyhow,” he added deprecatingly, “and we are liable to make a call.”

Captain Harren turned like a man in a dream and entered his bedroom. And when he emerged he was dressed and groomed with pathetic precision.

“Mr. Keen,” he said, “I—I don’t know why I am d-daring to hope for all s-sorts of things. Nothing you have said really warrants it. But somehow I’m venturing to cherish an absurd notion that I may s-see her.”

“Perhaps,” said the Tracer, smiling.

“Mr. Keen! You wouldn’t say that if—if there was no chance, would you? You wouldn’t dash a fellow’s hopes—”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Keen. “I tell you frankly that I expect to find her.”

“To-day?”

“We’ll see,” said Mr. Keen guardedly. “Come, Captain, don’t look that way! Courage, sir! We are about to execute a turning movement; but you look like a Russian general on his way to the south front.”

Harren managed to laugh; they went out, side by side, descended the elevator, and found a cab at the porte-cochère. Mr. Keen gave the directions and followed the Captain into the cab.

“Now,” he said, as they wheeled south, “we are first going to visit the Museum of Inscriptions and have this cipher translation verified. Here is the cipher as I copied it. Hold it tightly, Captain; we’ve only a few blocks to drive.”

Indeed they were already nearly there. The hansom drew up in front of a plain granite building wedged in between some rather elaborate private dwelling-houses. Over the door were letters of dull bronze:

AMERICAN MUSEUM OF INSCRIPTIONS
and the two men descended and entered a wide marble hall lined with glass-covered cabinets containing plaster casts of various ancient inscriptions and a few bronze and marble originals. Several female frumps were nosing the exhibits.

An attendant in livery stood in the middle distance. The Tracer walked over to him. “I have an appointment to consult Miss Inwood,” he whispered.

“This way, sir,” nodded the attendant, and the Tracer signaled the Captain to follow.

They climbed several marble stairways, crossed a rotunda, and entered a room—a sort of library. Beyond was a door which bore the inscription:

ASSISTANT CURATOR

“Now,” said the Tracer of Lost Persons in a low voice to Captain Harren, “I am going to ask you to sit here for a few minutes while I interview the assistant curator. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, I don’t mind,” said Harren wearily, “only, when are we going to begin to search for—her?”

“Very soon—I may say extremely soon,” said Mr. Keen gravely. “By the way, I think I’ll take that sheet of paper on which I copied the cipher. Thank you. I won’t be long.”

The attendant had vanished. Captain Harren sat down by a window and gazed out into the late afternoon sunshine. The Tracer of Lost Persons, treading softly across the carpeted floor, approached the sanctuary, turned the handle, and walked in, carefully closing the door behind him.

There was a young girl seated at a desk by an open window; she looked up quietly as he entered, then rose leisurely.

“Miss Inwood?”

“Yes.”

She was slender, dark-eyed, dark-haired—a lovely, wholesome young creature; gracious and graceful. And that was all—for the Tracer of Lost Persons could not see through the eyes of Captain Harren, and perhaps that is why he was not able to discern a miracle of beauty in the pretty girl who confronted him—no magic and matchless marvel of transcendent loveliness—only a quiet, sweet-faced, dark-eyed young girl whose features and figure were attractive in the manner that youth is always attractive. But then it is a gift of the gods to see through eyes anointed by the gods.

The Tracer touched his gray mustache and bowed; the girl bowed very sweetly.

“You are Mr. Keen,” she said; “you have an inscription for me to translate.”

“A mystery for young eyes to interpret,” he said, smiling. “May I sit here—and tell my story before I show you my inscription?”

“Please do,” she said, seating herself at her desk and facing him, one slender white hand supporting the oval of her face.

The Tracer drew his chair a little forward. “It is a curious matter,” he said. “May I give you a brief outline of the details?”

“By all means, Mr. Keen.”

“Then let me begin by saying that the inscription of which I have a copy was probably scratched upon a window pane by means of a diamond.”

“Oh! Then—then it is not an ancient inscription, Mr. Keen.”

“The theme is ancient—the oldest theme in the world—love! The cipher is old—as old as King Solomon.” She looked up quickly. The Tracer, apparently engrossed in his own story, went on with it. “Three years ago the young girl who wrote this inscription upon the window pane of her—her bedroom, I think it was—fell in love. Do you follow me, Miss Inwood?”

Miss Inwood sat very still—wide, dark eyes fixed on him.

“Fell in love,” repeated the Tracer musingly, “not in the ordinary way. That is the point, you see. No, she fell in love at first sight; fell in love with a young man whom she never before had seen, never again beheld—and never forgot. Do you still follow me, Miss Inwood?”

She made the slightest motion with her lips.

“No,” mused the Tracer of Lost Persons, “she never forgot him. I am not sure, but I think she sometimes dreamed of him. She dreamed of him awake, too. Once she inscribed a message to him, cutting it with the diamond in her ring on the window pane—”

A slight sound escaped from Miss Inwood’s lips. “I beg your pardon,” said the Tracer, “did you say something?”

The girl had risen, pale, astounded, incredulous.

“Who are you?” she faltered. “What has this—this story to do with me?”

“Child,” said the Tracer of Lost Persons, “the Seal of Solomon is a splendid mystery. All of heaven and earth are included within its symbol. And more, more than you dream of, more than I dare fathom; and I am an old man, my child—old, alone, with nobody to fear for, nothing to dread, not even the end of all—because I am ready for that, too. Yet I, having nothing on earth to dread, dare not fathom what that symbol may mean, nor what vast powers it may exert on life. God knows. It may be the very signet of Fate itself; the sign manual of Destiny.”

He drew the paper from his pocket, unrolled it, and spread it out under her frightened eyes.

“That!” she whispered, steadying herself blindly against the arm he offered. She stood a moment so, then, shuddering, covered her eyes with both hands. The Tracer of Lost Persons looked at her, turned and opened the door.

“Captain Harren!” he called quietly. Harren, pacing the anteroom, turned and came forward. As he entered the door he caught sight of the girl crouching by the window, her face hidden in her hands, and at the same moment she dropped her hands and looked straight at him.

“You!” she gasped.

The Tracer of Lost Persons stepped out, closing the door. For a moment he stood there, tall, gaunt, gray, staring vacantly into space.

“She was beautiful—when she looked at him,” he muttered.

For another minute he stood there, hesitating, glancing backward at the closed door. Then he went away, stooping slightly, his top hat held close against the breast of his tightly buttoned frock coat.

CHAPTER XI

[The Marble Man]

During his first year of wedded bliss, Gatewood cut the club. When Kerns wanted to see him he had to call like other people or, like other people, accept young Mrs. Gatewood’s invitations.

“Why,” said Gatewood scornfully, “should I, thirty-four years of age and safely married, go to a club? Why should I, at my age, idle with a lot of idlers and listen to stuffy stories from stuffier individuals? Do you think that stale tobacco smoke, and the idiotically reiterated click of billiard balls, and the vacant stare of the fashionably brainless, and the meaningless exchange of banalities with the intellectually aimless have any attractions for me?”

Mrs. Gatewood raised her pretty eyes in silence; Kerns returned her amused gaze rather blankly.

“Clubs!” sniffed Gatewood. “What are clubs but pretexts for wasting time? What mental, what spiritual stimulus can a man expect to find in a club? Why, Kerns, when I look back a year and think what I was, and when I look at you and think what you still are—”

“John,” said Mrs. Gatewood softly.

“Oh, he knows it!” insisted her husband, “don’t you, Tommy? You know the sort of life you’re leading, don’t you? You know what a miserable, aimless, selfish, unambitious, pitiable existence an unmarried man leads who lives at his club; don’t you?”

“Certainly,” said Kerns, blinking into the smiling gaze of Mrs. Gatewood.

“Then why don’t you marry?”

But Kerns had risen and was making his adieus with cheerful decision; and Mrs. Gatewood was laughing as she gave him her slender hand.

“Now I know a girl—” began Gatewood; but his wife was still speaking to Kerns, so he circled around them, politely suppressing the excitement of a sudden idea struggling for utterance.

Mrs. Gatewood was saying: “I do wish John would go to his clubs occasionally. Because a man is married is no reason for his losing touch with his clubs—”

“I know a girl,” broke in Gatewood excitedly, laying his arm on Kerns’s to detain him; but Kerns slid sideways through the door with a smile so noncommittal that Mrs. Gatewood laughed again and, linking her arm in her husband’s, faced partly toward him. This maneuver, and the slightest pressure of her shoulder, obliged her husband to begin a turning movement, so that Kerns might reasonably make his escape in the middle of Gatewood’s sentence; which he did with nimble and circumspect agility.

“I—I know a—” began Gatewood desperately, twisting his head over his shoulder, only to hear the deadened patter of his friend’s feet over the velvet stair carpet and the subdued clang of the front door.

“Isn’t it extraordinary?” he said to his wife. “I’ve been trying to tell Tommy, every time he comes here, about a girl I know—just the very girl he ought to marry; and something prevents him from listening every time.”

The attractive young matron beside him turned her face so that her eyes were directly in line with his.

“Did you ever know any people named Manners?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

“You never knew a girl named Marjorie Manners, did you, John?”

“No. What about her?”

“You never heard Mr. Kerns speak of her, did you, dear?”

“No, never. Tommy doesn’t talk about girls.”

“You never heard him speak of a Mrs. Stanley?”

“Never. Who are these two women?”

“One and the same, dear. Marjorie Manners married an Englishman named Stanley six years ago. Do you happen to recollect that Mr. Kerns took his vacation in England six years ago?”

“Yes. What of it?”

“He crossed to Southampton with Marjorie and her mother. He didn’t know she was going over to be married, and she didn’t tell him. She wrote to me about it, though. I was in school at Farmington; she left school to marry—a mere child of eighteen, undeveloped for her age, thin, almost scrawny, with pipe-stem arms and neck, red hair, a very sweet, full-lipped mouth, and gray eyes that were too big for her face.”

“Well,” said Gatewood with a short laugh, “what about it? You don’t think Kerns fell in love with an insect of that genus, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” smiled Mrs. Gatewood.

“Nonsense. Besides, what of it? She’s married, you say.”

“Her husband died of enteric at Ladysmith. She wrote me. She has never remarried. Think of it, John—in all these years she has never remarried!”

“Oh!” said Gatewood pityingly; “do you really suppose that Tommy Kerns has been nursing a blighted affection all these years without ever giving me an inkling? Besides, men don’t do that; men don’t curl up and blight. Besides, men don’t take any stock in big-eyed, flat-chested, red-headed pipe stems. Why do you think that Kerns ever cared for her?”

“I know he did.”

“How do you know it?”

“From Marjorie’s letters.”

“The conceited kid! Well, of all insufferable nerve! A man like Kerns—a man—one of the finest, noblest characters—spiritually, intellectually, physically—a practically faultless specimen of manhood! And a red-headed, spindle-legged—Oh, my! Oh, fizz! Dearest, men don’t worship a cage of bones with an eighteen-year-old soul in it—like a nervous canary pecking out at the world!”

“She created a furor in England,” observed his wife, smiling.

“Oh, I dare say she might over there. Besides, she’s doubtless fattened up since then. But if you suppose for one moment that Tommy could even remember a girl like that—”

Mrs. Gatewood smiled again—the wise, sweet smile of a young matron in whom her husband’s closest friend had confided. And after a moment or two the wise smile became more thoughtful and less assured; for that very day the Tracer of Lost Persons had called on her to inquire about a Mrs. Stanley—a new client of his who had recently bought a town house in East Eighty-third Street and a country house on Long Island; and who had applied to him to find her fugitive butler and a pint or two of family jewels. And, after her talk with the Tracer of Lost Persons, Mrs. Gatewood knew that her favorite among all her husband’s friends, Mr. Kerns, would never of his own volition go near that same Marjorie Manners who had flirted with him to the very perilous verge before she told him why she was going to England—and who, now a widow, had returned with her five-year-old daughter to dwell once more in the city of her ancestors.

Kerns had said very simply: “She has spoiled women for me—all except you, Mrs. Gatewood. And if Jack hadn’t married you—”

“I understand, Mr. Kerns. I’m awfully sorry.”

“Don’t feel sorry; only, if you can, call Jack off. He’s been perfectly possessed to marry me to somebody ever since he married you. And if I told him why I don’t care to consider the matter he wouldn’t believe me—he’d spend his life in trying to bring me around. Besides, I couldn’t ever tell him about—Marjorie Manners. Anyhow, nothing on earth could ever induce me to look at her again…. You say she is now a widow?”

“Yes, Mr. Kerns, and very beautiful.”

“Never again,” muttered Kerns. “Never! She was homely enough when I asked her to marry me. I don’t want to see her; I don’t want to know what she looks like. I’m glad she has changed so I wouldn’t recognize her, for that means the end of it all—the final elimination of the girl I remember on the ship…. It was probably a sort of diseased infatuation, wasn’t it, Mrs. Gatewood? Think of it! A few days on shipboard and—and I asked her to marry me!… I don’t blame her, after all, for letting me dangle. It was an excellent opportunity for her to study a rare species of idiot. She was justified and I am satisfied. Only, do call Jack off with a hint or two.”

“I shall try,” said young Mrs. Gatewood thoughtfully—very thoughtfully, for already every atom and fiber of her femininity was aroused in behalf of these two estranged young people whom Providence certainly had not meant to put asunder.

CHAPTER XII

“Nothing,” said Gatewood firmly, “can make me believe that Kerns ought not to marry somebody; and I’m never going to let up on him until he does. I’ll bet I could fix him for life if I called in the Tracer to help me. Isn’t it extraordinary how Kerns has kept out of it all these years?”

The attractive girl beside him turned her face once more so that her clear, sweet eyes were directly in line with his.

“It is extraordinary,” she said seriously. “I think you ought to drop in at the club some day when you can corner him and bully him.”

“I don’t want to go to the club,” said the infatuated man.

“Why, dear?”

He looked straight at her and she flushed prettily, while a tint of color touched his own face. Which was very nice of him. So she didn’t say what she was going to say—that it would be perhaps better for them both if he practiced on her an artistic absence now and then. Younger in years, she was more mature than he. She knew. But she was too much in love with him to salt their ambrosia with common sense or suggest economy in their use of the nectar bottle.

However, the gods attend to that, and she knew they would, and she let them. So one balmy evening late in May, when the new moon’s ghost floated through the upper haze, and the golden Diana above Manhattan turned flame color, and the electric lights began to glimmer along Fifth Avenue, and the first faint scent of the young summer freshened the foliage in square and park, Kerns, stopping at the club for a moment, found Gatewood seated at the same window they both were wont to haunt in earlier and more flippant days.

“Are you dining here?” inquired Kerns, pushing the electric button with enthusiasm. “Well, that’s the first glimmer of common sense you’ve betrayed since you’ve been married!”

“Dining here!” repeated Gatewood. “I should hope not! I am just going home—”

“He’s thoroughly cowed,” commented Kerns; “every married man you meet at the club is just going home.” But he continued to push the button, nevertheless.

Gatewood leaned back in his chair and gazed about him, nose in the air. “What a life!” he observed virtuously. “It’s all I can do to stand it for ten minutes. You’re here for the evening, I suppose?” he added pityingly.

“No,” said Kerns; “I’m going uptown to Billy Lee’s house to get my suit case. His family are out of town, and he is at Seabright, so he let me camp there until the workmen finish papering my rooms upstairs. I’m to lock up the house and send the key to the Burglar Alarm Company to-night. Then I go to Boston on the 12.10. Want to come? There’ll be a few doing.”

“To Boston! What for?”

“Contracts! We can go out to Cambridge when I’ve finished my business. There’ll be etwas doing.”

“Can’t you ever recover from being an undergraduate?” asked Gatewood, disgusted.

“Well—is there anything the matter with a man getting next to a little amusement in life?” asked Kerns. “Do you object to my being happy?”

“Amusement? You don’t know how to amuse yourself. You don’t know how to be happy. Here you sit, day after day, swallowing Martinis—” He paused to finish his own, then resumed: “Here you sit, day after day, intellectually stultified, unemotionally ignorant of the higher and better life—”

“No, I don’t. I’ve a book upstairs that tells all about that. I read it when I have holdovers—”

“Kerns, I wish to speak seriously. I’ve had it on my mind ever since I married. May I speak frankly?”

“Well, when I come back from Boston—”

“Because I know a girl,” interrupted Gatewood—“wait a moment, Tommy!”—as Kerns rose and sauntered toward the door—“you’ve plenty of time to catch your train and be civil, too! I mean to tell you about that girl, if you’ll listen.”

Kerns halted and turned upon his friend a pair of eyes, unwinking in their placid intelligence.

“I was going to say that I know a girl,” continued Gatewood, “who is just the sort of a girl you—”

“No, she isn’t!” said Kerns, wheeling to resume his progress toward the cloakroom.

“Tom!”

Kerns halted.

“You’re a fine specimen!” commented Gatewood scornfully. “You spent the best years of your life in persuading me to get married, and the first time I try to do the same for you, you make for the tall timber!”

“I know it,” admitted Kerns, unashamed; “I’m bashful. I’m a chipmunk for shyness, so I’ll say good night—”

“Come back,” said Gatewood coldly.

“But my suit case—”

“You left it at the Lee’s, didn’t you? Well, you’ve time enough to go there, get it, make your train, and listen to me, too. Look here, Kerns, have you any of the elements of decency about you?”

“No,” said Kerns, “not a single element.” He seated himself defiantly in the club window facing Gatewood and began to button his gloves. When he had finished he settled his new straw hat more comfortably on his head, and, leaning forward and balancing his malacca walking stick across his knees, gazed at Gatewood with composure.

“Crank up!” he said pleasantly; “I’m going in less than three minutes.” He pushed the electric knob as an afterthought, and when the gilt buttons of the club servant glimmered through the dusk, “Two more,” he explained briskly. After a few moments’ silence, broken by the tinkle of ice in thin glassware, Gatewood leaned forward, menacing his friend with an impressive forefinger:

“Did you or didn’t you once tell me that a decent citizen ought to marry?”

“I did, dear friend.”

“Did I or didn’t I do it?”

“In the words of the classic, you done it,” admitted Kerns.

“Was I or wasn’t I going to the devil before I had the sense to marry?” persisted Gatewood.

“You was! You was, dear friend!” said Kerns with enthusiasm. “You had almost went there ere I appeared and saved you.”

“Then why shouldn’t you marry and let me save you?”

“But I’m not going to the bowwows. I’m all right. I’m a decent citizen. I awake in the rosy dawn with a song on my lips; I softly whistle rag time as I button my collar; I warble a few delicious vagrant notes as I part my sparse hair; I’m not murderous before breakfast; I go downtown, singing, to my daily toil; I fish for fat contracts in Georgia marble; I return uptown immersed in a holy calm and the evening paper. I offer myself a cocktail; I bow and accept; I dress for dinner with the aid of a rascally valet, but—do I swear at him? No, dear friend; I say, ‘Henry, I have known far, far worse scoundrels than you. Thank you for filling up my bay rum with water. Bless you for wearing my imported hosiery! I deeply regret that my new shirts do not fit you, Henry!’ And my smile is a benediction upon that wayward scullion. Then, dear friend, why, why do you desire to offer me up upon the altar of unrest? What is a little wifey to me or I to any wifey?”

“Because,” said Gatewood irritated, “you offered me up. I’m happy and I want you to be—you great, hulking, self-satisfied symbol of supreme self-centered selfishness—”

“Oh, splash!” said Kerns feebly.

“Yes, you are. What do you do all day? Grub for money and study how to make life agreeable to yourself! Every minute of the day you are occupied in having a good time! You’ve admitted it! You wake up singing like a fool canary; you wear imported hosiery; you’ve made a soft, warm wallow for yourself at this club, and here you bask your life away, waddling downtown to nail contracts and cut coupons, and uptown to dinners and theaters, only to return and sprawl here in luxury without one single thought for posterity. Your crime is race suicide!”

“I—my—what!”

“Certainly. Some shirk taxes, some jury duty. You shirk fatherhood, and all its happy and sacred obligations! You deny posterity! You strike a blow at it! You flout it! You menace the future of this Republic! Your inertia is a crime against the people! Instead of pro bono publico your motto is pro bono tempo—for a good time! And, dog Latin or not, it’s the truth, and our great President—”

“Splash!” said Kerns, rising.

“I’ve a good mind,” said Gatewood indignantly, “to put the Tracer of Lost Persons on your trail. He’d rope you and tie you in record time!”

Kerns’s smile was a provocation.

“I’ll do it, too!” added Gatewood, losing his temper, “if you dare give me the chance.”

“Seriously,” inquired Kerns, delighted, “do you think your friend, Mr. Keen, could encompass my matrimony against my better sense and the full enjoyment of my unimpaired mental faculties?”

“Didn’t he—fortunately for me—force me into matrimony when I had never seen a woman I would look at twice? Didn’t you put him up to it? Very well, why can’t I put him on your trail then? Why can’t he do the same for you?”

“Try it, dear friend,” retorted Kerns courteously.

“Do you mean that you are not afraid? Do you mean you give me full liberty to set him on you? And do you realize what that means? No, you don’t; for you haven’t a notion of what that man, Westrel Keen, can accomplish. You haven’t the slightest idea of the machinery which he controls with a delicacy absolutely faultless; with a perfectly terrifying precision. Why, man, the Pinkerton system itself has become merely a detail in the immense complexity of the system of control which the Tracer of Lost Persons exercises over this entire continent. The urban police, the State constabulary of Pennsylvania, the rural systems of surveillance, the Secret Service, all municipal, provincial, State, and national organizations form but a few strands in the universal web he has woven. Custom officials, revenue officers, the militia of the States, the army, the navy, the personnel of every city, State, and national legislative bodies form interdependent threads in the mesh he is master of; and, like a big beneficent spider, he sits in the center of his web, able to tell by the slightest tremor of any thread exactly where to begin investigations!”

Flushed, earnest, a trifle out of breath with his own eloquence, Gatewood waved his hand to indicate a Ciceronian period, adding, as Kerns’s incredulous smile broadened: “Say splash again, and I’ll put you at his mercy!”

“Ker-splash! dear friend,” observed Kerns pleasantly. “If a man doesn’t want to marry, the army, the navy, the Senate, the white wings, and the great White Father at Washington can’t make him.”

“I tell you I want to see you happy!” said Gatewood angrily.

“Then gaze upon me. I’m it!”

“You’re not! You don’t know what happiness is.”

“Don’t I? Well, I don’t miss it, dear friend—”

“But if you’ve never had it, and therefore don’t miss it, it’s time somebody found some real happiness for you. Kerns, I simply can’t bear to see you missing so much happiness—”

“Why grieve?”

“Yes, I will! I do grieve—in spite of your grinning skepticism and your bantering attitude. See here, Tom; I’ve started about a thousand times to say that I knew a girl—”

“Do you want to hear that splash again?”

Gatewood grew madder. He said: “I could easily lay your case before Mr. Keen and have you in love and married and happy whether you like it or not!”

“If I were not going to Boston, my son, I should enjoy your misguided efforts,” returned Kerns blandly.

“Your going to Boston makes no difference. The Tracer of Lost Persons doesn’t care where you go or what you do. If he starts in on your case, Tommy, you can’t escape.”

“You mean he can catch me now? Here? At my own club? Or on the public highway? Or on the classic Boston train?”

“He could. Yes, I firmly believe he could land you before you ever saw the Boston State House. I tell you he can work like lightning, Kerns. I know it; I am so absolutely convinced of it that I—I almost hesitate—”

“Don’t feel delicate about it,” laughed Kerns; “you may call him on the telephone while I go uptown and get my suit case. Perhaps I’ll come back a blushing bridegroom; who knows?”

“If you’ll wait here I’ll call him up now,” said Gatewood grimly.

“Oh, very well. Only I left my suit case in Billy’s room, and it’s full of samples of Georgia marble, and I’ve got to get it to the train.”

“You’ve plenty of time. If you’ll wait until I talk to Mr. Keen I’ll dine with you here. Will you?”

“What? Dine in this abandoned joint with an outcast like me? Dear friend, are you dippy this lovely May evening?”

“I’ll do it if you’ll wait. Will you? And I’ll bet you now that I’ll have you in love and sprinting toward the altar before we meet again at this club. Do you dare bet?”

“The terms of the wager, kind friend?” drawled Kerns, delighted; and he fished out a notebook kept for such transactions.

“Let me see,” reflected Gatewood; “you’ll need a silver service when you’re married…. Well, say, forks and spoons and things against an imported trap gun—twelve-gauge, you know.”

“Done. Go and telephone to your friend, Mr. Keen.” And Kerns pushed the electric button with a jeering laugh, and asked the servant for a dinner card.

CHAPTER XIII

Gatewood, in the telephone booth, waited impatiently for Mr. Keen; and after a few moments the Tracer of Lost Persons’ agreeable voice sounded in the receiver.

“It’s about Mr. Kerns,” began Gatewood; “I want to see him happy, and the idiot won’t be. Now, Mr. Keen, you know what happiness you and he brought to me! You know what sort of an idle, selfish, aimless, meaningless life you saved me from? I want you to do the same for Mr. Kerns. I want to ask you to take up his case at once. Besides, I’ve a bet on it. Could you attend to it at once?”

“To-night?” asked the Tracer, laughing.

“Why—ah—well, of course, that would be impossible. I suppose—”

“My profession is to overcome the impossible, Mr. Gatewood. Where is Mr. Kerns?”

“Here, in this club, defying me and drinking cocktails. He won’t get married, and I want you to make him do it.”

“Where is he spending the evening?” asked the Tracer, laughing again.

“Why, he’s been stopping at the Danforth Lees’ in Eighty-third Street until the workmen at the club here finish putting new paper on his walls. The Lees are out of town. He left his suit case at their house and he’s going up to get it and catch the 12.10 train for Boston.”

“He goes from the Lenox Club to the residence of Mr. W. Danforth Lee, East Eighty-third Street, to get a suit case,” repeated the Tracer. “Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“What is in the suit case?”

“Samples of that new marble he’s quarrying in Georgia.”

“Is it an old suit case? Has it Mr. Kerns’s initials on it?”

“Hold the wire; I’ll find out.”

And Gatewood left the telephone and walked into the great lounging room, where Kerns sat twirling his stick and smiling to himself.

“All over, dear friend?” inquired Kerns, starting to rise. “I’ve ordered a corking dinner.”

“Wait!” returned Gatewood ominously. “What sort of a suit case is that one you’re going after?”

“What sort? Oh, just an ordinary—”

“Is it old or new?”

“Brand new. Why?”

“Is your name on it?”

“No; why? Would that thicken the plot, dear friend? Or is the Tracer foiled, ha! ha!”

Gatewood turned on his heel, went back to the telephone, and, carefully shutting the door of the booth, took up the receiver.

“It’s a new suit case, Mr. Keen,” he said; “no initials on it—just an ordinary case.”

“Mr. Lee’s residence is 38 East Eighty-third Street, between Madison and Fifth, I believe.”

“Yes,” replied Gatewood.

“And the family are out of town?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a caretaker there?”

“No; Mr. Kerns camped there. When he leaves to-night he will send the key to the Burglar Alarm Company.”

“Very well. Please hold the wire for a while.”

For ten full minutes Gatewood sat gleefully cuddling the receiver against his ear. His faith in Mr. Keen was naturally boundless; he believed that whatever the Tracer attempted could not result in failure. He desired nothing in the world so ardently as to see Kerns safely married. His own happiness may have been the motive power which had set him in action in behalf of his friend—that and a certain indefinable desire to practice a species of heavenly revenge, of grateful retaliation upon the prime mover and collaborateur, if not the sole author, of his own wedded bliss. Kerns had made him happy.

“And I’m hanged if I don’t pay him off and make him happy, too!” muttered Gatewood. “Does he think I’m going to sit still and see him go tearing and gyrating about town with no responsibility, no moral check to his evolutions, no wholesome home duties to limit his acrobatics, no wife to clip his wings? It’s time he had somebody to report to; time he assumed moral burdens and spiritual responsibilities. A man is just as happy when he is certain where he is going to sleep. A man can find just as much enjoyment in life when he feels it his duty to account for his movements. I don’t care whether Kerns is comparatively happy or not—there’s nothing either sacred or holy in that kind of happiness, and I’m not going to endure the sort of life he likes any longer!”

Immersed in moral reflections, inspired by affectionate obligations to violently inflict happiness upon Kerns, the minutes passed very agreeably until the amused voice of the Tracer of Lost Persons sounded again in the receiver.

“Mr. Gatewood?”

“Yes, I am here, Mr. Keen.”

“Do you really think it best for Mr. Kerns to fall in love?”

“I do, certainly!” replied Gatewood with emphasis.

“Because,” continued the Tracer of Lost Persons, “I see little chance for him to do otherwise if I take up this case. Fate itself, in the shape of a young lady, is already on the way here in a railroad train.”

“Good! Good!” exclaimed Gatewood. “Don’t let him escape, Mr. Keen! I beg of you to take up his case! I urge you most seriously to do so. Mr. Kerns is now exactly what I was a year ago—an utterly useless member of the community—a typical bachelor who lives at his clubs, shirking the duties of a decent citizen.”

“Exactly,” said the Tracer. “Do you insist that I take this case? That I attempt to trace and find for Mr. Kerns a sort of happiness he himself has never found?”

“I implore you to do so, Mr. Keen.”

“Exactly. If I do—if I carry it out as it has been arranged—or rather as the case seems to have already arranged itself, for it is rather a simple matter, I fancy—I do not exactly see how Mr. Kerns can avoid experiencing a—ahem—a tender sentiment for the very charming young lady whom I—and chance—have designed for him as a partner through life.”

“Excellent! Splendid!” shouted Gatewood through the telephone. “Can I do anything to aid you in this?”

“Yes,” replied the Tracer, laughing. “If you can keep him amused for an hour or two before he goes after his suit case it might make it easier for me. This young lady is due to arrive in New York at eight o’clock—a client of mine—coming to consult me. Her presence plays an important part in Mr. Kerns’s future. I wish you to detain Mr. Kerns until she is ready to receive him. But of this he must know nothing. Good-by, Mr. Gatewood, and would you be kind enough to present my compliments to Mrs. Gatewood?”

“Indeed I will! We never can forget what you have done for us. Good-by.”

“Good-by, Mr. Gatewood. Try to keep Mr. Kerns amused for two or three hours. Of course, if you can’t do this, there are other methods I may employ—a dozen other plans already partly outlined in my mind; but the present plan, which accident and coincidence make so easy, is likely to work itself out to your entire satisfaction within a few hours. We are already weaving a web around Mr. Kerns; we already have taken exclusive charge of his future movements after he leaves the Lenox Club. I do not believe he can escape us, or his charming destiny. Good night!”

Gatewood, enchanted, hung up the receiver. Song broke softly from his lips as he started in search of Kerns; his step was springy, buoyant—sort of subdued and modest prance.

“Now,” he said to himself, “Tommy must take out his papers. The time is ended when he can issue letters of marque to himself, hoist sail, square away, and go cruising all over this metropolis at his own sweet will.”

CHAPTER XIV

In the meanwhile, at the other end of the wire, Mr. Keen, the Tracer of Lost Persons, was preparing to trace for Mr. Kerns, against that gentleman’s will, the true happiness which Mr. Kerns had never been able to find for himself.

He sat in his easy chair within the four walls of his own office, inspecting a line of people who stood before him on the carpet forming a single and attentive rank. In this rank were five men: a policeman, a cab driver, an agent of the telephone company, an agent of the electric company, and a reformed burglar carrying a kit of his trade tools.

The Tracer of Lost Persons gazed at them, meditatively joining the tips of his thin fingers.

“I want the number on 36 East Eighty-third Street changed to No. 38, and the number 38 replaced by No. 36,” he said to the policeman. “I want it done at once. Get a glazier and go up there and have it finished in an hour. Mrs. Kenna, caretaker at No. 36, is in my pay; she will not interfere. There is nobody in No. 38: Mr. Kerns leaves there to-night and the Burglar Alarm Company takes charge to-morrow.”

And, turning to the others: “You,” nodding at the reformed burglar, “know your duty. Mike!” to the cab driver, “don’t miss Mr. Kerns at the Lenox Club. If he calls you before eleven, drive into the park and have an accident. And you,” to the agent of the telephone company, “will sever all telephone connection in Mrs. Stanley’s house; and you,” to the official of the electric company, “will see that the circuit in Mrs. Stanley’s house is cut so that no electric light may be lighted and no electric bell sound.”

The Tracer of Lost Persons stroked his gray mustache thoughtfully. “And that,” he ended, “will do, I think. Good night.”

He rose and stood by the door as the policeman headed the solemn file which marched out to their duty; then he looked at his watch, and, as it was already a few minutes after eight, he called up No. 36 East Eighty-third Street, and in a moment more had Mrs. Stanley on the wire.

“Good evening,” he said pleasantly. “I suppose you have just arrived from Rosylyn. I may be a little late—I may be very late, in fact, so I called you up to say so. And I wished to say another thing; to ask you whether your servants could recollect ever having seen a young man about the place, a rather attractive young man with excellent address and manners, five feet eleven inches, slim but well built, dark hair, dark eyes, and dark mustache, offering samples of Georgia marble for sale.”

“Really, Mr. Keen,” replied a silvery voice, “I have heard them say nothing about such an individual. If you will hold the wire I will ask my maid.” And, after a pause: “No, Mr. Keen, my maid cannot remember any such person. Do you think he was a confederate of that wretched butler of mine?”

“I am scarcely prepared to say that; in fact,” added Mr. Keen, “I haven’t the slightest idea that this young man could have been concerned in anything of that sort. Only, if you should ever by any chance see such a man, detain him if possible until you can communicate with me; detain him by any pretext, by ruse, by force if you can, only detain him until I can get there. Will you do this?”

“Certainly, Mr. Keen, if I can. Please describe him again?”

Mr. Keen did so minutely.

“You say he sells Georgia marble by samples, which he carries in a suit case?”

“He says that he has samples of Georgia marble in his suit case,” replied the Tracer cautiously. “It might be well, if possible, to see what he has in his suit case.”

“I will warn the servants as soon as I return to Rosylyn. When may I expect you this evening, Mr. Keen?”

“It is impossible to say, Mrs. Stanley. If I am not there by midnight I shall try to call next morning.”

So they exchanged civil adieus; the Tracer hung up his receiver and leaned back in his chair, smiling to himself.

“Curious,” he said, “that chance should have sent that pretty woman to me at such a time…. Kerns is a fine fellow, every inch of him. It hit him hard when he crossed with her to Southampton six years ago; it hit him harder when she married that Englishman. I don’t wonder he never cared to marry after that brief week of her society; for she is just about the most charming woman I have ever met—red hair and all…. And if quick action is what is required, it’s well to break the ice between them at once with a dreadful misunderstanding.”

CHAPTER XV

The dinner that Kerns had planned for himself and Gatewood was an ingenious one, cunningly contrived to discontent Gatewood with home fare and lure him by its seductive quality into frequent revisits to the club which was responsible for such delectable wines and viands.

A genial glow already enveloped Gatewood and pleasantly suffused Kerns. From time to time they held some rare vintage aloft, squinting through the crystal-imprisoned crimson with deep content.

“Not that my word is necessarily the last word concerning Burgundy,” said Gatewood modestly; “but I venture to doubt that any club in America can match this bottle, Kerns.”

“Now, Jack,” wheedled Kerns, “isn’t it pleasant to dine here once in a while? Be frank, man! Look about at the other tables—at all the pleasant, familiar faces—the same fine fellows, bless ’em—the same smoky old ceiling, the same bum portraits of dead governors, the same old stag heads on the wall. Now, Jack, isn’t it mighty pleasant, after all? Be a gentleman and admit it!”

“Y-yes,” confessed Gatewood, “it’s all right for me once in a while, because I know that I am presently going back to my own home—a jolly lamplit room and the prettiest girl in Manhattan curled up in an armchair—”

“You’re fortunate,” said Kerns shortly. And for the first time there remained no lurking mockery in his voice; for the first time his retort was tinged with bitterness. But the next instant his eyes glimmered with the same gay malice, and the unbelieving smile twitched at his clean-cut lips, and he raised his hand, touching the short ends of his mustache with that careless, amused cynicism which rather became him.

“All that you picture so entrancingly is forbidden the true believer,” he said; and began to repeat:

“O weaver! weave the flowers of Feraghan

Into the fabric that thy birth began;

Iris, narcissus, tulips cloud-band tied,

These thou shalt picture for the eye of Man;

Henna, Herati, and the Jhelums tide

In Sarraband and Saruk be thy guide,

And the red dye of Ispahan beside

The checkered Chinese fret of ancient gold;

—So heed the ban, old as the law is old,

Nor weave into thy warp the laughing face,

Nor limb, nor body, nor one line of grace,

Nor hint, nor tint, nor any veiled device

Of Woman who is barred from Paradise!”

“A nice sentiment!” said Gatewood hotly.

“Can’t help it; you see I’m forbidden to monkey with the eternal looms or weave the forbidden into the pattern of my life.”

Gatewood sat silent for a moment, then looked up at Kerns with something so closely akin to a grin that his friend became interested in its scarcely veiled significance, and grinned in reply.

“So you really expect that your friend, Mr. Keen, is going to marry me to somebody, nolens volens?” asked Kerns.

“I do. That’s what I dream of, Tommy.”

“My poor friend, dream on!”

“I am. Tommy, you’re lost! I mean you’re as good as married now!”

“You think so?”

“I know it! There you sit, savoring your Burgundy, idling over a cigar, happy, care free, fancy free, at liberty, as you believe, to roam off anywhere at any time and continue the eternal hunt for pleasure! That’s what you think! Ha! Tommy, I know better! That’s not the sort of man I see sitting on the same chair where you are now sprawling in such content! I see a doomed man, already in the shadow of the altar, wasting his time unsuspiciously while Chance comes whirling into the city behind a Long Island locomotive, and Fate, the footman, sits outside ready to follow him, and Destiny awaits him no matter what he does, what he desires, where he goes, wherever he turns to-night! Destiny awaits him at his journey’s end!”

“Very fine,” said Kerns admiringly. “Too bad it’s due to the Burgundy.”

“Never mind what my eloquence is due to,” retorted Gatewood, “the fact remains that this is probably your last bachelor dinner. Kerns, old fellow! Here’s to her! Bless her! I—I wish sincerely that we knew who she is and where to send those roses. Anyway, here’s to the bride!”

He stood up very gravely and drank the toast, then, reseating himself, tapped the empty glass gently against the table’s edge until it broke.

“You are certainly doing your part well,” said Kerns admiringly. Then he swallowed the remainder of his Burgundy and looked up at the club clock.

“Eleven,” he said with regret. “I’ve about time to go to Eighty-third Street, get my suit case, and catch my train at 125th Street.” To a servant he said, “Call a hansom,” then rose and sauntered downstairs to the cloakroom, where presently both men stood, hatted and gloved, swinging their sticks.

“That was a fool bet you made,” began Kerns; “I’ll release you, Jack.”

“Sorry, but I must insist on holding you,” replied Gatewood, laughing. “You’re going to your doom. Come on! I’ll see you as far as the cab door.”

They walked out, and Kerns gave the cabby the street and number and entered the hansom.

“Now,” said Gatewood, “you’re in for it! You’re done for! You can’t help yourself! I’ve won my twelve-gauge trap gun already, and I’ll have to set you up in table silver, anyway, so it’s an even break. You’re all in, Tommy! The Tracer is on your trail!”

In the beginning of a flippant retort Kerns experienced a curious sensation of hesitation. Something in Gatewood’s earnestness, in his jeering assurance and delighted certainty, made him, for one moment, feel doubtful, even uncomfortable.

“What nonsense you talk,” he said, recovering his equanimity. “Nothing on earth can prevent me driving to 38 East Eighty-third Street, getting my luggage, and taking the Boston express. Your Tracer doesn’t intend to stop my hansom and drag me into a cave, does he? You haven’t put knock-outs into that Burgundy, have you? Then what in the dickens are you laughing at?”

But Gatewood, on the sidewalk under the lamplight, was still laughing as Kerns drove away, for he had recognized in the cab driver a man he had seen in Mr. Kern’s office, and he knew that the Tracer of Lost Persons had Kerns already well in hand.

The hansom drove on through the summer darkness between rows of electric globes drooping like huge white moon flowers from their foliated bronze stalks, on up the splendid avenue, past the great brilliantly illuminated hotels, past the white cathedral, past clubs and churches and the palaces of the wealthy; on, on along the park wall edged by its double rows of elms under which shadowy forms moved—lovers strolling in couples.

“Pooh,” sniffed Kerns, “the whole world has gone love mad, and I’m the only sane man left.”

But he leaned back in his cab and fell a-thinking of a thin girl with red hair and great gray eyes—a thin, frail creature, scarcely more than a child, who had held him for a week in a strange sorcery only to release him with a frightened smile, leaving her indelible impression upon his life forever.

And, thinking, he looked up, realizing that the cab had stopped in East Eighty-third Street before one of a line of brownstone houses, all externally alike.

Then he leaned out and saw that the house number was thirty-eight. That was the number of the Lees’ house; he descended, bade the cabman await him, and, producing his latch key, started up the steps, whistling gaily.

But he didn’t require his key, for, as he reached the front door, he found, to his surprise and concern, that it swung partly open—just a mere crack.

“The mischief!” he muttered; “could I have failed to close it? Could anybody have seen it and crept in?”

He entered the hallway hastily and pressed the electric knob. No light appeared in the sconces.

“What the deuce!” he murmured; “something wrong with the switch!” And he hurriedly lighted a match and peered into the darkness. By the vague glimmer of the burning match he could distinguish nothing. He listened intently, tried the electric switch again without success. The match burned his fingers and he dropped it, watching the last red spark die out in the darkness.

Something about the shadowy hallway seemed unfamiliar; he went to the door, stepped out on the stoop, and looked up at the number on the transom. It was thirty-eight; no doubt about the house. Hesitating, he glanced around to see that his hansom was still there. It had disappeared.

“What an idiot that cabman is!” he exclaimed, intensely annoyed at the prospect of lugging his heavy suit case to a Madison Avenue car and traveling with it to Harlem.

He looked up and down the dimly lighted street; east, an electric car glided down Madison Avenue; west, the lights of Fifth Avenue glimmered against the dark foliage of the Park. He stood a moment, angry at the desertion of his cabman, then turned and reëntered the dark hall, closing the door behind him.

Up the staircase he felt his way to the first landing, and, lighting a match, looked for the electric button.

“Am I crazy, or was there no electric button in this hall?” he thought. The match burned low; he had to drop it. Perplexed, he struck another match and opened the door leading into the front room, and stood on the threshold a moment, looking about him at the linen-shrouded furniture and pictures. This front room, closed for the summer, he had not before entered, but he stepped in now, poking about for any possible intruder, lighting match after match.

“I suppose I ought to go over this confounded house inch by inch,” he murmured. “What could have possessed me to leave the front door ajar this morning?”

For an instant he thought that perhaps Mrs. Nolan, the woman who came in the morning to make his bed, might have left the door open, but he knew that couldn’t be so, because he always waited for her to finish her work and leave before he went out. So either he must have left the door open, or some marauder had visited the house—was perhaps at that moment in the house! And it was his duty to find out.

“I’d better be about it, too,” he thought savagely, “or I’ll never make my train.”

He struck his last match, looked around, and, seeing gas jets among the clustered electric bulbs of the sconces, tried to light one and succeeded.

He had left his suit case in the passageway between the front and rear rooms, and now, cautiously, stick in hand, he turned toward the dim corridor leading to the bedroom. There was his suit case, anyway! He picked it up and started to push open the door of the rear room; but at the same time, and before he could lay his hand on the knob, the door before him opened suddenly in a flood of light, and a woman stood there, dark against the gas-lit glare, a pistol waveringly extended in the general direction of his head.

CHAPTER XVI

“Good heavens!” he said, appalled, and dropped his suit case with a crash.

“W-what are you d-doing—” She controlled her voice and the wavering weapon with an effort. “What are you doing in this house?”

“Doing? In this house?” he repeated, his eyes protruding in the direction of the unsteady pistol muzzle. “What are you doing in this house—if you don’t mind saying!”

“I—I m-must ask you to put up your hands,” she said. “If you move I shall certainly s-shoot off this pistol.”

“It will go off, anyway, if you handle it like that!” he said, exasperated. “What do you mean by pointing it at me?”

“I mean to fire it off in a few moments if you don’t raise your hands above your head!”

He looked at the pistol; it was new and shiny; he looked at the athletic young figure silhouetted against the brilliant light.

“Well, if you make a point of it, of course.” He slowly held up both hands, higher, then higher still. “Upon my word!” he breathed. “Held up by a woman!” And he said aloud, bitterly: “No doubt you have assistance close at hand.”

“No doubt,” she said coolly. “What have you been packing into that valise?”

“P-packing into what? Oh, into that suit case? That is my suit case.”

“Of course it is,” she said quietly, “but what have you inside it?”

“Nothing you or your friends would care for,” he said meaningly.

“I must be the judge of that,” she retorted. “Please open that suit case.”

“How can I if my hands are in the air?” he expostulated, now intensely interested in the novelty of being held up by this graceful and vaguely pretty silhouette.

“You may lower your arms to unpack the suit case,” she said.

“I—I had rather not if you are going to keep me covered with your pistol.”

“Of course I shall keep you covered. Unpack your booty at once!”

“My—what?”

“Booty.”

“Madam, do you take me for a thief? Have you, by chance, entered the wrong house? I—I cannot reconcile your voice with what I am forced to consider you—a housebreaker—”

“We will discuss that later. Unpack that bag!” she insisted.

“But—but there is nothing in it except samples of marble—”

“What!” she exclaimed nervously. “What did you say? Samples of marble?”

“Marble, madam! Georgia marble!”

“Oh! So you are the young man who goes about pretending to peddle Georgia marble from samples! Are you? The famous marble man I have heard of.”

“I? Madam, I don’t know what you mean!”

“Come!” she said scornfully; “let me see the contents of that suit case. I—I am not afraid of you; I am not a bit afraid of you. And I shall catch your accomplice, too.”

“Madam, you speak like an honest woman! You must have managed to enter the wrong house. This is number thirty-eight, where I live.”

“It is number thirty-six; my house!”

“But I know it is number thirty-eight; Mr. Lee’s house,” he protested hopefully. “This is some dreadful mistake.”

“Mr. Lee’s house is next door,” she said. “Do you not suppose I know my own house? Besides, I have been warned against a plausible young man who pretends he has Georgia marble to sell—”

“There is a dreadful mistake somewhere,” he insisted. “Please p-p-put up your p-pistol and aid me to solve it. I am no robber, madam. I thought at first that you were. I’m living in Mr. Lee’s house, No. 38 East Eighty-third Street, and I’ve looked carefully at the number over the door of this house and the number is thirty-eight, and the street is East Eighty-third. So I naturally conclude that I am in Mr. Lee’s house.”

“Your arguments and your conclusions are very plausible,” she said, “but, fortunately for me, I have been expressly warned against a young man of your description. You are the marble man!”

“It’s a mistake! A very dreadful one.”

“Then how did you enter this house?”

“I have a key—I mean I found the front door unlatched. Please don’t misunderstand me; I know it sounds unconvincing, but I really have a key to number thirty-eight.”

He attempted to reach for his pocket and the pistol glittered in his face.

“Won’t you let me prove my innocence?” he asked.

“You can’t prove it by showing me a key. Besides, it’s probably a weapon. Anyhow, if, as you pretend, you have managed to get into the wrong house, why did you bring that suit case up here?”

“It was here. It’s mine. I left it here in this passageway.”

“In my house?” she asked incredulously.

“In number thirty-eight; that is all I know. I’ll open the suit case if you will let me. I have already described its contents. If it has samples of marble in it you must be convinced!”

“It will convince me that it is your valise. But what of that? I know it is yours already,” she said defiantly. “I know, at least, that you are the marble man—if nothing worse!”

“But malefactors don’t go about carrying samples of Georgia marble,” he protested, dropping on one knee under the muzzle of her revolver and tugging at the straps and buckles. In a second or two he threw open the case—and the sight of the contents staggered him. For there, thrown in pellmell among small square blocks of polished marble was a complete kit of burglar’s tools, including also a mask, a dark lantern, and a blackjack.

“What—w—w—what on earth is this?” he stammered. “These things don’t belong to me. I won’t have them! I don’t want them. Who put them into my suit case? How the deuce—”

“You are the marble man!” she said with a shudder. “Your crimes are known! Your wretched accomplice will be caught! You are the marble man—or something worse!”

Kneeling there, aghast, bewildered, he passed his hand across his eyes as though to clear them from some terrible vision. But the suit case was still there with its incriminating contents when he looked again.

“I am sorry for you,” she said tremulously. “I—if it were not for the marble—I would let you go. But you are the marble man!”

“Yes, and I’m probably a madman, too. I don’t know what I am! I don’t know what is happening to me. I ought to be going, that is all I know—”

“I cannot let you go.”

“But I must! I’ve got to catch a train.”

The feebleness of his excuse chilled her pity.

“I shall not let you go,” she said, resting the hand which held the pistol on her hip, but keeping him covered. “I know you came to rob my house; I know you are a thoroughly bad and depraved young man, but for all that I could find it in my heart to let you go if you were not also the marble man!”

“What on earth is the marble man?” he asked, exasperated.

“I don’t know. I have been earnestly warned against him. Probably he is a relative of my butler—”

“I’m not a relative of anybody’s butler!”

“You say you are not. How do I know? I—I will make you an offer. I will give you one last chance. If you will return to me the jewels that my butler took—”

“Good heavens, madam! Do you really take me for a professional burglar?”

“How can I help it?” she said indignantly. “Look at your suit case full of lanterns and masks—full of marble, too!”

Speechless, he stared at the burglar’s kit.

“I am sorry—” Her voice had altered again to a tremulous sweetness. “I can’t help feeling sorry for you. You do not seem to be hardened; your voice and manner are not characteristically criminal. I—I can’t see your face very clearly, but it does not seem to be a brutally inhuman face—”

An awful desire to laugh seized Kerns; he struggled against it; hysteria lay that way; and he covered his face with both hands and pinched himself.

She probably mistook the action for the emotion of shame and despair born of bitter grief; perhaps of terror of the law. It frightened her a little, but pity dominated. She could scarcely endure to do what she must do.

“This is dreadful, dreadful!” she faltered. “If you only would give me back my jewels—”

Sounds, hastily smothered, escaped him. She believed them to be groans, and it made her slightly faint.

“I—I’ve simply got to telephone for the police,” she said pityingly. “I must ask you to sit down there and wait—there is a chair. Sit there—and please don’t move, for I—this has unnerved me—I am not accustomed to doing cruel things; and if you should move too quickly or attempt to run away I feel certain that this pistol would explode.”

“Are you going to telephone?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

She backed away, cautiously, pistol menacing him, reached for the receiver, and waited for Central. She waited a long time before she realized that the telephone as well as the electric light was out of commission.

“Did you cut all these wires?” she demanded angrily.

“I? What wires?”

She reached out and pressed the electric button which should have rung a bell in her maid’s bedroom on the top floor. She kept her finger on the button for ten minutes. It was useless.

“You laid deliberate plans to rob this house,” she said, her cheeks pink with indignation. “I am not a bit sorry for you. I shall not let you go! I shall sit here until somebody comes to my assistance, if I have to sit here for weeks and weeks!”

“If you’d let me telephone to my club—” he began.

“Your club! You are very plausible. You didn’t offer to call up any club until you found that the telephone was not working!”

He thought a moment. “I don’t suppose you would trust me to go out and get a policeman?”

“Certainly not.”

“Or go into the front room and open a window and summon some passer-by?”

“How do I know you haven’t confederates waiting outside?”

“That’s true,” he said seriously.

There was a silence. Her nerves seemed to trouble her, for she began to pace to and fro in front of the passageway where he sat comfortably on his chair, arms folded, one knee dropped over the other.

The light being behind her he could not as yet distinguish her features very clearly. Her figure was youthful, slender, yet beautifully rounded; her head charming in contour. He watched her restlessly walking on the floor, small hand clutching the pistol resting on her hip.

The ruddy burnished glimmer on the edges of her hair he supposed, at first, was caused by the strong light behind her.

“This is atrocious!” she murmured, halting to confront him. “How dared you sever every electric connection in my house?”

As she spoke she stepped backward a pace or two, resting herself for a moment against the footboard of the bed—full in the gaslight. And he saw her face.

For a moment he studied her; an immense wave of incredulity swept over him—of wild unbelief, slowly changing to the astonishment of dawning conviction. Astounded, silent, he stared at her from his shadowy corner; and after a while his pulses began to throb and throb and hammer, and the clamoring confusion of his senses seemed to deafen him.

She rested a moment or two against the footboard of the bed, her big gray eyes fixed on his vague and shadowy form.

“This won’t do,” she said.

“No,” he said, “it won’t do.”

He spoke very quietly, very gently. She detected the alteration in his voice and started slightly, as though the distant echo of a familiar voice had sounded.

“What did you say?” she asked, coming nearer, pistol glittering in advance.

“I said ‘It won’t do.’ I don’t know what I meant by it. If I meant anything I was wrong. It will do. The situation is perfectly agreeable to me.”

“Insolence will not help you,” she said sharply. And under the sharpness he detected the slightest quaver of a new alarm.

“I am going to free myself,” he said coolly.

“If you move I shall certainly shoot!” she retorted.

“I am going to move—but only my lips. I have only to move my lips to free myself.”

“I should scarcely advise you to trust to your eloquence. I have been duly warned, you see.”

“Who warned you?” he asked curiously. And, as she disdained to reply: “Never mind. We can clear that up later. Now let me ask you something.”

“You are scarcely in a position to ask questions,” she said.

“May I not speak to you?”

“Is it necessary?”

He thought a moment. “No, not necessary. Nothing is in this life, you know. I thought differently once. Once—when I was younger—six years younger—I thought happiness was necessary. I found that a man might live without it.”

She stood gazing at him through the shadows, pistol on hip.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean that happiness is not necessary to life. Life goes on all the same. My life has continued for six years without that happiness which some believe to be essential.”

After a silence she said: “I can tell by the way you speak that you are well born. I—I dread to do what I simply must do.”

He, too, sat silent a long time—long enough for an utterly perverse and whimsical humor to take complete possession of him.

“Won’t you let me go—this time?” he pleaded.

“I cannot.”

“You had better let me go while you can,” he said, “because, perhaps, you may find it difficult to get rid of me later.”

Affronted, she shrank back from the doorway and stood in the center of her room, angry, disdainful, beautiful, under the ruddy glory of her lustrous hair.

His perverse mood changed, too; he leaned forward, studying her minutely—the splendid gray eyes, the delicate mouth and nose, the full, sweet lips, the witchery of wrist and hand, and the flowing, rounded outline of limb and body under the pretty gown. Could this be she? This lovely, mature woman, wearing scarcely a trace of the young girl he had never forgotten—scarcely a trace save in the beauty of her eyes and hair—save in the full, red mouth, sweet and sensitive even in its sudden sullenness?

“Once,” he said, and his voice sounded to him like voices heard in dreams—“once, years and years ago, there was a steamer, and a man and a young girl on board. Do you mind my telling you about it?”

She stood leaning against the footboard of the bed, not even deigning to raise her eyes in reply. So he made the slightest stir in his chair; and then she looked up quickly enough, pistol poised.

“The steamer,” said Kerns slowly, “was coming into Southampton—six years ago. On deck these two people stood—a man of twenty-eight, a girl of eighteen—six years ago. The name of the steamer was the Carnatic. Did you ever hear of that ship?”

She was looking at him attentively. He waited for her reply; she made none; and he went on.

“The man had asked the girl something—I don’t know what—I don’t know why her gray eyes filled with tears. Perhaps it was because she could not do what the man asked her to do. It may have been to love him; it may have been that he was asking her to marry him and that she couldn’t. Perhaps that is why there were tears in her eyes—because she may have been sorry to cause him the pain of refusal—sorry, perhaps, perhaps a little guilty. Because she must have seen that he was falling in love with her, and she—she let him—knowing all the time that she was to marry another man. Did you ever hear of that man before?”

She had straightened up, quivering, wide eyed, lips parted. He rose and walked slowly into her room, confronting her under the full glare of light.

Her pistol fell clattering to the floor. It did not explode because it was not loaded.

“Now,” he said unsteadily, “will you give me my freedom? I have waited for it—not minutes—but years—six years. I ask it now—the freedom I enjoyed before I ever saw you. Can you give it back to me? Can you restore to me a capacity for happiness? Can you give me a heart to love with—love some woman, as other men love? Is it very much I ask of you—to give me a chance in life—the chance I had before I ever saw you?”

Her big gray eyes seemed fascinated; he looked deep into them, smiling; and she turned white.

“Will you give me what I ask?” he said, still smiling.

She strove to speak; she could not, but her eyes never faltered. Suddenly the color flooded her neck and cheeks to the hair, and the quick tears glimmered.

“I—I did not understand; I was too young to be cruel,” she faltered. “How could I know what I was doing? Or what—what you did?”

“I? To you?”

“Y-yes. Did you think that I escaped heart free? Do you realize what my punishment was—to—to marry—and remember! If I was too young, too inexperienced to know what I was doing, I was not too young to suffer for it!”

“You mean—” He strove to control his voice, but the sweet, fearless gray eyes met his; the old flame leaped in his veins. He reached out to steady himself and his hand touched hers—that soft, white hand that had held him all these years in the hollow of its palm.

“Did you ever love me?” he demanded.

Her eyes, wet with tears, met his straight as the starry gaze of a child.

“Yes,” she said.

His hand tightened over hers; she swayed a moment, quivering from head to foot; then drawing a quick, sobbing breath, closed her eyes, imprisoned in his arms; and, after a long while, aroused, she looked up at him, her divine eyes unclosing dreamily.

“Somebody is hammering at the front door,” he breathed. “Listen!”

“I hear. I believe it must be the Tracer of Lost Persons.”

“What?”

“Only a Mr. Keen.”

“O Lord!” said Kerns faintly, and covered his face with her fragrant hands.

Very tenderly, very gravely, she drew her hands away, and, laying them on his shoulders, looked up at him.

“You—you know what there is in your suit case,” she faltered; “are you a burglar, dear?”

“Ask the Tracer of Lost Persons,” said Kerns gently, “what sort of a criminal I am!”

They stood together for one blissful moment listening to the loud knocking below, then, hand in hand, they descended the dark stairway to admit the Tracer of Lost Persons.

CHAPTER XVII

[Samaris]

On the thirteenth day of March, 1906, Kerns received the following cable from an old friend:

IS THERE ANYBODY IN NEW YORK WHO CAN FIND TWO CRIMINALS FOR ME? I DON’T WANT TO CALL IN THE POLICE.

J.T. BURKE.

To which Kerns replied promptly:

WIRE KEEN, TRACER OF LOST PERSONS, N.Y.

And a day or two later, being on his honeymoon, he forgot all about his old friend Jack Burke.

On the fifteenth day of March, 1906, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, received the following cablegram from Alexandria, Egypt:

KEEN, TRACER, NEW YORK:

LOCATE JORAM SMILES, FORTY, STOUT, LAME, RED HAIR, RAGGED RED MUSTACHE, CAST IN LEFT EYE, PALLID SKIN; CARRIES ONE CRUTCH; SUPPOSED TO HAVE ARRIVED IN AMERICA PER S.S. SCYTHIAN QUEEN, WITH MAN KNOWN AS EMANUEL GANDON, SWARTHY, SHORT, FAT, LIGHT BLUISH EYES, EURASIAN TYPE.

I WILL CALL ON YOU AT YOUR OFFICE AS SOON AS MY STEAMER, EMPRESS OF BABYLON, ARRIVES. IF YOU DISCOVER MY MEN, KEEP THEM UNDER SURVEILLANCE, BUT ON NO ACCOUNT CALL IN POLICE. SPARE NO EXPENSE. DUNDAS, GRAY & CO. ARE MY BANKERS AND REFERENCE.

JOHN TEMPLETON BURKE.

On Monday, April 2d, a few minutes after eight o’clock in the morning, the card of Mr. John Templeton Burke was brought to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, and a moment later a well-built, wiry, sun-scorched young man was ushered into Mr. Keen’s private office by a stenographer prepared to take minutes of the interview.

The first thing that the Tracer of Lost Persons noted in his visitor was his mouth; the next his eyes. Both were unmistakably good—the eyes which his Creator had given him looked people squarely in the face at every word; the mouth, which a man’s own character fashions agreeably or mars, was pleasant, but firm when the trace of the smile lurking in the corners died out.

There were dozens of other external characteristics which Mr. Keen always looked for in his clients; and now the rapid exchange of preliminary glances appeared to satisfy both men, for they advanced toward each other and exchanged a formal hand clasp.

“Have you any news for me?” asked Burke.

“I have,” said the Tracer. “There are cigars on the table beside you—matches in that silver case. No, I never smoke; but I like the aroma—and I like to watch men smoke. Do you know, Mr. Burke, that no two men smoke in the same fashion? There is as much character in the manner of holding a cigar as there is difference in the technic of artists.”

Burke nodded, amused, but, catching sight of the busy stenographer, his bronzed features became serious, and he looked at Mr. Keen inquiringly.

“It is my custom,” said the Tracer. “Do you object to my stenographer?”

Burke looked at the slim young girl in her black gown and white collar and cuffs. Then, very simply, he asked her pardon for objecting to her presence, but said that he could not discuss his case if she remained. So she rose, with a humorous glance at Mr. Keen; and the two men stood up until she had vanished, then reseated themselves vis-a-vis. Mr. Keen calmly dropped his elbow on the concealed button which prepared a hidden phonograph for the reception of every word that passed between them.

“What news have you for me, Mr. Keen?” asked the younger man with that same directness which the Tracer had already been prepared for, and which only corroborated the frankness of eyes and voice.

“My news is brief,” he said. “I have both your men under observation.”

“Already?” exclaimed Burke, plainly unprepared. “Do you actually mean that I can see these men whenever I desire to do so? Are these scoundrels in this town—within pistol shot?”

His youthful face hardened as he snapped out his last word, like the crack of a whip.

“I don’t know how far your pistol carries,” said Mr. Keen. “Do you wish to swear out a warrant?”

“No, I do not. I merely wish their addresses. You have not used the police in this matter, have you, Mr. Keen?”

“No. Your cable was explicit,” said the Tracer. “Had you permitted me to use the police it would have been much less expensive for you.”

“I can’t help that,” said the young man. “Besides, in a matter of this sort, a man cannot decently consider expense.”

“A matter of what sort?” asked the Tracer blandly.

“Of this sort.”

“Oh! Yet even now I do not understand. You must remember, Mr. Burke, that you have not told me anything concerning the reasons for your quest of these two men, Joram Smiles and Emanuel Gandon. Besides, this is the first time you have mentioned pistol range.”

Burke, smoking steadily, looked at the Tracer through the blue fog of his cigar.

“No,” he said, “I have not told you anything about them.”

Mr. Keen waited a moment; then, smiling quietly to himself, he wrote down the present addresses of Joram Smiles and Emanuel Gandon, and, tearing off the leaf, handed it to the younger man, saying: “I omit the pistol range, Mr. Burke.”

“I am very grateful to you,” said Burke. “The efficiency of your system is too famous for me to venture to praise it. All I can say is ‘Thank you’; all I can do in gratitude is to write my check—if you will be kind enough to suggest the figures.”

“Are you sure that my services are ended?”

“Thank you, quite sure.”

So the Tracer of Lost Persons named the figures, and his client produced a check book and filled in a check for the amount. This was presented and received with pleasant formality. Burke rose, prepared to take his leave, but the Tracer was apparently busy with the combination lock of a safe, and the young man lingered a moment to make his adieus.

As he stood waiting for the Tracer to turn around he studied the writing on the sheet of paper which he held toward the light:

Joram Smiles, no profession, 613 West 24th Street. Emanuel Gandon, no profession, same address. Very dangerous men.

It occurred to him that these three lines of pencil-writing had cost him a thousand dollars—and at the same instant he flushed with shame at the idea of measuring the money value of anything in such a quest as this.

And yet—and yet he had already spent a great deal of money in his brief quest, and—was he any nearer the goal—even with the penciled addresses of these two men in his possession? Even with these men almost within pistol shot!

Pondering there, immersed in frowning retrospection, the room, the Tracer, the city seemed to fade from his view. He saw the red sand blowing in the desert; he heard the sickly squealing of camels at the El Teb Wells; he saw the sun strike fire from the rippling waters of Saïs; he saw the plain, and the ruins high above it; and the odor of the Long Bazaar smote him like a blow, and he heard the far call to prayer from the minarets of Sa-el-Hagar, once Saïs, the mysterious—Saïs of the million lanterns, Saïs of that splendid festival where the Great Triad’s worship swayed dynasty after dynasty, and where, through the hot centuries, Isis, veiled, impassive, looked out upon the hundredth king of kings, Meris, the Builder of Gardens, dragged dead at the chariot of Upper and Lower Egypt.

Slowly the visions faded; into his remote eyes crept the consciousness of the twentieth century again; he heard the river whistles blowing, and the far dissonance of the streets—that iron undertone vibrating through the metropolis of the West from river to river and from the Palisades to the sea.

His gaze wandered about the room, from telephone desk to bookcase, from the table to the huge steel safe, door ajar, swung outward like the polished breech of a twelve-inch gun.

Then his vacant eyes met the eyes of the Tracer of Lost Persons, almost helplessly. And for the first time the full significance of this quest he had undertaken came over him like despair—this strange, hopeless, fantastic quest, blindly, savagely pursued from the sand wastes of Saïs to the wastes of this vast arid city of iron and masonry, ringing to the sky with the menacing clamor of its five monstrous boroughs.

Curiously weary of a sudden, he sat down, resting his head on one hand. The Tracer watched him, bent partly over his desk. From moment to moment he tore minute pieces from the blotter, or drew imaginary circles and arabesques on his pad with an inkless pen.

“Perhaps I could help you, after all—if you’d let me try,” he said quietly.

“Do you mean—me?” asked Burke, without raising his head.

“If you like—yes, you—or any man in trouble—in perplexity—in the uncertain deductions which arise from an attempt at self-analysis.”

“It is true; I am trying to analyze myself. I believe that I don’t know how. All has been mere impulse—so far. No, I don’t know how to analyze it all.”

“I do,” said the Tracer.

Burke raised his level, unbelieving eyes.

“You are in love,” said the Tracer.

After a long time Burke looked up again. “Do you think so?”

“Yes. Can I help you?” asked the Tracer pleasantly.

The young man sat silent, frowning into space; then:

“I tell you plainly enough that I have come here to argue with two men at the end of a pistol; and—you tell me I’m in love. By what logic—”

“It is written in your face, Mr. Burke—in your eyes, in every feature, every muscle’s contraction, every modulation of your voice. My tables, containing six hundred classified superficial phenomena peculiar to all human emotions, have been compiled and scientifically arranged according to Bertillon’s system. It is an absolutely accurate key to every phase of human emotion, from hate, through all its amazingly paradoxical phenomena, to love, with all its genera under the suborder—all its species, subspecies, and varieties.”

He leaned back, surveying the young man with kindly amusement.

“You talk of pistol range, but you are thinking of something more fatal than bullets, Mr. Burke. You are thinking of love—of the first, great, absorbing, unreasoning passion that has ever shaken you, blinded you, seized you and dragged you out of the ordered path of life, to push you violently into the strange and unexplored! That is what stares out on the world through those haunted eyes of yours, when the smile dies out and you are off your guard; that is what is hardening those flat, clean bands of muscle in jaw and cheek; that is what those hints of shadow mean beneath the eye, that new and delicate pinch to the nostril, that refining, almost to sharpness, of the nose, that sensitive edging to the lips, and the lean delicacy of the chin.”

He bent slightly forward in his chair.

“There is all that there, Mr. Burke, and something else—the glimmering dawn of desperation.”

“Yes,” said the other, “that is there. I am desperate.”

“Exactly. Also you wear two revolvers in a light, leather harness strapped up under your armpits,” said the Tracer, laughing. “Take them off, Mr. Burke. There is nothing to be gained in shooting up Mr. Smiles or converting Mr. Gandon into nitrates.”

“If it is a matter where one man can help another,” the Tracer added simply, “it would give me pleasure to place my resources at your command—without recompense—”

“Mr. Keen!” said Burke, astonished.

“Yes?”

“You are very amiable; I had not wished—had not expected anything except professional interest from you.”

“Why not? I like you, Mr. Burke.”

The utter disarming candor of this quiet, elderly gentleman silenced the younger man with a suddenness born of emotions long crushed, long relentlessly mastered, and which now, in revolt, shook him fiercely in every fiber. All at once he felt very young, very helpless in the world—that same world through which, until within a few weeks, he had roved so confidently, so arrogantly, challenging man and the gods themselves in the pride of his strength and youth.

But now, halting, bewildered, lost amid the strange maze of byways whither impulse had lured and abandoned him, he looked out into a world of wilderness and unfamiliar stars and shadow shapes undreamed of, and he knew not which way to turn—not even how to return along the ways his impetuous feet had trodden in this strange and hopeless quest of his.

“How can you help me?” he said bluntly, while the quivering undertone rang in spite of him. “Yes, I am in love; but how can any living man help me?”

“Are you in love with the dead?” asked the Tracer gravely. “For that only is hopeless. Are you in love with one who is not living?”

“Yes.”

“You love one whom you know to be dead?”

“Yes; dead.”

“How do you know that she is dead?”

“That is not the question. I knew that when I fell in love with her. It is not that which appals me; I ask nothing more than to live my life out loving the dead. I—I ask very little.”

He passed his unsteady hand across his dry lips, across his eyes and forehead, then laid his clinched fist on the table.

“Some men remain constant to a memory; some to a picture—sane, wholesome, normal men. Some men, with a fixed ideal, never encounter its facsimile, and so never love. There is nothing strange, after all, in this; nothing abnormal, nothing unwholesome. Grünwald loved the marble head and shoulders of the lovely Amazon in the Munich Museum; he died unmarried, leaving the charities and good deeds of a blameless life to justify him. Sir Henry Guest, the great surgeon who worked among the poor without recompense, loved Gainsborough’s ‘Lady Wilton.’ The portrait hangs above his tomb in St. Clement’s Hundreds. D’Epernay loved Mlle. Jeanne Vacaresco, who died before he was born. And I—I love in my own fashion.”

His low voice rang with the repressed undertone of excitement; he opened and closed his clinched hand as though controlling the lever of his emotions.

“What can you do for a man who loves the shadow of Life?” he asked.

“If you love the shadow because the substance has passed away—if you love the soul because the dust has returned to the earth as it was—”

“It has not!” said the younger man.

The Tracer said very gravely: “It is written that whenever ‘the Silver Cord’ is loosed, ‘then shall the dust return unto the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto Him who gave it.’”

“The spirit—yes; that has taken its splendid flight—”

His voice choked up, died out; he strove to speak again, but could not. The Tracer let him alone, and bent again over his desk, drawing imaginary circles on the stained blotter, while moment after moment passed under the tension of that fiercest of all struggles, when a man sits throttling his own soul into silence.

And, after a long time, Burke lifted a haggard face from the cradle of his crossed arms and shook his shoulders, drawing a deep, steady breath.

“Listen to me!” he said in an altered voice.

And the Tracer of Lost Persons nodded.

CHAPTER XVIII

“When I left the Point I was assigned to the colored cavalry. They are good men; we went up Kettle Hill together. Then came the Philippine troubles, then that Chinese affair. Then I did staff duty, and could not stand the inactivity and resigned. They had no use for me in Manchuria; I tired of waiting, and went to Venezuela. The prospects for service there were absurd; I heard of the Moorish troubles and went to Morocco. Others of my sort swarmed there; matters dragged and dragged, and the Kaiser never meant business, anyway.

“Being independent, and my means permitting me, I got some shooting in the back country. This all degenerated into the merest nomadic wandering—nothing but sand, camels, ruins, tents, white walls, and blue skies. And at last I came to the town of Sa-el-Hagar.”

His voice died out; his restless, haunted eyes became fixed.

“Sa-el-Hagar, once ancient Saïs,” repeated the Tracer quietly; and the young man looked at him.

“You know that?”

“Yes,” said the Tracer.

For a while Burke remained silent, preoccupied, then, resting his chin on his hand and speaking in a curiously monotonous voice, as though repeating to himself by rote, he went on:

“The town is on the heights—have you a pencil? Thank you. Here is the town of Sa-el-Hagar, here are the ruins, here is the wall, and somewhere hereabouts should be the buried temple of Neith, which nobody has found.” He shifted his pencil. “Here is the lake of Saïs; here, standing all alone on the plain, are those great monolithic pillars stretching away into perspective—four hundred of them in all—a hundred and nine still upright. There were one hundred and ten when I arrived at El Teb Wells.”

He looked across at the Tracer, repeating: “One hundred and ten—when I arrived. One fell the first night—a distant pillar far away on the horizon. Four thousand years had it stood there. And it fell—the first night of my arrival. I heard it; the nights are cold at El Teb Wells, and I was lying awake, all a-shiver, counting the stars to make me sleep. And very, very far away in the desert I heard and felt the shock of its fall—the fall of forty centuries under the Egyptian stars.”

His eyes grew dreamy; a slight glow had stained his face.

“Did you ever halt suddenly in the Northern forests, listening, as though a distant voice had hailed you? Then you understand why that far, dull sound from the dark horizon brought me to my feet, bewildered, listening, as though my own name had been spoken.

“I heard the wind in the tents and the stir of camels; I heard the reeds whispering on Saïs Lake and the yap-yap of a shivering jackal; and always, always, the hushed echo in my ears of my own name called across the star-lit waste.

“At dawn I had forgotten. An Arab told me that a pillar had fallen; it was all the same to me, to him, to the others, too. The sun came out hot. I like heat. My men sprawled in the tents; some watered, some went up to the town to gossip in the bazaar. I mounted and cast bridle on neck—you see how much I cared where I went! In two hours we had completed a circle—like a ruddy hawk above El Teb. And my horse halted beside the fallen pillar.”

As he spoke his language had become very simple, very direct, almost without accent, and he spoke slowly, picking his way with that lack of inflection, of emotion characteristic of a child reading a new reader.

“The column had fallen from its base, eastward, and with its base it had upheaved another buried base, laying bare a sort of cellar and a flight of stone steps descending into darkness.

“Into this excavation the sand was still running in tiny rivulets. Listening, I could hear it pattering far, far down into the shadows.

“Sitting there in the saddle, the thing explained itself as I looked. The fallen pillar had been built upon older ruins; all Egypt is that way, ruin founded on the ruin of ruins—like human hopes.

“The stone steps, descending into the shadow of remote ages, invited me. I dismounted, walked to the edge of the excavation, and, kneeling, peered downward. And I saw a wall and the lotus-carved rim of a vast stone-framed pool; and as I looked I heard the tinkle of water. For the pillar, falling, had unbottled the ancient spring, and now the stone-framed lagoon was slowly filling after its drought of centuries.

“There was light enough to see by, but, not knowing how far I might penetrate, I returned to my horse, pocketed matches and candles from the saddlebags, and, returning, started straight down the steps of stone.

“Fountain, wall, lagoon, steps, terraces half buried—all showed what the place had been: a water garden of ancient Egypt—probably royal—because, although I am not able to decipher hieroglyphics, I have heard somewhere that these picture inscriptions, when inclosed in a cartouch like this”—he drew rapidly—

“or this

indicate that the subject of the inscription was once a king.

“And on every wall, every column, I saw the insignia of ancient royalty, and I saw strange hawk-headed figures bearing symbols engraved on stone—beasts, birds, fishes, unknown signs and symbols; and everywhere the lotus carved in stone—the bud, the blossom half-inclosed, the perfect flower.”

His dreamy eyes met the gaze of the Tracer, unseeing; he rested his sunburned face between both palms, speaking in the same vague monotone:

“Everywhere dust, ashes, decay, the death of life, the utter annihilation of the living—save only the sparkle of reborn waters slowly covering the baked bed of the stone-edged pool—strange, luminous water, lacking the vital sky tint, enameled with a film of dust, yet, for all that, quickening with imprisoned brilliancy like an opal.

“The slow filling of the pool fascinated me; I stood I know not how long watching the thin film of water spreading away into the dimness beyond. At last I turned and passed curiously along the wall where, at its base, mounds of dust marked what may have been trees. Into these I probed with my riding crop, but discovered nothing except the depths of the dust.

“When I had penetrated the ghost of this ancient garden for a thousand yards the light from the opening was no longer of any service. I lighted a candle; and its yellow rays fell upon a square portal into which led another flight of steps. And I went down.

“There were eighteen steps descending into a square stone room. Strange gleams and glimmers from wall and ceiling flashed dimly in my eyes under the wavering flame of the candle. Then the flame grew still—still as death—and Death lay at my feet—there on the stone floor—a man, square shouldered, hairless, the cobwebs of his tunic mantling him, lying face downward, arms outflung.

“After a moment I stooped and touched him, and the entire prostrate figure dissolved into dust where it lay, leaving at my feet a shadow shape in thin silhouette against the pavement—merely a gray layer of finest dust shaped like a man, a tracery of impalpable powder on the stones.

“Upward and around me I passed the burning candle; vast figures in blue and red and gold grew out of the darkness; the painted walls sparkled; the shadows that had slept through all those centuries trembled and shrank away into distant corners.

“And then—and then I saw the gold edges of her sandals sparkle in the darkness, and the clasped girdle of virgin gold around her slender waist glimmered like purest flame!”

Burke, leaning far across the table, interlocked hands tightening, stared and stared into space. A smile edged his mouth; his voice grew wonderfully gentle:

“Why, she was scarcely eighteen—this child—there so motionless, so lifelike, with the sandals edging her little upturned feet, and the small hands of her folded between the breasts. It was as though she had just stretched herself out there—scarcely sound asleep as yet, and her thick, silky hair—cut as they cut children’s hair in these days, you know—cradled her head and cheeks.

“So marvelous the mimicry of life, so absolute the deception of breathing sleep, that I scarce dared move, fearing to awaken her.

“When I did move I forgot the dusty shape of the dead at my feet, and left, full across his neck, the imprint of a spurred riding boot. It gave me my first shudder; I turned, feeling beneath my foot the soft, yielding powder, and stood aghast. Then—it is absurd!—but I felt as a man feels who has trodden inadvertently upon another’s foot—and in an impulse of reparation I stooped hastily and attempted to smooth out the mortal dust which bore the imprint of my heel. But the fine powder flaked my glove, and, looking about for something to compose the ashes with, I picked up a papyrus scroll. Perhaps he himself had written on it; nobody can ever know, and I used it as a sort of hoe to scrape him together and smooth him out on the stones.”

The young man drew a yellowish roll of paper-like substance from his pocket and laid it on the table.

“This is the same papyrus,” he said. “I had forgotten that I carried it away with me until I found it in my shooting coat while packing to sail for New York.”

The Tracer of Lost Persons reached over and picked up the scroll. It was flexible still, but brittle; he opened it with great care, considered the strange figures upon it for a while, then turned almost sharply on his visitor.

“Go on,” he said.

And Burke went on:

“The candle was burning low; I lighted two more, placing them at her head and feet on the edges of the stone couch. Then, lighting a third candle, I stood beside the couch and looked down at the dead girl under her veil-like robe, set with golden stars.”

He passed his hand wearily over his hair and forehead.

“I do not know what the accepted meaning of beauty may be if it was not there under my eyes. Flawless as palest amber ivory and rose, the smooth-flowing contours melted into exquisite symmetry; lashes like darkest velvet rested on the pure curve of the cheeks; the closed lids, the mouth still faintly stained with color, the delicate nose, the full, childish lips, sensitive, sweet, resting softly upon each other—if these were not all parts of but one lovely miracle, then there is no beauty save in a dream of Paradise….

“A gold band of linked scarabs bound her short, thick hair straight across the forehead; thin scales of gold fell from a necklace, clothing her breasts in brilliant discolored metal, through which ivory-tinted skin showed. A belt of pure, soft gold clasped her body at the waist; gold-edged sandals clung to her little feet.

“At first, when the stunned surprise had subsided, I thought that I was looking upon some miracle of ancient embalming, hitherto unknown. Yet, in the smooth skin there was no slit to prove it, no opening in any vein or artery, no mutilation of this sculptured masterpiece of the Most High, no cerements, no bandages, no gilded carven case with painted face to stare open eyed through the wailing cycles.

“This was the image of sleep—of life unconscious—not of death. Yet it was death—death that had come upon her centuries and centuries ago; for the gold had turned iridescent and magnificently discolored; the sandal straps fell into dust as I bent above them, leaving the sandals clinging to her feet only by the wired silver core of the thongs. And, as I touched it fearfully, the veil-like garment covering her, vanished into thin air, its metal stars twinkling in a shower around her on the stone floor.”

The Tracer, motionless, intent, scarcely breathed; the younger man moved restlessly in his chair, the dazed light in his eyes clearing to sullen consciousness.

“What more is there to tell?” he said. “And to what purpose? All this is time wasted. I have my work cut out for me. What more is there to tell?”

“What you have left untold,” said the Tracer, with the slightest ring of authority in his quiet voice.

And, as though he had added “Obey!” the younger man sank back in his chair, his hands contracting nervously.

“I went back to El Teb,” he said; “I walked like a dreaming man. My sleep was haunted by her beauty; night after night, when at last I fell asleep, instantly I saw her face, and her dark eyes opening into mine in childish bewilderment; day after day I rode out to the fallen pillar and descended to that dark chamber where she lay alone. Then there came a time when I could not endure the thought of her lying there alone. I had never dared to touch her. Horror of what might happen had held me aloof lest she crumble at my touch to that awful powder which I had trodden on.

“I did not know what to do; my Arabs had begun to whisper among themselves, suspicious of my absences, impatient to break camp, perhaps, and roam on once more. Perhaps they believed I had discovered treasure somewhere; I am not sure. At any rate, dread of their following me, determination to take my dead away with me, drove me into action; and that day when I reached her silent chamber I lighted my candle, and, leaning above her for one last look, I touched her shoulder with my finger tip.

“It was a strange sensation. Prepared for a dreadful dissolution, utterly unprepared for cool, yielding flesh, I almost dropped where I stood. For her body was neither cold nor warm, neither dust-dry nor moist; neither the skin of the living nor the dead. It was firm, almost stiff, yet not absolutely without a certain hint of flexibility.

“The appalling wonder of it consumed me; fear, incredulity, terror, apathy succeeded each other; then slowly a fierce shrinking happiness swept me in every fiber.

“This marvelous death, this triumph of beauty over death, was mine. Never again should she lie here alone through the solitudes of night and day; never again should the dignity of Death lack the tribute demanded of Life. Here was the appointed watcher—I, who had found her alone in the wastes of the world—all alone on the outermost edges of the world—a child, dead and unguarded. And standing there beside her I knew that I should never love again.”

He straightened up, stretching out his arm: “I did not intend to carry her away to what is known as Christian burial. How could I consign her to darkness again, with all its dreadful mockery of marble, all its awful emblems?

“This lovely stranger was to be my guest forever. The living should be near her while she slept so sweetly her slumber through the centuries; she should have warmth, and soft hangings and sunlight and flowers; and her unconscious ears should be filled with the pleasant stir of living things…. I have a house in the country, a very old house among meadows and young woodlands. And I—I had dreamed of giving this child a home—”

His voice broke; he buried his head in his hands a moment; but when he lifted it again his features were hard as steel.

“There was already talk in the bazaar about me. I was probably followed, but I did not know it. Then one of my men disappeared. For a week I hesitated to trust my Arabs; but there was no other way. I told them there was a mummy which I desired to carry to some port and smuggle out of the country without consulting the Government. I knew perfectly well that the Government would never forego its claim to such a relic of Egyptian antiquity. I offered my men too much, perhaps. I don’t know. They hesitated for a week, trying by every artifice to see the treasure, but I never let them out of my sight.

“Then one day two white men came into camp; and with them came a government escort to arrest me for looting an Egyptian tomb. The white men were Joram Smiles and that Eurasian, Emanuel Gandon, who was partly white, I suppose. I didn’t comprehend what they were up to at first. They escorted me forty miles to confront the official at Shen-Bak. When, after a stormy week, I was permitted to return to Saïs, my Arabs and the white men were gone. And the stone chamber under the water garden wall was empty as the hand I hold out to you!”

He opened his palm and rose, his narrowing eyes clear and dangerous.

“At the bazaar I learned enough to know what had been done. I traced the white men to the coast. They sailed on the Scythian Queen, taking with them all that I care for on earth or in heaven! And you ask me why I measure their distance from me by a bullet’s flight!”

The Tracer also rose, pale and grave.

“Wait!” he said. “There are other things to be done before you prepare to face a jury for double murder.”

“It is for them to choose,” said Burke. “They shall have the choice of returning to me my dead, or of going to hell full of lead.”

“Exactly, my dear sir. That part is not difficult,” said the Tracer quietly. “There will be no occasion for violence, I assure you. Kindly leave such details to me. I know what is to be done. You are outwardly very calm, Mr. Burke—even dangerously placid; but though you maintain an admirable command over yourself superficially, you are laboring under terrible excitement. Therefore it is my duty to say to you at once that there is no cause for your excitement, no cause for your apprehension as to results. I feel exceedingly confident that you will, in due time, regain possession of all that you care for most—quietly, quietly, my dear sir! You are not yet ready to meet these men, nor am I ready to go with you. I beg you to continue your habit of self-command for a little while. There is no haste—that is to say, there is every reason to make haste slowly. And the quickest method is to seat yourself. Thank you. And I shall sit here beside you and spread out this papyrus scroll for your inspection.”

Burke stared at the Tracer, then at the scroll.

“What has that inscription to do with the matter in hand?” he demanded impatiently.

“I leave you to judge,” said the Tracer. A dull tint of excitement flushed his lean cheeks; he twisted his gray mustache and bent over the unrolled scroll which was now held flat by weights at the four corners.

“Can you understand any of these symbols, Mr. Burke?” he asked.

“No.”

“Curious,” mused the Tracer. “Do you know it was fortunate that you put this bit of papyrus in the pocket of your shooting coat—so fortunate that, in a way, it approaches the miraculous?”

“What do you mean? Is there anything in that scroll bearing on this matter?”

“Yes.”

“And you can read it? Are you versed in such learning, Mr. Keen?”

“I am an Egyptologist—among other details,” said the Tracer calmly.

The young man gazed at him, astonished. The Tracer of Lost Persons picked up a pencil, laid a sheet of paper on the table beside the papyrus, and slowly began to copy the first symbol:

CHAPTER XIX

“The ancient Egyptian word for the personal pronoun ‘I’ was anuk,” said the Tracer placidly. “The phonetic for a was the hieroglyph

a reed; for n the water symbol

for u the symbols

for k

Therefore this hieroglyphic inscription begins with the personal pronoun

or I. That is very easy, of course.

“Now, the most ancient of Egyptian inscriptions read vertically in columns; there are only two columns in this papyrus, so we’ll try it vertically and pass downward to the next symbol, which is inclosed in a sort of frame or cartouch. That immediately signifies that royalty is mentioned; therefore, we have already translated as much as ‘I, the king (or queen).’ Do you see?”

“Yes,” said Burke, staring.

“Very well. Now this symbol, number two,

spells out the word ‘Meris,’ in this way: M (pronounced me) is phonetically symbolized by the characters

r by

(a mouth) and the comma

and the hieroglyph

i by two reeds

and two oblique strokes,

and s by

This gives us Meris, the name of that deposed and fugitive king of Egypt who, after a last raid on the summer palace of Mer-Shen, usurping ruler of Egypt, was followed and tracked to Saïs, where, with an arrow through his back, he crawled to El Teb and finally died there of his wound. All this Egyptologists are perfectly familiar with in the translations of the boastful tablets and inscriptions erected near Saïs by Mer-Shen, the three hundred and twelfth sovereign after Queen Nitocris.”

He looked up at Burke, smiling. “Therefore,” he said, “this papyrus scroll was written by Meris, ex-king, a speculative thousands of years before Christ. And it begins: ‘I, Meris the King.’”

“How does all this bear upon what concerns me?” demanded Burke.

“Wait!”

Something in the quiet significance of the Tracer’s brief command sent a curious thrill through the younger man. He leaned stiffly forward, studying the scroll, every faculty concentrated on the symbol which the Tracer had now touched with the carefully sharpened point of his pencil:

“That,” said Mr. Keen, “is the ancient Egyptian word for ‘little,’ ‘Ket.’ The next, below, written in two lines, is ‘Samaris,’ a proper name—the name of a woman. Under that, again, is the symbol for the number 18; the decimal sign,

and eight vertical strokes,

Under that, again, is a hieroglyph of another sort, an ideograph representing a girl with a harp; and, beneath that, the symbol which always represented a dancing girl

and also the royal symbol inclosed in a cartouch,

which means literally ‘the Ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt.’ Under that is the significant symbol

representing an arm and a hand holding a stick. This always means force—to take forcibly or to use violence. Therefore, so far, we have the following literal translation: ‘I, Meris the King, little Samaris, eighteen, a harpist, dancing girl, the Ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt, to take by violence—’”

“What does that make?” broke in Burke impatiently.

“Wait! Wait until we have translated everything literally. And, Mr. Burke, it might make it easier for us both if you would remember that I have had the pleasure of deciphering many hundreds of papyri before you had ever heard that there were such things.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the young man in a low voice.

“I beg yours for my impatience,” said the Tracer pleasantly. “This deciphering always did affect my nerves and shorten my temper. And, no doubt, it is quite as hard on you. Shall we go on, Mr. Burke?”

“If you please, Mr. Keen.”

So the Tracer laid his pencil point on the next symbol

“That is the symbol for night,” he said; “and that

is the water symbol again, as you know; and that

is the ideograph, meaning a ship. The five reversed crescents

record the number of days voyage; the sign

means a house, and is also the letter H in the Egyptian alphabet.

“Under it, again, we have a repetition of the first symbol meaning I, and a repetition of the second symbol, meaning ‘Meris, the King.’ Then, below that cartouch, comes a new symbol,

which is the feminine personal pronoun, sentus, meaning ‘she‘; and the first column is completed with the symbol for the ancient Egyptian verb, nehes, ‘to awake.’

“And now we take the second column, which begins with the jackal ideograph expressing slyness or cleverness. Under it is the hieroglyph meaning ‘to run away,’ ‘to escape.’ And under that, Mr. Burke, is one of the rarest of all Egyptian symbols; a symbol seldom seen on stone or papyrus,

except in rare references to the mysteries of Isis. The meaning of it, so long in dispute, has finally been practically determined through a new discovery in the cuneiform inscriptions. It is the symbol of two hands holding two closed eyes; and it signifies power.”

“You mean that those ancients understood hypnotism?” asked Burke, astonished.

“Evidently their priests did; evidently hypnotism was understood and employed in certain mysteries. And there is the symbol of it; and under it the hieroglyphs

meaning ‘a day and a night,’ with the symbol

as usual present to signify force or strength employed. Under that, again, is a human figure stretched upon a typical Egyptian couch. And now, Mr. Burke, note carefully three modifying signs: first, that it is a couch or bed on which the figure is stretched, not the funeral couch, not the embalming slab; second, there is no mummy mask covering the face, and no mummy case covering the body; third, that under the recumbent figure is pictured an open mouth, not a closed one.

“All these modify the ideograph, apparently representing death. But the sleep symbol is not present. Therefore it is a sound inference that all this simply confirms the symbol of hypnotism.”

Burke, intensely absorbed, stared steadily at the scroll.

“Now,” continued Mr. Keen, “we note the symbol of force again, always present; and, continuing horizontally, a cartouch quite empty except for the midday sun. That is simply translated; the midday sun illuminates nothing. Meris, deposed, is king only in name; and the sun no longer shines on him as ‘Ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt.’ Under that despairing symbol, ‘King of Nothing,’ we have

the phonetics which spell sha, the word for garden. And, just beyond this, horizontally, the modifying ideograph meaning ‘a water garden’;

a design of lotus and tree alternating on a terrace. Under that is the symbol for the word ‘aneb,’

a ‘wall.’ Beyond that, horizontally, is the symbol for ‘house.’ It should be placed under the wall symbol, but the Egyptians were very apt to fill up spaces instead of continuing their vertical columns. Now, beneath, we find the imperative command

‘arise!’ And the Egyptian personal pronoun ‘entuten,’

which means ‘you’ or ‘thou.’

“Under that is the symbol

which means ‘priest,’ or, literally, ‘priest man.’ Then comes the imperative ‘awake to life!’

After that, our first symbol again, meaning ‘I,’ followed horizontally by the symbol

signifying ‘to go.’

“Then comes a very important drawing—you see?—the picture of a man with a jackal’s head, not a dog’s head. It is not accompanied by the phonetic in a cartouch, as it should be. Probably the writer was in desperate haste at the end. But, nevertheless, it is easy to translate that symbol of the man with a jackal’s head. It is a picture of the Egyptian god, Anubis, who was supposed to linger at the side of the dying to conduct their souls. Anubis, the jackal-headed, is the courier, the personal escort of departing souls. And this is he.

“And now the screed ends with the cry ‘Pray for me!’

the last symbol on this strange scroll—this missive written by a deposed, wounded, and dying king to an unnamed priest. Here is the literal translation in columns:

I | | cunning
Meris the King | | escape
little | | hypnotize
Samaris | | King of Nothing
eighteen | | place forcibly
a harpist | | garden

a dancing girl

Ruler of
Upper and Lower Egypt

water garden

took forcibly | night | wall
by water | | house
five days | | Arise. Do
ship | | Thou
house | | Priest Man
I | | Awake
Meris the King | | To life
she | | I go
awake | | Anubis
| | Pray

“And this is what that letter, thousands of years old, means in this language of ours, hundreds of years young: ‘I, Meris the King, seized little Samaris, a harpist and a dancing girl, eighteen years of age, belonging to the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and carried her away at night on shipboard—a voyage of five days—to my house. I, Meris the King, lest she lie awake watching cunningly for a chance to escape, hypnotized her (or had her hypnotized) so that she lay like one dead or asleep, but breathing, and I, King no longer of Upper and Lower Egypt, took her and placed her in my house under the wall of the water garden. Arise! therefore, O thou priest; (go) and awaken her to life. I am dying (I go with Anubis!). Pray for me!’”

CHAPTER XX

For a full minute the two men sat there without moving or speaking. Then the Tracer laid aside his pencil.

“To sum up,” he said, opening the palm of his left hand and placing the forefinger of his right across it, “the excavation made by the falling pillar raised in triumph above the water garden of the deposed king, Meris, by his rival, was the subterranean house of Meris. The prostrate figure which crumbled to powder at your touch may have been the very priest to whom this letter or papyrus was written. Perhaps the bearer of the scroll was a traitor and stabbed the priest as he was reading the missive. Who can tell how that priest died? He either died or betrayed his trust, for he never aroused the little Samaris from her suspended animation. And the water garden fell into ruins and she slept; and the Ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt raised his columns, lotus crowned, above the ruins; and she slept on. Then—you came.”

Burke stared like one stupefied.

“I do not know,” said the Tracer gravely, “what balm there may be in a suspension of sensation, perhaps of vitality, to protect the human body from corruption after death. I do not know how soon suspended animation or the state of hypnotic coma, undisturbed, changes into death—whether it comes gradually, imperceptibly freeing the soul; whether the soul hides there, asleep, until suddenly the flame of vitality is extinguished. I do not know how long she lay there with life in her.”

He leaned back and touched an electric bell, then, turning to Burke:

“Speaking of pistol range,” he said, “unstrap those weapons and pass them over, if you please.”

And the young man obeyed as in a trance.

“Thank you. There are four men coming into this room. You will keep your seat, if you please, Mr. Burke.”

After a moment the door opened noiselessly. Two men handcuffed together entered the room; two men, hands in their pockets, sauntered carelessly behind the prisoners and leaned back against the closed door.

“That short, red-haired, lame man with the cast in his eye—do you recognize him?” asked the Tracer quietly.

Burke, grasping the arms of his chair, had started to rise, fury fairly blazing from his eyes; but, at the sound of the Tracer’s calm, even voice, he sank back into his chair.

“That is Joram Smiles? You recognize him?” continued Mr. Keen.

Burke nodded.

“Exactly—alias Limpy, alias Red Jo, alias Big Stick Joram, alias Pinky; swindler, international confidence man, fence, burglar, gambler; convicted in 1887, and sent to Sing Sing for forgery; convicted in 1898, and sent to Auburn for swindling; arrested by my men on board the S.S. Scythian Queen, at the cabled request of John T. Burke, Esquire, and held to explain the nature of his luggage, which consisted of the contents of an Egyptian vault or underground ruin, declared at the customhouse as a mummy, and passed as such.”

The quiet, monotonous voice of the Tracer halted, then, as he glanced at the second prisoner, grew harder:

“Emanuel Gandon, general international criminal, with over half a hundred aliases, arrested in company with Smiles and held until Mr. Burke’s arrival.”

Turning to Burke, the Tracer continued: “Fortunately, the Scythian Queen broke down off Brindisi. It gave us time to act on your cable; we found these men aboard when she was signaled off the Hook. I went out with the pilot myself, Mr. Burke.”

Smiles shot a wicked look at Burke; Gandon scowled at the floor.

“Now,” said the Tracer pleasantly, meeting the venomous glare of Smiles, “I’ll get you that warrant you have been demanding to have exhibited to you. Here it is—charging you and your amiable friend Gandon with breaking into and robbing the Metropolitan Museum of ancient Egyptian gold ornaments, in March, 1903, and taking them to France, where they were sold to collectors. It seems that you found the business good enough to go prowling about Egypt on a hunt for something to sell here. A great mistake, my friends—a very great mistake, because, after the Museum has finished with you, the Egyptian Government desires to extradite you. And I rather suspect you’ll have to go.”

He nodded to the two quiet men leaning against the door.

“Come, Joram,” said one of them pleasantly.

But Smiles turned furiously on the Tracer. “You lie, you old gray rat!” he cried. “That ain’t no mummy; that’s a plain dead girl! And there ain’t no extrydition for body snatchin’, so I guess them niggers at Cairo won’t get us, after all!”

“Perhaps,” said the Tracer, looking at Burke, who had risen, pale and astounded. “Sit down, Mr. Burke! There is no need to question these men; no need to demand what they robbed you of. For,” he added slowly, “what they took from the garden grotto of Saïs, and from you, I have under my own protection.”

The Tracer rose, locked the door through which the prisoners and their escorts had departed; then, turning gravely on Burke, he continued:

“That panel, there, is a door. There is a room beyond—a room facing to the south, bright with sunshine, flowers, soft rugs, and draperies of the East. She is there—like a child asleep!”

Burke reeled, steadying himself against the wall; the Tracer stared at space, speaking very slowly:

“Such death I have never before heard of. From the moment she came under my protection I have dared to doubt—many things. And an hour ago you brought me a papyrus scroll confirming my doubts. I doubt still—Heaven knows what! Who can say how long the flame of life may flicker within suspended animation? A week? A month? A year? Longer than that? Yes; the Hindoos have proved it. How long? The span of a normal life? Or longer? Can the life flame burn indefinitely when the functions are absolutely suspended—generation after generation, century after century?”

Burke, ghastly white, straightened up, quivering in every limb; the Tracer, as pale as he, laid his hand on the secret panel.

“If—if you dare say it—the phrase is this: ‘O Ket Samaris, Nehes!‘—‘O Little Samaris, awake!’”

“I—dare. In Heaven’s name, open that door!”

Then, averting his head, the Tracer of Lost Persons swung open the panel.

A flood of sunshine flashed on Burke’s face; he entered; and the paneled door closed behind him without a sound.

Minute after minute passed; the Tracer stood as though turned to stone, gray head bent.

Then he heard Burke’s voice ring out unsteadily:

“O Ket Samaris—Samaris! O Ket Samaris—Nehes!”

And again: “Samaris! Samaris! O beloved, awake!”

And once more: “Nehes! O Samaris!”

Silence, broken by a strange, sweet, drowsy plaint—like a child awakened at midnight by a dazzling light.

“Samaris!”

Then, through the stillness, a little laugh, and a softly tremulous voice:

“Ari un āhā, O Entuk sen!”

CHAPTER XXI

[The “Carden Girl”]

“What we want to do,” said Gatewood over the telephone, “is to give you a corking little dinner at the Santa Regina. There’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Tommy Kerns, Captain and Mrs. Harren, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Burke, Mrs. Gatewood, and myself. We want you to set the date for it, Mr. Keen, and we also wish you to suggest one more deliriously happy couple whom you have dragged out of misery and flung head-first into terrestrial paradise.”

“Do you young people really care to do this for me?” asked the Tracer, laughing.

“Of course we do. We’re crazy about it. We want one more couple, and you to set the date.”

There was the slightest pause; then the Tracer’s voice, with the same undertone of amusement ringing through it:

“How would your cousin, Victor Carden, do?”

“He’s all right, only he isn’t married. We want two people whom you have joined together after hazard has put them asunder and done stunts with them.”

“Very well; Victor Carden and his very lovely wife will be just the people.”

“Is Victor married?” demanded Gatewood, astonished.

“No,” said the Tracer demurely, “but he will be in time for that dinner.” And he set the date for the end of the week in an amused voice, and rang off.

Then he glanced at the clock, touched an electric bell, and again unhooking the receiver of the telephone, called up the Sherwood Studios and asked for Mr. Carden.

“Is this Mr. Carden? Oh, good morning, Mr. Carden! This is Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. Could you make it convenient to call—say in course of half an hour? Thank you…. What?… Well, speaking with that caution and reserve which we are obliged to employ in making any preliminary statements to our clients, I think I may safely say that you have every reason to feel moderately encouraged.”

“You mean,” said Carden’s voice, “that you have actually solved the proposition?”

“It has been a difficult proposition, Mr. Carden; I will not deny that it has taxed our resources to the uttermost. Over a thousand people, first and last, have been employed on this case. It has been a slow and tedious affair, Mr. Carden—tedious for us all. We seldom have a case continue as long as this has; it is a year ago to-day since you placed the matter in our hands…. What? Well, without committing myself, I think that I may venture to express a carefully qualified opinion that the solution of the case is probably practically in the way of being almost accomplished!… Yes, I shall expect you in half an hour. Good-by!”

The Tracer of Lost Persons’ eyes were twinkling as he hung up the receiver and turned in his revolving chair to meet the pretty young woman who had entered in response to his ring.

“The Carden case, if you please, Miss Smith,” he said, smiling to himself.

The young woman also smiled; the Carden case had become a classic in the office. Nobody except Mr. Keen had believed that the case could ever be solved.

“Safe-deposit box 108923!” said Miss Smith softly, pressing a speaking tube to her red lips. In a few moments there came a hissing thud from the pneumatic tube; Miss Smith unlocked it and extracted a smooth, steel cylinder.

“The combination for that cylinder is A-4-44-11-X,” observed the Tracer, consulting a cipher code, “which, translated,” he added, “gives us the setting combination, One, D, R-R,-J-‘24.”

Miss Smith turned the movable disks at the end of the cylinder until the required combination appeared. Then she unscrewed the cylinder head and dumped out the documents in the famous Carden case.

“As Mr. Carden will be here in half an hour or so I think we had better run over the case briefly,” nodded the Tracer, leaning back in his chair and composing himself to listen. “Begin with my preliminary memorandum, Miss Smith.”

“Case 108923,” began the girl. Then she read the date, Carden’s full name, Victor Carden, a terse biography of the same gentleman, and added: “Case accepted. Contingent fee, $5,000.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Keen; “now, run through the minutes of the first interview.”

And Miss Smith unrolled a typewritten scroll and read:

Victor Carden, Esquire, the well-known artist, called this evening at 6.30. Tall, well-bred, good appearance, very handsome; very much embarrassed. Questioned by Mr. Keen he turned pink, and looked timidly at the stenographer (Miss Colt). Asked if he might not see Mr. Keen alone, Miss Colt retired. Mr. Keen set the recording phonograph in motion by dropping his elbow on his desk.

A brief résumé of the cylinder records followed:

Mr. Carden asked Mr. Keen if he (Mr. Keen) knew who he (Mr. Carden) was. Mr. Keen replied that everybody knew Mr. Carden, the celebrated painter and illustrator who had created the popular type of beauty known as the “Carden Girl.” Mr. Carden blushed and fidgeted. (Notes from. Mr. Keen’s Observation Book, pp. 291-297.) Admitted that he was the creator of the “Carden Girl.” Admitted he had drawn and painted that particular type of feminine beauty many times. Fidgeted some more. (Keen’s O.B., pp. 298-299.) Volunteered the statement that this type of beauty, known as the “Carden Girl,” was the cause of great unhappiness to himself. Questioned, turned pinker and fidgeted. (K.O.B., page 300.) Denied that his present trouble was caused by the model who had posed for the “Carden Girl.” Explained that a number of assorted models had posed for that type of beauty. Further explained that none of them resembled the type; that the type was his own creation; that he used models merely for the anatomy, and that he always idealized form and features.

Questioned again, admitted that the features of the “Carden Girl” were his ideal of the highest and loveliest type of feminine beauty. Did not deny that he had fallen in love with his own creation. Turned red and tried to smoke. (K.O.B., page 303.) Admitted he had been fascinated himself with his own rendering of a type of beauty which he had never seen anywhere except as rendered by his own pencil on paper or on canvas. Fidgeted. (K.O.B., page 304.) Admitted that he could easily fall in love with a woman who resembled the “Carden Girl.” Didn’t believe she ever really existed. Confessed he had hoped for years to encounter her, but had begun to despair. Admitted that he had ventured to think that Mr. Keen might trace such a girl for him. Doubted Mr. Keen’s success. Fidgeted (K.O.B., page 306), and asked Mr. Keen to take the case. Promised to send to Mr. Keen a painting in oil which embodied his loftiest ideal of the type known as the “Carden Girl.” (Portrait received; lithographs made and distributed to our agents according to routine, from Canada to Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.)

Mr. Keen terminated the interview with characteristic tact, accepting the case on the contingent fee of $5,000.

“Very well,” said the Tracer, as Miss Smith rolled up the scroll and looked at him for further instructions. “Now, perhaps you had better run over the short summary of proceedings to date. I mean the digest which you will find attached to the completed records.”

Miss Smith found the paper, unrolled it, and read:

During the twelve months’ investigation and search (in re Carden) seven hundred and nine young women were discovered who resembled very closely the type sought for. By process of elimination, owing to defects in figure, features, speech, breeding, etc., etc., this list was cut down to three. One of these occasionally chewed gum, but otherwise resembled the type. The second married before the investigation of her habits could be completed. The third is apparently a flawless replica of Mr. Carden’s original in face, figure, breeding, education, moral and mental habits. (See Document 23, A.)

“Read Document 23, A,” nodded Mr. Keen.

And Miss Smith read:

ROSALIND HOLLIS, M.D.

Age | | 24
Height | | 5 feet 9 inches
Weight | | 160 pounds
Hair | | Thick, bright, ruddy golden, and inclined to curl.
Teeth | | Perfect
Eyes | | Dark violet-blue
Mouth | | Perfect
Color | | Fair. An ivory-tinted blonde.
Figure | | Perfect
Health | | Perfect
Temper | | Feminine
Habits | | Austere, with a resolutely suppressed capacity for romance.
Business | | None
Profession | | Physician
Mania | | A Mission

NOTE.—Dr. Rosalind Hollis was presented to society in her eighteenth year. At the end of her second season she withdrew from society with the determination to devote her entire life to charity. Settlement work and the study of medicine have occupied her constantly. Recently admitted to practice, she spends her mornings in visiting the poor, whom she treats free of all charge; her afternoons and evenings are devoted to what she expects is to be her specialty: the study of the rare malady known as Lamour’s Disease. (See note on second page.)

It is understood that Dr. Hollis has abjured the society of all men other than her patients and such of her professional confrères as she is obliged to consult or work with. Her theory is that of the beehive: drones for mates, workers for work. She adds, very decidedly, that she belongs to the latter division, and means to remain there permanently.

NOTE (Mr. Keen’s O.B., pp. 916-18).—Her eccentricity is probably the result of a fine, wholesome, highly strung young girl taking life and herself too seriously. The remedy will be the Right Man.

“Exactly,” nodded Mr. Keen, joining the tips of his thin fingers and partly closing his eyes. “Now, Miss Smith, the disease which Dr. Hollis intends to make her specialty—have you any notes on that?”

“Here they are,” said Miss Smith; and she read:

Lamour’s Disease; the rarest of all known diseases; first discovered and described by Ero S. Lamour, M.D., M.S., F.B.A., M.F.H., in 1861. Only a single case has ever been observed. This case is fully described in Dr. Lamour’s superb and monumental work in sixteen volumes. Briefly, the disease appears without any known cause, and is ultimately supposed to result fatally. The first symptom is the appearance of a faintly bluish circle under the eyes, as though the patient was accustomed to using the eyes too steadily at times. Sometimes a slight degree of fever accompanies this manifestation; pulse and temperature vary. The patient is apparently in excellent health, but liable to loss of appetite, restlessness, and a sudden flushing of the face. These symptoms are followed by others unmistakable: the patient becomes silent at times; at times evinces a weakness for sentimental expressions; flushes easily; is easily depressed; will sit for hours looking at one person; and, if not checked, will exhibit impulsive symptoms of affection for the opposite sex. The strangest symptom of all, however, is the physical change in the patient, whose features and figure, under the trained eye of the observer, gradually from day to day assume the symmetry and charm of a beauty almost unearthly, sometimes accompanied by a spiritual pallor which is unmistakable in confirming the diagnosis, and which, Dr. Lamour believes, presages the inexorable approach of immortality.

There is no known remedy for Lamour’s Disease. The only case on record is the case of the young lady described by Dr. Lamour, who watched her for years with unexampled patience and enthusiasm; finally, in the interest of science, marrying his patient in order to devote his life to a study of her symptoms. Unfortunately, some of these disappeared early—within a week—but the curious manifestation of physical beauty remained, and continued to increase daily to a dazzling radiance, with no apparent injury to the patient. Dr. Lamour, unfortunately, died before his investigations, covering over forty years, could be completed; his widow survived him for a day or two only, leaving sixteen children.

Here is a wide and unknown field for medical men to investigate. It is safe to say that the physician who first discovers the bacillus of Lamour’s Disease and the proper remedy to combat it will reap as his reward a glory and renown imperishable. Lamour’s Disease is a disease not yet understood—a disease whose termination is believed to be fatal—a strange disease which seems to render radiant and beautiful the features of the patient, brightening them with the forewarning of impending death and the splendid resurrection of immortality.

The Tracer of Lost Persons caressed his chin reflectively. “Exactly, Miss Smith. So this is the disease which Dr. Hollis has chosen for her specialty. And only one case on record. Exactly. Thank you.”

Miss Smith replaced the papers in the steel cylinder, slipped it into the pneumatic tube, sent it whizzing below to the safe-deposit vaults, and, saluting Mr. Keen with a pleasant inclination of her head, went out of the room.

The Tracer turned in his chair, picked up the daily detective report, and scanned it until he came to the name Hollis. It appeared that the daily routine of Rosalind Hollis had not varied during the past three weeks. In the mornings she was good to the poor with bottles and pills; in the afternoons she tucked one of Lamour’s famous sixteen volumes under her arm and walked to Central Park, where, with democratic simplicity, she sat on a secluded bench and pored over the symptoms of Lamour’s Disease. About five she retired to her severely simple apartments in the big brownstone office building devoted to physicians, corner of Fifty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue. Here she took tea, read a little, dined all alone, and retired about nine. This was the guileless but determined existence of Rosalind Hollis, M.D., according to McConnell, the detective assigned to observe her.

The Tracer refolded the report of his chief of detectives and pigeonholed it just as the door opened and a tall, well-built, attractive young man entered.

Shyness was written all over him; he offered his hand to Mr. Keen with an embarrassed air and seated himself at that gentleman’s invitation.

“I’m almost sorry I ever began this sort of thing,” he blurted out, like a big schoolboy appalled at his own misdemeanors. “The truth is, Mr. Keen, that the prospect of actually seeing a ‘Carden Girl’ alive has scared me through and through. I’ve a notion that my business with that sort of a girl ends when I’ve drawn her picture.”

“But surely,” said the Tracer mildly, “you have some natural curiosity to see the living copy of your charming but inanimate originals, haven’t you, Mr. Carden?”

“Yes—oh, certainly. I’d like to see one of them alive—say out of a window, or from a cab. I should not care to be too close to her.”

“But merely seeing her does not commit you,” interposed Mr. Keen, smiling. “She is far too busy, too much absorbed in her own affairs to take any notice of you. I understand that she has something of an aversion for men.”

“Aversion!”

“Well, she excludes them as unnecessary to her existence.”

“Why?” asked Carden.

“Because she has a mission in life,” said Mr. Keen gravely.

Carden looked out of the window. It was pleasant weather—June in all its early loveliness—the fifth day of June. The sixth was his birthday.

“I’ve simply got to marry somebody before the day after to-morrow,” he said aloud—“that is, if I want my legacy.”

“What!” demanded the Tracer sharply.

Carden turned, pink and guilty. “I didn’t tell you all the circumstances of my case,” he said. “I suppose I ought to have done so.”

“Exactly,” said the Tracer severely. “Why is it necessary that you marry somebody before the day after to-morrow?”

“Well, it’s my twenty-fifth birthday—”

“Somebody has left you money on condition that you marry before your twenty-fifth birthday? Is that it, Mr. Carden? An uncle? An imbecile grandfather? A sentimental aunt?”

“My Aunt Tabby Van Beekman.”

“Where is she?”

“In Trinity churchyard. It’s too late to expostulate with her, you see. Besides, it wouldn’t have done any good when she was alive.”

The Tracer knitted his brows, musing, the points of his slim fingers joined.

“She was very proud, very autocratic,” said Carden. “I am the last of my race and my aunt was determined that the race should not die out with me. I don’t want to marry and increase, but she’s trying to make me. At all events, I am not going to marry any woman inferior to the type I have created with my pencil—what the public calls the ‘Carden Girl.’ And now you see that your discovery of this living type comes rather late. In two days I must be legally married if I want my Aunt Tabby’s legacy; and to-day for the first time I hear of a girl who, you assure me, compares favorably to my copyrighted type, but who has a mission and an aversion to men. So you see, Mr. Keen, that the matter is perfectly hopeless.”

“I don’t see anything of the kind,” said Mr. Keen firmly.

“What?—do you believe there is any chance—”

“Of your falling in love within the next hour or so? Yes, I do. I think there is every chance of it. I am sure of it. But that is not the difficulty. The problem is far more complicated.”

“You mean—”

“Exactly; how to marry that girl before day after to-morrow. That’s the problem, Mr. Carden!—not whether you are capable of falling in love with her. I have seen her; I know you can’t avoid falling in love with her. Nobody could. I myself am on the verge of it; and I am fifty: you can’t avoid loving her.”

“If that were so,” said Carden gravely; “if I were really going to fall in love with her—I would not care a rap about my Aunt Tabby and her money—”

“You ought to care about it for this young girl’s sake. That legacy is virtually hers, not yours. She has a right to it. No man can ever give enough to the woman he loves; no man has ever done so. What she gives and what he gives are never a fair exchange. If you can balance the account in any measure, it is your duty to do it. Mr. Carden, if she comes to love you she may think it very fine that you bring to her your love, yourself, your fame, your talents, your success, your position, your gratifying income. But I tell you it’s not enough to balance the account. It is never enough—no, not all your devotion to her included! You can never balance the account on earth—all you can do is to try to balance it materially and spiritually. Therefore I say, endow her with all your earthly goods. Give all you can in every way to lighten as much as possible man’s hopeless debt to all women who have ever loved.”

“You talk about it as though I were already committed,” said Carden, astonished.

“You are, morally. For a month I have, without her knowledge, it is true, invaded the privacy of a very lovely young girl—studied her minutely, possessed myself of her history, informed myself of her habits. What excuse had I for this unless I desired her happiness and yours? Nobody could offer me any inducement to engage in such a practice unless I believed that the means might justify a moral conclusion. And the moral conclusion of this investigation is your marriage to her.”

“Certainly,” said Carden uneasily, “but how are we going to accomplish it by to-morrow? How is it going to be accomplished at all?”

The Tracer of Lost Persons rose and began to pace the long rug, clasping his hands behind his back. Minute after minute sped; Carden stared alternately at Mr. Keen and at the blue sky through the open window.

“It is seldom,” said Mr. Keen with evident annoyance, “that I personally take any spectacular part in the actual and concrete demonstrations necessary to a successful conclusion of a client’s case. But I’ve got to do it this time.”

He went to a cupboard, picked out a gray wig and gray side whiskers and deliberately waved them at Carden.

“You see what these look like?” he demanded.

“Y-yes.”

“Very well. It is now noon. Do you know the Park? Do you happen to recollect a shady turn in the path after you cross the bridge over the swan lake? Here; I’ll draw it for you. Now, here is the lake; here’s the esplanade and fountain, you see. Here’s the path. You follow it—so!—around the lake, across the bridge, then following the lake to the right—so!—then up the wooded slope to the left—so! Now, here is a bench. I mark it Number One. She sits there with her book—there she is!”

“If she looks like that—” began Carden. And they both laughed with the slightest trace of excitement.

“Here is Bench Number Two!” resumed the Tracer. “Here you sit—and there you are!”

MR. KEEN’S SKETCH OF THE RENDEZVOUS

“Thanks,” said Carden, laughing again.

“Now,” continued the Tracer, “you must be there at one o’clock. She will be there at one-thirty, or earlier perhaps. A little later I will become benignly visible. Your part is merely a thinking part; you are to do nothing, say nothing, unless spoken to. And when you are spoken to you are to acquiesce in whatever anybody says to you, and you are to do whatever anybody requests you to do. And, above all, don’t be surprised at anything that may happen. You’ll be nervous enough; I expect that. You’ll probably color up and flush and fidget; I expect that; I count on that. But don’t lose your nerve entirely; and don’t think of attempting to escape.”

“Escape! From what? From whom?”

“From her.”

“Her?”

“Are you going to follow my instructions?” demanded the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“I—y-yes, of course.”

“Very well, then, I am going to rub some of this under your eyes.” And Mr. Keen produced a make-up box and, walking over to Carden, calmly darkened the skin under his eyes.

“I look as though I had been on a bat!” exclaimed Carden, surveying himself in a mirror. “Do you think any girl could find any attraction in such a countenance?”

“She will,” observed the Tracer meaningly. “Now, Mr. Carden, one last word: The moment you find yourself in love with her, and the first moment you have the chance to do so decently, make love to her. She won’t dismiss you; she will repulse you, of course, but she won’t let you go. I know what I am saying; all I ask of you is to promise on your honor to carry out these instructions. Do you promise?”

“I do.”

“Then here is the map of the rendezvous which I have drawn. Be there promptly. Good morning.”

CHAPTER XXII

At one o’clock that afternoon a young man earnestly consulting a map might have been seen pursuing his solitary way through Central Park. Fresh green foliage arched above him, flecking the path with fretted shadow and sunlight; the sweet odor of flowering shrubs saturated the air; the waters of the lake sparkled where swans swept to and fro, snowy wings spread like sails to the fitful June wind.

“This,” he murmured, pausing at a shaded bend in the path, “must be Bench Number One. I am not to sit on that. This must be Bench Number Two. I am to sit on that. So here I am,” he added nervously, seating himself and looking about him with the caution of a cat in a strange back yard.

There was nobody in sight. Reassured, he ventured to drop one knee over the other and lean upon his walking stick. For a few minutes he remained in this noncommittal attitude, alert at every sound, anxious, uncomfortable, dreading he knew not what. A big, fat, gray squirrel racing noisily across the fallen leaves gave him a shock. A number of birds came to look at him—or so it appeared to him, for in the inquisitive scrutiny of a robin he fancied he divined sardonic meaning, and in the blank yellow stare of a purple grackle, a sinister significance out of all proportion to the size of the bird.

“What an absurd position to be in!” he thought. And suddenly he was seized with a desire to flee.

He didn’t because he had promised not to, but the desire persisted to the point of mania. Oh, how he could run if he only hadn’t promised not to! His entire being tingled with the latent possibilities of a burst of terrific speed. He wanted to scuttle away like a scared rabbit. The pace of the kangaroo would be slow in comparison. What a record he could make if he hadn’t promised not to.

He crossed his knees the other way and brooded. The gray squirrel climbed the bench and nosed his pockets for possible peanuts, then hopped off hopefully toward a distant nursemaid and two children.

Growing more alarmed every time he consulted his watch Carden attempted to stem his rising panic with logic and philosophy, repeating: “Steady! my son! Don’t act like this! You’re not obliged to marry her if you don’t fall in love with her; and if you do, you won’t mind marrying her. That is philosophy. That is logic. Oh, I wonder what will have happened to me by this time to-morrow! I wish it were this time to-morrow! I wish it were this time next month! Then it would be all over. Then it would be—”

His muttering speech froze on his lips. Rooted to his bench he sat staring at a distant figure approaching—the figure of a young girl in a summer gown.

Nearer, nearer she came, walking with a free-limbed, graceful step, head high, one arm clasping a book.

That was the way the girls he drew would have walked had they ever lived. Even in the midst of his fright his artist’s eyes noted that: noted the perfect figure, too, and the witchery of its grace and contour, and the fascinating poise of her head, and the splendid color of her hair; noted mechanically the flowing lines of her gown, and the dainty modeling of arm and wrist and throat and ear.

Then, as she reached her bench and seated herself, she raised her eyes and looked at him. And for the first time in his life he realized that ideal beauty was but the pale phantom of the real and founded on something more than imagination and thought; on something of vaster import than fancy and taste and technical skill; that it was founded on Life itself—on breathing, living, palpitating, tremulous Life!—from which all true inspiration must come.

Over and over to himself he was repeating: “Of course, it is perfectly impossible that I can be in love already. Love doesn’t happen between two ticks of a watch. I am merely amazed at that girl’s beauty; that is all. I am merely astounded in the presence of perfection; that is all. There is nothing more serious the matter with me. It isn’t necessary for me to continue to look at her; it isn’t vital to my happiness if I never saw her again…. That is—of course, I should like to see her, because I never did see living beauty such as hers in any woman. Not even in my pictures. What superb eyes! What a fascinatingly delicate nose! What a nose! By Heaven, that nose is a nose! I’ll draw noses that way in future. My pictures are all out of drawing; I must fit arms into their sockets the way hers fit! I must remember the modeling of her eyelids, too—and that chin! and those enchanting hands—”

She looked up leisurely from her book, surveyed him calmly, absent-eyed, then bent her head again to the reading.

“There is something the matter with me,” he thought with a suppressed gulp. “I—if she looks at me again—with those iris-hued eyes of a young goddess—I—I think I’m done for. I believe I’m done for anyway. It seems rather mad to think it. But there is something the matter—”

She deliberately looked at him again.

“It’s all wrong for them to let loose a girl like that on people,” he thought to himself, “all wrong. Everybody is bound to go mad over her. I’m going now. I’m mad already. I know I am, which proves I’m no lunatic. It isn’t her beauty; it’s the way she wears it—every motion, every breath of her. I know exactly what her voice is like. Anybody who looks into her eyes can see what her soul is like. She isn’t out of drawing anywhere—physically or spiritually. And when a man sees a girl like that, why—why there’s only one thing that can happen to him as far as I can see. And it doesn’t take a year either. Heavens! How awfully remote from me she seems to be.”

She looked up again, calmly, but not at him. A kindly, gray-whiskered old gentleman came tottering and rocking into view, his rosy, wrinkled face beaming benediction on the world as he passed through it—on the sunshine dappling the undergrowth, on the furry squirrels sitting up on their hind legs to watch him pass, on the stray dickybird that hopped fearlessly in his path, at the young man sitting very rigid there on his bench, at the fair, sweet-faced girl who met his aged eyes with the gentlest of involuntary smiles. And Carden did not recognize him!

Who could help smiling confidently into that benign face, with its gray hair and gray whiskers? Goodness radiated from every wrinkle.

“Dr. Atwood!” exclaimed the girl softly as she rose to meet this marvelous imitation of Dr. Austin Atwood, the great specialist on children’s diseases.

The old man beamed weakly at her, halted, still beaming, fumbled for his eyeglasses, adjusted them, and peered closely into her face.

“Bless my soul,” he smiled, “our pretty Dr. Hollis!”

“I—I did not suppose you would remember me,” she said, rosy with pleasure.

“Remember you? Surely, surely.” He made her a quaint, old-fashioned bow, turned, and peeped across the walk at Carden. And Carden, looking straight into his face, did not know the old man, who turned to Dr. Hollis again with many mysterious nods of his doddering head.

“You’re watching him, too, are you?” he chuckled, leaning toward her.

“Watching whom, Dr. Atwood?” she asked surprised.

“Hush, child! I thought you had noticed that unfortunate and afflicted young man opposite.”

Dr. Hollis looked curiously at Carden, then at the old gentleman with gray whiskers.

“Please sit down, Dr. Atwood, and tell me,” she murmured. “I have noticed nothing in particular about the young man on the bench there.” And she moved to give him room; and the young man opposite stared at them both as though bereft of reason.

“A heavy book for small hands, my child,” said the old gentleman in his quaintly garrulous fashion, peering with dimmed eyes at the volume in her lap.

She smiled, looking around at him.

“My, my!” he said, tremblingly raising his eyeglasses to scan the title on the page; “Dr. Lamour’s famous works! Are you studying Lamour, child?”

“Yes,” she said with that charming inflection youth reserves for age.

“Astonishing!” he murmured. “The coincidence is more than remarkable. A physician! And studying Lamour’s Disease! Incredible!”

“Is there anything strange in that, Dr. Atwood?” she smiled.

“Strange!” He lowered his voice, peering across at Carden. “Strange, did you say? Look across the path at that poor young man sitting there!”

“Yes,” she said, perplexed, “I see him.”

“What do you see?” whispered the old gentleman in a shakily portentous voice. “Here you sit reading about what others have seen; now what do you see?”

“Why, only a man—rather young—”

“No symptoms?”

“Symptoms? Of what?”

The old gentleman folded his withered hands over his cane. “My child,” he said, “for a year I have had that unfortunate young man under secret observation. He was not aware of it; it never entered his mind that I could be observing him with minutest attention. He may have supposed there was nothing the matter with him. He was in error. I have studied him carefully. Look closer! Are there dark circles under his eyes—or are there not?” he ended in senile triumph.

“There are,” she began, puzzled, “but I—but of what interest to me—”

“Compare his symptoms with the symptoms in that book you are studying,” said the old gentleman hoarsely.

“Do you mean—do you suppose—” she stammered, turning her eyes on Carden, who promptly blushed to his ears and began to fidget.

“Every symptom,” muttered the old gentleman. “Poor, poor young man!”

She had seen Carden turn a vivid pink; she now saw him fidget with his walking stick; she discovered the blue circles under his eyes. Three symptoms at once!

“Do you believe it possible?” she whispered excitedly under her breath to the old gentleman beside her. “It seems incredible! Such a rare disease! Only one single case ever described and studied! It seems impossible that I could be so fortunate as actually to see a case! Tell me, Dr. Atwood, do you believe that young man is really afflicted with Lamour’s Disease?”

“There is but one way to be absolutely certain,” said the old gentleman in a solemn voice, “and that is to study him; corroborate your suspicions by observing his pulse and temperature, as did Dr. Lamour.”

“But—how can I?” she faltered. “I—he would probably object to becoming a patient of mine—”

“Ask him, child! Ask him.”

“I have not courage—”

“Courage should be the badge of your profession,” said the old gentleman gravely. “When did a good physician ever show the white feather in the cause of humanity?”

“I—I know, but this requires a different sort of courage.”

“How,” persisted the old gentleman, “can you confirm your very natural suspicions concerning this unfortunate young man unless you corroborate your observations by studying him at close range? Besides, already it seems to me that certain unmistakable signs are visible; I mean that strange physical phase which Dr. Lamour dwells on: the symmetry of feature and limb, the curiously spiritual beauty. Do you not notice these? Or is my sight so dim that I only imagine it?”

“He is certainly symmetrical—and—in a certain way—almost handsome in regard to features,” she admitted, looking at Carden.

“Poor, poor boy!” muttered the old gentleman, wagging his gray whiskers. “I am too old to help him—too old to dream of finding a remedy for the awful malady which I am now convinced has seized him. I shall study him no more. It is useless. All I can do now is to mention his case to some young, vigorous, ambitious physician—some specialist—”

“Don’t!” she whispered almost fiercely, “don’t do that, Dr. Atwood! I want him, please! I—you helped me to discover him, you see. And his malady is to be my specialty. Please, do you mind if I keep him all to myself and study him?”

“But you refused, child.”

“I didn’t mean to. I—I didn’t exactly see how I was to study him. But I must study him! Oh, I must! There will surely be some way. Please let me. You discovered him, I admit, but I will promise you faithfully to devote my entire life to studying him, as the great Lamour devoted his life for forty years to his single patient.”

“But Dr. Lamour married his patient,” said the Tracer mildly.

“He—I—that need not be necessary—”

“But if it should prove necessary?”

“I—you—”

“Answer me, child.”

She stared across at Carden, biting her red lips. He turned pink promptly and fidgeted.

“He has got it!” she whispered excitedly. “Oh, do you mind if I take him for mine? I am perfectly wild to begin on him!”

“You have not yet answered my question,” said the old gentleman gravely. “Do you lack the courage to marry him if it becomes necessary to do so in order to devote your entire life to studying him?”

“Oh—it cannot be necessary—”

“You lack the courage.”

She was silent.

“Braver things have been done by those of your profession who have gone among lepers,” said the old gentleman sadly.

She flushed up instantly; her eyes sparkled; her head proudly high, delicate nostrils dilated.

“I am not afraid!” she said. “If it ever becomes necessary, I can show courage and devotion, as well as those of my profession who minister to the lepers of Molokai! Yes; I do promise you to marry him if I cannot otherwise study him. And I promise you solemnly to devote my entire life to observing his symptoms and searching for proper means to combat them. My one ambition in life is personally to observe and study a case of Lamour’s Disease, and to give my entire life to investigating its origin, its course, and its cure.”

The old gentleman rose, bowing with that quaintly obsolete courtesy which was in vogue in his youth.

“I am contented to leave him exclusively to you, Dr. Hollis. And I wish you happiness in your life’s work—and success in your cure of this unhappy young man.”

Hat in hand, he bowed again as he tottered past her, muttering and smiling to himself and shaking his trembling head as he went rocking on unsteady legs out into the sunshine, where the nursemaids and children flocked along the lake shore throwing peanuts to the waterfowl and satiated goldfish.

Dr. Hollis looked after him, her small hand buried among the pages of her open book. Carden viewed his disappearing figure with guileless emotions. He was vaguely aware that something important was about to happen to him. And it did before he was prepared.

CHAPTER XXIII

When Rosalind Hollis found herself on her feet again a slight sensation of fright checked her for a moment. Then, resolutely suppressing such unworthy weakness, the lofty inspiration of her mission in life dominated her, and she stepped forward undaunted. And Carden, seeing her advance toward him, arose in astonishment to meet her.

For a second they stood facing each other, he astounded, she a trifle pale but firm. Then in a low voice she asked his pardon for disturbing him.

“I am Rosalind Hollis, a physician,” she said quietly, “and physicians are sometimes obliged to do difficult things in the interest of their profession. It is dreadfully difficult for me to speak to you in this way. But”—she looked fearlessly at him—“I am confident you will not misinterpret what I have done.”

He managed to assure her that he did not misinterpret it.

She regarded him steadily; she examined the dark circles under his eyes; she coolly observed his rising color under her calm inspection; she saw him fidgeting with his walking stick. She must try his pulse!

“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions in the interest of science?” she said earnestly.

“As a m-m-matter of fact,” he stammered, “I don’t know much about science. Awfully glad to do anything I can, you know.”

“Oh, I don’t mean it that way,” she reassured him. A hint of a smile tinted her eyes with brilliant amethyst. “Would you mind if I sat here for a few moments? Could you overlook this horrid unconventionality long enough for me to explain why I have spoken to you?”

“I could indeed!” he said, so anxiously cordial that her lovely face grew serious and she hesitated. But he was standing aside, hat off, placing the bench at her disposal, and she seated herself, placing her book on the bench beside her.

“Would you mind sitting here for a few moments?” she asked him gravely.

Dazed, scarcely crediting the evidence of his senses, he took possession of the end of the bench with the silent obedience of a schoolboy. His attitude was irreproachable. She was grateful for this, and her satisfaction with herself for not having misjudged him renewed her confidence in him, in herself, and in the difficult situation.

She began, quietly, by again telling him her name and profession; where she lived, and that she was studying to be a specialist, though she did not intimate what that specialty was to be.

Outwardly composed and attentively deferential, his astonishment at times dominated a stronger sentiment that seemed to grow and expand with her every word, seizing him in a fierce possession absolutely and hopelessly complete.

The bewildering fascination of her mastered him. No cool analysis of what his senses were confirming could be necessary to convince him of his condition. Every word of hers, every gesture, every inflection of her sweet, clear voice, every lifting of her head, her eyes, her perfectly gloved hands, only repeated to him what he knew was a certainty. Never had he looked upon such physical loveliness; never had he dreamed of such a voice.

She had asked him a question, and, absorbed in the pure delight of looking at her, he had not comprehended or answered. She flushed sensitively, accepting his silence as refusal, and he came out of his trance hastily.

“I beg your pardon; I did not quite understand your question, Miss Hollis—I mean, Dr. Hollis.”

“I asked you if you minded my noting your pulse,” she said.

He stretched out his right hand; she stripped off her glove, laid the tip of her middle finger on his wrist, and glanced down at the gold watch which she held.

“I am wondering,” he said, laughing uncertainly, “whether you believe me to be ill. Of course it is easy to see that you have found something unusual about me—something of particular interest to a physician. Is there anything very dreadful going to happen to me, Dr. Hollis? I feel perfectly well.”

“Are you sure you feel well?” she asked, so earnestly that the smile on his lips faded out.

“Absolutely. Is my pulse queer?”

“It is not normal.”

He could easily account for that, but he said nothing.

She questioned him for a few minutes, noted his pulse again, looked closely at the bluish circles under his eyes. Naturally he flushed up and grew restless under the calm, grave, beautiful eyes.

“I—I have an absolutely new and carefully sterilized thermometer—” She drew it from a tiny gold-initialed pocket case, and looked wistfully at him.

“You want to put that into my mouth?” he asked, astonished.

“If you don’t mind.”

She held it up, shook it once or twice, and deliberately inserted it between his lips. And there he sat, round-eyed, silent, the end of the thermometer protruding at a rakish angle from the corner of his mouth. And he grew redder and redder.

“I don’t wish to alarm you,” she was saying, “but all this is so deeply significant, so full of vital interest to me—to the world, to science—”

“What have I got, in Heaven’s name?” he said thickly, the thermometer wiggling in his mouth.

“Ah!” she exclaimed with soft enthusiasm, clasping her pretty ungloved hands, “I cannot be sure yet—I dare not be too sanguine—”

“Do you mean that you want me to have something queer?” he blurted out, while the thermometer wiggled with every word he uttered.

“N-no, of course, I don’t want you to be ill,” she said hastily. “Only, if you are ill it will be a wonderful thing for me. I mean—ah—that I am intensely interested in certain symptoms which—”

She gently withdrew the glass tube from his lips and examined it carefully.

“Is there anything the matter?” he insisted, looking at the instrument over her shoulder.

She did not reply; pure excitement rendered her speechless.

“I seem to feel all right,” he added uneasily. “If you really believe that there’s anything wrong with me, I’ll stop in to see my doctor.”

“Your doctor!” she repeated, appalled.

“Yes, certainly. Why not?”

“Don’t do that! Please don’t do that! I—why I discovered this case. I beg you most earnestly to let me observe it. You don’t understand the importance of it! You don’t begin to dream of the rarity of this case! How much it means to me!”

He flushed up. “Do you intend to intimate that I am afflicted with some sort of rare and s-s-trange d-d-disease?” he stammered.

“I dare not pronounce upon it too confidently,” she said with enthusiasm; “I have not yet absolutely determined the nature of the disease. But, oh, I am beginning to hope—”

“Then I am diseased!” he faltered. “I’ve got something anyhow; is that it? Only you are not yet perfectly sure what it is called! Is that the truth, Miss Hollis?”

“How can I answer positively until I have had time to observe these symptoms? It requires time to be certain. I do not wish to alarm you, but it is my duty to say to you that you should immediately place yourself under medical observation.”

“You think that?”

“I do; I am convinced of it. Please understand me; I do not pronounce upon these visible symptoms; I do not express an unqualified opinion; but I could be in a position to do so if you consent to place yourself under my observations and care. For these suspicious symptoms are not only very plainly apparent to me, but were even noted by that old gentleman whom you may perhaps have observed conversing with me.”

“Yes, I saw him. Who is he?”

“Dr. Austin Atwood,” said the girl solemnly.

“Oh! And you say he also observed something queer about me? What did he see? Are there spots on me? Am I turning any remarkable color? Am I—” And in the very midst of his genuine alarm he suddenly remembered the make-up box and what the Tracer of Lost Persons had done to his eyes. Was that it? Where was the Tracer, anyway? He had promised to appear. And then Carden recollected the gray wig and whiskers that the Tracer had waved at him from the cupboard, bidding him note them well. Could that beaming, benignant, tottering old gentleman have been the Tracer of Lost Persons himself? And the same instant Carden was sure of it, spite of the miraculous change in the man.

Then logic came to his aid; and, deducing with care and patience, an earnest conviction grew within him that the dark circles under his eyes and the tottering old gentleman resembling Dr. Austin Atwood had a great deal to do with this dreadful disease which Dr. Hollis desired to study.

He looked at the charming girl beside him, and she looked back at him very sweetly, very earnestly, awaiting his decision.

For a moment he realized that she had really scared him, and in the reaction of relief an overwhelming desire to laugh seized him. He managed to suppress it, to compose himself. Then he remembered the Tracer’s admonition to acquiesce in everything, do what he was told to do, not to run away, and to pay his court at the first decent opportunity.

He had no longer any desire to escape; he was quite willing to do anything she desired.

“Do you really want to study me, Dr. Hollis?” he asked, feeling like a hypocrite.

“Indeed I do,” she replied fervently.

“You believe me worth studying?”

“Oh, truly, truly, you are! You don’t suspect—you cannot conceive how important you have suddenly become to me.”

“Then I think you had better take my case, Dr. Hollis,” he said seriously. “I begin now to realize that you believe me to be a sort of freak—an afflicted curiosity, and that, in the interest of medicine, I ought to go to an asylum or submit myself to the ceaseless observation of a competent private physician.”

“I—I think it best for you to place yourself in my care,” she said. “Will you?”

“Yes,” he said, “I will. I’ll do anything in the world you ask.”

“That is very—very generous, very noble of you!” she exclaimed, flushing with excitement and delight. “It means a great deal to me—it means, perhaps, a fame that I scarcely dared dream of even in my most enthusiastic years. I am too grateful to express my gratitude coherently; I am trying to say to you that I thank you; that I recognize in you those broad, liberal, generous qualities which, from your appearance and bearing, I—I thought perhaps you must possess.”

She colored again very prettily; he bowed, and ventured to remind her that she had not yet given him the privilege of naming himself.

“That is true!” she said, surprised. “I had quite forgotten it.” But when he named himself she raised her head, startled.

“Victor Carden!” she repeated. “You are the artist, Victor Carden!”

“Yes,” he said, watching her dilated eyes like two violet-tinted jewels.

For a minute she sat looking at him; and imperceptibly a change came into her face, and its bewildering beauty softened as the vivid tints died out, leaving her cheeks almost pale.

“It is—a pity,” she said under her breath. All the excitement, all the latent triumph, all the scarcely veiled eager enthusiasm had gone from her now.

“A pity?” he repeated, smiling.

“Yes. I wish it had been only an ordinary man. I—why should this happen to you? You have done so much for us all—made us forget ourselves in the beauty of what you offer us. Why should this happen to you!”

“But you have not told me yet what has happened to me, Miss Hollis.”

She looked up, almost frightened.

“Are you our Victor Carden? I do not wish to believe it! You have done so much for the world—you have taught us to understand and desire all that is noble and upright and clean and beautiful!—to desire it, to aspire toward it, to venture to live the good, true, wholesome lives that your penciled creations must lead—must lead to wear such beautiful bodies and such divine eyes!”

“Do you care for my work?” he asked, astonished and moved.

“I? Yes, of course I do. Who does not?”

“Many,” he replied simply.

“I am sorry for them,” she said.

They sat silent for a long while.

At first his overwhelming desire was to tell her of the deception practiced upon her; but he could not do that, because in exposing himself he must fail in loyalty to the Tracer of Lost Persons. Besides, she would not believe him. She would think him mad if he told her that the old gentleman she had taken for Dr. Atwood was probably Mr. Keen, the Tracer of Lost Persons. Also, he himself was not absolutely certain about it. He had merely deduced as much.

“Tell me,” he said very gently, “what is the malady from which you believe I am suffering?”

For a moment she remained silent, then, face averted, laid her finger on the book beside her.

“That,” she said unsteadily.

He read aloud: “Lamour’s Disease. A Treatise in sixteen volumes by Ero S. Lamour, M.D., M.S., F.B.A., M.F.H.”

“All that?” he asked guiltily.

“I don’t know, Mr. Carden. Are you laughing at me? Do you not believe me?” She had turned suddenly to confront him, surprising a humorous glimmer in his eyes.

“I really do not believe I am seriously ill,” he said, laughing in spite of her grave eyes.

“Then perhaps you had better read a little about what Lamour describes as the symptoms of this malady,” she said sadly.

“Is it fatal?” he inquired.

“Ultimately. That is why I desire to spend my life in studying means to combat it. That is why I desire you so earnestly to place yourself under my observation and let me try.”

“Tell me one thing,” he said; “is it contagious? Is it infectious? No? Then I don’t mind your studying me all you wish, Dr. Hollis. You may take my temperature every ten minutes if you care to. You may observe my pulse every five minutes if you desire. Only please tell me how this is to be accomplished; because, you see, I live in the Sherwood Studio Building, and you live on Madison Avenue.”

“I—I have a ward—a room—fitted up with every modern surgical device—every improvement,” she said. “It adjoins my office. Would you mind living there for a while—say for a week at first—until I can be perfectly certain in my diagnosis?”

“Do you intend to put me to bed?” he asked, appalled.

“Oh, no! Only I wish to watch you carefully and note your symptoms from moment to moment. I also desire to try the effects of certain medicines on you—”

“What kind of medicines?” he asked uneasily.

“I cannot tell yet. Perhaps antitoxin; I don’t know; perhaps formalin later. Truly, Mr. Carden, this case has taken on a graver, a more intimate significance since I have learned who you are. I would have worked hard to save any life; I shall put my very heart and soul into my work to save you, who have done so much for us all.”

The trace of innocent emotion in her voice moved him.

“I am really not ill,” he said unsteadily. “I cannot let you think I am—”

“Don’t speak that way, Mr. Carden. I—I am perfectly miserable over it; I don’t feel any happiness in my discovery now—not the least bit. I had rather live my entire life without seeing one case of Lamour’s Disease than to believe you are afflicted with it.”

“But I’m not, Miss Hollis!—really, I am not—”

She looked at him compassionately for a moment, then rose.

“It is best that you should be informed as to your probable condition,” she said. “In Lamour’s works, volume nine, you had better read exactly what Lamour says. Do you mind coming to the office with me, Mr. Carden?”

“Now?”

“Yes. The book is there. Do you mind coming?”

“No—no, of course not.” And, as they turned away together under the trees: “You don’t intend to begin observing me this afternoon, do you?” he ventured.

“I think it best if you can arrange your affairs. Can you, Mr. Carden?”

“Why, yes, I suppose I can. Did you mean for me to begin to occupy that surgical bedroom at once?”

“Do you mind?”

“N-no. I’ll telephone my servants to pack a steamer trunk and send it around to your apartment this evening. And—where am I to board?”

“I have a dining room,” she said simply. “My apartment consists of the usual number of servants and rooms, including my office, and my observation ward which you will occupy.”

He walked on, troubled.

“I only w-want to ask one or two things, Dr. Hollis. Am I to be placed on a diet? I hate diets!”

“Not at once.”

“May I smoke?”

“Certainly,” she said, smiling.

“And you won’t p-put me—send me to bed too early?”

“Oh, no! The later you sit up the better, because I shall wish to take your temperature every ten minutes and I shall feel very sorry to arouse you.”

“You mean you are coming in to wake me up every ten minutes and put that tube in my mouth?” he asked, aghast.

“Only every half-hour, Mr. Carden. Can’t you stand it for a week?”

“Well,” he said, “I—I suppose I can if you can. Only, upon my honor, there is really nothing the matter with me, and I’ll prove it to you out of your own book.”

“I wish you could, Mr. Carden. I should be only too happy to give you back to the world with a clear bill of health if you can convince me I am wrong. Do you not believe me? Indeed, indeed I am not selfish and wicked enough to wish you this illness, no matter how rare it is!”

“The rarer a disease is the madder it makes people who contract it,” he said. “I should be the maddest man in Manhattan if I really did have Lamour’s malady. But I haven’t. There is only one malady afflicting me, and I am waiting for a suitable opportunity to tell you all about it, but—”

“Tell me now,” she said, raising her eyes to his.

“Not now.”

“To-night?”

“I hope so. I will if I can, Miss Hollis.”

“But you must not fear to tell a physician about anything which troubles you, Mr. Carden.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said thoughtfully, as they emerged from the Park and crossed to Madison Avenue.

A moment later he hailed a car and they both entered.

CHAPTER XXIV

No, there could be no longer any doubt in her mind as she went into her bedroom, closed the door, and, unhooking the telephone receiver, called up the great specialist in rare diseases, Dr. Austin Atwood, M.S., F.B.A., M.F.H.

“Dr. Atwood,” she said with scarcely concealed emotion, “this is Dr. Rosalind Hollis.”

“How-de-do?” squeaked the aged specialist amiably.

“Oh, I am well enough, thank you, doctor—except in spirits. Dr. Atwood, you were right! He has got it, and I am perfectly wretched!”

“Who has got what?” retorted the voice of Atwood.

“The unfortunate young gentleman we saw to-day in the Park.”

“What park?”

“Why, Central Park, doctor.”

“Central Park! I haven’t been in Central Park for ten years, my child.”

“Why, Dr. Atwood!—Ah—is this Dr. Austin Atwood with whom I am talking?”

“Not the least doubt! And you are that pretty Dr. Hollis—Rosalind Hollis, who consulted me in those charity cases, are you not?”

“I certainly am. And I wanted to say to you that I have the unfortunate patient now under closest observation here in my own apartment. I have given him the room next to the office. And, doctor, you were perfectly right. He shows every symptom of the disease—he is even inclined to sentimentalism; he begins to blush and fidget and look at me—ah—in that unmistakable manner—not that he isn’t well-bred and charming—indeed he is most attractive, and it grieves me dreadfully to see that he already is beginning to believe himself in love with the first person of the opposite sex he encounters—I mean that he—that I cannot mistake his attitude toward me—which is perfectly correct, only one cannot avoid seeing the curious infatuation—”

“What the dickens is all this?” roared the great specialist, and Dr. Hollis jumped.

“I was only confirming your diagnosis, doctor,” she explained meekly.

“What diagnosis?”

“Yours, doctor. I have confirmed it, I fear. And the certainty has made me perfectly miserable, because his is such a valuable life to the world, and he himself is such a splendid, wholesome, noble specimen of youth and courage, that I cannot bear to believe him incurably afflicted.”

“Good Heavens!” shouted the doctor, “what has he got and who is he?”

“He is Victor Carden, the celebrated artist, and he has Lamour’s Disease!” she gasped.

There was a dead silence; then: “Keep him there until I come! Chloroform him if he attempts to escape!”

And the great specialist rang off excitedly.

So Rosalind Hollis went back to the lamp-lit office where, in a luxurious armchair, Carden was sitting, contentedly poring over the ninth volume of Lamour’s great treatise and smoking his second cigar.

“Dr. Atwood is coming here,” she said in a discouraged voice, as he rose with alacrity to place her chair.

“Oh! What for?”

“T-to see you, Mr. Carden.”

“Who? Me? Great Scott! I don’t want to be slapped and pinched and polled by a man! I didn’t expect that, you know. I’m willing enough to have you observe me in the interest of humanity—”

“But, Mr. Carden, he is only called in for consultation. I—I have a dreadful sort of desperate hope that perhaps I may have made a mistake; that possibly I am in error.”

“No doubt you are,” he said cheerfully. “Let me read a few more pages, Dr. Hollis, and then I think I shall be all ready to dispute my symptoms, one by one, and convince you what really is the trouble with me. And, by the way, did Dr. Atwood seem a trifle astonished when you told him about me?”

“A trifle—yes,” she said uncertainly. “He is a very, very old man; he forgets. But he is coming.”

“Oh! And didn’t he appear to recollect seeing me in the Park?”

“N-not clearly. He is very old, you know. But he is coming here.”

“Exactly—as a friend of mine puts it,” smiled Carden. “May I be permitted to use your telephone a moment?”

“By all means, Mr. Carden. You will find it there in my bedroom.”

So he entered her pretty bedroom and, closing the door tightly, called up the Tracer of Lost Persons.

“Is that you, Mr. Keen? This is Mr. Carden. I’m head over heels in love. I simply must win her, and I’m going to try. If I don’t—if she will not listen to me—I’ll certainly go to smash. And what I want you to do is to prevent Atwood from butting in. Do you understand?… Yes, Dr. Austin Atwood. Keep him away somehow…. Yes, I’m here, at Dr. Hollis’s apartments, under anxious observation…. She is the only woman in the world! I’m mad about her—and getting madder every moment! She is the most perfectly splendid specimen of womanhood—what? Oh, yes; I rang you up to ask you whether it was you in the Park to-day?—that old gentleman—What! Yes, in Central Park. Yes, this afternoon! No, he didn’t resemble you; and Dr. Hollis took him for Dr. Atwood…. What are you laughing about?… I can hear you laughing…. Was it you?… What do I think? Why, I don’t know exactly what to think, but I suppose it must have been you. Was it?… Oh, I see. You don’t wish me to know. Certainly, you are quite right. Your clients have no business behind the scenes. I only asked out of curiosity…. All right. Good-by.”

He came back to the lamp-lit office, which was more of a big, handsome, comfortable living room than a physician’s quarters, and for a moment or two he stood on the threshold, looking around.

In the pleasant, subdued light of the lamp Rosalind Hollis looked up and around, smiling involuntarily to see him standing there; then, serious, silent, she dropped her eyes to the pages of the volume he had discarded—volume nine of Lamour’s great works.

Even with the evidence before her, corroborated in these inexorably scientific pages which she sat so sadly turning, she found it almost impossible to believe that this big, broad-shouldered, attractive young man could be fatally stricken.

Twice her violet eyes stole toward him; twice the thick lashes veiled them, and the printed pages on her knee sprang into view, and the cold precision of the type confirmed her fears remorselessly:

“The trained scrutiny of the observer will detect in the victim of this disease a peculiar and indefinable charm—a strange symmetry which, on closer examination, reveals traces of physical beauty almost superhuman—”

Again her eyes were lifted to Carden; again she dropped her white lids. Her worst fears were confirmed.

Meanwhile he stood on the threshold looking at her, his pulses racing, his very soul staring through his eyes; and, within him, every sense clamoring out revolt at the deception, demanding confession and its penalty.

“I can’t stand this!” he blurted out; and she looked up quickly, her face blanched with foreboding.

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

“No—not that sort of pain! I—won’t you please believe that I am not ill? I’m imposing on you. I’m an impostor! There’s nothing whatever the trouble with me except—something that I want to tell you—if you’ll let me—”

“Why should you hesitate to confide in a physician, Mr. Carden?”

He came forward slowly. She laid her small hand on the empty chair which faced hers and he sank into it, clasping his restless hands under his chin.

“You are feeling depressed,” she said gently. Depression was a significant symptom. Three chapters were devoted to it.

“I’m depressed, of course. I’m horribly depressed and ashamed of myself, because there is nothing on earth the matter with me, and I’ve let you think there is.”

She smiled mournfully; this was another symptom of a morbid state. She turned, unconsciously, to page 379 to verify her observation.

“See here, Miss Hollis,” he broke out, “haven’t I any chance to convince you that I am not ill? I want to be honest without involving a—a friend of mine. I can’t endure this deception. Won’t you let me prove to you that these symptoms are—are only significant of something else?”

She looked straight at him, considering him in silence.

“Let us begin with those dark circles under my eyes,” he said desperately. “I found some cold-cream in my room and—look! They are practically gone! At any rate, if there is a sort of shadow left it’s because I use my eyes in my profession.”

“Dr. Lamour says that the dark circles disappear, anyway,” said the girl, unconvinced. “Cold-cream had nothing to do with it.”

“But it did! Really it did. And as for the other symptoms, I—well, I can’t help my pulses when y-you t-t-touch me.”

“Please, Mr. Carden.”

“I don’t mean to be impertinent. I am trying my hardest to tell the truth. And my pulses do gallop when you test them; they’re galloping now! This very moment!”

“Let me try them,” she said coolly, laying her hand on his wrist.

“Didn’t I say so!” he insisted grimly. “And I’m turning red, too. But those symptoms mean something else; they mean you!”

“Mr. Carden!”

“I can’t help saying so—”

“I know it,” she said soothingly; “these sentimental outbursts are part of the disease—”

“Good Heavens! Won’t you try to believe me! There’s nothing in the world the matter with me except that I am—am—p-p-perfectly f-f-fascinated—”

“You must struggle against it, Mr. Carden. That is only part of the—”

“It isn’t! It isn’t! It’s you! It’s your mere presence, your personality, your charm, your beauty, your loveliness, your—”

“Mr. Carden, I beg of you! I—it is part of my duty to observe symptoms, but—but you are making it very hard for me—very difficult—”

“I am only proving to you that it isn’t Lamour’s Disease which does stunts with my pulses, my temperature, my color. I’m not morbid except when I realize my deception. I’m not depressed except when I think how far you are from me—how far above me—how far out of reach of such a man as I am—how desperately I—I—”

“D-don’t you think I had better administer a s-s-sedative, Mr. Carden?” she said, distressed.

“I don’t care. I’ll take anything you give me—as long as you give it to me. I’ll swallow pint after pint of pills! I’ll fletcherize ’em! I’ll luxuriate in poison—anything—”

She was hastily running through the pages of the ninth volume to see whether the symptoms of sentimental excitement ever turned into frenzy.

“What can you learn from that book?” he insisted, leaning forward to see what she was reading. “Anyway, Dr. Lamour married his patient so early in the game that all the symptoms disappeared. And I believe the trouble with his patient was my trouble. She had every symptom of it until he married her! She was in love with him, that is absolutely all!”

Rosalind Hollis raised her beautiful, incredulous eyes.

“What do you mean, Mr. Carden?”

“I mean that, in my opinion, there’s no such disease as Lamour’s Disease. That young girl was in love with him. Then he married her at last, and—presto!—all the symptoms vanished—the pulse, the temperature, the fidgets, the blushes, the moods, the whole business!”

“W-what about the strangely curious manifestations of physical beauty—superhuman symmetry, Mr. Carden?”

“Do you notice them in me?” he gasped.

“Ah—yes—in a m-modified measure—”

“In me?”

“Certainly!” she said firmly; but the slow glow suffusing her cheeks was disconcerting her. Then his own face began to reflect the splendid color in hers; their eyes met, dismayed.

“There are sixteen volumes about this disease,” she said. “There must be such a disease!”

“There is,” he said. “I have it badly. But I never had it before I first saw you in the Park!”

“Mr. Carden—this is the wildest absurdity—”

“I know it. Wildness is a symptom. I’m mad as a hatter. I’ve got every separate symptom, and I wish it was infectious and contagious and catching and fatal!”

She made an effort to turn the pages to the chapter entitled “Manias and Illusions,” but he laid his hand across the book and his clear eyes defied her.

“Mr. Carden—”

Her smooth hand trembled under his, then, suddenly nerveless, relaxed. With an effort she lifted her head; their eyes met, spellbound.

“You have every symptom,” he said unsteadily—“every one! What have you to say?”

Her fascinated eyes held his.

“What have you to say?” he repeated under his breath—“you, with every symptom, and your heavenly radiant beauty to confirm them—that splendid youthful loveliness which blinds and stuns me as I look—as I speak—as I tell you that I love you. That is my malady; that is the beginning and the end of it; love!”

She sat speechless, immovable, as one under enchantment.

“All my life,” he said, “I have spent in painting shadows. But the shadows were those dim celestial shapes cast by your presence in the world. You tell me that the world is better for my work; that I have offered my people beauty and a sort of truth, which they had never dreamed of until I revealed it? Yet what inspired me was the shadow only, for I had never seen the substance; I had never believed I should ever see the living source of the shadows which inspired me. And now I see; now I have seen with my own eyes. Now the confession of faith is no longer a blind creed, born of instinct. You live! You are you! What I believed from necessity I find proved in fact. The occult no longer can sway one who has seen. And you, who, without your knowledge or mine, have always been the one and only source of any good in me or in my work—why is it strange that I loved you at first sight?—that I worshiped you at first breath?—I, who, like him who raises his altar to ‘the unknown god,’ raised my altar to truth and beauty? And a miracle has answered me.”

She rose, the beautiful dazed eyes meeting his, both hands clasping the ninth volume of Lamour’s great monograph to her breast as though to protect it from him—from him who was threatening her, enthralling her, thrilling her with his magic voice, his enchanted youth, the masterful mystery of his eyes. What was he saying to her? What was this mounting intoxication sweeping her senses—this delicious menace threatening her very will? What did he want with her? What was he asking? What was he doing now—with both her hands in his, and her gaze deeply lost in his—and the ninth volume of Lamour on the floor between them, sprawling there, abandoned, waving its helpless, discredited leaves in air—discredited, abandoned, obsolete as her own specialty—her life’s work! He had taken that, too—taken her life’s work from her. And in return she was holding nothing!—nothing except a young man’s hands—strong, muscular hands which, after all, were holding her own imprisoned. So she had nothing in exchange for the ninth volume of Lamour; and her life’s work had been annihilated by a smile; and she was very much alone in the world—very isolated and very youthful.

After a while she emerged from the chaos of attempted reflection and listened to what he was saying. He spoke very quietly, very distinctly, not sparing himself, laying bare every deception without involving anybody except himself.

He told her the entire history of his case, excluding Mr. Keen in person; he told her about his aunt, about his birthday, about his determination to let the legacy go. Then in a very manly way he told her that he had never before loved a woman; and fell silent, her hands a dead weight in his.

She was surprised that she could experience no resentment. A curious inertia crept over her. She was tired of expectancy, tired of effort, weary of the burden of decision. Life and its problems overweighted her. Her eyes wandered to his broad young shoulders, then were raised to his face.

“What shall we do?” she asked innocently.

Unresisting, she suffered him to explain. His explanation was not elaborate; he only touched his lips to her hands and straightened up, a trifle pale.

After a moment they walked together to the door and he took his hat and gloves from the rack.

“Will you come to-morrow morning?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Come early. I am quite certain of how matters are with me. Everything has gone out of my life—everything I once cared for—all the familiar things. So come early, for I am quite alone without you.”

“And I without you, Rosalind.”

“That is only right,” she said simply. “I shall cast no more shadows for you…. Are you going?… Oh, I know it is best that you should go, but—”

He halted. She laid both hands in his.

“We both have it,” she faltered—“every symptom. And—you will come early, won’t you?”

THE END

THE SLAYER OF SOULS

(1920)

CONTENTS:

… Dedication
1 … The Yezidee
2 … The Yellow Snake
3 … Grey Magic
4 … Body and Soul
5 … The Assassins
6 … In Battle
7 … The Bridal
8 … The Man in White
9 … The West Wind
10 … At the Ritz
11 … Yulun the Beloved
12 … His Excellency
13 … Sa-n’sa
14 … A Death Trail
15 … In the Firelight
16 … The Place of Prayer
17 … The Slayer of Souls

MAIN ToC     INDEX

TO
MY FRIEND
GEORGE ARMSBY

I

Mirror of Fashion,

Admiral of Finance,

Don’t, in a passion,

Denounce this poor Romance;

For, while I dare not hope it might

Enthuse you,

Perhaps it will, some rainy night,

Amuse you.

II

So, your attention,

In poetry polite,

To my invention

I bashfully invite.

Don’t hurl the book at Eddie’s head

Deep laden,

Or Messmore’s; you might hit instead

Will Braden.

III

Khan among Canners,

And Grand Vizier of style,

Emir of Manners,

Accept—and place on file—

This tribute, which I proffer while

I grovel,

And honor with thy matchless Smile

My novel.

—R. W. C.

THE SLAYER OF SOULS

I

THE YEZIDEE

Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.

For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.

But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.

She stood near the steamer’s stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour in the misty lustre of the moon.

Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or how it was accomplished.

As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young American; and added, “if there is anything my husband and I can do, it would give us much pleasure.” The girl had turned her head as though not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.

“This is Doctor Norne’s daughter, is it not?” she inquired in a pleasant voice.

“Yes, I am Tressa Norne…. I ask your pardon…. Thank you, madam:—I am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——”

“What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of companionship.”

“You are very kind…. I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.”

“I understand…. Good-night, my dear.”

Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark, glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again; the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.

That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on the deserted hurricane deck.

And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song called Tchinguiz. She sang Camel Bells and The Blue Bazaar,—children’s songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou song called “The Saghalien”:

I

In the month of Saffar

Among the river-reeds

I saw two horsemen

Sitting on their steeds.

Tulugum!

Heitulum!

By the river-reeds

II

In the month of Saffar

A demon guards the ford.

Tokhta, my Lover!

Draw your shining sword!

Tulugum!

Heitulum!

Slay him with your sword!

III

In the month of Saffar

Among the water-weeds

I saw two horsemen

Fighting on their steeds.

Tulugum!

Heitulum!

How my lover bleeds!

IV

In the month of Saffar,

The Year I should have wed—

The Year of The Panther—

My lover lay dead,—

Tulugum!

Heitulum!

Dead without a head.

And songs like these—the one called “Keuke Mongol,” and an ancient air of the Tchortchas called “The Thirty Thousand Calamities,” and some Chinese boatmen’s songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy; these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.

Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the entire moonlit world.

•      •      •      •      •      •

She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her during the last four years of the Great World War.

It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew of the Nan-yang Maru were invariably considerate and courteous to her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so, surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa Norne, reborn to light out of hell’s own shadows, awoke from four years of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely actual.

And now God’s real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its web of sorcery.

•      •      •      •      •      •

And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the dreadful abyss of spiritual annihilation.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the water to the southward.

She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours, but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.

As she stood there a Japanese ship’s officer crossing the deck, forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the southward.

At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded, died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.

When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa Norne’s eyes opened.

“Are you ill, Miss Norne?” he asked.

“The—the Dragon,” she whispered.

The officer laughed. “Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,” he explained. “The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself.” He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: “If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?”

She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of a smile.

He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home, then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.

Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her folded arms.

After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.

And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon’s phantom in the sky.

Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.

A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.

But no more “Chinese day-fireworks” rose out of it. And at length she summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there, half senseless, huddled on her bed.

•      •      •      •      •      •

When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised soul had touched all depths.

But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage, terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary, alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly ready to fight for bodily existence.

That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain, she defied its murderers to slay her body also.

•      •      •      •      •      •

That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an automatic pistol underneath her pillow.

Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed slowly opening of its own accord.

Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.

With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and clutched at the pistol under her pillow.

“Sanang!” she cried in a terrible voice.

“Keuke Mongol!” he said, smilingly.

For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide smoothly into place again.

Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at first: “Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?” she managed to gasp. “Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?”

“You are afraid,” he said serenely.

“You lie!”

“No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.”

“You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!”

He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an instant.

“Bullets?” he murmured. “But you and I are of the Hassanis.”

“The third lie, Sanang!” Her voice had regained its strength. Tense, alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess poised on the swift verge of murder.

“Tokhta!” [Look out!] She spat the word. “Any movement toward a hidden weapon, any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang, exactly where you stand!”

“With a pistol?” He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly. He said: “Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:

“Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white turbans and in robes of white;—you—Azure-blue eyes—heed the Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!”

There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: “It is decreed: You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for your—convenience.”

Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for her winding-sheet.

Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: “Have you ended your Oriental mummery?” she asked calmly. “Listen very seriously in your turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth a hell.

“If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin, poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend, nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I am determined to live in the body, anyway.”

He nodded gravely.

She said: “Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in mid-heaven. I understood. But——” And here she suddenly showed an edge of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: “Keep your signs and your shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!”

Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his expressionless face:

“I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were afraid, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.”

A slight tinge of pink came into the young man’s pale face. Tressa Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.

“Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the Mountain?” she asked jeeringly. “And where, also, was your Yezidee magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the chance of death to you?”

The young man’s top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.

“I went on no such errand,” he said with an effort. “I went with a thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——”

“A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize me!”

He turned still paler. “By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!”

“You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!”

She stepped closer. “And I’ll tell you another thing you fear—you Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine, America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and called the Bolshevik!”

“Tokhta!” he cried sharply.

“Damn you!” retorted the girl; “get out of my room! Get out of my sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I please. And if I please, I turn against him!”

“In that event,” he said hoarsely, “there lies your winding-sheet on the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!”

“Sanang,” she said very seriously.

“I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.”

“Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and that your sorcerers really control its destiny.

“But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between God and Erlik.”

She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.

“I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,” she said. “I know how to open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know other things. And if you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then slay you. Then I shall tell all!… and unroll my shroud.”

“I keep your word of promise until you break it,” he interrupted hastily. “Yarlig! It is decreed!” And then he slowly turned as though to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.

“Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,” said the girl scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.

Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid back, the door gently opened.

Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless evening garb.

Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror. Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed in silence at Tressa Norne.

The girl laughed.

“Sorceress!” he burst out hoarsely. “Take that accursed thing from my path!”

“What thing, Sanang?” At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling all over.

Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.

And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand, calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.

II

THE YELLOW SNAKE

When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a “Prince Albert” looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

“Gutchlug,” stammered Sanang, “I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils——”

“You chatter like a temple ape,” said Gutchlug tranquilly. “Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.”

“Gutchlug,” faltered the young man, “thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee——”

“I know that it is inclined to lust,” said the other bluntly.

Sanang’s pale face flamed.

“Listen,” he said. “If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?”

“You loved life better,” said Gutchlug. “You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps—you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.”

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan—at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands—the powerful hands of a murderer—now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

“Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,” growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade’s edge on his thumb—“Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?”

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. “She dares not betray us.”

“By what pledge?”

“Fear.”

“That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!”

“She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.”

“And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!” sneered Gutchlug. “Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?” And he continued to hone his yataghan.

“Gutchlug——”

“No, she dies,” said the other tranquilly.

“Not yet!”

“When, then?”

“Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery—her first thought of betrayal—I myself will end it all.”

“You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?”

“By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!”

Gutchlug sneered. “Kill her—yes—with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.”

“Gutchlug!”

“I hear, Prince Sanang.”

“Strike when I nod. Not until then.”

“I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!”

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

“I go forth,” he said more pleasantly.

“I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,” remarked Gutchlug.

“When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,” said Sanang with a quick smile, “I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug—once—before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.”

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

“I go among Germans,” he volunteered amiably. “The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.”

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.

When the shorter man who had been in the apartment when the other entered, and who was dark and curly-headed, had attired himself in pyjamas, he sat down on one of the twin beds to enjoy his cigar to the bitter end.

“Has Sanang gone out?” he inquired in a low voice.

“Yes. Benton went after him.”

The other man nodded. “Cleves,” he said, “I guess it looks as though this Norne girl is in it, too.”

“What happened?”

“As soon as she arrived, Sanang made straight for her apartment. He remained inside for half an hour. Then he came out in a hurry and went to his own rooms, where that surly servant of his squats all day, shining up his arsenal, and drinking koumiss.”

“Did you get their conversation?”

“I’ve got a record of the gibberish. It requires an interpreter, of course.”

“I suppose so. I’ll take the records east with me to-morrow, and by the same token I’d better notify New York that I’m leaving.”

He went, half-undressed, to the telephone, got the telegraph office, and sent the following message:

RECKLOW, NEW YORK:

LEAVING TOMORROW FOR N. Y. WITH SAMPLES. RETAIN EXPERT IN ORIENTAL FABRICS.

VICTOR CLEVES.

“Report for me, too,” said the dark young man, who was still enjoying his cigar on his pillows.

So Cleves sent another telegram, directed also to

RECKLOW, NEW YORK:

BENTON AND I ARE WATCHING THE MARKET. CHINESE IMPORTATIONS FLUCTUATE. RECENT CONSIGNMENT PER NAN-YANG MARU WILL BE CAREFULLY INSPECTED AND DETAILS FORWARDED.

ALEK SELDEN.

In the next room Gutchlug could hear the voice of Cleves at the telephone, but he merely shrugged his heavy shoulders in contempt. For he had other things to do beside eavesdropping.

Also, for the last hour—in fact, ever since Sanang’s departure—something had been happening to him—something that happens to a Hassani only once in a lifetime. And now this unique thing had happened to him—to him, Gutchlug Khan—to him before whose Khiounnou ancestors eighty-one thousand nations had bowed the knee.

It had come to him at last, this dread thing, unheralded, totally unexpected, a few minutes after Sanang had departed.

And he suddenly knew he was going to die.

And, when, presently, he comprehended it, he bent his grizzled head and listened seriously. And, after a little silence, he heard his soul bidding him farewell.

So the chatter of white men at a telephone in the next apartment had no longer any significance for him. Whether or not they had been spying on him; whether they were plotting, made no difference to him now.

He tested his knife’s edge with his thumb and listened gravely to his soul bidding him farewell.

But, for a Yezidee, there was still a little detail to attend to before his soul departed;—two matters to regulate. One was to select his shroud. The other was to cut the white throat of this young snow-leopardess called Keuke Mongol, the Yezidee temple girl.

And he could steal down to her bedroom and finish that matter in five minutes.

But first he must choose his shroud, as is the custom of the Yezidee.

That office, however, was quickly accomplished in a country where fine white sheets of linen are to be found on every hotel bed.

So, on his way to the door, his naked knife in his right hand, he paused to fumble under the bed-covers and draw out a white linen sheet.

Something hurt his hand like a needle. He moved it, felt the thing squirm under his fingers and pierce his palm again and again. With a shriek, he tore the bedclothes from the bed.

A little yellow snake lay coiled there.

He got as far as the telephone, but could not use it. And there he fell heavily, shaking the room and dragging the instrument down with him.

•      •      •      •      •      •

There was some excitement. Cleves and Selden in their bathrobes went in to look at the body. The hotel physician diagnosed it as heart-trouble. Or, possibly, poison. Some gazed significantly at the naked knife still clutched in the dead man’s hands.

Around the wrist of the other hand was twisted a pliable gold bracelet representing a little snake. It had real emeralds for eyes.

It had not been there when Gutchlug died.

But nobody except Sanang could know that. And later when Sanang came back and found Gutchlug very dead on the bed and a policeman sitting outside, he offered no information concerning the new bracelet shaped like a snake with real emeralds for eyes, which adorned the dead man’s left wrist.

Toward evening, however, after an autopsy had confirmed the house physician’s diagnosis that heart-disease had finished Gutchlug, Sanang mustered enough courage to go to the desk in the lobby and send up his card to Miss Norne.

It appeared, however, that Miss Norne had left for Chicago about noon.

III

GREY MAGIC

To Victor Cleves came the following message in code:

Washington,
April 14th, 1919.

Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic in battle.

From information so far gathered by the several branches of the United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security, of all established civilisation on earth, may have had a common origin. This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch; the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder.

Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins—a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence.

On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in the United States and other countries. You personally are formally instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303 (James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible, enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid and comrade.

It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he is not to be taken into custody. M. H. 2479.

(Signed)

John Recklow.

The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves’s duty plain enough.

For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And they had learned practically nothing about her.

And now the girl had come within Cleves’s sphere of operation. She had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.

He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her entr’ acte was staged. He knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although warned that he had arrived.

So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patroons’ Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr’ acte in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.

He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thundering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.

Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.

The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway—her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world’s wisdom.

Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue—the brooding iris hue of far horizons.

She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped foot-gear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes.

All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles.

She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician’s patter. She did her work close to the footlights.

Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.

But when she needed anything—a little table, for example—well, it was suddenly there where she required it—a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes—and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and—suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it.

Applause followed, not very enthusiastic, for the sort of audience which sustains the shows of which her performance was merely an entr’ acte is an audience responsive only to the obvious.

Nobody ever before had seen that sort of magic in America. People scarcely knew whether or not they quite liked it. The lightning of innovation stupefies the dull; ignorance is always suspicious of innovation—always afraid to put itself on record until its mind is made up by somebody else.

So in this typical New York audience approbation was cautious, but every fascinated eye remained focused on this young girl who continued to do incredible things, which seemed to resemble “putting something over” on them; a thing which no uneducated American conglomeration ever quite forgives.

The girl’s silence, too, perplexed them; they were accustomed to gabble, to noise, to jazz, vocal and instrumental, to that incessant metropolitan clamour which fills every second with sound in a city whose only distinction is its din. Stage, press, art, letters, social existence unless noisy mean nothing in Gotham; reticence, leisure, repose are the three lost arts. The megaphone is the city’s symbol; its chiefest crime, silence.

The girl having finished with the big glass bubble full of tiny fish, picked it up and tossed it aside. For a moment it apparently floated there in space like a soap-bubble. Changing rainbow tints waxed and waned on the surface, growing deeper and more gorgeous until the floating globe glowed scarlet, then suddenly burst into flame and vanished. And only a strange, sweet perfume lingered in the air.

But she gave her perplexed audience no time to wonder; she had seated herself on the stage and was already swiftly busy unfolding a white veil with which she presently covered herself, draping it over her like a tent.

The veil seemed to be translucent; she was apparently visible seated beneath it. But the veil turned into smoke, rising into the air in a thin white cloud; and there, where she had been seated, was a statue of white stone the image of herself!—in all the frail springtide of early adolescence—a white statue, cold, opaque, exquisite in its sculptured immobility.

There came, the next moment, a sound of distant thunder; flashes lighted the blank curtain; and suddenly a vein of lightning and a sharper peal shattered the statue to fragments.

There they lay, broken bits of her own sculptured body, glistening in a heap behind the footlights. Then each fragment began to shimmer with a rosy internal light of its own, until the pile of broken marble glowed like living coals under thickening and reddening vapours. And, presently, dimly perceptible, there she was in the flesh again, seated in the fiery centre of the conflagration, stretching her arms luxuriously, yawning, seemingly awakening from refreshing slumber, her eyes unclosing to rest with a sort of confused apology upon her astounded audience.

As she rose to her feet nothing except herself remained on the stage—no débris, not a shred of smoke, not a spark.

She came down, then, across an inclined plank into the orchestra among the audience.

In the aisle seat nearest her sat Victor Cleves. His business was to be there that evening. But she didn’t know that, knew nothing about him—had never before set eyes on him.

At her gesture of invitation he made a cup of both his hands. Into these she poured a double handful of unset diamonds—or what appeared to be diamonds—pressed her own hands above his for a second—and the diamonds in his palms had become pearls.

These were passed around to people in the vicinity, and finally returned to Mr. Cleves, who, at her request, covered the heap of pearls with both his hands, hiding them entirely from view.

At her nod he uncovered them. The pearls had become emeralds. Again, while he held them, and without even touching him, she changed them into rubies. Then she turned away from him, apparently forgetting that he still held the gems, and he sat very still, one cupped hand over the other, while she poured silver coins into a woman’s gloved hands, turned them into gold coins, then flung each coin into the air, where it changed to a living, fragrant rose and fell among the audience.

Presently she seemed to remember Cleves, came back down the aisle, and under his close and intent gaze drew from his cupped hands, one by one, a score of brilliant little living birds, which continually flew about her and finally perched, twittering, on her golden headdress—a rainbow-crest of living jewels.

As she drew the last warm, breathing little feathered miracle from Cleves’s hands and released it, he said rapidly under his breath: “I want a word with you later. Where?”

She let her clear eyes rest on him for a moment, then with a shrug so slight that it was perceptible, perhaps, only to him, she moved on along the inclined way, stepped daintily over the footlights, caught fire, apparently, nodded to a badly rattled audience, and sauntered off, burning from head to foot.

What applause there was became merged in a dissonant instrumental outburst from the orchestra; the great god Jazz resumed direction, the mindless audience breathed freely again as the curtain rose upon a familiar, yelling turbulence, including all that Gotham really understands and cares for—legs and noise.

Victor Cleves glanced up at the stage, then continued to study the name of the girl on the programme. It was featured in rather pathetic solitude under “Entr’ acte.” And he read further:

During the entr’ acte Miss Tressa Norne will entertain you with several phases of Black Magic. This strange knowledge was acquired by Miss Norne from the Yezidees, among which almost unknown people still remain descendants of that notorious and formidable historic personage known in the twelfth century as The Old Man of the Mountain—or The Old Man of Mount Alamout.

The pleasant profession of this historic individual was assassination; and some historians now believe that genuine occult power played a part in his dreadful record—a record which terminated only when the infantry of Genghis Khan took Mount Alamout by storm and hanged the Old Man of the Mountain and burned his body under a boulder of You-Stone.

For Miss Norne’s performance there appears to be no plausible, practical or scientific explanation.

During her performance the curtain will remain lowered for fifteen minutes and will then rise on the last act of “You Betcha Life.”

The noisy show continued while Cleves, paying it scant attention, brooded over the programme. And ever his keen, grey eyes reverted to her name, Tressa Norne.

Then, for a little while, he settled back and let his absent gaze wander over the galloping battalions of painted girls and the slapstick principals whose perpetual motion evoked screams of approbation from the audience amid the din of the great god Jazz.

He had an aisle seat; he disturbed nobody when he went out and around to the stage door.

The aged man on duty took his card, called a boy and sent it off. The boy returned with the card, saying that Miss Norne had already dressed and departed.

Cleves tipped him and then tipped the doorman heavily.

“Where does she live?” he asked.

“Say,” said the old man, “I dunno, and that’s straight. But them ladies mostly goes up to the roof for a look in at the ‘Moonlight Masque’ and a dance afterward. Was you ever up there?”

“Yes.”

“Seen the new show?”

“No.”

“Well, g’wan up while you can get a table. And I bet the little girl will be somewheres around.”

“The little girl” was “somewheres around.” He secured a table, turned and looked about at the vast cabaret into which only a few people had yet filtered, and saw her at a distance in the carpeted corridor buying violets from one of the flower-girls.

A waiter placed a reserve card on his table; he continued on around the outer edge of the auditorium.

Miss Norne had already seated herself at a small table in the rear, and a waiter was serving her with iced orange juice and little French cakes.

When the waiter returned Cleves went up and took off his hat.

“May I talk with you for a moment, Miss Norne?” he said.

The girl looked up, the wheat-straw still between her scarlet lips. Then, apparently recognising in him the young man in the audience who had spoken to her, she resumed her business of imbibing orange juice.

The girl seemed even frailer and younger in her hat and street gown. A silver-fox stole hung from her shoulders; a gold bag lay on the table under the bunch of violets.

She paid no attention whatever to him. Presently her wheat-straw buckled, and she selected a better one.

He said: “There’s something rather serious I’d like to speak to you about if you’ll let me. I’m not the sort you evidently suppose. I’m not trying to annoy you.”

At that she looked around and upward once more.

Very, very young, but already spoiled, he thought, for the dark-blue eyes were coolly appraising him, and the droop of the mouth had become almost sullen. Besides, traces of paint still remained to incarnadine lip and cheek and there was a hint of hardness in the youthful plumpness of the features.

“Are you a professional?” she asked without curiosity.

“A theatrical man? No.”

“Then if you haven’t anything to offer me, what is it you wish?”

“I have a job to offer if you care for it and if you are up to it,” he said.

Her eyes became slightly hostile:

“What kind of job do you mean?”

“I want to learn something about you first. Will you come over to my table and talk it over?”

“No.”

“What sort do you suppose me to be?” he inquired, amused.

“The usual sort, I suppose.”

“You mean a Johnny?”

“Yes—of sorts.”

She let her insolent eyes sweep him once more, from head to foot.

He was a well-built young man and in his evening dress he had that something about him which placed him very definitely where he really belonged.

“Would you mind looking at my card?” he asked.

He drew it out and laid it beside her, and without stirring she scanned it sideways.

“That’s my name and address,” he continued. “I’m not contemplating mischief. I’ve enough excitement in life without seeking adventure. Besides, I’m not the sort who goes about annoying women.”

She glanced up at him again:

“You are annoying me!”

“I’m sorry. I was quite honest. Good-night.”

He took his congé with unhurried amiability; had already turned away when she said:

“Please … what do you desire to say to me?” He came back to her table:

“I couldn’t tell you until I know a little more about you.”

“What—do you wish to know?”

“Several things. I could scarcely ask you—go over such matters with you—standing here.”

There was a pause; the girl juggled with the straw on the table for a few moments, then, partly turning, she summoned a waiter, paid him, adjusted her stole, picked up her gold bag and her violets and stood up. Then she turned to Cleves and gave him a direct look, which had in it the impersonal and searching gaze of a child.

When they were seated at the table reserved for him the place already was filling rapidly—backwash from the theatres slopped through every aisle—people not yet surfeited with noise, not yet sufficiently sodden by their worship of the great god Jazz.

“Jazz,” said Cleves, glancing across his dinner-card at Tressa Norne—“what’s the meaning of the word? Do you happen to know?”

“Doesn’t it come from the French ‘jaser’?”

He smiled. “Possibly. I’m rather hungry. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you indicate your preferences?”

She studied her card, and presently he gave the order.

“I’d like some champagne,” she said, “unless you think it’s too expensive.”

He smiled at that, too, and gave the order.

“I didn’t suggest any wine because you seem so young,” he said.

“How old do I seem?”

“Sixteen perhaps.”

“I am twenty-one.”

“Then you’ve had no troubles.”

“I don’t know what you call trouble,” she remarked, indifferently, watching the arriving throngs.

The orchestra, too, had taken its place.

“Well,” she said, “now that you’ve picked me up, what do you really want of me?” There was no mitigating smile to soften what she said. She dropped her elbows on the table, rested her chin between her palms and looked at him with the same searching, undisturbed expression that is so disconcerting in children. As he made no reply: “May I have a cocktail?” she inquired.

He gave the order. And his mind registered pessimism. “There is nothing doing with this girl,” he thought. “She’s already on the toboggan.” But he said aloud: “That was beautiful work you did down in the theatre, Miss Norne.”

“Did you think so?”

“Of course. It was astounding work.”

“Thank you. But managers and audiences differ with you.”

“Then they are very stupid,” he said.

“Possibly. But that does not help me pay my board.”

“Do you mean you have trouble in securing theatrical engagements?”

“Yes, I am through here to-night, and there’s nothing else in view, so far.”

“That’s incredible!” he exclaimed.

She lifted her glass, slowly drained it.

For a few moments she caressed the stem of the empty glass, her gaze remote.

“Yes, it’s that way,” she said. “From the beginning I felt that my audiences were not in sympathy with me. Sometimes it even amounts to hostility. Americans do not like what I do, even if it holds their attention. I don’t quite understand why they don’t like it, but I’m always conscious they don’t. And of course that settles it—to-night has settled the whole thing, once and for all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What others do, I presume.”

“What do others do?” he inquired, watching the lovely sullen eyes.

“Oh, they do what I’m doing now, don’t they?—let some man pick them up and feed them.” She lifted her indifferent eyes. “I’m not criticising you. I meant to do it some day—when I had courage. That’s why I just asked you if I might have some champagne—finding myself a little scared at my first step…. But you did say you might have a job for me. Didn’t you?”

“Suppose I haven’t. What are you going to do?”

The curtain was rising. She nodded toward the bespangled chorus. “Probably that sort of thing. They’ve asked me.”

Supper was served. They both were hungry and thirsty; the music made conversation difficult, so they supped in silence and watched the imbecile show conceived by vulgarians, produced by vulgarians and served up to mental degenerates of the same species—the average metropolitan audience.

For ten minutes a pair of comedians fell up and down a flight of steps, and the audience shrieked approval.

“Miss Norne?”

The girl who had been watching the show turned in her chair and looked back at him.

“Your magic is by far the most wonderful I have ever seen or heard of. Even in India such things are not done.”

“No, not in India,” she said, indifferently.

“Where then?”

“In China.”

“You learned to do such things there?”

“Yes.”

“Where, in China, did you learn such amazing magic?”

“In Yian.”

“I never heard of it. Is it a province?”

“A city.”

“And you lived there?”

“Fourteen years.”

“When?”

“From 1904 to 1918.”

“During the great war,” he remarked, “you were in China?”

“Yes.”

“Then you arrived here very recently.”

“In November, from the Coast.”

“I see. You played the theatres from the Coast eastward.”

“And went to pieces in New York,” she added calmly, finishing her glass of champagne.

“Have you any family?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you care to say anything further?” he inquired, pleasantly.

“About my family? Yes, if you wish. My father was in the spice trade in Yian. The Yezidees took Yian in 1910, threw him into a well in his own compound and filled it up with dead imperial troops. I was thirteen years old…. The Hassani did that. They held Yian nearly eight years, and I lived with my mother, in a garden pagoda, until 1914. In January of that year Germans got through from Kiaou-Chou. They had been six months on the way. I think they were Hassanis. Anyway, they persuaded the Hassanis to massacre every English-speaking prisoner. And so—my mother died in the garden pagoda of Yian…. I was not told for four years.”

“Why did they spare you?” he asked, astonished at her story so quietly told, so utterly destitute of emotion.

“I was seventeen. A certain person had placed me among the temple girls in the temple of Erlik. It pleased this person to make of me a Mongol temple girl as a mockery at Christ. They gave me the name Keuke Mongol. I asked to serve the shrine of Kwann-an—she being like to our Madonna. But this person gave me the choice between the halberds of the Tchortchas and the sorcery of Erlik.”

She lifted her sombre eyes. “So I learned how to do the things you saw. But—what I did there on the stage is not—respectable.”

An odd shiver passed over him. For a second he took her literally, suddenly convinced that her magic was not white but black as the demon at whose shrine she had learned it. Then he smiled and asked her pleasantly, whether indeed she employed hypnosis in her miraculous exhibitions.

But her eyes became more sombre still, and, “I don’t care to talk about it,” she said. “I have already said too much.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry into professional secrets——”

“I can’t talk about it,” she repeated. “… Please—my glass is quite empty.”

When he had refilled it:

“How did you get away from Yian?” he asked.

“The Japanese.”

“What luck!”

“Yes. One battle was fought at Buldak. The Hassanis and Blue Flags were terribly cut up. Then, outside the walls of Yian, Prince Sanang’s Tchortcha infantry made a stand. He was there with his Yezidee horsemen, all in leather and silk armour with casques and corselets of black Indian steel.

“I could see them from the temple—saw the Japanese gunners open fire. The Tchortchas were blown to shreds in the blast of the Japanese guns…. Sanang got away with some of his Yezidee horsemen.”

“Where was that battle?”

“I told you, outside the walls of Yian.”

“The newspapers never mentioned any such trouble in China,” he said, suspiciously.

“Nobody knows about it except the Germans and the Japanese.”

“Who is this Sanang?” he demanded.

“A Yezidee-Mongol. He is one of the Sheiks-el-Djebel—a servant of The Old Man of Mount Alamout.”

“What is he?”

“A sorcerer—assassin.”

“What!” exclaimed Cleves incredulously.

“Why, yes,” she said, calmly. “Have you never heard of The Old Man of Mount Alamout?”

“Well, yes——”

“The succession has been unbroken since 1090 B.C.A Hassan Sabbah is still the present Old Man of the Mountain. His Yezidees worship Erlik. They are sorcerers. But you would not believe that.”

Cleves said with a smile, “Who is Erlik?”

“The Mongols’ Satan.”

“Oh! So these Yezidees are devil-worshipers!”

“They are more. They are actually devils.”

“You don’t really believe that even in unexplored China there exists such a creature as a real sorcerer, do you?” he inquired, smilingly.

“I don’t wish to talk of it.”

To his surprise her face had flushed, and he thought her sensitive mouth quivered a little.

He watched her in silence for a moment; then, leaning a little way across the table:

“Where are you going when the show here closes?”

“To my boarding-house.”

“And then?”

“To bed,” she said, sullenly.

“And to-morrow what do you mean to do?”

“Go out to the agencies and ask for work.”

“And if there is none?”

“The chorus,” she said, indifferently.

“What salary have you been getting?”

She told him.

“Will you take three times that amount and work with me?”

IV

BODY AND SOUL

The girl’s direct gaze met his with that merciless searching intentness he already knew.

“What do you wish me to do?”

“Enter the service of the United States.”

“Wh-what?”

“Work for the Government.”

She was too taken aback to answer.

“Where were you born?” he demanded abruptly.

“In Albany, New York,” she replied in a dazed way.

“You are loyal to your country?”

“Yes—certainly.”

“You would not betray her?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean for money; I mean from fear.”

After a moment, and, avoiding his gaze: “I am afraid of death,” she said very simply.

He waited.

“I—I don’t know what I might do—being afraid,” she added in a troubled voice. “I desire to—live.”

He still waited.

She lifted her eyes: “I’d try not to betray my country,” she murmured.

“Try to face death for your country’s honour?”

“Yes.”

“And for your own?”

“Yes; and for my own.”

He leaned nearer: “Yet you’re taking a chance on your own honour to-night.”

She blushed brightly: “I didn’t think I was taking a very great chance with you.”

He said: “You have found life too hard. And when you faced failure in New York you began to let go of life—real life, I mean. And you came up here to-night wondering whether you had courage to let yourself go. When I spoke to you it scared you. You found you hadn’t the courage. But perhaps to-morrow you might find it—or next week—if sufficiently scared by hunger—you might venture to take the first step along the path that you say others usually take sooner or later.”

The girl flushed scarlet, sat looking at him out of eyes grown dark with anger.

He said: “You told me an untruth. You have been tempted to betray your country. You have resisted. You have been threatened with death. You have had courage to defy threats and temptations where your country’s honour was concerned!”

“How do you know?” she demanded.

He continued, ignoring the question: “From the time you landed in San Francisco you have been threatened. You tried to earn a living by your magician’s tricks, but in city after city, as you came East, your uneasiness grew into fear, and your fear into terror, because every day more terribly confirmed your belief that people were following you determined either to use you to their own purposes or to murder you——”

The girl turned quite white and half rose in her chair, then sank back, staring at him out of dilated eyes. Then Cleves smiled: “So you’ve got the nerve to do Government work,” he said, “and you’ve got the intelligence, and the knowledge, and something else—I don’t know exactly what to call it—Skill? Dexterity? Sorcery?” he smiled—“I mean your professional ability. That’s what I want—that bewildering dexterity of yours, to help your own country in the fight of its life. Will you enlist for service?”

“W-what fight?” she asked faintly.

“The fight with the Red Spectre.”

“Anarchy?”

“Yes…. Are you ready to leave this place? I want to talk to you.”

“Where?”

“In my own rooms.”

After a moment she rose.

“I’ll go to your rooms with you,” she said. She added very calmly that she was glad it was to be his rooms and not some other man’s.

Out of countenance, he demanded what she meant, and she said quite candidly that she’d made up her mind to live at any cost, and that if she couldn’t make an honest living she’d make a living anyway.

He offered no reply to this until they had reached the street and he had called a taxi.

On their way to his apartment he re-opened the subject, rather bluntly, remarking that life was not worth living at the price she had mentioned.

“That is the accepted Christian theory,” she replied coolly, “but circumstances alter things.”

“Not such things.”

“Oh, yes, they do. If one is already damned, what difference does anything else make?”

He asked, sarcastically, whether she considered herself already damned.

She did not reply for a few moments, then she said, in a quick, breathless way, that souls have been entrapped through ignorance of evil. And asked him if he did not believe it.

“No,” he said, “I don’t.”

She shook her head. “You couldn’t understand,” she said. “But I’ve made up my mind to one thing; even if my soul has perished, my body shall not die for a long, long time. I mean to live,” she added. “I shall not let my body be slain! They shall not steal life from me, whatever they have done to my soul——”

“What in heaven’s name are you talking about?” he exclaimed. “Do you actually believe in soul-snatchers and life-stealers?”

She seemed sullen, her profile turned to him, her eyes on the brilliantly lighted avenue up which they were speeding. After a while: “I’d rather live decently and respectably if I can,” she said. “That is the natural desire of any girl, I suppose. But if I can’t, nevertheless I shall beat off death at any cost. And whatever the price of life is, I shall pay it. Because I am absolutely determined to go on living. And if I can’t provide the means I’ll have to let some man do it, I suppose.”

“It’s a good thing it was I who found you when you were out of a job,” he remarked coldly.

“I hope so,” she said. “Even in the beginning I didn’t really believe you meant to be impertinent”—a tragic smile touched her lips—“and I was almost sorry——”

“Are you quite crazy?” he demanded.

“No, my mind is untouched. It’s my soul that’s gone…. Do you know I was very hungry when you spoke to me? The management wouldn’t advance anything, and my last money went for my room…. Last Monday I had three dollars to face the future—and no job. I spent the last of it to-night on violets, orange juice and cakes. My furs and my gold bag remain. I can go two months more on them. Then it’s a job or——.” She shrugged and buried her nose in her violets.

“Suppose I advance you a month’s salary?” he said.

“What am I to do for it?”

The taxi stopped at a florist’s on the corner of Madison Avenue and 58th Street. Overhead were apartments. There was no elevator—merely the street door to unlock and four dim flights of stairs rising steeply to the top.

He lived on the top floor. As they paused before his door in the dim corridor:

“Are you afraid?” he asked.

She came nearer, laid a hand on his arm:

“Are you afraid?”

He stood silent, the latch-key in his hand.

“I’m not afraid of myself—if that is what you mean,” he said.

“That is partly what I mean … you’ll have to mount guard over your soul.”

“I’ll look out for my soul,” he retorted dryly.

“Do so. I lost mine. I—I would not wish any harm to yours through our companionship.”

“Don’t you worry about my soul,” he remarked, fitting the key to the lock. But again her hand fell on his wrist:

“Wait. I can’t—can’t help warning you. Neither your soul nor your body are safe if—if you ever do make of me a companion. I’ve got to tell you this!”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded bluntly.

“Because you have been courteous—considerate—and you don’t know—oh, you don’t realise what spiritual peril is!—What your soul and body have to fear if you—if you win me over—if you ever manage to make of me a friend!”

He said: “People follow and threaten you. We know that. I understand also that association with you involves me, and that I shall no doubt be menaced with bodily harm.”

He laid his hand on hers where it still rested on his sleeves:

“But that’s my business, Miss Norne,” he added with a smile. “So, otherwise, it being merely a plain business affair between you and me, I think I may also venture my immortal soul alone with you in my room.”

The girl flushed darkly.

“You have misunderstood,” she said.

He looked at her coolly, intently; and arrived at no conclusion. Young, very lovely, confessedly without moral principle, he still could not believe her actually depraved. “What did you mean?” he said bluntly.

“In companionship with the lost, one might lose one’s way—unawares…. Do you know that there is an Evil loose in the world which is bent upon conquest by obtaining control of men’s minds?”

“No,” he replied, amused.

“And that, through the capture of men’s minds and souls the destruction of civilisation is being planned?”

“Is that what you learned in your captivity, Miss Norne?”

“You do not believe me.”

“I believe your terrible experiences in China have shaken you to your tragic little soul. Horror and grief and loneliness have left scars on tender, impressionable youth. They would have slain maturity—broken it, crushed it. But youth is flexible, pliable, and bends—gives way under pressure. Scars become slowly effaced. It shall be so with you. You will learn to understand that nothing really can harm the soul.”

For a few moments’ silence they stood facing each other on the dim landing outside his locked door.

“Nothing can slay our souls,” he repeated in a grave voice. “I do not believe you really ever have done anything to wound even your self-respect. I do not believe you are capable of it, or ever have been, or ever will be. But somebody has deeply wounded you, spiritually, and has wounded your mind to persuade you that your soul is no longer in God’s keeping. For that is a lie!”

He saw her features working with poignant emotions as though struggling to believe him.

“Souls are never lost,” he said. “Ungoverned passions of every sort merely cripple them for a space. God always heals them in the end.”

He laid his hand on the door-knob once more and lifted the latch-key.

“Don’t!” she whispered, catching his hand again, “if there should be somebody in there waiting for us!”

“There is not a soul in my rooms. My servant sleeps out.”

“There is somebody there!” she said, trembling.

“Nobody, Miss Norne. Will you come in with me?”

“I don’t dare——”

“Why?”

“You and I alone together—no! oh, please—please! I am afraid!”

“Of what?”

“Of—giving you—my c-confidence—and trust—and—and f-friendship.”

“I want you to.”

“I must not! It would destroy us both, soul and body!”

“I tell you,” he said, impatiently, “that there is no destruction of the soul—and it’s a clean comradeship anyway—a fighting friendship I ask of you—all I ask; all I offer! Wherein, then, lies this peril in being alone together?”

“Because I am finding it in my heart to believe in you, trust you, hold fast to your strength and protection. And if I give way—yield—and if I make you a promise—and if there is anybody in that room to see us and hear us—then we shall be destroyed, both of us, soul and body——”

He took her hands, held them until their trembling ceased.

“I’ll answer for our bodies. Let God look after the rest. Will you trust Him?”

She nodded.

“And me?”

“Yes.”

But her face blanched as he turned the latch-key, switched on the electric light, and preceded her into the room beyond.

The place was one of those accentless, typical bachelor apartments made comfortable for anything masculine, but quite unlivable otherwise.

Live coals still glowed in the hob grate; he placed a lump of cannel coal on the embers, used a bellows vigorously and the flame caught with a greasy crackle.

The girl stood motionless until he pulled up an easy chair for her, then he found another for himself. She let slip her furs, folded her hands around the bunch of violets and waited.

“Now,” he said, “I’ll come to the point. In 1916 I was at Plattsburg, expecting a commission. The Department of Justice sent for me. I went to Washington where I was made to understand that I had been selected to serve my country in what is vaguely known as the Secret Service—and which includes government agents attached to several departments.

“The great war is over; but I am still retained in the service. Because something more sinister than a hun victory over civilisation threatens this Republic. And threatens the civilised world.”

“Anarchy,” she said.

“Bolshevism.”

She did not stir in her chair.

She had become very white. She said nothing. He looked at her with his quiet, reassuring smile.

“That’s what I want of you,” he repeated.

“I want your help,” he went on, “I want your valuable knowledge of the Orient. I want whatever secret information you possess. I want your rather amazing gifts, your unprecedented experience among almost unknown people, your familiarity with occult things, your astounding powers—whatever they are—hypnotic, psychic, material.

“Because, to-day, civilisation is engaged in a secret battle for existence against gathering powers of violence, the force and limit of which are still unguessed.

“It is a battle between righteousness and evil, between sanity and insanity, light and darkness, God and Satan! And if civilisation does not win, then the world perishes.”

She raised her still eyes to his, but made no other movement.

“Miss Norne,” he said, “we in the International Service know enough about you to desire to know more.

“We already knew the story you have told to me. Agents in the International Secret Service kept in touch with you from the time that the Japanese escorted you out of China.

“From the day you landed, and all across the Continent to New York, you have been kept in view by agents of this government.

“Here, in New York, my men have kept in touch with you. And now, to-night, the moment has come for a personal understanding between you and me.”

The girl’s pale lips moved—became stiffly articulate: “I—I wish to live,” she stammered, “I fear death.”

“I know it. I know what I ask when I ask your help.”

She said in the ghost of a voice: “If I turn against them—they will kill me.”

“They’ll try,” he said quietly.

“They will not fail, Mr. Cleves.”

“That is in God’s hands.”

She became deathly white at that.

“No,” she burst out in an agonised voice, “it is not in God’s hands! If it were, I should not be afraid! It is in the hands of those who stole my soul!”

She covered her face with both arms, fairly writhing on her chair.

“If the Yezidees have actually made you believe any such nonsense”—he began; but she dropped her arms and stared at him out of terrible blue eyes:

“I don’t want to die, I tell you! I am afraid!—afraid! If I reveal to you what I know they’ll kill me. If I turn against them and aid you, they’ll slay my body, and send it after my soul!”

She was trembling so violently that he sprang up and went to her. After a moment he passed one arm around her shoulders and held her firmly, close to him.

“Come,” he said, “do your duty. Those who enlist under the banner of Christ have nothing to dread in this world or the next.”

“If—if I could believe I were safe there.”

“I tell you that you are. So is every human soul! What mad nonsense have the Yezidees made you believe? Is there any surer salvation for the soul than to die in Christ’s service?”

He slipped his arm from her quivering shoulders and grasped both her hands, crushing them as though to steady every fibre in her tortured body.

“I want you to live. I want to live, too. But I tell you it’s in God’s hands, and we soldiers of civilisation have nothing to fear except failure to do our duty. Now, then, are we comrades under the United States Government?”

“O God—I—dare not!”

“Are we?”

Perhaps she felt the physical pain of his crushing grip for she turned and looked him in the eyes.

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered. “Don’t make me!”

“Will you help your country?”

The terrible directness of her child’s gaze became almost unendurable to him.

“Will you offer your country your soul and body?” he insisted in a low, tense voice.

Her stiff lips formed a word.

“Yes!” he exclaimed.

“Yes.”

For a moment she rested against his shoulder, deathly white, then in a flash she had straightened, was on her feet in one bound and so swiftly that he scarcely followed her movement—was unaware that she had risen until he saw her standing there with a pistol glittering in her hand, her eyes fixed on the portières that hung across the corridor leading to his bedroom.

“What on earth,” he began, but she interrupted him, keeping her gaze focused on the curtains, and the pistol resting level on her hip.

“I’ll answer you if I die for it!” she cried. “I’ll tell you everything I know! You wish to learn what is this monstrous evil that threatens the world with destruction—what you call anarchy and Bolshevism? It is an Evil that was born before Christ came! It is an Evil which not only destroys cities and empires and men but which is more terrible still for it obtains control of the human mind, and uses it at will; and it obtains sovereignty over the soul, and makes it prisoner. Its aim is to dominate first, then to destroy. It was conceived in the beginning by Erlik and by Sorcerers and devils…. Always, from the first, there have been sorcerers and living devils.

“And when human history began to be remembered and chronicled, devils were living who worshiped Erlik and practised sorcery.

“They have been called by many names. A thousand years before Christ Hassan Sabbah founded his sect called Hassanis or Assassins. The Yezidees are of them. Their Chief is still called Sabbah; their creed is the annihilation of civilisation!”

Cleves had risen. The girl spoke in a clear, accentless monotone, not looking at him, her eyes and pistol centred on the motionless curtains.

“Look out!” she cried sharply.

“What is the matter?” he demanded. “Do you suppose anybody is hidden behind that curtain in the passageway?”

“If there is,” she replied in her excited but distinct voice, “here is a tale to entertain him:

“The Hassanis are a sect of assassins which has spread out of Asia all over the world, and they are determined upon the annihilation of everything and everybody in it except themselves!

“In Germany is a branch of the sect. The hun is the lineal descendant of the ancient Yezidee; the gods of the hun are the old demons under other names; the desire and object of the hun is the same desire—to rule the minds and bodies and souls of men and use them to their own purposes!”

She lifted her pistol a little, came a pace forward:

“Anarchist, Yezidee, Hassani, Boche, Bolshevik—all are the same—all are secretly swarming in the hidden places for the same purpose!”

The girl’s blue eyes were aflame, now, and the pistol was lifting slowly in her hand to a deadly level.

“Sanang!” she cried in a terrible voice.

“Sanang!” she cried again in her terrifying young voice—“Toad! Tortoise egg! Spittle of Erlik! May the Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake you! Sheik-el-Djebel!—cowardly Khan whom I laughed at from the temple when it rained yellow snakes on the marble steps when all the gongs in Yian sounded in your frightened ears!”

She waited.

“What! You won’t step out? Tokhta!” she exclaimed in a ringing tone, and made a swift motion with her left hand. Apparently out of her empty open palm, like a missile hurled, a thin, blinding beam of light struck the curtains, making them suddenly transparent.

A man stood there.

He came out, moving very slowly as though partly stupefied. He wore evening dress under his overcoat, and had a long knife in his right hand.

Nobody spoke.

“So—I really was to die then, if I came here,” said the girl in a wondering way.

Sanang’s stealthy gaze rested on her, stole toward Cleves. He moistened his lips with his tongue. “You deliver me to this government agent?” he asked hoarsely.

“I deliver nobody by treachery. You may go, Sanang.”

He hesitated, a graceful, faultless, metropolitan figure in top-hat and evening attire. Then, as he started to move, Cleves covered him with his weapon.

“I can’t let that man go free!” cried Cleves angrily.

“Very well!” she retorted in a passionate voice—“then take him if you are able! Tokhta! Look out for yourself!”

Something swift as lightning struck the pistol from his grasp,—blinded him, half stunned him, set him reeling in a drenching blaze of light that blotted out all else.

He heard the door slam; he stumbled, caught at the back of a chair while his senses and sight were clearing.

“By heavens!” he whispered with ashen lips, “you—you are a sorceress—or something. What—what, are you doing to me?”

There was no answer. And when his vision cleared a little more he saw her crouched on the floor, her head against the locked door, listening, perhaps—or sobbing—he scarcely understood which until the quiver of her shoulders made it plainer.

When at last Cleves went to her and bent over and touched her she looked up at him out of wet eyes, and her grief-drawn mouth quivered.

“I—I don’t know,” she sobbed, “if he truly stole away my soul—there—there in the temple dusk of Yian. But he—he stole my heart—for all his wickedness—Sanang, Prince of the Yezidees—and I have been fighting him for it all these years—all these long years—fighting for what he stole in the temple dusk!… And now—now I have it back—my heart—all broken to pieces—here on the floor behind your—your bolted door.”

V

THE ASSASSINS

On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.

Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.

Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The “Eight Towers of the Assassins” guarded it—still guard it, possibly.

The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.

In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.

Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated—three of them under thirty.

These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government—men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.

The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.

The fourth man’s name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.

Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.

Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.

“Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?” she asked as though frightened.

Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.

“If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?” she demanded nervously.

“That makes no difference,” he replied with a smile. “It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian.”

“Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?”

“Dear child,” he interrupted gently, “what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know?—a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!”

She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.

“Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?” she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.

Recklow remained silent.

“Because,” she went on, “if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you.”

Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:

“The worship of Erlik is devil worship,” he said. “Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation—who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers.”

Cleves said: “The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles.”

The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: “Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?”

“Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing.”

She spoke again in the same uneasy voice: “Then you do not believe that either God or Satan is involved?”

“No,” he replied smilingly, “and you must not so believe.”

“Nor the—the destruction of human souls,” she persisted; “you do not believe it is being accomplished to-day?”

“Not in the slightest, dear young lady,” he said cheerfully.

“Do you not believe that to have been instructed in such unlawful knowledge is damning? Do you not believe that ability to employ unknown forces is forbidden of God, and that to disobey His law means death to the soul?”

“No!”

“That it is the price one pays to Satan for occult power over people’s minds?” she insisted.

“Hypnotic suggestion is not one of the cardinal sins,” explained Recklow, still smiling—“unless wickedly employed. The Yezidee priesthood is a band of so-called sorcerers only because of their wicked employment of whatever hypnotic and psychic knowledge they may have obtained.

“There was nothing intrinsically wicked in the huns’ discovery of phosgene. But the use they made of it made devils out of them. My ability to manufacture phosgene gas is no crime. But if I manufacture it and use it to poison innocent human beings, then, in that sense, I am, perhaps, a sort of modern sorcerer.”

Tressa Norne turned paler:

“I had better tell you that I have used—forbidden knowledge—which the Yezidees taught me in the temple of Erlik.”

“Used it how?” demanded Cleves.

“To—to earn a living…. And once or twice to defend myself.”

There was the slightest scepticism in Recklow’s bland smile. “You did quite right, Miss Norne.”

She had become very white now. She stood beside Recklow, her back toward the suspended map, and looked in a scared sort of way from one to the other of the men seated before her, turning finally to Cleves, and coming toward him.

“I—I once killed a man,” she said with a catch in her breath.

Cleves reddened with astonishment. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

“He was already on his way to kill me in bed.”

“You were perfectly right,” remarked Recklow coolly.

“I don’t know … I was in bed…. And then, on the edge of sleep, I felt his mind groping to get hold of mine—feeling about in the darkness to get hold of my brain and seize it and paralyse it.”

All colour had left her face. Cleves gripped the arm of his chair and watched her intently.

“I—I had only a moment’s mental freedom,” she went on in a ghost of a voice. “I was just able to rouse myself, fight off those murderous brain-fingers—let loose a clear mental ray…. And then, O God! I saw him in his room with his Kalmuck knife—saw him already on his way to murder me—Gutchlug Khan, the Yezidee—looking about in his bedroom for a shroud…. And when—when he reached for the bed to draw forth a fine, white sheet for the shroud without which no Yezidee dares journey deathward—then—then I became frightened…. And I killed him—I slew him there in his hotel bedroom on the floor above mine!”

Selden moistened his lips: “That Oriental, Gutchlug, died from heart-failure in a San Francisco hotel,” he said. “I was there at the time.”

“He died by the fangs of a little yellow snake,” whispered the girl.

“There was no snake in his room,” retorted Cleves.

“And no wound on his body,” added Selden. “I attended the autopsy.”

She said, faintly: “There was no snake, and no wound, as you say…. Yet Gutchlug died of both there in his bedroom…. And before he died he heard his soul bidding him farewell; and he saw the death-adder coiled in the sheet he clutched—saw the thing strike him again and again—saw and felt the tiny wounds on his left hand; felt the fangs pricking deep, deep into the veins; died of it there within the minute—died of the swiftest poison known. And yet——”

She turned her dead-white face to Cleves—“And yet there was no snake there!… And never had been…. And so I—I ask you, gentlemen, if souls do not die when minds learn to fight death with death—and deal it so swiftly, so silently, while one’s body lies, unstirring on a bed—in a locked room on the floor below——”

She swayed a little, put out one hand rather blindly.

Recklow rose and passed a muscular arm around her; Cleves, beside her, held her left hand, crushing it, without intention, until she opened her eyes with a cry of pain.

“Are you all right?” asked Recklow bluntly.

“Yes.” She turned and looked at Cleves and he caressed her bruised hand as though dazed.

“Tell me,” she said to Cleves—“you who know—know more about my mind than anybody living——” a painful colour surged into her face—but she went on steadily, forcing herself to meet his gaze: “tell me, Mr. Cleves—do you still believe that nothing can really destroy my soul? And that it shall yet win through to safety?”

He said: “Your soul is in God’s keeping, and always shall be…. And if the Yezidees have made you believe otherwise, they lie.”

Recklow added in a slow, perplexed way: “I have no personal knowledge of psychic power. I am not psychic, not susceptible. But if you actually possess such ability, Miss Norne, and if you have employed such knowledge to defend your life, then you have done absolutely right.”

“No guilt touches you,” added Selden with an involuntary shiver, “if by hypnosis or psychic ability you really did put an end to that would-be murderer, Gutchlug.”

Selden said: “If Gutchlug died by the fangs of a yellow death-adder which existed only in his own mind, and if you actually had anything to do with it, you acted purely in self-defence.”

“You did your full duty,” added Benton—“but—good God!—it seems incredible to me, that such power can actually be available in the world!”

Recklow spoke again in his pleasant, undisturbed voice: “Go back to the map, Miss Norne, and tell us a little more about this rather terrifying thing which you believe menaces the civilised world with destruction.”

Tressa Norne laid a slim finger on the map. Her voice had become steady. She said:

“The devil-worship, of which one of the modern developments is Bolshevism, and another the terrorism of the hun, began in Asia long before Christ’s advent: At least so it was taught us in the temple of Erlik.

“It has always existed, its aim always has been the annihilation of good and the elevation of evil; the subjection of right by might, and the worldwide triumph of wrong.

“Perhaps it is as old as the first battle between God and Satan. I have wondered about it, sometimes. There in the dusk of the temple when the Eight Assassins came—the eight Sheiks-el-Djebel, all in white—chanting the Yakase of Sabbah—always that dirge when they came and spread their eight white shrouds on the temple steps——”

Her voice caught; she waited to recover her composure. Then went on:

“The ambition of Genghis was to conquer the world by force of arms. It was merely of physical subjection that he dreamed. But the Slayer of Souls——”

“Who?” asked Recklow sharply.

“The Slayer of Souls—Erlik’s vice-regent on earth—Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. It is of him I am speaking,” exclaimed Tressa Norne—with quiet resolution. “Genghis sought only physical conquest of man; the Yezidee’s ambition is more awful, for he is attempting to surprise and seize the very minds of men!”

There was a dead silence. Tressa looked palely upon the four.

“The Yezidees—who you tell me are not sorcerers—are using power—which you tell me is not magic accursed by God—to waylay, capture, enslave, and destroy the minds and souls of mankind.

“It may be that what they employ is hypnotic ability and psychic power and can be, some day, explained on a scientific basis when we learn more about the occult laws which govern these phenomena.

“But could anything render the threat less awful? For there have existed for centuries—perhaps always—a sect of Satanists determined upon the destruction of everything that is pure and holy and good on earth; and they are resolved to substitute for righteousness the dreadful reign of hell.

“In the beginning there were comparatively few of these human demons. Gradually, through the eras, they have increased. In the twelfth century there were fifty thousand of the Sect of Assassins.

“Beside the castle of the Slayer of Souls on Mount Alamout——” she laid her finger on the map—“eight other towers were erected for the Eight Chief Assassins, called Sheiks-el-Djebel.

“In the temple we were taught where these eight towers stood.” She picked up a pencil, and on eight blank spaces of unexplored and unmapped Mongolia she made eight crosses. Then she turned to the men behind her.

“It was taught to us in the temple that from these eight foci of infection the disease of evil has been spreading throughout the world; from these eight towers have gone forth every year the emissaries of evil—perverted missionaries—to spread the poisonous propaganda, to teach it, to tamper stealthily with the minds of men, dominate them, pervert them, instruct them in the creed of the Assassin of Souls.

“All over the world are people, already contaminated, whose minds are already enslaved and poisoned, and who are infecting the still healthy brains of others—stealthily possessing themselves of the minds of mankind—teaching them evil, inviting them to mock the precepts of Christ.

“Of such lost minds are the degraded brains of the Germans—the pastors and philosophers who teach that might is right.

“Of such crippled minds are the Bolsheviki, poisoned long, long ago by close contact with Asia which, before that, had infected and enslaved the minds of the ruling classes with ferocious philosophy.

“Of such minds are all anarchists of every shade and stripe—all terrorists, all disciples of violence,—the murderously envious, the slothful slinking brotherhood which prowls through the world taking every opportunity to set it afire; those mentally dulled by reason of excesses; those weak intellects become unsound through futile gabble,—parlour socialists, amateur revolutionists, theoretical incapables excited by discussion fit only for healthy minds.”

She left the map and came over to where the four men were seated terribly intent upon her every word.

“In the temple of Erlik, where my girlhood was passed after the murder of my parents, I learned what I am repeating to you,” she said.

“I learned this, also, that the Eight Towers still exist—still stand to-day,—at least theoretically—and that from the Eight Towers pours forth across the world a stream of poison.

“I was told that, to every country, eight Yezidees were allotted—eight sorcerers—or adepts in scientific psychology if you prefer it—whose mission is to teach the gospel of hell and gradually but surely to win the minds of men to the service of the Slayer of Souls.

“That is what was taught us in the temple. We were educated in the development of occult powers—for it seems all human beings possess this psychic power latent within them—only few, even when instructed, acquire any ability to control and use this force….

“I—I learned—rapidly. I even thought, sometimes, that the Yezidees were beginning to be a little afraid of me,—even the Hassani priests…. And the Sheiks-el-Djebel, spreading their shrouds on the temple steps, looked at me with unquiet eyes, where I stood like a corpse amid the incense clouds——”

She passed her fingers over her eyelids, then framed her face between both hands for a moment’s thought lost in tragic retrospection.

“Kai!” she whispered dreamily as though to herself—“what Erlik awoke within my body that was asleep, God knows, but it was as though a twin comrade arose within me and looked out through my eyes upon a world which never before had been visible.”

Utter silence reigned in the room: Cleves’s breathing seemed almost painful to him, so intently was he listening and watching this girl; Benton’s hands whitened with his grip on the chair-arms; Selden, tense, absorbed, kept his keen gaze of a business man fastened on her face. Recklow slowly caressed the cold bowl of his pipe with both thumbs.

Tressa Norne’s strange and remote eyes subtly altered, and she lifted her head and looked calmly at the men before her.

“I think that there is nothing more for me to add,” she said. “The Red Spectre of Anarchy, called Bolshevism at present, threatens our country. Our Government is now awake to this menace and the Secret Service is moving everywhere.

“Great damage already has been done to the minds of many people in this Republic; poison has spread; is spreading. The Eight Towers still stand. The Eight Assassins are in America.

“But these eight Assassins know me to be their enemy…. They will surely attempt to kill me…. I don’t believe I can avoid—death—very long…. But I want to serve my country and—and mankind.”

“They’ll have to get me first,” said Cleves, bluntly. “I shall not permit you out of my sight.”

Recklow said in a musing voice: “And these eight gentlemen, who are very likely to hurt us, also, are the first people we ought to hunt.”

“To get them,” added Selden, “we ought to choke the stream at its source.”

“To find out who they are is what is going to worry us,” added Benton. Cleves had stood holding a chair for Tressa Norne. Finally she noticed it and seated herself as though tired.

“Is Sanang one of these eight?” he asked her. The girl turned and looked up at him, and he saw the flush mounting in her face.

“Sometimes,” she said steadily, “I have almost believed he was Erlik’s own vice-regent on earth—the Slayer of Souls himself.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

Benton and Selden had gone. Recklow left a little later. Cleves accompanied him out to the landing.

“Are you going to keep Miss Norne here with you for the present?” inquired the older man.

“Yes. I dare not let her out of my sight, Recklow. What else can I do?”

“I don’t know. Is she prepared for the consequences?”

“Gossip? Slander?”

“Of course.”

“I can get a housekeeper.”

“That only makes it look worse.”

Cleves reddened. “Well, do you want to find her in some hotel or apartment with her throat cut?”

“No,” replied Recklow, gently, “I do not.”

“Then what else is there to do but keep her here in my own apartment and never let her out of my sight until we can find and lock up the eight gentlemen who are undoubtedly bent on murdering her?”

“Isn’t there some woman in the Service who could help out? I could mention several.”

“I tell you I can’t trust Tressa Norne to anybody except myself,” insisted Cleves. “I got her into this; I am responsible if she is murdered; I dare not entrust her safety to anybody else. And, Recklow, it’s a ghastly responsibility for a man to induce a young girl to face death, even in the service of her country.”

“If she remains here alone with you she’ll face social destruction,” remarked Recklow.

Cleves was silent for a moment, then he burst out: “Well, what am I to do? What is there left for me to do except to watch over her and see her through this devilish business? What other way have I to protect her, Recklow?”

“You could offer her the protection of your name,” suggested the other, carelessly.

“What? You mean—marry her?”

“Well, nobody else would be inclined to, Cleves, if it ever becomes known she has lived here quite alone with you.”

Cleves stared at the elder man.

“This is nonsense,” he said in a harsh voice. “That young girl doesn’t want to marry anybody. Neither do I. She doesn’t wish to have her throat cut, that’s all. And I’m determined she shan’t.”

“There are stealthier assassins, Cleves,—the slayers of reputations. It goes badly with their victim. It does indeed.”

“Well, hang it, what do you think I ought to do?”

“I think you ought to marry her if you’re going to keep her here.”

“Suppose she doesn’t mind the unconventionality of it?”

“All women mind. No woman, at heart, is unconventional, Cleves.”

“She—she seems to agree with me that she ought to stay here…. Besides, she has no money, no relatives, no friends in America——”

“All the more tragic. If you really believe it to be your duty to keep her here where you can look after her bodily safety, then the other obligation is still heavier. And there may come a day when Miss Norne will wish that you had been less conscientious concerning the safety of her pretty throat…. For the knife of the Yezidee is swifter and less cruel than the tongue that slays with a smile…. And this young girl has many years to live, after this business of Bolshevism is dead and forgotten in our Republic.”

“Recklow!”

“Yes?”

“You think I might dare try to find a room somewhere else for her and let her take her chances? Do you?”

“It’s your affair.”

“I know—hang it! I know it’s my affair. I’ve unintentionally made it so. But can’t you tell me what I ought to do?”

“I can’t.”

“What would you do?”

“Don’t ask me,” returned Recklow, sharply. “If you’re not man enough to come to a decision, you may turn her over to me.”

Cleves flushed brightly. “Do you think you are old enough to take my job and avoid scandal?”

Recklow’s cold eyes rested on him: “If you like,” he said, “I’ll assume your various kinds of personal responsibility toward Miss Norne.”

Cleves’ visage burned. “I’ll shoulder my own burdens,” he retorted.

“Sure. I knew you would.” And Recklow smiled and held out his hand. Cleves took it without cordiality. Standing so, Recklow, still smiling, said: “What a rotten deal that child has had—is having. Her father and mother were fine people. Did you ever hear of Dr. Norne?”

“She mentioned him once.”

“They were up-State people of most excellent antecedents and no money. Dr. Norne was our Vice-Consul at Yarkand in the province of Sin Kiang. All he had was his salary, and he lost that and his post when the administration changed. Then he went into the spice trade.

“Some Jew syndicate here sent him up the Yarkand River to see what could be done about jade and gold concessions. He was on that business when the tragedy happened. The Kalmuks and Khirghiz were responsible, under Yezidee instigation. And there you are:—and here is his child, Cleves—back, by some miracle, from that flowering hell called Yian, believing in her heart that she really lost her soul there in the temple. And now, here in her own native land, she is exposed to actual and hourly danger of assassination…. Poor kid!… Did you ever hear of a rottener deal, Cleves?”

Their hands had remained clasped while Recklow was speaking. He spoke again, clearly, amiably:

“To lay down one’s life for a friend is fine. I’m not sure that it’s finer to offer one’s honour in behalf of a girl whose honour is at stake.”

After a moment Cleves’s grip tightened.

“All right,” he said.

Recklow went downstairs.

VI

IN BATTLE

Cleves went back into the apartment; he noticed that Miss Norne’s door was ajar.

To get to his own room he had to pass that way; and he saw her, seated before the mirror, partly undressed, her dark, lustrous hair being combed out and twisted up for the night.

Whether this carelessness was born of innocence or of indifference mattered little; he suddenly realised that these conditions wouldn’t do. And his first feeling was of anger.

“If you’ll put on your robe and slippers,” he said in an unpleasant voice, “I’d like to talk to you for a few moments.”

She turned her head on its charming neck and looked around and up at him over one naked shoulder.

“Shall I come into your room?” she inquired.

“No!… when you’ve got some clothes on, call me.”

“I’m quite ready now,” she said calmly, and drew the Chinese slippers over her bare feet and passed a silken loop over the silver bell buttons on her right shoulder. Then, undisturbed, she continued to twist up her hair, following his movements in the mirror with unconcerned blue eyes.

He entered and seated himself, the impatient expression still creasing his forehead and altering his rather agreeable features.

“Miss Norne,” he said, “you’re absolutely convinced that these people mean to do you harm. Isn’t that true?”

“Of course,” she said simply.

“Then, until we get them, you’re running a serious risk. In fact, you live in hourly peril. That is your belief, isn’t it?”

She put the last peg into her thick, curly hair, lowered her arms, turned, dropped one knee over the other, and let her candid gaze rest on him in silence.

“What I mean to explain,” he said coldly, “is that as long as I induced you to go into this affair I’m responsible for you. If I let you out of my sight here in New York and if anything happens to you, I’ll be as guilty as the dirty beast who takes your life. What is your opinion? It’s up to me to stand by you now, isn’t it?”

“I had rather be near you—for a while,” she said timidly.

“Certainly. But, Miss Norne, our living here together, in my apartment—or living together anywhere else—is never going to be understood by other people. You know that, don’t you?”

After a silence, still looking at him out of clear unembarrassed eyes:

“I know…. But … I don’t want to die.”

“I told you,” he said sharply, “they’ll have to kill me first. So that’s all right. But how about what I am doing to your reputation?”

“I understand.”

“I suppose you do. You’re very young. Once out of this blooming mess, you will have all your life before you. But if I kill your reputation for you while saving your body from death, you’ll find no happiness in living. Do you realise that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then? Have you any solution for this problem that confronts you?”

“No.”

“Haven’t you any idea to suggest?”

“I don’t—don’t want to die,” she repeated in an unsteady voice.

He bit his lip; and after a moment’s scowling silence under the merciless scrutiny of her eyes: “Then you had better marry me,” he said.

It was some time before she spoke. For a second or two he sustained the searching quality of her gaze, but it became unendurable.

Presently she said: “I don’t ask it of you. I can shoulder my own burdens.” And he remembered what he had just said to Recklow.

“You’ve shouldered more than your share,” he blurted out. “You are deliberately risking death to serve your country. I enlisted you. The least I can do is to say my affections are not engaged; so naturally the idea of—of marrying anybody never entered my head.”

“Then you do not care for anybody else?”

Her candour amazed and disconcerted him.

“No.” He looked at her, curiously. “Do you care for anybody in that way?”

A light blush tinted her face. She said gravely: “If we really are going to marry each other I had better tell you that I did care for Prince Sanang.”

“What!” he cried, astounded.

“It seems incredible, doesn’t it? Yet it is quite true. I fought him; I fought myself; I stood guard over my mind and senses there in the temple; I knew what he was and I detested him and I mocked him there in the temple…. And I loved him.”

“Sanang!” he repeated, not only amazed but also oddly incensed at the naïve confession.

“Yes, Sanang…. If we are to marry, I thought I ought to tell you. Don’t you think so?”

“Certainly,” he replied in an absent-minded way, his mind still grasping at the thing. Then, looking up: “Do you still care for this fellow?”

She shook her head.

“Are you perfectly sure, Miss Norne?”

“As sure as that I am alive when I awake from a nightmare. My hatred for Sanang is very bitter,” she added frankly, “and yet somehow it is not my wish to see him harmed.”

“You still care for him a little?”

“Oh, no. But—can’t you understand that it is not in me to wish him harm?… No girl feels that way—once having cared. To become indifferent to a familiar thing is perhaps natural; but to desire to harm it is not in my character.”

“You have plenty of character,” he said, staring; at her.

“You don’t think so. Do you?”

“Why not?”

“Because of what I said to you on the roof-garden that night. It was shameful, wasn’t it?”

“You behaved like many a thoroughbred,” he returned bluntly; “you were scared, bewildered, ready to bolt to any shelter offered.”

“It’s quite true I didn’t know what to do to keep alive. And that was all that interested me—to keep on living—having lost my soul and being afraid to die and find myself in hell with Erlik.”

He said: “Isn’t that absurd notion out of your head yet?”

“I don’t know…. I can’t suddenly believe myself safe after all those years. It is not easy to root out what was planted in childhood and what grew to be part of one during the tender and formative period…. You can’t understand, Mr. Cleves—you can’t ever feel or visualise what became my daily life in a region which was half paradise and half hell——”

She bent her head and took her face between her fingers, and sat so, brooding.

After a little while: “Well,” he said, “there’s only one way to manage this affair—if you are willing, Miss Norne.”

She merely lifted her eyes.

“I think,” he said, “there’s only that one way out of it. But you understand”—he turned pink—“it will be quite all right—your liberty—privacy—I shan’t bother you—annoy——”

She merely looked at him.

“After this Bolshevistic flurry is settled—in a year or two—or three—then you can very easily get your freedom; and you’ll have all life before you” … he rose: “—and a jolly good friend in me—a good comrade, Miss Norne. And that means you can count on me when you go into business—or whatever you decide to do.”

She also had risen, standing slim and calm in her exquisite Chinese robe, the sleeves of which covered her finger tips.

“Are you going to marry me?” she asked.

“If you’ll let me.”

“Yes—I will … it’s so generous and considerate of you. I—I don’t ask it; I really don’t——”

“But I do.”

“—And I never dreamed of such a thing.”

He forced a smile. “Nor I. It’s rather a crazy thing to do. But I know of no saner alternative…. So we had better get our license to-morrow…. And that settles it.”

He turned to go; and, on her threshold, his feet caught in something on the floor and he stumbled, trying to free his feet from a roll of soft white cloth lying there on the carpet. And when he picked it up, it unrolled, and a knife fell out of the folds of cloth and struck his foot.

Still perplexed, not comprehending, he stooped to recover the knife. Then, straightening up, he found himself looking into the colourless face of Tressa Norne.

“What’s all this?” he asked—“this sheet and knife here on the floor outside your door?”

She answered with difficulty: “They have sent you your shroud, I think.”

“Are not those things yours? Were they not already here in your baggage?” he demanded incredulously. Then, realising that they had not been there on the door-sill when he entered her room a few moments since, a rough chill passed over him—the icy caress of fear.

“Where did that thing come from?” he said hoarsely. “How could it get here when my door is locked and bolted? Unless there’s somebody hidden here!”

Hot anger suddenly flooded him; he drew his pistol and sprang into the passageway.

“What the devil is all this!” he repeated furiously, flinging open his bedroom door and switching on the light.

He searched his room in a rage, went on and searched the dining-room, smoking-room, and kitchen, and every clothes-press and closet, always aware of Tressa’s presence close behind him. And when there remained no tiniest nook or cranny in the place unsearched, he stood in the centre of the carpet glaring at the locked and bolted door.

He heard her say under her breath: “This is going to be a sleepless night. And a dangerous one.” And, turning to stare at her, saw no fear in her face, only excitement.

He still held clutched in his left hand the sheet and the knife. Now he thrust these toward her.

“What’s this damned foolery, anyway?” he demanded harshly. She took the knife with a slight shudder. “There is something engraved on the silver hilt,” she said.

He bent over her shoulder.

“Eighur,” she added calmly, “not Arabic. The Mongols had no written characters of their own.”

She bent closer, studying the inscription. After a moment, still studying the Eighur characters, she rested her left hand on his shoulder—an impulsive, unstudied movement that might have meant either confidence or protection.

“Look,” she said, “it is not addressed to you after all, but to a symbol—a series of numbers, 53-6-26.”

“That is my designation in the Federal Service,” he said, sharply.

“Oh!” she nodded slowly. “Then this is what is written in the Mongol-Yezidee dialect, traced out in Eighur characters: ‘To 53-6-26! By one of the Eight Assassins the Slayer of Souls sends this shroud and this knife from Mount Alamout. Such a blade shall divide your heart. This sheet is for your corpse.’”

After a grim silence he flung the soft white cloth on the floor.

“There’s no use my pretending I’m not surprised and worried,” he said; “I don’t know how that cloth got here. Do you?”

“It was sent.”

“How?”

She shook her head and gave him a grave, confused look.

“There are ways. You could not understand…. This is going to be a sleepless night for us.”

“You can go to bed, Tressa. I’ll sit up and read and keep an eye on that door.”

“I can’t let you remain alone here. I’m afraid to do that.”

He gave a laugh, not quite pleasant, as he suddenly comprehended that the girl now considered their rôles to be reversed.

“Are you planning to sit up in order to protect me?” he asked, grimly amused.

“Do you mind?”

“Why, you blessed little thing, I can take care of myself. How funny of you, when I am trying to plan how best to look out for you!”

But her face remained pale and concerned, and she rested her left hand more firmly on his shoulder.

“I wish to remain awake with you,” she said. “Because I myself don’t fully understand this”—she looked at the knife in her palm, then down at the shroud. “It is going to be a strange night for us,” she sighed. “Let us sit together here on the lounge where I can face that bolted door. And if you are willing, I am going to turn out the lights——” She suddenly bent forward and switched them off—“because I must keep my mind on guard.”

“Why do you do that?” he asked, “you can’t see the door, now.”

“Let me help you in my own way,” she whispered. “I—I am very deeply disturbed, and very, very angry. I do not understand this new menace. Yezidee that I am, I do not understand what kind of danger threatens you through your loyalty to me.”

She drew him forward, and he opened his mouth to remonstrate, to laugh; but as he turned, his foot touched the shroud, and an uncontrollable shiver passed over him.

They went close together, across the dim room to the lounge, and seated themselves. Enough light from Madison Avenue made objects in the room barely discernible.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Sounds from the street below became rarer as the hours wore away. The iron jar of trams, the rattle of vehicles, the harsh warning of taxicabs broke the stillness at longer and longer intervals, until, save only for that immense and ceaseless vibration of the monstrous iron city under the foggy stars, scarcely a sound stirred the silence.

The half-hour had struck long ago on the bell of the little clock. Now the clear bell sounded three times.

Cleves stirred on the lounge beside Tressa. Again and again he had thought that she was asleep for her head had fallen back against the cushions, and she lay very still. But always, when he leaned nearer to peer down at her, he saw her eyes open, and fixed intently upon the bolted door.

His pistol, which still rested on his knee, was pointed across the room, toward the door. Once he reminded her in a whisper that she was unarmed and that it might be as well for her to go and get her pistol. But she murmured that she was sufficiently equipped; and, in spite of himself, he shivered as he glanced down at her frail and empty hands.

It was some time between three and half-past, he judged, when a sudden movement of the girl brought him upright on his seat, quivering with excitement.

“Mr. Cleves!”

“Yes?”

“The Sorcerers!”

“Where? Outside the door?”

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, “they are after my mind again! Their fingers are groping to seize my brain and get possession of it!”

“What!” he stammered, horrified.

“Here—in the dark,” she whispered—“and I feel their fingers caressing me—searching—moving stealthily to surprise and grasp my thoughts…. I know what they are doing…. I am resisting…. I am fighting—fighting!”

She sat bolt upright with clenched hands at her breast, her face palely aglow in the dimness as though illumined by some vivid inward light—or, as he thought—from the azure blaze in her wide-open eyes.

“Is—is this what you call—what you believe to be magic?” he asked unsteadily. “Is there some hostile psychic influence threatening you?”

“Yes. I’m resisting. I’m fighting—fighting. They shall not trap me. They shall not harm you!… I know how to defend myself and you!… And you!”

Suddenly she flung her left arm around his neck and the delicate clenched hand brushed his cheek.

“They shall not have you,” she breathed. “I am fighting. I am holding my own. There are eight of them—eight Assassins! My mind is in battle with theirs—fiercely in battle…. I hold my own! I am armed and waiting!”

With a convulsive movement she drew his head closer to her shoulder. “Eight of them!” she whispered,—“trying to entrap and seize my brain. But my thoughts are free! My mind is defending you—you, here in my arms!”

After a breathless silence: “Look out!” she whispered with terrible energy; “they are after your mind at last. Fix your thoughts on me! Keep your mind clear of their net! Don’t let their ghostly fingers touch it. Look at me!” She drew him closer. “Look at me! Believe in me! I can resist. I can defend you. Does your head feel confused?”

“Yes—numb.”

“Don’t sleep! Don’t close your eyes! Keep them open and look at me!”

“I can scarcely see you——”

“You must see me!”

“My eyes are heavy,” he said drowsily. “I can’t see you, Tressa——”

“Wake! Look at me! Keep your mind clear. Oh, I beg you—I beg you! They’re after our minds and souls, I tell you! Oh, believe in me,” she beseeched him in an agonised whisper—“Can’t you believe in me for a moment,—as if you loved me!”

His heavy lids lifted and he tried to look at her.

“Can you see me? Can you?”

He muttered something in a confused voice.

“Victor!”

At the sound of his own name, he opened his eyes again and tried to straighten up, but his pistol fell to the carpet.

“Victor!” she gasped, “clear your mind in the name of God!”

“I can not—”

“I tell you hell is opening beyond that door!—outside your bolted door, there! Can’t you believe me! Can’t you hear me! Oh, what will hold you if the love of God can not!” she burst out. “I’d crucify myself for you if you’d look at me—if you’d only fight hard enough to believe in me—as though you loved me!”

His eyes unclosed but he sank back against her shoulder.

“Victor!” she cried in a terrible voice.

There was no answer.

“If the love of God could only hold you for a moment more!”—she stammered with her mouth against his ear, “just for a moment, Victor! Can’t you hear me?”

“Yes—very far away.”

“Fight for me! Try to care for me! Don’t let Sanang have me!”

He shuddered in her arms, reached out and resting heavily on her shoulder, staggered to his feet and stood swaying like a drunken man.

“No, by God,” he said thickly, “Sanang shall not touch you.”

The girl was on her feet now, holding him upright with an arm around his shoulders.

“They can’t—can’t harm us together,” she stammered. “Hark! Listen! Can you hear? Oh, can you hear?”

“Give me my pistol,” he tried to say, but his tongue seemed twisted. “No—by God—Sanang shall not touch you.”

She stooped lithely and recovered the weapon. “Hush,” she said close to his burning face. “Listen. Our minds are safe! I can hear somebody’s soul bidding its body farewell!”

White-lipped she burst out laughing, kicked the shroud out of the way, thrust the pistol into his right hand, went forward, forcing him along beside her, and drew the bolts from the door.

Suddenly he spoke distinctly:

“Is there anything outside that door on the landing?”

“Yes…. I don’t know what. Are you ready?” She laid her hand on lock and knob.

He nodded. At the same instant she jerked open the door; and a hunchback who had been picking at the lock fell headlong into the room, his pistol exploding on the carpet in a streak of fire.

It was a horrible struggle to secure the powerful misshapen creature, for he clawed and squealed and bounced about on the floor, striking blindly with ape-like arms. But at last Cleves held him down, throttled and twitching, and Tressa ripped strips from the shroud to truss up the writhing thing.

Then Cleves switched on the light.

“Why—why—you rat!” he exclaimed in hysterical relief at seeing a living man whom he recognised there at his feet. “What are you doing here?”

The hunchback’s red eyes blazed up at him from the floor.

“Who—who is he?” faltered the girl.

“He’s a German tailor named Albert Feke—one of the Chicago Bolsheviki—the most dangerous sort we harbour—one of their vile leaders who preaches that might is right and tells his disciples to go ahead and take what they want.”

He looked down at the malignant cripple.

“You’re wanted for the I.W.W. bomb murder, Albert. Did you know it?”

The hunchback licked his bloody lips. Then he kicked himself to a sitting position, squatted there like a toad and looked steadily at Tressa Norne out of small red-rimmed eyes. Blood dripped on his beard; his huge hairy fists, tied and crossed behind his back, made odd, spasmodic movements.

Cleves went to the telephone. Presently Tressa heard his voice, calm and distinct as usual:

“We’ve caught Albert Feke. He’s here at my rooms. I’d like to have you come over, Recklow…. Oh, yes, he kicked and scuffled and scratched like a cat…. What?… No, I hadn’t heard that he’d been in China…. Who?… Albert Feke? You say he was one of the Germans who escaped from Shantung four years ago?… You think he’s a Yezidee! You mean one of the Eight Assassins?”

The hunchback, staring at Tressa out of red-rimmed eyes, suddenly snarled and lurched his misshapen body at her.

“Teufelstuck!” he screamed, “ain’t I tell efferybody in Yian already it iss safer if we cut your throat! Devil-slut of Erlik—snow-leopardess!—cat of the Yezidees who has made of Sanang a fool!—it iss I who haf said always, always, that you know too damn much!… Kai!… I hear my soul bidding me farewell. Gif me my shroud!”

Cleves came back from the telephone. With the toe of his left foot he lifted the shroud and kicked it across the hunchback’s knees.

“So you were one of the huns who instigated the massacre in Yian,” he said, curiously. At that Tressa turned very white and a cry escaped her.

But the hunchback’s features were all twisted into ferocious laughter, and he beat on the carpet with the heels of his great splay feet.

“Ja! Ja!” he shrieked, “in Yian it vas a goot hunting! English and Yankee men und vimmens ve haff dropped into dose deep wells down. Py Gott in Himmel, how dey schream up out of dose deep wells in Yian!” He began to cackle and shriek in his frenzy. “Ach Gott ja! It iss not you either—you there, Keuke Mongol, who shall escape from the Sheiks-el-Djebel! It iss dot Old Man of the Mountain who shall tell your soul it iss time to say farewell! Ja! Ja! Ach Gott!—it iss my only regret that I shall not see the world when it is all afire! Ja! Ja!—all on fire like hell! But you shall see it, slut-leopard of the snows! You shall see it und you shall burn! Kai! Kai! My soul it iss bidding my body farewell. Kai! May Erlik curse you, Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure—Sorceress of the temple!—”

He spat at her and rolled over in his shroud.

The girl looking down on him closed her eyes for a moment, and Cleves saw her bloodless lips move, and bent nearer, listening. And he heard her whispering to herself:

“Preserve us all, O God, from the wrath of Satan who was stoned.”

VII

THE BRIDAL

Over the United States stretched an unseen network of secret intrigue woven tirelessly night and day by the busy enemies of civilisation—Reds, parlour-socialists, enemy-aliens, terrorists, Bolsheviki, pseudo-intellectuals, I.W.W.’s, social faddists, and amateur meddlers of every nuance—all the various varieties of the vicious, witless, and mentally unhinged—brought together through the “cohesive power of plunder” and the degeneration of cranial tissue.

All over the United States the various departmental divisions of the Secret Service were busily following up these threads of intrigue leading everywhere through the obscurity of this vast and secret maze.

To meet the constantly increasing danger of physical violence and to uncover secret plots threatening sabotage and revolution, there were capable agents in every branch of the Secret Service, both Federal and State.

But in the first months of 1919 something more terrifying than physical violence suddenly threatened civilised America,—a wild, grotesque, incredible threat of a war on human minds!

And, little by little, the United States Government became convinced that this ghastly menace was no dream of a disordered imagination, but that it was real: that among the enemies of civilisation there actually existed a few powerful but perverted minds capable of wielding psychic forces as terrific weapons: that by the sinister use of psychic knowledge controlling these mighty forces the very minds of mankind could be stealthily approached, seized, controlled and turned upon civilisation to aid in the world’s destruction.

In terrible alarm the Government turned to England for advice. But Sir William Crookes was dead.

However, in England, Sir Conan Doyle immediately took up the matter, and in America Professor Hyslop was called into consultation.

And then, when the Government was beginning to realise what this awful menace meant, and that there were actually in the United States possibly half a dozen people who already had begun to carry on a diabolical warfare by means of psychic power, for the purpose of enslaving and controlling the very minds of men,—then, in the terrible moment of discovery, a young girl landed in America after fourteen years’ absence in Asia.

And this was the amazing girl that Victor Cleves had just married, at Recklow’s suggestion, and in the line of professional duty,—and moral duty, perhaps.

It had been a brief, matter-of-fact ceremony. John Recklow, of the Secret Service, was there; also Benton and Selden of the same service.

The bride’s lips were unresponsive; cold as the touch of the groom’s unsteady hand.

She looked down at her new ring in a blank sort of way, gave her hand listlessly to Recklow and to the others in turn, whispered a timidly comprehensive “Thank you,” and walked away beside Cleves as though dazed.

There was a taxicab waiting. Tressa entered. Recklow came out and spoke to Cleves in a low voice.

“Don’t worry,” replied Cleves dryly. “That’s why I married her.”

“Where are you going now?” inquired Recklow.

“Back to my apartment.”

“Why don’t you take her away for a month?”

Cleves flushed with annoyance: “This is no occasion for a wedding trip. You understand that, Recklow.”

“I understand. But we ought to give her a breathing space. She’s had nothing but trouble. She’s worn out.”

Cleves hesitated: “I can guard her better in the apartment. Isn’t it safer to go back there, where your people are always watching the street and house day and night?”

“In a way it might be safer, perhaps. But that girl is nearly exhausted. And her value to us is unlimited. She may be the vital factor in this fight with anarchy. Her weapon is her mind. And it’s got to have a chance to rest.”

Cleves, with one hand on the cab door, looked around impatiently.

“Do you, also, conclude that the psychic factor is actually part of this damned problem of Bolshevism?”

Recklow’s cool eyes measured him: “Do you?”

“My God, Recklow, I don’t know—after what my own eyes have seen.”

“I don’t know either,” said the other calmly, “but I am taking no chances. I don’t attempt to explain certain things that have occurred. But if it be true that a misuse of psychic ability by foreigners—Asiatics—among the anarchists is responsible for some of the devilish things being done in the United States, then your wife’s unparalleled knowledge of the occult East is absolutely vital to us. And so I say, better take her away somewhere and give her mind a chance to recover from the incessant strain of these tragic years.”

The two men stood silent for a moment, then Recklow went to the window of the taxicab.

“I have been suggesting a trip into the country, Mrs. Cleves,” he said pleasantly, “—into the real country, somewhere,—a month’s quiet in the woods, perhaps. Wouldn’t it appeal to you?”

Cleves turned to catch her low-voiced answer.

“I should like it very much,” she said in that odd, hushed way of speaking, which seemed to have altered her own voice and manner since the ceremony a little while before.

Driving back to his apartment beside her, he strove to realise that this girl was his wife.

One of her gloves lay across her lap, and on it rested a slender hand. And on one finger was his ring.

But Victor Cleves could not bring himself to believe that this brand-new ring really signified anything to him,—that it had altered his own life in any way. But always his incredulous eyes returned to that slim finger resting there, unstirring, banded with a narrow circlet of virgin gold.

In the apartment they did not seem to know exactly what to do or say—what attitude to assume—what effort to make.

Tressa went into her own room, removed her hat and furs, and came slowly back into the living-room, where Cleves still stood gazing absently out of the window.

A fine rain was falling.

They seated themselves. There seemed nothing better to do.

He said, politely: “In regard to going away for a rest, you wouldn’t care for the North Woods, I fancy, unless you like winter sports. Do you?”

“I like sunlight and green leaves,” she said in that odd, still voice.

“Then, if it would please you to go South for a few weeks’ rest——”

“Would it inconvenience you?”

Her manner touched him.

“My dear Miss Norne,” he began, and checked himself, flushing painfully. The girl blushed, too; then, when he began to laugh, her lovely, bashful smile glimmered for the first time.

“I really can’t bring myself to realise that you and I are married,” he explained, still embarrassed, though smiling.

Her smile became an endeavour. “I can’t believe it either, Mr. Cleves,” she said. “I feel rather stunned.”

“Hadn’t you better call me Victor—under the circumstances?” he suggested, striving to speak lightly.

“Yes…. It will not be very easy to say it—not for some time, I think.”

“Tressa?”

“Yes.”

“Yes—what?”

“Yes—Victor.”

“That’s the idea,” he insisted with forced gaiety.

“The thing to do is to face this rather funny situation and take it amiably and with good humour. You’ll have your freedom some day, you know.”

“Yes—I—know.”

“And we’re already on very good terms. We find each other interesting, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“It even seems to me,” he ventured, “it certainly seems to me, at times, as though we are approaching a common basis of—of mutual—er—esteem.”

“Yes. I—I do esteem you, Mr. Cleves.”

“In point of fact,” he concluded, surprised, “we are friends—in a way. Wouldn’t you call it—friendship?”

“I think so, I think I’d call it that,” she admitted.

“I think so, too. And that is lucky for us. That makes this crazy situation more comfortable—less—well, perhaps less ponderous.”

The girl assented with a vague smile, but her eyes remained lowered.

“You see,” he went on, “when two people are as oddly situated as we are, they’re likely to be afraid of being in each other’s way. But they ought to get on without being unhappy as long as they are quite confident of each other’s friendly consideration. Don’t you think so, Tressa?”

Her lowered eyes rested steadily on her ring-finger. “Yes,” she said. “And I am not—unhappy, or—afraid.”

She lifted her blue gaze to his; and, somehow, he thought of her barbaric name, Keuke,—and its Yezidee significance, “heavenly—azure.”

“Are we really going away together?” she asked timidly.

“Certainly, if you wish.”

“If you, also, wish it, Mr. Cleves.”

He found himself saying with emphasis that he always wished to do what she desired. And he added, more gently:

“You are tired, Tressa—tired and lonely and unhappy.”

“Tired, but not the—others.”

“Not unhappy?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you lonely?”

“Not with you.”

The answer came so naturally, so calmly, that the slight sensation of pleasure it gave him arrived only as an agreeable afterglow.

“We’ll go South,” he said…. “I’m so glad that you don’t feel lonely with me.”

“Will it be warmer where we are going, Mr. Cleves?”

“Yes—you poor child! You need warmth and sunshine, don’t you? Was it warm in Yian, where you lived so many years?”

“It was always June in Yian,” she said under her breath.

She seemed to have fallen into a revery; he watched the sensitive face. Almost imperceptibly it changed; became altered, younger, strangely lovely.

Presently she looked up—and it seemed to him that it was not Tressa Norne at all he saw, but little Keuke—Heavenly Azure—of the Yezidee temple, as she dropped one slim knee over the other and crossed her hands above it.

“It was very beautiful in Yian,” she said, “—Yian of the thousand bridges and scented gardens so full of lilies. Even after they took me to the temple, and I thought the world was ending, God’s skies still remained soft overhead, and His weather fair and golden…. And when, in the month of the Snake, the Eight Sheiks-el-Djebel came to the temple to spread their shrouds on the rose-marble steps, then, after they had departed, chanting the Prayers for the Dead, each to his Tower of Silence, we temple girls were free for a week…. And once I went with Tchagane—a girl—and with Yulun—another girl—and we took our keutch, which is our luggage, and we went to the yaïlak, or summer pavilion on the Lake of the Ghost. Oh, wonderful,—a silvery world of pale-gilt suns and of moons so frail that the cloud-fleece at high-noon has more substance!”

Her voice died out; she sat gazing down at her spread fingers, on one of which gleamed her wedding-ring.

After a little, she went on dreamily:

“On that week, each three months, we were free…. If a young man should please us….”

“Free?” he repeated.

“To love,” she explained coolly.

“Oh.” He nodded, but his face became rather grim.

“There came to me at the yaïlak,” she went on carelessly, “one Khassar Noïane—Noïane means Prince—all in a surcoat of gold tissue with green vines embroidered, and wearing a green cap trimmed with dormouse, and green boots inlaid with stiff gold….

“He was so young … a boy. I laughed. I said: ‘Is this a Yaçaoul? An Urdu-envoy of Prince Erlik?’—mocking him as young and thoughtless girls mock—not in unfriendly manner—though I would not endure the touch of any man at all.

“And when I laughed at him, this Eighur boy flew into such a rage! Kai! I was amazed.

“‘Sou-sou! Squirrel!’ he cried angrily at me. ‘Learn the Yacaz, little chatterer! Little mocker of men, it is ten blows with a stick you require, not kisses!’

“At that I whistled my two dogs, Bars and Alaga, for I did not think what he said was funny.

“I said to him: ‘You had better go home, Khassar Noïane, for if no man has ever pleased me where I am at liberty to please myself, here on the Lake of the Ghost, then be very certain that no boy can please Keuke-Mongol here or anywhere!’

“And at that—kai! What did he say—that monkey?” She looked at her husband, her splendid eyes ablaze with wrathful laughter, and made a gesture full of angry grace:

“‘Squirrel!’ he cries—‘little malignant sorceress of Yian! May everything high about you become a sandstorm, and everything long a serpent, and everything broad a toad, and everything——’

“But I had had enough, Victor,” she added excitedly, “and I made a wild bee bite him on the lip! What do you think of such a courtship?” she cried, laughing. But Cleves’s face was a study in emotions.

And then, suddenly, the laughing mask seemed to slip from the bewitching features of Keuke Mongol; and there was Tressa Norne—Tressa Cleves—disconcerted, paling a little as the memory of her impulsive confidence in this man beside her began to dawn on her more clearly.

“I—I’m sorry——” she faltered…. “You’ll think me silly—think evil of me, perhaps——”

She looked into his troubled eyes, then suddenly she took her face into both hands and covered it, sitting very still.

“We’ll go South together,” he said in an uncertain voice…. “I hope you will try to think of me as a friend…. I’m just troubled because I am so anxious to understand you. That is all…. I’m—I’m troubled, too, because I am anxious that you should think well of me. Will you try, always?”

She nodded.

“I want to be your friend, always,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Cleves.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

It was a strange spot he chose for Tressa—strange but lovely in its own unreal and rather spectral fashion—where a pearl-tinted mist veiled the St. Johns, and made exquisite ghosts of the palmettos, and softened the sun to a silver-gilt wafer pasted on a nacre sky.

It was a still country, where giant water-oaks towered, fantastic under their misty camouflage of moss, and swarming with small birds.

Among the trees the wood-ibis stole; without on the placid glass of the stream the eared grebe floated. There was no wind, no stirring of leaves, no sound save the muffled splash of silver mullet, the breathless whirr of a humming-bird, or the hushed rustle of lizards in the woods.

For Tressa this was the blessed balm that heals,—the balm of silence. And, for the first week, she slept most of the time, or lay in her hammock watching the swarms of small birds creeping and flitting amid the moss-draped labyrinths of the live-oaks at her very door.

It had been a little club house before the war, this bungalow on the St. Johns at Orchid Hammock. Its members had been few and wealthy; but some were dead in France and Flanders, and some still remained overseas, and others continued busy in the North.

And these two young people were quite alone there, save for a negro cook and a maid, and an aged negro kennel-master who wore a scarlet waistcoat and cords too large for his shrunken body, and who pottered, pottered through the fields all day, with his whip clasped behind his bent back and the pointers ranging wide, or plodding in at heel with red tongues lolling.

Twice Cleves went a little way for quail, using Benton’s dogs; but even here in this remote spot he dared not move out of view of the little house where Tressa lay asleep.

So he picked up only a few brace of birds, and confined his sport to impaling too-familiar scorpions on the blade of his knife.

And all the while life remained unreal for him; his marriage seemed utterly unbelievable; he could not realise it, could not reconcile himself to conditions so incomprehensible.

Also, ever latent in his mind, was knowledge that made him restless—the knowledge that the young girl he had married had been in love with another man: Sanang.

And there were other thoughts—thoughts which had scarcely even taken the shape of questions.

One morning he came from his room and found Tressa on the veranda in her hammock. She had her moon-lute in her lap.

“You feel better—much better!” he said gaily, saluting her extended hand.

“Yes. Isn’t this heavenly? I begin to believe it is life to me, this pearl-tinted world, and the scent of orange bloom and the stillness of paradise itself.”

She gazed out over the ghostly river. Not a wing stirred its glassy surface.

“Is this dull for you?” she asked in a low voice.

“Not if you are contented, Tressa.”

“You’re so nice about it. Don’t you think you might venture a day’s real shooting?”

“No, I think I won’t,” he replied.

“On my account?”

“Well—yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right as long as you’re getting rested. What is that instrument?”

“My moon-lute.”

“Oh, is that what it’s called?”

She nodded, touched the strings. He watched her exquisite hands.

“Shall I?” she inquired a little shyly.

“Go ahead. I’d like to hear it!”

“I haven’t touched it in months—not since I was on the steamer.” She sat up in her hammock and began to swing there; and played and sang while swinging in the flecked shadow of the orange bloom:

“Little Isle of Cispangou,

Isle of iris, isle of cherry,

Tell your tiny maidens merry

Clouds are looming over you!

La-é-la!

La-é-la!

All your ocean’s but a ferry;

Ships are bringing death to you!

La-é-lou!

La-é-lou!

“Little Isle of Cispangou,

Half a thousand ships are sailing;

Captain Death commands each crew;

Lo! the ruddy moon is paling!

La-é-la!

La-é-la!

Clouds the dying moon are veiling,

Every cloud a shroud for you!

La-é-lou!

La-é-lou!”

“Cispangou,” she explained, “is the very, very ancient name, among the Mongols, for Japan.”

“It’s not exactly a gay song,” he said. “What’s it about?”

“Oh, it’s a very ancient song about the Mongol invasion of Japan. I know scores and scores of such songs.”

She sang some other songs. Afterward she descended from the hammock and came and sat down beside him on the veranda steps.

“I wish I could amuse you,” she said wistfully.

“Why do you think I’m bored, Tressa? I’m not at all.”

But she only sighed, lightly, and gathered her knees in both arms.

“I don’t know how young men in the Western world are entertained,” she remarked presently.

“You don’t have to entertain me,” he said, smiling.

“I should be happy to, if I knew how.”

“How are young men entertained in the Orient?”

“Oh, they like songs and stories. But I don’t think you do.”

He laughed in spite of himself.

“Do you really wish to entertain me?”

“I do,” she said seriously.

“Then please perform some of those tricks of magic which you can do so amazingly well.”

Her dawning smile faded a trifle. “I don’t—I haven’t——” She hesitated.

“You haven’t your professional paraphernalia with you,” he suggested.

“Oh—as for that——”

“Don’t you need it?”

“For some things—some kinds of things…. I could do—other things——”

He waited. She seemed disconcerted. “Don’t do anything you don’t wish to do, Tressa,” he said.

“I was only—only afraid—that if I should do some little things to amuse you, I might stir—stir up—interfere—encounter some sinister current—and betray myself—betray my whereabouts——”

“Well, for heaven’s sake don’t venture then!” he said with emphasis. “Don’t do anything to stir up any other wireless—any Yezidee——”

“I am wondering,” she reflected, “just what I dare venture to do to amuse you.”

“Don’t bother about me. I wouldn’t have you try any psychic stunt down here, and run the chance of stirring up some Asiatic devil somewhere!”

She nodded absently, occupied with her own thoughts, sitting there, chin on hand, her musing eyes intensely blue.

“I think I can amuse you,” she concluded, “without bringing any harm to myself.”

“Don’t try it, Tressa!——”

“I’ll be very careful. Now, sit quite still—closer to me, please.”

He edged closer; and became conscious of an indefinable freshness in the air that enveloped him, like the scent of something young and growing. But it was no magic odour,—merely the virginal scent of her hair and skin that even clung to her summer gown.

He heard her singing under her breath to herself:

“La-é-la!

La-é-la!”

and murmuring caressingly in an unknown tongue.

Then, suddenly in the pale sunshine, scores of little birds came hovering around them, alighting all over them. And he saw them swarming out of the mossy festoons of the water-oaks—scores and scores of tiny birds—Parula warblers, mostly—all flitting fearlessly down to alight upon his shoulders and knees, all keeping up their sweet, dreamy little twittering sound.

“This is wonderful,” he whispered.

The girl laughed, took several birds on her forefinger.

“This is nothing,” she said. “If I only dared—wait a moment!——” And, to the Parula warblers:

“Go home, little friends of God!”

The air was filled with the musical whisper of wings. She passed her right arm around her husband’s neck.

“Look at the river,” she said.

“Good God!” he blurted out. And sat dumb.

For, over the St. John’s misty surface, there was the span of a bridge—a strange, marble bridge humped up high in the centre.

And over it were passing thousands of people—he could make them out vaguely—see them passing in two never-ending streams—tinted shapes on the marble bridge.

And now, on the farther shore of the river, he was aware of a city—a vast one, with spectral pagoda shapes against the sky——

Her arm tightened around his neck.

He saw boats on the river—like the grotesque shapes that decorate ancient lacquer.

She rested her face lightly against his cheek.

In his ears was a far confusion of voices—the stir and movement of multitudes—noises on ships, boatmen’s cries, the creak of oars.

Then, far and sonorous, quavering across the water from the city, the din of a temple gong.

There were bells, too—very sweet and silvery—camel bells, bells from the Buddhist temples.

He strained his eyes, and thought, amid the pagodas, that there were minarets, also.

Suddenly, clear and ringing came the distant muezzin’s cry: “There is no other god but God!… It is noon. Mussulmans, pray!”

The girl’s arm slipped from his neck and she shuddered and pushed him from her.

There was nothing, now, on the river or beyond it but the curtain of hanging mist; no sound except the cry of a gull, sharp and querulous in the vapours overhead.

“Have—have you been amused?” she asked.

“What did you do to me!” he demanded harshly.

She smiled and drew a light breath like a sigh.

“God knows what we living do to one another,—or to ourselves,” she said. “I only tried to amuse you—after taking counsel with the birds.”

“What was that bridge I saw!”

“The Bridge of Ten Thousand Felicities.”

“And the city?”

“Yian.”

“You lived there?”

“Yes.”

He moistened his dry lips and stole another glance at this very commonplace Florida river. Sky and water were blank and still, and the ghostly trees stood tall, reflected palely in the translucent tide.

“You merely made me visualise what you were thinking about,” he concluded in a voice which still remained unsteady.

“Did you hear nothing?”

He was silent, remembering the bells and the enormous murmur of a living multitude.

“And—there were the birds, too.” She added, with an uncertain smile: “I do not mean to worry you…. And you did ask me to amuse you.”

“I don’t know how you did it,” he said harshly. “And the details—those thousands and thousands of people on the bridge!… And there was one, quite near this end of the bridge, who looked back…. A young girl who turned and laughed at us—”

“That was Yulun.”

“Who?”

“Yulun. I taught her English.”

“A temple girl?”

“Yes. From Black China.”

“How could you make me see her!” he demanded.

“Why do you ask such things? I do not know how to tell you how I do it.”

“It’s a dangerous, uncanny knowledge!” he blurted out; and suddenly checked himself, for the girl’s face went white.

“I don’t mean uncanny,” he hastened to add. “Because it seems to me that what you did by juggling with invisible currents to which, when attuned, our five senses respond, is on the same lines as the wireless telegraph and telephone.”

She said nothing, but her colour slowly returned.

“You mustn’t be so sensitive,” he added. “I’ve no doubt that it’s all quite normal—quite explicable on a perfectly scientific basis. Probably it’s no more mysterious than a man in an airplane over mid-ocean conversing with people ashore on two continents.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

For the remainder of the day and evening Tressa seemed subdued—not restless, not nervous, but so quiet that, sometimes, glancing at her askance, Cleves involuntarily was reminded of some lithe young creature of the wilds, intensely alert and still, immersed in fixed and dangerous meditation.

About five in the afternoon they took their golf sticks, went down to the river, and embarked in the canoe.

The water was glassy and still. There was not a ripple ahead, save when a sleeping gull awoke and leisurely steered out of their way.

Tressa’s arms and throat were bare and she wore no hat. She sat forward, wielding the bow paddle and singing to herself in a low voice.

“You feel all right, don’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, I am so well, physically, now! It’s really wonderful, Victor—like being a child again,” she replied happily.

“You’re not much more,” he muttered.

She heard him: “Not very much more—in years,” she said…. “Does Scripture tell us how old Our Lord was when He descended into Hell?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, startled.

After a little while Tressa tranquilly resumed her paddling and singing:

“—And eight tall towers

Guard the route

Of human life,

Where at all hours

Death looks out,

Holding a knife

Rolled in a shroud.

For every man,

Humble or proud,

Mighty or bowed,

Death has a shroud;—for every man,—

Even for Tchingniz Khan!

Behold them pass!—lancer.

Baroulass,

Temple dancer

In tissue gold,

Khiounnou,

Karlik bold,

Christian, Jew,—

Nations swarm to the great Urdu.

Yaçaoul, with your kettledrum,

Warn your Khan that his hour is come!

Shroud and knife at his spurred feet throw,

And bid him stretch his neck for the blow!—”

“You know,” remarked Cleves, “that some of those songs you sing are devilish creepy.”

Tressa looked around at him over her shoulder, saw he was smiling, smiled faintly in return.

They were off Orchid Cove now. The hotel and cottages loomed dimly in the silver mist. Voices came distinctly across the water. There were people on the golf course paralleling the river; laughter sounded from the club-house veranda.

They went ashore.

VIII

THE MAN IN WHITE

It was at the sixth hole that they passed the man ahead who was playing all alone—a courteous young fellow in white flannels, who smiled and bowed them “through” in silence.

They thanked him, drove from the tee, and left the polite and reticent young man still apparently hunting for a lost ball.

Like other things which depended upon dexterity and precision, Tressa had taken most naturally to golf. Her supple muscles helped.

At the ninth hole they looked back but did not see the young man in white flannels.

Hammock, set with pine and palmetto, and intervals of evil-looking swamp, flanked the course. Rank wire-grass, bayberry and scrub palmetto bounded the fairgreen.

On every blossoming bush hung butterflies—Palomedes swallowtails—drugged with sparkle-berry honey, their gold and black velvet wings conspicuous in the sunny mist.

“Like the ceremonial vestments of a Yezidee executioner,” murmured the girl. “The Tchortchas wear red when they robe to do a man to death.”

“I wish you could forget those things,” said Cleves.

“I am trying…. I wonder where that young man in white went.”

Cleves searched the links. “I don’t see him. Perhaps he had to go back for another ball.”

“I wonder who he was,” she mused.

“I don’t remember seeing him before,” said Cleves…. “Shall we start back?”

They walked slowly across the course toward the tenth hole.

Tressa teed up, drove low and straight. Cleves sliced, and they walked together into the scrub and towards the woods, where his ball had bounded into a bunch of palm trees.

Far in among the trees something white moved and vanished.

“Probably a white egret,” he remarked, knocking about in the scrub with his midiron.

“It was that young man in white flannels,” said Tressa in a low voice.

“What would he be doing in there?” he asked incredulously. “That’s merely a jungle, Tressa—swamp and cypress, thorn and creeper,—and no man would go into that mess if he could. There is no bottom to those swamps.”

“But I saw him in there,” she said in a troubled voice.

“But when I tell you that only a wild animal or a snake or a bird could move in that jungle! The bog is one vast black quicksand. There’s death in those depths.”

“Victor.”

“Yes?” He looked around at her. She was pale. He came up and took her hand inquiringly.

“I don’t feel—well,” she murmured. “I’m not ill, you understand——”

“What’s the matter, Tressa?”

She shook her head drearily: “I don’t know…. I wonder whether I should have tried to amuse you this morning—”

“You don’t think you’ve stirred up any of those Yezidee beasts, do you?” he asked sharply.

And as she did not answer, he asked again whether she was afraid that what she had done that morning might have had any occult consequences. And he reminded her that she had hesitated to venture anything on that account.

His voice, in spite of him, betrayed great nervousness now, and he saw apprehension in her eyes, also.

“Why should that man in white have followed us, keeping out of sight in the woods?” he went on. “Did you notice about him anything to disturb you, Tressa?”

“Not at the time. But—it’s odd—I can’t put him out of my mind. Since we passed him and left him apparently hunting a lost ball, I have not been able to put him out of my mind.”

“He seemed civil and well bred. He was perfectly good-humoured—all courtesy and smiles.”

“I think—perhaps—it was the way he smiled at us,” murmured the girl. “Everybody in the East smiles when they draw a knife….”

He placed his arm through hers. “Aren’t you a trifle morbid?” he said pleasantly.

She stooped for her golf ball, retaining a hold on his arm. He picked up his ball, too, put away her clubs and his, and they started back together in silence, evidently with no desire to make it eighteen holes.

“It’s a confounded shame,” he muttered, “just as you were becoming so rested and so delightfully well, to have anything—any unpleasant flash of memory cut in to upset you——”

“I brought it on myself. I should not have risked stirring up the sinister minds that were asleep.”

“Hang it all!—and I asked you to amuse me.”

“It was not wise in me,” she said under her breath. “It is easy to disturb the unknown currents which enmesh the globe. I ought not to have shown you Yian. I ought not to have shown you Yulun. It was my fault for doing that. I was a little lonely, and I wanted to see Yulun.”

They came down the river back to the canoe, threw in their golf bags, and embarked on the glassy stream.

Over the calm flood, stained deep with crimson, the canoe glided in the sanguine evening light. But Tressa sang no more and her head was bent sideways as though listening—always listening—to something inaudible to Cleves—something very, very far away which she seemed to hear through the still drip of the paddles.

They were not yet in sight of their landing when she spoke to him, partly turning:

“I think some of your men have arrived.”

“Where?” he asked, astonished.

“At the house.”

“Why do you think so?”

“I think so.”

They paddled a little faster. In a few minutes their dock came into view.

“It’s funny,” he said, “that you should think some of our men have arrived from the North. I don’t see anybody on the dock.”

“It’s Mr. Recklow,” she said in a low voice. “He is seated on our veranda.”

As it was impossible to see the house, let alone the veranda, Cleves made no reply. He beached the canoe; Tressa stepped out; he followed, carrying the golf bags.

A mousy light lingered in the shrubbery; bats were flying against a salmon-tinted sky as they took the path homeward.

With an impulse quite involuntary, Cleves encircled his young wife’s shoulders with his left arm.

“Girl-comrade,” he said lightly, “I’d kill any man who even looked as though he’d harm you.”

He smiled, but she had not missed the ugly undertone in his words.

They walked slowly, his arm around her shoulders. Suddenly he felt her start. They halted.

“What was it?” he whispered.

“I thought there was something white in the woods.”

“Where, dear?” he asked coolly.

“Over there beyond the lawn.”

What she called the “lawn” was only a vast sheet of pink and white phlox, now all misty with the whirring wings of sphinx-moths and Noctuidae.

The oak grove beyond was dusky. Cleves could see nothing among the trees.

After a moment they went forward. His arm had fallen away from her shoulders.

There were no lights except in the kitchen when they came in sight of the house. At first nobody was visible on the screened veranda under the orange trees. But when he opened the swing door for her a shadowy figure arose from a chair.

It was John Recklow. He came forward, bent his strong white head, and kissed Tressa’s hand.

“Is all well with you, Mrs. Cleves?”

“Yes. I am glad you came.”

Cleves clasped the elder man’s firm hand.

“I’m glad too, Recklow. You’ll stop with us, of course.”

“Do you really want me?”

“Of course,” said Cleves.

“All right. I’ve a driver and a surrey behind your house.”

So Cleves went around in the dusk and sent the outfit back to the hotel, and he himself carried in Recklow’s suitcase.

Then Tressa went away to give instructions, and the two men were left together on the dusky veranda.

“Well?” said Recklow quietly.

Cleves went to him and rested both hands on his shoulders:

“I’m playing absolutely square. She’s a perfectly fine girl and she’ll have her chance some day, God willing.”

“Her chance?” repeated Recklow.

“To marry whatever man she will some day care for.”

“I see,” said Recklow drily.

There was a silence, then:

“She’s simply a splendid specimen of womanhood,” said Cleves earnestly. “And intensely interesting to me. Why, Recklow, I haven’t known a dull moment—though I fear she has known many——”

“Why?”

“Why? Well, being married to a—a sort of temporary figurehead—shut up here all day alone with a man of no particular interest to her——”

“Don’t you interest her?”

“Well, how could I? She didn’t choose me because she liked me particularly.”

“Didn’t she?” asked Recklow, still more drily. “Well, that does make it a trifle dull for you both.”

“Not for me,” said the younger man naïvely. “She is one of the most interesting women I ever met. And good heavens!—what psychic knowledge that child possesses! She did a thing to-day—merely to amuse me——” He checked himself and looked at Recklow out of sombre eyes.

“What did she do?” inquired the older man.

“I think I’ll let her tell you—if she wishes…. And that reminds me. Why did you come down here, Recklow?”

“I want to show you something, Cleves. May we step into the house?”

They went into a little lamplit living-room. Recklow handed a newspaper clipping to Cleves: the latter read it, standing:

Had Deadliest Gas
Ready for Germans

“Lewisite” Might Have Killed Millions

Washington, April 24.—Guarded night and day and far out of human reach on a pedestal at the Interior Department Exposition here is a tiny vial. It contains a specimen of the deadliest poison ever known, “Lewisite,” the product of an American scientist.

Germany escaped this poison by signing the armistice before all the resources of the United States were turned upon her.

Ten airplanes carrying “Lewisite” would have wiped out, it is said, every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin. A single day’s output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island. A drop poured in the palm of the hand would penetrate to the blood, reach the heart and kill the victim in agony.

What was coming to Germany may be imagined by the fact that when the armistice was signed “Lewisite” was being manufactured at the rate of ten tons a day. Three thousand tons of this most terrible instrument ever conceived for killing would have been ready for business on the American front in France on November 1.

“Lewisite” is another of the big secrets of the war just leaking out. It was developed in the Bureau of Mines by Professor W. Lee Lewis, of Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., who took a commission as a captain in the army.

The poison was manufactured in a specially built plant near Cleveland, called the “Mouse Trap,” because every workman who entered the stockade went under an agreement not to leave the eleven-acre space until the war was won. The object of this, of course, was to protect the secret.

Work on the plant was started eighteen days after the Bureau of Mines had completed its experiments.

Experts are certain that no one will want to steal the sample. Everybody at the Exposition, which shows what Secretary Lane’s department is doing, keeps as far away from it as possible.

When Cleves had finished reading, he raised his eyes in silence.

“That vial was stolen a week ago,” said Recklow gravely, “by a young man who killed one guard and fatally wounded the other.”

“Was there any ante-mortem statement?”

“Yes. I’ve followed the man. I lost all trace of him at Palm Beach, but I picked it up again at Ormond. And now I’m here, Cleves.”

“You don’t mean you’ve traced him here!” exclaimed Cleves under his breath.

“He’s here on the St. Johns River, somewhere. He came up in a motor-boat, but left it east of Orchard Cove. Benton knows this country. He’s covering the motor-boat. And I—came here to see how you are getting on.”

“And to warn us,” added Cleves quietly.

“Well—yes. He’s got that stuff. It’s deadlier than the newspaper suspects. And I guess—I guess, Cleves, he’s one of those damned Yezidee witch-doctors—or sorcerers, as they call them;—one of that sect of Assassins sent over here to work havoc on feeble minds and do murder on the side.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because the dirty beast lugs his shroud around with him—a bed-sheet stolen from the New Willard in Washington.

“We were so close to him in Jacksonville that we got it, and his luggage. But we didn’t get him, the rat! God knows how he knew we were waiting for him in his room. He never came back to get his luggage.

“But he stole a bed-sheet from his hotel in St. Augustine, and that is how we picked him up again. Then, at Palm Beach, we lost the beggar, but somehow or other I felt it in my bones that he was after you—you and your wife. So I sent Benton to Ormond and I went to Palatka. Benton picked up his trail. It led toward you—toward the St. Johns. And the reptile has been here forty-eight hours, trying to nose you out, I suppose——”

Tressa came into the room. Both men looked at her.

Cleves said in a guarded voice:

“To-day, on the golf links at Orchard Cove, there was a young man in white flannels—very polite and courteous to us—but—Tressa thought she saw him slinking through the woods as though following and watching us.”

“My man, probably,” said Recklow. He turned quietly to Tressa and sketched for her the substance of what he had just told Cleves.

“The man in white flannels on the golf links,” said Cleves, “was well built and rather handsome, and not more than twenty-five. I thought he was a Jew.”

“I thought so too,” said Tressa, calmly, “until I saw him in the woods. And then—and then—suddenly it came to me that his smile was the smile of a treacherous Shaman sorcerer.

“… And the idea haunts me—the memory of those smooth-faced, smiling men in white—men who smile only when they slay—when they slay body and soul under the iris skies of Yian!—O God, merciful, long suffering,” she whispered, staring into the East, “deliver our souls from Satan who was stoned, and our bodies from the snare of the Yezidee!”

IX

THE WEST WIND

The night grew sweet with the scent of orange bloom, and all the perfumed darkness was vibrant with the feathery whirr of hawk-moths’ wings.

Tressa had taken her moon-lute to the hammock, but her fingers rested motionless on the strings.

Cleves and Recklow, shoulder to shoulder, paced the moonlit path along the hedges of oleander and hibiscus which divided garden from jungle.

And they moved cautiously on the white-shell road, not too near the shadow line. For in the cypress swamp the bloated grey death was awake and watching under the moon; and in the scrub palmetto the diamond-dotted death moved lithely.

And somewhere within the dark evil of the jungle, a man in white might be watching.

So Recklow’s pistol swung lightly in his right hand and Cleves’ weapon lay in his side-pocket, and they strolled leisurely around the drive and up and down the white-shell walks, passing Tressa at regular intervals, where she sat in her hammock with the moon-lute across her knees.

Once Cleves paused to place two pink hibiscus blossoms in her hair above her ears; and the girl smiled gravely at him in the light.

Again, pausing beside her hammock on one of their tours of the garden, Recklow said in a low voice: “If the beast would only show himself, Mrs. Cleves, we’d not miss him. Have you caught a glimpse of anything white in the woods?”

“Only the night mist rising from the branch and a white ibis stealing through it.”

Cleves came nearer: “Do you think the Yezidee is in the woods watching us, Tressa?”

“Yes, he is there,” she said calmly.

“You know it?”

“Yes.”

Recklow stared at the woods. “We can’t go in to hunt for him,” he said. “That fellow would get us with his Lewisite gas before we could discover and destroy him.”

“Suppose he waits for a west wind and squirts his gas in this direction?” whispered Cleves.

“There is no wind,” said Tressa tranquilly. “He has been waiting for it, I think. The Yezidee is very patient. And he is a Shaman sorcerer.”

“My God!” breathed Recklow. “What sort of hellish things has the Old World been dumping into America for the last fifty years? An ordinary anarchist is bad enough, but this new breed of devil—these Yezidees—this sect of Assassins——”

“Hush!” whispered Tressa.

All three listened to the great cat-owl howling from the jungle. But Tressa had heard another sound—the vague stir of leaves in the live-oaks. Was it a passing breeze? Was a night wind rising? She listened. But heard no brittle clatter from the palm-fronds.

“Victor,” she said.

“Yes, Tressa.”

“If a wind comes, we must hunt him. That will be necessary.”

“Either we hunt him and get him, or he kills us here with his gas,” said Recklow quietly.

“If the night wind comes,” said Tressa, “we must hunt the darkness for the Yezidee.” She spoke coolly.

“If he’d only show himself,” muttered Recklow, staring into the darkness.

The girl picked up her lute, caught Cleves’ worried eyes fixed on her, suddenly comprehended that his anxiety was on her account, and blushed brightly in the moonlight. And he saw her teeth catch at her underlip; saw her look up again at him, confused.

“If I dared leave you,” he said, “I’d go into the hammock and start that reptile. This won’t do—this standing pat while he comes to some deadly decision in the woods there.”

“What else is there to do?” growled Recklow.

“Watch,” said the girl. “Out-watch the Yezidee. If there is no night-wind he may tire of waiting. Then you must shoot fast—very, very fast and straight. But if the night-wind comes, then we must hunt him in darkness.”

Recklow, pistol in hand, stood straight and sturdy in the moonlight, gazing fixedly at the forest. Cleves sat down at his wife’s feet.

She touched her moon-lute tranquilly and sang in her childish voice:

“Ring, ring, Buddha bells,

Gilded gods are listening.

Swing, swing, lily bells,

In my garden glistening.

Now I hear the Shaman drum;

Now the scarlet horsemen come;

Ding-dong!

Ding-dong!

Through the chanting of the throng

Thunders now the temple gong.

Boom-boom!

Ding-dong!

“Let the gold gods listen!

In my garden; what care I

Where my lily bells hang mute!

Snowy-sweet they glisten

Where I’m singing to my lute.

In my garden; what care I

Who is dead and who shall die?

Let the gold gods save or slay

Scented lilies bloom in May.

Boom, boom, temple gong!

Ding-dong!

Ding-dong!”

“What are you singing?” whispered Cleves.

“‘The Bells of Yian.’”

“Is it old?”

“Of the 13th century. There were few Buddhist bells in Yian then. It is Lamaism that has destroyed the Mongols and that has permitted the creed of the Assassins to spread—the devil worship of Erlik.”

He looked at her, not understanding. And she, pale, slim prophetess, in the moonlight, gazed at him out of lost eyes—eyes which saw, perhaps, the bloody age of men when mankind took the devil by the throat and all Mount Alamout went up in smoking ruin; and the Eight Towers were dark as death and as silent before the blast of the silver clarions of Ghenghis Khan.

“Something is stirring in the forest,” whispered Tressa, her fingers on her lips.

“Damnation,” muttered Recklow, “it’s the wind!”

They listened. Far in the forest they heard the clatter of palm-fronds. They waited. The ominous warning grew faint, then rose again,—a long, low rattle of palm-fronds which became a steady monotone.

“We hunt,” said Recklow bluntly. “Come on!”

But the girl sprang from the hammock and caught her husband’s arm and drew Recklow back from the hibiscus hedge.

“Use me,” she said. “You could never find the Yezidee. Let me do the hunting; and then shoot very, very fast.”

“We’ve got to take her,” said Recklow. “We dare not leave her.”

“I can’t let her lead the way into those black woods,” muttered Cleves.

“The wind is blowing in my face,” insisted Recklow. “We’d better hurry.”

Tressa laid one hand on her husband’s arm.

“I can find the Yezidee, I think. You never could find him before he finds you! Victor, let me use my own knowledge! Let me find the way. Please let me lead! Please, Victor. Because, if you don’t, I’m afraid we’ll all die here in the garden where we stand.”

Cleves cast a haggard glance at Recklow, then looked at his wife.

“All right,” he said.

The girl opened the hedge gate. Both men followed with pistols lifted.

The moon silvered the forest. There was no mist, but a night-wind blew mournfully through palm and cypress, carrying with it the strange, disturbing pungency of the jungle—wild, unfamiliar perfumes,—the acrid aroma of swamp and rotting mould.

“What about snakes?” muttered Recklow, knee deep in wild phlox.

But there was a deadlier snake to find and destroy, somewhere in the blotched shadows of the forest.

The first sentinel trees were very near, now; and Tressa was running across a ghostly tangle, where once had been an orange grove, and where aged and dying citrus stumps rose stark amid the riot of encroaching jungle.

“She’s circling to get the wind at our backs,” breathed Recklow, running forward beside Cleves. “That’s our only chance to kill the dirty rat—catch him with the wind at our backs!”

Once, traversing a dry hammock where streaks of moonlight alternated with velvet-black shadow a rattlesnake sprang his goblin alarm.

They could not locate the reptile. They shrank together and moved warily, chilled with fear.

Once, too, clear in the moonlight, the Grey Death reared up from bloated folds and stood swaying rhythmically in a horrible shadow dance before them. And Cleves threw one arm around his wife and crept past, giving death a wide berth there in the checkered moonlight.

Now, underfoot, the dry hammock lay everywhere and the night wind blew on their backs.

Then Tressa turned and halted the two men with a gesture. And went to her husband where he stood in the palm forest, and laid her hands on his shoulders, looking him very wistfully in the eyes.

Under her searching gaze he seemed oddly to comprehend her appeal.

“You are going to use—to use your knowledge,” he said mechanically. “You are going to find the man in white.”

“Yes.”

“You are going to find him in a way we don’t understand,” he continued, dully.

“Yes…. You will not hold me in—in horror—will you?”

Recklow came up, making no sound on the spongy palm litter underfoot.

“Can you find this devil?” he whispered.

“I—think so.”

“Does your super-instinct—finer sense—knowledge—whatever it is—give you any inkling as to his whereabouts, Mrs. Cleves?”

“I think he is here in this hammock. Only——” she turned again, with swift impulse, to her husband, “—only if you—if you do not hold me in—in horror—because of what I do——”

There was a silence; then:

“What are you about to do?” he asked hoarsely.

“Slay this man.”

“We’ll do that,” said Cleves with a shudder. “Only show him to us and we’ll shoot the dirty reptile to slivers——”

“Suppose we hit the jar of gas,” said Recklow.

After a silence, Tressa said:

“I have got to give him back to Satan. There is no other way. I understood that from the first. He can not die by your pistols, though you shoot very fast and straight. No!”

After another silence, Recklow said:

“You had better find him before the wind changes. We hunt downwind or—we die here together.”

She looked at her husband.

“Show him to us in your own way,” he said, “and deal with him as he must be dealt with.”

A gleam passed across her pale face and she tried to smile at her husband.

Then, turning down the hammock to the east, she walked noiselessly forward over the fibrous litter, the men on either side of her, their pistols poised.

They had halted on the edge of an open glade, ringed with young pines in fullest plumage.

Tressa was standing very straight and still in a strange, supple, agonised attitude, her left forearm across her eyes, her right hand clenched, her slender body slightly twisted to the left.

The men gazed pallidly at her with tense, set faces, knowing that the girl was in terrible mental conflict against another mind—a powerful, sinister mind which was seeking to grasp her thoughts and control them.

Minute after minute sped: the girl never moved, locked in her psychic duel with this other brutal mind,—beating back its terrible thought-waves which were attacking her, fighting for mental supremacy, struggling in silence with an unseen adversary whose mental dominance meant death.

Suddenly her cry rang out sharply in the moonlight, and then, all at once, a man in white stood there in the lustre of the moon—a young, graceful man dressed in white flannels and carrying on his right arm what seemed to be a long white cloak.

Instantly the girl was transformed from a living statue into a lithe, supple, lightly moving thing that passed swiftly to the west of the glade, keeping the young man in white facing the wind, which was blowing and tossing the plumy young pines.

“So it is you, young man, with whom I have been wrestling here under the moon of the only God!” she said in a strange little voice, all vibrant and metallic with menacing laughter.

“It is I, Keuke Mongol,” replied the young man in white, tranquilly; yet his words came as though he were tired and out of breath, and the hand he raised to touch his small black moustache trembled as if from physical exhaustion.

“Yarghouz!” she exclaimed. “Why did I not know you there on the golf links, Assassin of the Seventh Tower? And why do you come here with your shroud over your arm and hidden under it, in your right hand, a flask full of death?”

He said, smiling:

“I come because you are to die, Heavenly-Azure Eyes. I bring you your shroud.” And he moved warily westward around the open circle of young pines.

Instantly the girl flung her right arm straight upward.

“Yarghouz!”

“I hear thee, Heavenly Azure.”

“Another step to the west and I shatter thy flask of gas.”

“With what?” he demanded; but stood discreetly motionless.

“With what I grasp in an empty palm. Thou knowest, Yarghouz.”

“I have heard,” he said with smiling uncertainty, “but to hear of force that can be hurled out of an empty palm is one thing, and to see it and feel it is another. I think you lie, Heavenly Azure.”

“So thought Gutchlug. And died of a yellow snake.”

The young man seemed to reflect. Then he looked up at her in his frank, smiling way.

“Wilt thou listen, Heavenly Eyes?”

“I hear thee, Yarghouz.”

“Listen then, Keuke Mongol. Take life from us as we offer it. Life is sweet. Erlik, like a spider, waits in darkness for lost souls that flutter to his net.”

“You think my soul was lost there in the temple, Yarghouz?”

“Unutterably lost, little temple girl of Yian. Therefore, live. Take life as a gift!”

“Whose gift?”

“Sanang’s.”

“It is written,” she said gravely, “that we belong to God and we return to him. Now then, Yezidee, do your duty as I do mine! Kai!”

At the sound of the formula always uttered by the sect of Assassins when about to do murder, the young man started and shrank back. The west wind blew fresh in his startled eyes.

“Sorceress,” he said less firmly, “you leave your Yiort to come all alone into this forest and seek me. Why then have you come, if not to submit!—if not to take the gift of life—if not to turn away from your seducers who are hunting me, and who have corrupted you?”

“Yarghouz, I come to slay you,” she said quietly.

Suddenly the man snarled at her, flung the shroud at her feet, and crept deliberately to the left.

“Be careful!” she cried sharply; “look what you’re about! Stand still, son of a dog! May your mother bewail your death!”

Yarghouz edged toward the west, clasping in his right hand the flask of gas.

“Sorceress,” he laughed, “a witch of Thibet prophesied with a drum that the three purities, the nine perfections, and the nine times nine felicities shall be lodged in him who slays the treacherous temple girl, Keuke Mongol! There is more magic in this bottle which I grasp than in thy mind and body. Heavenly Eyes! I pray God to be merciful to this soul I send to Erlik!”

All the time he was advancing, edging cautiously around the circle of little plumy pines; and already the wind struck his left cheek.

“Yarghouz Khan!” cried the girl in her clear voice. “Take up your shroud and repeat the fatha!”

“Backward!” laughed the young man, “—as do you, Keuke Mongol!”

“Heretic!” she retorted. “Do you also refuse to name the ten Imaums in your prayers? Dog! Toad! Spittle of Erlik! May all your cattle die and all your horses take the glanders and all your dogs the mange!”

“Silence, sorceress!” he shouted, pale with fear and fury. “Witch! Mud worm! May Erlik seize you! May your skin be covered with putrefying sores! May all the demons torment you! May God remember you in hell!”

“Yarghouz! Stand still!”

“Is your word then the Rampart of Gog and Magog, you young witch of Yian, that a Khan of the Seventh Tower need fear you!” he sneered, stealing stealthily westward through the feathery pines.

“I give thee thy last chance, Yarghouz Khan,” she said in an excited voice that trembled. “Recite thy prayer naming the ten, because with their holy names upon thy lips thou mayest escape damnation. For I am here to slay thee, Yarghouz! Take up thy shroud and pray!”

The young man felt the west wind at the back of his left ear. Then he began to laugh.

“Heavenly Eyes,” he said, “thy end is come—together with the two police who hide in the pines yonder behind thee! Behold the bottle magic of Yarghouz Khan!”

And he lifted the glass flask in the moonlight as though he were about to smash it at her feet.

Then a terrible thing occurred. The entire flask glowed red hot in his grasp; and the man screamed and strove convulsively to fling the bottle; but it stuck to his hand, melted into the smoking flesh.

Then he screamed again—or tried to—but his entire lower jaw came off and he stood there with the awful orifice gaping in the moonlight—stood, reeled a moment—and then—and then—his whole face slid off, leaving nothing but a bony mask out of which burst shriek after shriek——

Keuke Mongol had fainted dead away. Cleves took her into his arms.

Recklow, trembling and deathly white, went over to the thing that lay among the young pines and forced himself to bend over it.

The glass flask still stuck to one charred hand, but it was no longer hot. And Recklow rolled the unspeakable thing into the white shroud and pushed it into the swamp.

An evil ooze took it, slowly sucked it under and engulfed it. A few stinking bubbles broke.

Recklow went back to the little glade among the pines.

A young girl lay sobbing convulsively in her husband’s arms, asking God’s pardon and his for the justice she had done upon an enemy of all mankind.

X

AT THE RITZ

When Victor Cleves telegraphed from St. Augustine to Washington that he and his wife were on their way North, and that they desired to see John Recklow as soon as they arrived, John Recklow remarked that he knew of no place as private as a public one. And he came on to New York and established himself at the Ritz, rather regally.

To dine with him that evening were two volunteer agents of the United States Secret Service, ZB-303, otherwise James Benton, a fashionable architect; and XLY-371, Alexander Selden, sometime junior partner in the house of Milwyn, Selden & Co.

A single lamp was burning in the white-and-rose rococo room. Under its veiled glow these three men sat conversing in guarded voices over coffee and cigars, awaiting the advent of 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves, recently Professor of Ornithology at Cambridge; and his young wife, Tressa, known officially as V-69.

“Did the trip South do Mrs. Cleves any good?” inquired Benton.

“Some,” said Recklow. “When Selden and I saw her she was getting better.”

“I suppose that affair of Yarghouz upset her pretty thoroughly.”

“Yes.” Recklow tossed his cigar into the fireplace and produced a pipe. “Victor Cleves upsets her more,” he remarked.

“Why?” asked Benton, astonished.

“She’s beginning to fall in love with him and doesn’t know what’s the matter with her,” replied the elder man drily. “Selden noticed it, too.”

Benton looked immensely surprised. “I supposed,” he said, “that she and Cleves considered the marriage to be merely a temporary necessity. I didn’t imagine that they cared for each other.”

“I don’t suppose they did at first,” said Selden. “But I think she’s interested in Victor. And I don’t see how he can help falling in love with her, because she’s a very beautiful thing to gaze on, and a most engaging one to talk to.”

“She’s about the prettiest girl I ever saw,” admitted Benton, “and about the cleverest. All the same——”

“All the same—what?”

“Well, Mrs. Cleves has her drawbacks, you know—as a real wife, I mean.”

Recklow said: “There is a fixed idea in Cleves’s head that Tressa Norne married him as a last resort, which is true. But he’ll never believe she’s changed her ideas in regard to him unless she herself enlightens him. And the girl is too shy to do that. Besides, she believes the same thing of him. There’s a mess for you!”

Recklow filled his pipe carefully.

“In addition,” he went on, “Mrs. Cleves has another and very terrible fixed idea in her charming head, and that is that she really did lose her soul among those damned Yezidees. She believes that Cleves, though kind to her, considers her merely as something uncanny—something to endure until this Yezidee campaign is ended and she is safe from assassination.”

Benton said: “After all, and in spite of all her loveliness, I myself should not feel entirely comfortable with such a girl for a real wife.”

“Why?” demanded Recklow.

“Well—good heavens, John!—those uncanny things she does—her rather terrifying psychic knowledge and ability—make a man more or less uneasy.” He laughed without mirth.

“For example,” he added, “I never was nervous in any physical crisis; but since I’ve met Tressa Norne—to be frank—I’m not any too comfortable in my mind when I remember Gutchlug and Sanang and Albert Feke and that dirty reptile Yarghouz—and when I recollect how that girl dealt with them! Good God, John, I’m not a coward, I hope, but that sort of thing worries me!”

Recklow lighted his pipe. He said: “In the Government’s campaign against these eight foreigners who have begun a psychic campaign against the unsuspicious people of this decent Republic, with the purpose of surprising, overpowering and enslaving the minds of mankind by a misuse of psychic power, we agents of the Secret Service are slowly gaining the upper hand.

“In this battle of minds we are gaining a victory. But we are winning solely and alone through the psychic ability and the loyalty and courage of a young girl who, through tragedy of circumstances, spent the years of her girlhood in the infamous Yezidee temple at Yian, and who learned from the devil-worshipers themselves not only this so-called magic of the Mongol sorcerers, but also how to meet its psychic menace and defeat it.”

He looked at Benton, shrugged:

“If you and if Cleves really feel the slightest repugnance toward the strange psychic ability of this brave and generous girl, I for one do not share it.”

Benton reddened: “It isn’t exactly repugnance——” But Recklow interrupted sharply:

“Do you realise, Benton, what she’s already accomplished for us in our secret battle against Bolshevism?—against the very powers of hell itself, led by these Mongol sorcerers?

“Of the Eight Assassins—or Sheiks-el-Djebel—who came to the United States to wield the dreadful weapon of psychic power against the minds of our people, and to pervert them and destroy all civilisation,—of the Eight Chief Assassins of the Eight Towers, this girl already has discovered and identified four,—Sanang, Gutchlug, Albert Feke, and Yarghouz; and she has destroyed the last three.”

He sat calmly enjoying his pipe for a few moments’ silence, then:

“Five of this sect of Assassins remain—five sly, murderous, psychic adepts who call themselves sorcerers. Except for Prince Sanang, I do not know who these other four men may be. I haven’t a notion. Nor have you. Nor do I believe that with all the resources of the United States Secret Service we ever should be able to discover these four Sheiks-el-Djebel except for the astounding spiritual courage and psychic experience of the young wife of Victor Cleves.”

After a moment Selden nodded. “That is quite true,” he said simply. “We are utterly helpless against unknown psychic forces. And I, for one, feel no repugnance toward what Mrs. Cleves has done for all mankind and in the name of God.”

“She’s a brave girl,” muttered Benton, “but it’s terrible to possess such knowledge and horrible to use it.”

Recklow said: “The horror of it nearly killed the girl herself. Have you any idea how she must suffer by being forced to employ such terrific knowledge? by being driven to use it to combat this menace of hell? Can you imagine what this charming, sensitive, tragic young creature must feel when, with powers natural to her but unfamiliar to us, she destroys with her own mind and will-power demons in human shape who are about to destroy her?

“Talk of nerve! Talk of abnegation! Talk of perfect loyalty and courage! There is more than these in Tressa Cleves. There is that dauntless bravery which faces worse than physical death. Because the child still believes that her soul is damned for whatever happened to her in the Yezidee temple; and that when these Yezidees succeed in killing her body, Erlik will surely seize the soul that leaves it.”

There was a knocking at the door. Benton got up and opened it. Victor Cleves came in with his young wife.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Tressa Cleves seemed to have grown since she had been away. Taller, a trifle paler, yet without even the subtlest hint of that charming maturity which the young and happily married woman invariably wears, her virginal allure now verged vaguely on the delicate edges of austerity.

Cleves, sunburnt and vigorous, looked older, somehow—far less boyish—and he seemed more silent than when, nearly seven months before, he had been assigned to the case of Tressa Norne.

Recklow, Selden and Benton greeted them warmly; to each in turn Tressa gave her narrow, sun-tanned hand. Recklow led her to a seat. A servant came with iced fruit juice and little cakes and cigarettes.

Conversation, aimless and general, fulfilling formalities, gradually ceased.

A full June moon stared through the open windows—searching for the traditional bride, perhaps—and its light silvered a pale and lovely figure that might possibly have passed for the pretty ghost of a bride, but not for any girl who had married because she was loved.

Recklow broke the momentary silence, bluntly:

“Have you anything to report, Cleves?”

The young fellow hesitated:

“My wife has, I believe.”

The others turned to her. She seemed, for a moment, to shrink back in her chair, and, as her eyes involuntarily sought her husband, there was in them a vague and troubled appeal.

Cleves said in a sombre voice: “I need scarcely remind you how deeply distasteful this entire and accursed business is to my wife. But she is going to see it through, whatever the cost. And we four men understand something of what it has cost her—is costing her—in violence to her every instinct.”

“We honour her the more,” said Recklow quietly.

“We couldn’t honour her too much,” said Cleves.

A slight colour came into Tressa’s face; she bent her head, but Recklow saw her eyes steal sideways toward her husband.

Still bowed a little in her chair, she seemed to reflect for a while concerning what she had to say; then, looking up at John Recklow:

“I saw Sanang.”

“Good heavens! Where?” he demanded.

“I—don’t—know.”

Cleves, flushing with embarrassment, explained: “She saw him clairvoyantly. She was lying in the hammock. You remember I had a trained nurse for her after—what happened in Orchid Lodge.”

Tressa looked miserably at Recklow,—dumbly, for a moment. Then her lips unclosed.

“I saw Prince Sanang,” she repeated. “He was near the sea. There were rocks—cottages on cliffs—and very brilliant flowers in tiny, pocket-like gardens. Sanang was walking on the cliffs with another man. There were forests, inland.”

“Do you know who the other man was?” asked Recklow gently.

“Yes. He was one of the Eight. I recognised him. When I was a girl he came once to the Temple of Yian, all alone, and spread his shroud on the pink marble steps. And we temple girls mocked him and threw stemless roses on the shroud, telling him they were human heads with which to grease his toug.”

She became excited and sat up straighter in her chair, and her strange little laughter rippled like a rill among pebbles.

“I threw a big rose without a stem upon the shroud,” she exclaimed, “and I cried out, ‘Niaz!’ which means, ‘Courage,’ and I mocked him, saying, ‘Djamouk Khagan,’ when he was only a Khan, of course; and I laughed and rubbed one finger against the other, crying out, ‘Toug ia glachakho!’ which means, ‘The toug is anointed.’ And which was very impudent of me, because Djamouk was a Sheik-el-Djebel and Khan of the Fifth Tower, and entitled to a toug and to eight men and a Toughtchi. And it is a grave offence to mock at the anointing of a toug.”

She paused, breathless, her splendid azure eyes sparkling with the memory of that girlish mischief. Then their brilliancy faded; she bit her lip and stole an uncertain glance at her husband.

And after a pause she explained in a very subdued voice that the “Iagla michi,” or action of “greasing the toug,” or standard, was done when a severed human head taken in battle was cast at the foot of the lance shaft stuck upright in the ground.

“You see,” she said sadly, “we temple girls, being already damned, cared little what we said, even to such a terrible man as Djamouk Khan. And even had the ghost of old Tchinguiz Khagan himself come to the temple and looked at us out of his tawny eyes, I think we might have done something saucy.”

Tressa’s pretty face was spiritless, now; she leaned back in her armchair and they heard an unconscious sigh escape her.

“Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” she murmured to herself, “what crazy things we did on the rose-marble steps, Yulun and I, so long—so long ago.”

Cleves got up and went over to stand beside his wife’s chair.

“What happened is this,” he said heavily. “During my wife’s convalescence after that Yarghouz affair, she found herself, at a certain moment, clairvoyant. And she thought she saw—she did see—Sanang, and an Asiatic she recognised as being one of the chiefs of the Assassins sect, whose name is Djamouk.

“But, except that it was somewhere near the sea—some summer colony probably on the Atlantic coast—she does not know where this pair of jailbirds roost. And this is what we have come here to report.”

Benton, politely appalled, tried not to look incredulous. But it was evident that Selden and Recklow had no doubts.

“Of course,” said Recklow calmly, “the thing to do is for you and your wife to try to find this place she saw.”

“Make a tour of all such ocean-side resorts until Mrs. Cleves recognises the place she saw,” added Selden. And to Recklow he added: “I believe there are several perfectly genuine cases on record where clairvoyants have aided the police.”

“Several authentic cases,” said Recklow quietly. But Benton’s face was a study.

Tressa looked up at her husband. He dropped his hand reassuringly on her shoulder and nodded with a slight smile.

“There—there was something else,” she said with considerable hesitation—“something not quite in line of duty—perhaps——”

“It seems to concern Benton,” added Cleves, smiling.

“What is it?” inquired Selden, smiling also as Benton’s features froze to a mask.

“Let me tell you, first,” interrupted Cleves, “that my wife’s psychic ability and skill can make me visualise and actually see scenes and people which, God knows, I never before laid eyes upon, but which she has both seen and known.

“And one morning, in Florida, I asked her to do something strange—something of that sort to amuse me—and we were sitting on the steps of our cottage—you know, the old club-house at Orchid!—and the first I knew I saw, in the mist on the St. Johns, a Chinese bridge humped up over that very commonplace stream, and thousands of people passing over it,—and a city beyond—the town of Yian, Tressa tells me,—and I heard the Buddhist bells and the big temple gong and the noises in streets and on the water——”

He was becoming considerably excited at the memory, and his lean face reddened and he gesticulated as he spoke:

“It was astounding, Recklow! There was that bridge, and all those people moving over it; and the city beyond, and the boats and shipping, and the vast murmur of multitudes…. And then, there on the bridge crossing toward Yian, I saw a young girl, who turned and looked back at my wife and laughed.”

“And I told him it was Yulun,” said Tressa, simply.

“A playfellow of my wife’s in Yian,” explained Cleves. “But if she were really Chinese she didn’t look like what are my own notions of a Chinese girl.”

“Yulun came from Black China,” said Mrs. Cleves. “I taught her English. I loved her dearly. I was her most intimate friend in Yian.”

There ensued a silence, broken presently by Benton; and:

“Where do I appear in this?” he asked stiffly.

Tressa’s smile was odd; she looked at Selden and said:

“When I was convalescent I was lonely…. I made the effort one evening. And I found Yulun. And again she was on a bridge. But she was dressed as I am. And the bridge was one of those great, horrible steel monsters that sprawl across the East River. And I was astonished, and I said, ‘Yulun, darling, are you really here in America and in New York, or has a demon tangled the threads of thought to mock my mind in illness?’

“Then Yulun looked very sorrowfully at me and wrote in Arabic characters, in the air, the name of our enemy who once came to the Lake of Ghosts for love of her—Yaddin-ed-Din, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox…. And who went his way again amid our scornful laughter…. He is a demon. And he was tangling my thread of thought!”

Tressa became exceedingly animated once more. She rose and came swiftly to where Benton was standing.

“And what do you think!” she said eagerly. “I said to her, ‘Yulun! Yulun! Will you make the effort and come to me if I make the effort? Will you come to me, beloved?’ And Yulun made ‘Yes,’ with her lips.”

After a silence: “But—where do I come in?” inquired Benton, stiffly fearful of such matters.

“You came in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You came in the door while Yulun and I were talking.”

“When?”

“When you came to see me after I was better, and you and Mr. Selden were going North with Mr. Recklow. Don’t you remember; I was lying in the hammock in the moonlight, and Victor told you I was asleep?”

“Yes, of course——”

“I was not asleep. I had made the effort and I was with Yulun…. I did not know you were standing beside my hammock in the moonlight until Yulun told me…. And that is what I am to tell you; Yulun saw you…. And Yulun has written it in Chinese, in Eighur characters and in Arabic,—tracing them with her forefinger in the air—that Yulun, loveliest in Yian, flame-slender and very white, has seen her heart, like a pink pearl afire, burning between your august hands.”

“My hands!” exclaimed Benton, very red.

There fell an odd silence. Nobody laughed.

Tressa came nearer to Benton, wistful, uncertain, shy.

“Would you care to see Yulun?” she asked.

“Well—no,” he said, startled. “I—I shall not deny that such things worry me a lot, Mrs. Cleves. I’m a—an Episcopalian.”

The tension released, Selden was the first to laugh.

“There’s no use blinking the truth,” he said; “we’re up against something absolutely new. Of course, it isn’t magic. It can, of course, be explained by natural laws about which we happen to know nothing at present.”

Recklow nodded. “What do we know about the human mind? It has been proven that no thought can originate within that mass of convoluted physical matter called the brain. It has been proven that something outside the brain originates thought and uses the brain as a vehicle to incubate it. What do we know about thought?”

Selden, much interested, sat cogitating and looking at Mrs. Cleves. But Benton, still flushed and evidently nervous, sat staring out of the window at the full moon, and twisting an unlighted cigarette to shreds.

“Why didn’t you tell Benton when the thing occurred down there at Orchid Lodge, the night we called to say good-bye?” asked Selden, curiously.

Tressa gave him a distressed smile: “I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me. And I was afraid that you and Mr. Recklow, even if you believed it, might not like—like me any the better for—for being clairvoyant.”

Recklow came over, bent his handsome grey head, and kissed her hand.

“I never liked any woman better, nor respected any woman as deeply,” he said. And, lifting his head, he saw tears sparkling in her eyes.

“My dear,” he said in a low voice, and his firm hand closed over the slim fingers he had kissed.

Benton got up from his chair, went to the window, turned shortly and came over to Tressa.

“You’re braver than I ever could learn to be,” he said shortly. “I ask your pardon if I seem sceptical. I’m more worried than incredulous. There’s something born in me—part of me—that shrinks from anything that upsets my orthodox belief in the future life. But—if you wish me to see this—this girl—Yulun—it’s quite all right.”

She said softly, and with gentle wonder: “I know of nothing that could upset your belief, Mr. Benton. There is only one God. And if Mahomet be His prophet, or if he be Lord Buddha, or if your Lord Christ be vice-regent to the Most High, I do not know. All I know is that God is God, and that He prevailed over Satan who was stoned. And that in Paradise is eternal life, and in hell demons hide where dwells Erlik, Prince of Darkness.”

Benton, silent and secretly aghast at her theology, said nothing. Recklow pleasantly but seriously denied that Satan and his demons were actual and concrete creatures.

Again Cleves’s hand fell lightly on his wife’s shoulder, in a careless gesture of reassurance. And, to Benton, “No soul is ever lost,” he said, calmly. “I don’t exactly know how that agrees with your orthodoxy, Benton. But it is surely so.”

“I don’t know myself,” said Benton. “I hope it’s so.” He looked at Tressa a moment and then blurted out: “Anyway, if ever there was a soul in God’s keeping and guarded by His angels, it’s your wife’s!”

“That also is true,” said Cleves quietly.

“By the way,” remarked Recklow carelessly, “I’ve arranged to have you stop at the Ritz while you’re in town, Mrs. Cleves. You and your husband are to occupy the apartment adjoining this. Where is your luggage, Victor?”

“In our apartment.”

“That won’t do,” said Recklow decisively. “Telephone for it.”

Cleves went to the telephone, but Recklow took the instrument out of his hand and called the number. The voice of one of his own agents answered.

Cleves was standing alone by the open window when Recklow hung up the telephone. Tressa, on the sofa, had been whispering with Benton. Selden, looking over the evening paper by the rose-shaded lamp, glanced up as Recklow went over to Cleves.

“Victor,” he said, “your man has been murdered. His throat was cut; his head was severed completely. Your luggage has been ransacked and so has your apartment. Three of my men are in possession, and the local police seem to comprehend the necessity of keeping the matter out of the newspapers. What was in your baggage?”

“Nothing,” said Cleves, ghastly pale.

“All right. We’ll have your effects packed up again and brought over here. Are you going to tell your wife?”

Cleves, still deathly pale, cast a swift glance toward her. She sat on the sofa in animated conversation with Benton. She laughed once, and Benton smiled at what she was saying.

“Is there any need to tell her, Recklow?”

“Not for a while, anyway.”

“All right. I suppose the Yezidees are responsible for this horrible business.”

“Certainly. Your poor servant’s head lay at the foot of a curtain-pole which had been placed upright between two chairs. On the pole were tied three tufts of hair from the dead man’s head. The pole had been rubbed with blood.”

“That’s Mongol custom,” muttered Cleves. “They made a toug and ‘greased’ it!—the murderous devils!”

“They did more. They left at the foot of your bed and at the foot of your wife’s bed two white sheets. And a knife lay in the centre of each sheet. That, of course, is the symbol of the Sect of Assassins.”

Cleves nodded. His body, as he leaned there on the window sill in the moonlight, trembled. But his face had grown dark with rage.

“If I could—could only get my hands on one of them,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Be careful. Don’t wear a face like that. Your wife is looking at us,” murmured Recklow.

With an effort Cleves raised his head and smiled across the room at his wife.

“Our luggage will be sent over shortly,” he said. “If you’re tired, we’ll say good-night.”

So she rose and the three men came to make their adieux and pay their compliments and devoirs. Then, with a smile that seemed almost happy, she went into her own apartment on her husband’s arm.

Cleves and his wife had connecting bedrooms and a sitting-room between. Here they paused for a moment before the always formal ceremony of leave-taking at night. There were roses on the centre table. Tressa dropped one hand on the table and bent over the flowers.

“They seem so friendly,” she said under her breath.

He thought she meant that she found even in flowers a refuge from the solitude of a loveless marriage.

He said quietly: “I think you will find the world very friendly, if you wish.” But she shook her head, looking at the roses.

Finally he said good-night and she extended her hand, and he took it formally.

Then their hands fell away. Tressa turned and went toward her bedroom. At the door she stopped, turned slowly.

“What shall I do about Yulun?” she asked.

“What is there to do? Yulun is in China.”

“Yes, her body is.”

“Do you mean that the rest of her—whatever it is—could come here?”

“Why, of course.”

“So that Benton could see her?”

“Yes.”

“Could he see her just as she is? Her face and figure—clothes and everything?”

“Yes.”

“Would she seem real or like a ghost—spirit—whatever you choose to call such things?”

Tressa smiled. “She’d be exactly as real as you or I, Victor. She’d seem like anybody else.”

“That’s astonishing,” he muttered. “Could Benton hear her speak?”

“Certainly.”

“Talk to her?”

Tressa laughed: “Of course. If Yulun should make the effort she could leave her body as easily as she undresses herself. It is no more difficult to divest one’s self of one’s body than it is to put off one garment and put on another…. And, somehow, I think Yulun will do it to-night.”

“Come here?”

“It would be like her.” Tressa laughed. “Isn’t it odd that she should have become so enamoured of Mr. Benton—just seeing him there in the moonlight that night at Orchid Lodge?”

For a moment the smile curved her lips, then the shadow fell again across her eyes, veiling them in that strange and lovely way which Cleves knew so well; and he looked into her impenetrable eyes in troubled silence.

“Victor,” she said in a low voice, “were you afraid to tell me that your man had been murdered?”

After a moment: “You always know everything,” he said unsteadily. “When did you learn it?”

“Just before Mr. Recklow told you.”

“How did you learn it, Tressa?”

“I looked into our apartment.”

“When?”

“While you were telephoning.”

“You mean you looked into our rooms from here?”

“Yes, clairvoyantly.”

“What did you see?”

“The Iaglamichi!” she said with a shudder. “Kai! The Toug of Djamouk is anointed at last!”

“Is that the beast of a Mongol who did this murder?”

“Djamouk and Prince Sanang planned it,” she said, trembling a little. “But that butchery was Yaddin’s work, I think. Kai! The work of Yaddin-ed-Din, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox!”

They stood confronting each other, the length of the sitting-room between them. And after the silence had lasted a full minute Cleves reddened and said: “I am going to sleep on the couch at the foot of your bed, Tressa.”

His young wife reddened too.

He said: “This affair has thoroughly scared me. I can’t let you sleep out of my sight.”

“I am quite safe. And you would have an uncomfortable night,” she murmured.

“Do you mind if I sleep on the couch, Tressa?”

“No.”

“Will you call me when you are ready?”

“Yes.”

She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

When he was ready he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his dressing-gown, belted it over his pyjamas, and walked into the sitting-room. His wife called him presently, and he went in. Her night-lamp was burning and she extended her hand to extinguish it.

“Could you sleep if it burns?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes.”

“Then let it burn. This business has got on my nerves,” he muttered.

They looked at each other in an expressionless way. Both really understood how useless was this symbol of protection—this man the girl called husband;—how utterly useless his physical strength, and the pistol sagging in the pocket of his dressing-gown. Both understood that the only real protection to be looked for must come from her—from the gifted and guardian mind of this young girl who lay there looking at him from the pillows.

“Good-night,” he said, flushing; “I’ll do my best. But only one of God’s envoys, like you, knows how to do battle with things that come out of hell.”

After a moment’s silence she said in a colourless voice: “I wish you’d lie down on the bed.”

“Had you rather I did?”

“Yes.”

So he went slowly to the bed, placed his pistol under the pillow, drew his dressing-gown around him, and lay down.

After he had lain unstirring for half an hour: “Try to sleep, Tressa,” he said, without turning his head.

“Can’t you seem to sleep, Victor?” she asked. And he heard her turn her head.

“No.”

“Shall I help you?”

“Do you mean use hypnosis—the power of suggestion—on me?”

“No. I can help you to sleep very gently. I can make you very drowsy…. You are drowsy now…. You are very close to the edge of sleep…. Sleep, dear…. Sleep, easily, naturally, confidently as a tired boy…. You are sleeping, … deeply … sweetly … my dear … my dear, dear husband.”

XI

YULUN THE BELOVED

Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.

The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.

But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her delicate little hands, caressing Tressa’s, were too eagerly real to doubt.

Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what they were saying to each other could he understand.

Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.

“Tokhta!” she exclaimed. “Yulun! My lord is awake!”

Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and, “Darling,” she said in English, “I think your dear lord remembers that he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across the mist.”

Tressa said, laughing at her husband: “This is Yulun, flame-slender, very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk’s shroud, where he had spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.

“And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white…. Tell my dear lord, Yulun!”

Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at the corners.

“Kai!” she cried softly, clapping her palms. “I took his roses and tore them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.

“I said: ‘Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!’”

Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.

“You are Yulun. You are alive and real——” He looked at Tressa: “She is real, isn’t she?” And, to Yulun: “Where do you come from?”

The girl replied seriously: “I come from Yian.” She turned to Tressa with a dazzling smile: “Thou knowest, my heart’s gold, how it was I came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple for his understanding…. And now—because my visit is ending—I think thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart’s gold!”

At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to. But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush of drowsiness.

He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his pillow.

The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.

“Thy dear lord,” murmured Yulun. “Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?”

“No,” said Tressa, under her breath.

“Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?”

“He says no soul is ever really harmed,” whispered Tressa.

“Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?” exclaimed Yulun incredulously.

“My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can have power over God to slay the human soul.”

“Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee temple.”

Tressa looked down at Cleves:

“My dear lord says no,” she said under her breath.

“And—Sanang?”

Tressa paled: “His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord’s feet. Let God judge between us, Yulun.”

“There was a day,” whispered Yulun, “when Prince Sanang went to the Lake of the Ghosts.”

Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:

“Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the cherry-trees covered the young world. The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet carp…. Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night long…. Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight…. May God remember him in hell!”

“May God remember him.”

“Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!”

“May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.”

Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her face gently across her husband’s feet, touching them with her lips.

Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and looking silently down at the sleeping man.

“No soul shall die,” she said. “Niaz!”

“Is it written?” asked Yulun, surprised.

“My lord has said it.”

“Allahou Ekber,” murmured Yulun; “thy lord is only a man.”

Tressa said: “Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of them with his own lips.”

“And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?”

“Erlik!” repeated Tressa insolently. “Who is Erlik but the servant of Satan who was stoned?”

Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said in a voice shaking with rage:

“Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of the Eight Towers. With God’s help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk, Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I slay, even to the last one among them!”

“Sanang, also?”

“I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”

Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: “For it is written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I shall execute my duty!”

Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking back tears—or laughter.

“Heart of a rose,” she said in a suppressed voice, “my time is nearly ended…. So…. I go to the chamber of this strange young man who holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands…. I think it it written that I shall love him.”

Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun’s ear: “His name, beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall we make the effort together?”

“Yes,” said Yulun. “Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord who sleeps so deeply…. And now stretch out…. And fold both hands…. And now put off thy body like a silken garment…. So! And leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.”

They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night lamp.

Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of his wife lying on the bed beside him.

But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the confused rosy radiance of the lamp.

Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into his bedroom.

When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his pillow.

Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself, and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.

When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.

Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.

The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his knees, looking at her all the while.

“You are Yulun,” he said very calmly.

The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.

“Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in the South?”

“Yes.”

“Twice,” she said, laughing, “you stopped to peer at the blossoms in the moonlight.”

“I thought I saw a face among them.”

“You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl’s face looking at you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,” said Yulun.

“I know now,” he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.

“Yes, it was I,” she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his feet.

So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.

“Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!” she cried softly.

Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.

A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.

“There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And I am very young,” said Yulun wistfully.

Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa standing by the empty fireplace.

“What you see and hear need not disturb you,” she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. “There is no god but God; and His prophet has been called by many names.” And to Yulun: “Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?”

Yulun’s expression altered and she turned to Benton: “Say it to me!” she pleaded.

As in a dream he heard his own words: “Nothing can ever really harm the soul.”

Yulun’s hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.

She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: “I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.”

Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.

In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.

Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.

“Tokhta! Look out!” she said distinctly.

Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces, slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.

“Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!” cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.

“One shroud for two souls!” she said breathlessly, “—and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!”

The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.

“Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!” cried Tressa in a clear voice, “you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!”

Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.

“Tougtchi!” she said coldly, “you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!”

“Don’t stir!” came Tressa’s warning voice, as Benton snatched his pistol from the pillow. “Don’t fire! Those men have no real substance! For God’s sake don’t fire! I tell you they have no bodies!”

Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.

Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.

Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.

Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl’s eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.

The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: “Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din…. I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!”

“Sorceress!” shrieked Yaddin, “what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!”

“Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!”

The man’s swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.

“Let me go back to my body!” he panted. “What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——”

“Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!” cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. “There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.”

“Cancer,” said Tressa calmly. “Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.”

“My Tougtchi!” shouted Djamouk, “I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!”

He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.

“My soul be ransom for yours!” cried Yulun to Tressa. “Bar that man’s path to life!”

Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through space, bar above bar.

And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.

Through the deafening tumult Yulun’s voice cut like a sword:

“Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!… Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!”

And, after a dreadful silence: “The train speeding north carries two dead men! God is God. Niaz!”

The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.

Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.

Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.

With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face. And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy’s.

Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.

“Seek me, dear lord,” she whispered. “Or send me a sign and I shall come.”

And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: “Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.”

Then she lifted her head.

But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.

So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.

XII

HIS EXCELLENCY

His Excellency President Tintinto, Chief Executive of one of the newer and cruder republics, visiting New York incognito with his Secretaries of War and of the Navy, had sent for John Recklow. And now the reception was in full operation.

Recklow was explaining. “In the beginning,” he said, “the Bolsheviks’ aim was to destroy everything and everybody except themselves, and then to reorganise for their own benefit what was left of a wrecked world. That was their programme——”

“Quite a programme,” interrupted the Secretary of War, with something that almost resembled a giggle. But his prominent eyes continued to stare at Recklow untouched by the mirth which stretched his large, silly mouth.

The face of the Secretary of the Navy resembled the countenance of a benevolent manatee. The visage of the President was a study in tinted chalks.

Recklow said: “To combat that sort of Bolshevism was a business that we of the United States Secret Service understood—or supposed we understood.

“Then, suddenly, out of unknown Mongolia and into the civilised world stepped eight men.”

“Yezidees,” said the President mechanically. “Your Government has sent me a very full report.”

“Yezidees of the Sect of the Assassins,” continued Recklow; “—the most ancient sect in the world surviving from ancient times—the Sorcerers of Asia. And, as it was in ancient times, so it is now: the Yezidees are devil worshipers; their god is Satan; his prophet is Erlik, Prince of Darkness; his regent on earth is the old man of Mount Alamout; and to this ancient and sinister title a Yezidee sorcerer called Prince Sanang, or Sanang Noïane, has succeeded.

“His murderous deputies were the Eight Khans of the Eight Towers. Four of these assassins are dead—Gutchlug, Yarghouz, Djamouk the Fox, and Yaddin-ed-Din. One is in prison charged with murder,—Albert Feke.

“Four of the sorcerers remain alive: Tiyang Khan, Togrul, Arrak, Sou-Sou, called The Squirrel, and the Old Man of the Mountain himself, Saï-Sanang, Prince of the Yezidees.”

Recklow paused; the pop-eyes of the War Secretary were upon him; the benevolent manatee gazed mildly at him; the countenance of the President seemed more like a Rocky Mountain goat than ever—chiselled out of a block of tinted chalk.

Recklow said: “To the menace of Bolshevism, which endangers this Republic and yours, has been added a more terrible threat—the threat of powerful and evil minds made formidable by psychic knowledge.

“For these Yezidee Sorcerers are determined to conquer, seize, and subdue the minds of mankind. They are here for that frightful purpose. Powerfully, terrifically equipped to surprise and capture the unarmed minds of our people, enslave their very thoughts and use them to their own purposes, these Sorcerers of the Yezidees assumed control of the Bolsheviki, who were merely envious and ferocious bandits, but whose crippled minds are now utterly enslaved by these Assassins from Asia.

“And this is what the United States Secret Service has to combat. And its weapons are not warrants, not pistols. For in this awful battle between decency and evil, it is mind against mind in an occult death grapple. And our only weapon against these minds made powerful by psychic knowledge and made terrible by an esoteric ability akin to what is called black magic,—our only weapon is the mind of a young girl.”

“I understand,” said the President, “that she became an adept in occult practices while imprisoned in the Yezidee Temple of Erlik at Yian.”

Recklow looked into the President’s face, which had grown very pale.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “God alone knows what this child learned in the Yezidee Temple. All I know is that with this knowledge she has met the Yezidees in a battle of minds, has halted them, confounded them, fought them with their own occult knowledge, and has slain four of them.”

The intense silence was broken by the frivolous titter of the Secretary of War:

“Of course I don’t believe any of this supernatural stuff,” he said with the split grin which did not modify his protruding stare. “This girl is merely a clever detective, that is the gist of the matter. And I don’t believe anything else.”

“Perhaps, sir, you will believe this, then,” said John Recklow quietly. “I cut it from the Times this morning.” And he handed the clipping to the Secretary of War.

NEW PLOT IN EAST

Moslem and Hindu Conspirators
Have Formed Secret
Organisation

Have World Revolution in View

Think to Rouse Asia, America, and Africa
to Outbreaks by Their
Propaganda.

Copyright, 1919,
by The New York Times Company.

Special Cable to
The New York Times.

July 1.—A significant event has recently taken place. Under the name of the Oriental League has recently been established a central organisation uniting all the various secret societies of Moslem and Hindu nationalists. The aim of the new association is to prepare for joint revolutionary action in Asia, America, and Africa.

The effects of this vast conspiracy may already be traced in recent events in Egypt, India, and Afghanistan. For the first time, through the creation of this league, the racial and religious differences which have divided Eastern conspirators have been overcome. The Ottoman League, founded by Mahmud Muktar Pasha, Munir Pasha, and Ahmed Rechid Bey, has adhered to the new organisation. So have the extreme Egyptian nationalists and the Hindu revolutionary group, “Pro India,” emissaries of which were recently sentenced for bringing bombs into Switzerland during the war at the instigation of the German General Staff.

At a “Constituent Assembly” of the league, which took place in Yian, there were present, besides Young Turks, Egyptians and Hindus, delegates representing Persia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Morocco, and Mongolia.

The league is of Mongolian origin. Its leading spirit is a certain Prince Sanang, of whom little is known.

Associated with this mischievous and rather mysterious Mongolian personage are three better known criminals, now fugitives from justice—Talaat, Enver, and Djemal. It is to Enver Pasha’s talent for intrigue that the union between Moslems and Hindus, the most striking and dangerous feature of the movement, is chiefly due.

Considerable funds are at the disposal of the league. These are partly supplied from Germany. Besides enjoying the support of the Germans, the league is also in close touch with Lenine, who very soon after his advent to power organised an Oriental Department in Moscow.

The alliance between the league and the Russian Bolsheviki was brought about by the notorious German Socialist agent, “Parvus,” who is now in Switzerland. Many weeks ago he conferred with the Soviet rulers in Moscow, whence he went to Afghanistan, hoping to reorganise the new Amir’s army and establish lines of communication for propaganda in India.

Evidence exists that the recent insurrection in Egypt, the sudden attack of the Afghans, and the rising in India, remarkable for co-operation between Moslems and Hindus, were connected with the activities of the league.

The Secretary looked up after he finished the reading.

“I don’t see anything about Black Magic in this?” he remarked flippantly.

Recklow’s features became very grave.

“I think,” he said, “that everybody—myself included—and, with all respect, even yourself, sir,—and your honourable colleague,—and perhaps even his Excellency your President,—should be on perpetual guard over their minds, and the thoughts that range there, lest, surreptitiously, stealthily, some taint of Yezidee infection lodge there and take root—and spread—perhaps—throughout your new Republic.”

The Secretary of War grinned. “They say I’m something of a socialist already,” he chuckled. “Do you think your magic Yezidees are responsible?”

The President, troubled and pallid, gazed steadily at Recklow.

“Mine is a single-track mind,” he remarked as though to himself.

Recklow said nothing. It is one kind of mind, after all. However, single-track roads are now obsolete.

“A single-track mind,” repeated the President. “And—I should not like anything to happen to the switch. It would mean ditching—or a rusty siding at best…. Please do all that is possible to get those four Yezidees, Mr. Recklow.”

Recklow said calmly: “Our only hope is in this young girl, Tressa Norne, who is now Mrs. Cleves.”

“My conscience!” piped the Secretary of the Navy. “What would happen to us if these Yezidees should murder her?”

“God knows,” replied John Recklow, unsmiling.

“Why not put her aboard our new dreadnought?” suggested the Secretary, “and keep her cruising until you United States Secret Service fellows get the rest of these infernal Yezidees and clap ’em into jail?”

“We can do nothing without her,” said Recklow sombrely.

There was a painful silence. The President joined his finger tips and stared palely into space.

“May I not say,” he suggested, “that I think it a vital necessity that these Yezidees be caught and destroyed before they do any damage to the minds of myself and my cabinet?”

“God grant it, sir,” said Recklow grimly.

“Mine,” murmured the President, “is a single-track mind. I should be very much annoyed if anybody tampered with the rails—very much annoyed indeed, Mr. Recklow.”

“They mustn’t murder that girl,” said the Secretary of the Navy. “Do you need any Marines, Mr. Recklow? Why not ask your Government for a few?”

Recklow rose: “Mr. President,” he said, “I shall not deny that my Government is very deeply disturbed by this situation. In the beginning, these eight Assassins, and Sanang, came here for the purpose of attacking, overpowering, and enslaving the minds of the people of the United States and of the South American Republics.

“But now, after four of their infamous colleagues have been destroyed, the ferocious survivors, thoroughly alarmed, have turned their every energy toward accomplishing the death of Mrs. Cleves! Why, sir, scarcely a day passes but that some attempt upon her life is made by these Yezidees.

“Scarcely a day passes that this young girl is not suddenly summoned to defend her mind as well as her body against the occult attacks of these Mongol Sorcerers. Yes, sir, Sorcerers!” repeated Recklow, his calm voice deep with controlled passion, “—whatever your honourable Secretary of War may think about it!”

His cold, grey eyes measured the President as he stood there.

“Mr. President, I am at my wits’ end to protect her from assassination! Her husband is always with her—Victor Cleves, sir, of our Secret Service. But wherever he takes her these devils follow and send their emissaries to watch her, to follow, to attempt her mental destruction or her physical death.

“There is no end to their stealthy cunning, to their devilish devices, to their hellish ingenuity!

“And all we can do is to guard her person from the approach of strangers, and stand ready, physically, to aid her.

“She is our only barrier—your only defence—between civilisation and horrors worse than Bolshevism.

“I believe, Mr. President, that civilisation in North and South America—in your own Republic as well as in ours—depends, literally, upon the safety of Tressa Cleves. For, if the Yezidees kill her, then I do not see what is to save civilisation from utter disintegration and total destruction.”

There was a silence. Recklow was not certain that the President had been listening.

His Excellency sat with finger tips joined, gazing pallidly into space; and Recklow heard him murmuring under his breath and all to himself, as though to fix the deathless thought forever in his brain:

“May I not say that mine is a single-track mind? May I not say it? May I not,—may I not,—not, not, not——”

XIII

SA-N’SA

June sunshine poured through the window of his bedroom in the Ritz; and Cleves had just finished dressing when he heard his wife’s voice in the adjoining sitting-room.

He had not supposed that Tressa was awake. He hastened to tie his tie and pull on a smoking jacket, listening all the while to his wife’s modulated but gay young voice.

Then he opened the sitting-room door and went in. And found his wife entirely alone.

She looked up at him, her lips still parted as though checked in what she had been saying, the smile still visible in her blue eyes.

“Who on earth are you talking to?” he asked, his bewildered glance sweeping the sunny room again.

She did not reply; her smile faded as a spot of sunlight wanes, veiled by a cloud—yet a glimmer of it remained in her gaze as he came over to her.

“I thought they’d brought our breakfast,” he said, “—hearing your voice…. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, Victor.”

He seated himself, and his perplexed scrutiny included her frail morning robe of China silk, her lovely bare arms, and her splendid hair twisted up and pegged down with a jade dagger. Around her bare throat and shoulders, too, was a magnificent necklace of imperial jade which he had never before seen; and on one slim, white finger a superb jade ring.

“By Jove!” he said, “you’re very exotic this morning, Tressa. I never before saw that negligee effect.”

The girl laughed, glanced at her ring, lifted a frail silken fold and examined the amazing embroidery.

“I wore it at the Lake of the Ghosts,” she said.

The name of that place always chilled him. He had begun to hate it, perhaps because of all that he did not know about it—about his wife’s strange girlhood—about Yian and the devil’s Temple there—and about Sanang.

He said coldly but politely that the robe was unusual and the jade very wonderful.

The alteration in his voice and expression did not escape her. It meant merely masculine jealousy, but Tressa never dreamed he cared in that way.

Breakfast was brought, served; and presently these two young people were busy with their melons, coffee, and toast in the sunny room high above the softened racket of traffic echoing through avenue and street below.

“Recklow telephoned me this morning,” he remarked.

She looked up, her face serious.

“Recklow says that Yezidee mischief is taking visible shape. The Socialist Party is going to be split into bits and a new party, impudently and publicly announcing itself as the Communist Party of America, is being organised. Did you ever hear of anything as shameless—as outrageous—in this Republic?”

She said very quietly: “Sanang has taken prisoner the minds of these wretched people. He and his remaining Yezidees are giving battle to the unarmed minds of our American people.”

“Gutchlug is dead,” said Cleves, “—and Yarghouz and Djamouk, and Yaddin.”

“But Tiyang Khan is alive, and Togrul, and that cunning demon Arrak Sou-Sou, called The Squirrel,” she said. She bent her head, considering the jade ring on her finger. “—And Prince Sanang,” she added in a low voice.

“Why didn’t you let me shoot him when I had the chance?” said Cleves harshly.

So abrupt was his question, so rough his sudden manner, that the girl looked up in dismayed surprise. Then a deep colour stained her face.

“Once,” she said, “Prince Sanang held my heart prisoner—as Erlik held my soul…. I told you that.”

“Is that the reason you gave the fellow a chance?”

“Yes.”

“Oh…. And possibly you gave Sanang a chance because he still holds your—affections!”

She said, crimson with the pain of the accusation: “I tore my heart out of his keeping…. I told you that…. And, believing—trying to believe what you say to me, I have tried to tear my soul out of the claws of Erlik…. Why are you angry?”

“I don’t know…. I’m not angry…. The whole horrible situation is breaking my nerve, I guess…. With whom were you talking before I came in?”

After a silence the girl’s smile glimmered.

“I’m afraid you won’t like it if I tell you.”

“Why not?”

“You—such things perplex and worry you…. I am afraid you won’t like me any the better if I tell you who it was I had been talking with.”

His intent gaze never left her. “I want you to tell me,” he repeated.

“I—I was talking with Sa-n’sa,” she faltered.

“With whom?”

“With Sa-n’sa…. We called her Sansa.”

“Who the dickens is Sansa?”

“We were three comrades at the Temple,” she said timidly, “—Yulun, Sansa, and myself. We loved each other. We always went to the Lake of the Ghosts together—for protection——”

“Go on!”

“Sansa was a girl of the Aroulads, born at Buldak—as was Temujin. The night she was born three moon-rainbows made circles around her Yaïlak. The Baroulass horsemen saw this and prayed loudly in their saddles. Then they galloped to Yian and came crawling on their bellies to Sanang Noïane with the news of the miracle. And Sanang came with a thousand riders in leather armour. And, ‘What is this child’s name?’ he shouted, riding into the Yaïlak with his black banners flapping around him like devil’s wings.

“A poor Manggoud came out of the tent of skins, carrying the new born infant, and touched his head to Sanang’s stirrup. ‘This babe is called Tchagane,’ he said, trembling all over. ‘No!’ cries Sanang, ‘she is called Sansa. Give her to me and may Erlik seize you!’

“And he took the baby on his saddle in front of him and struck his spurs deep; and so came Sansa to Yian under a roaring rustle of black silk banners…. It is so written in the Book of Iron…. Allahou Ekber.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

Cleves had leaned his elbow on the table, his forehead rested in his palm.

Perhaps he was striving in a bewildered way to reconcile such occult and amazing things with the year 1920—with the commonplace and noisy city of New York—with this pretty, modern, sunlit sitting-room in the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue—with this girl in her morning negligee opposite, her coffee and melon fragrant at her elbow, her wonderful blue eyes resting on him.

“Sansa,” he repeated slowly, as though striving to grasp even a single word from the confusion of names and phrases that were sounding still in his ears like the vibration of distant and unfamiliar seas.

“Is this the girl you were talking with just now? In—in this room?” he added, striving to understand.

“Yes.”

“She wasn’t here, of course.”

“Her body was not.”

“Oh!”

Tressa said in her sweet, humorous way: “You must try to accustom yourself to such things, Victor. You know that Yulun talks to me…. I wanted to talk to Sansa. The longing awakened me. So—I made the effort.”

“And she came—I mean the part of her which is not her body.”

“Yes, she came. We talked very happily while I was bathing and dressing. Then we came in here. She is such a darling!”

“Where is she?”

“In Yian, feeding her silk-worms and making a garden. You see, Sansa is quite wealthy now, because when the Japanese came she filled a bullock cart with great lumps of spongy gold from the Temple and filled another cart with Yu-stone, and took the Hezar of Baroulass horsemen on guard at the Lake of the Ghosts. And with this Keutch, riding a Soubz horse, and dressed like an Urieng lancer, my pretty little comrade Tchagane, who is called Sansa, marched north preceded by two kettle-drums and a toug with two tails——”

Tressa’s clear laughter checked her; she clapped her hands, breathless with mirth at the picture she evoked.

“Kai!” she laughed; “what adorable impudence has Sansa! Neither Tchortcha nor Khiounnou dared ask her who were her seven ancestors! No! And when her caravan came to the lovely Yliang river, my darling Sansa rode out and grasped the lance from her Tougtchi and drove the point deep into the fertile soil, crying in a clear voice: ‘A place for Tchagane and her people! Make room for the toug!’

“Then her Manggoud, who carried the spare steel tip for her lance, got out of his saddle and, gathering a handful of mulberry leaves, rubbed the shaft of the lance till it was all pale green.

“‘Toug iaglachakho!’ cries my adorable Sansa! ‘Build me here my Urdu! [imperial encampment] —my Mocalla! [platform used as a Moslem pulpit] And upon it pitch my tent of skins!”

Again Tressa’s laughter checked her, and she strove to control it with the jade ring pressed to her lips.

“Oh, Victor,” she added in a stifled voice, looking at him out of eyes full of mischief, “you don’t realise how funny it was—Sansa and her toug and her Urdu—Oh, Allah!—the bones of Tchinguiz must have rattled in his tomb!”

Her infectious laughter evoked a responsive but perplexed smile from Cleves; but it was the smile of a bewildered man who has comprehended very little of an involved jest; and he looked around at the modern room as though to find his bearings.

Suddenly Tressa leaned forward swiftly and laid one hand on his.

“You don’t think all this is very funny. You don’t like it,” she said in soft concern.

“It isn’t that, Tressa. But this is New York City in the year 1920. And I can’t—I absolutely can not get into touch—hook up, mentally, with such things—with the unreal Oriental life that is so familiar to you.”

She nodded sympathetically: “I know. You feel like a Mergued Pagan from Lake Baïkal when all the lamps are lighted in the Mosque;—like a camel driver with his jade and gold when he enters Yarkand at sunrise.”

“Probably I feel like that,” said Cleves, laughing outright. “I take your word, dear, anyway.”

But he took more; he picked up her soft hand where it still rested on his, pressed it, and instantly reddened because he had done it. And Tressa’s bright flush responded so quickly that neither of them understood, and both misunderstood.

The girl rose with heightened colour, not knowing why she stood up or what she meant to do. And Cleves, misinterpreting her emotion as a silent rebuke to the invasion of that convention tacitly accepted between them, stood up, too, and began to speak carelessly of commonplace things.

She made the effort to reply, scarcely knowing what she was saying, so violently had his caress disturbed her heart,—and she was still speaking when their telephone rang.

Cleves went; listened, then, still listening, summoned Tressa to his side with a gesture.

“It’s Selden,” he said in a low voice. “He says he has the Yezidee Arrak Sou-Sou under observation, and that he needs you desperately. Will you help us?”

“I’ll go, of course,” she replied, turning quite pale.

Cleves nodded, still listening. After a while: “All right. We’ll be there. Good-bye,” he said sharply; and hung up.

Then he turned and looked at his wife.

“I wish to God,” he muttered, “that this business were ended. I—I can’t bear to have you go.”

“I am not afraid…. Where is it?”

“I never heard of the place before. We’re to meet Selden at ‘Fool’s Acre.’”

“Where is it, Victor?”

“I don’t know. Selden says there are no roads,—not even a spotted trail. It’s a wilderness left practically blank by the Geological Survey. Only the contours are marked, and Selden tells me that the altitudes are erroneous and the unnamed lakes and water courses are all wrong. He says it is his absolute conviction that the Geological Survey never penetrated this wilderness at all, but merely skirted it and guessed at what lay inside, because the map he has from Washington is utterly misleading, and the entire region is left blank except for a few vague blue lines and spots indicating water, and a few heights marked ‘1800.’”

He turned and began to pace the sitting-room, frowning, perplexed, undecided.

“Selden tells me,” he said, “that the Yezidee, Arrak Sou-Sou, is in there and very busy doing something or other. He says that he can do nothing without you, and will explain why when we meet him.”

“Yes, Victor.”

Cleves turned on his heel and came over to where his wife stood beside the sunny window.

“I hate to ask you to go. I know that was the understanding. But this incessant danger—your constant peril——”

“That does not count when I think of my country’s peril,” she said in a quiet voice. “When are we to start? And what shall I pack in my trunk?”

“Dear child,” he said with a brusque laugh, “it’s a wilderness and we carry what we need on our backs. Selden meets us at a place called Glenwild, on the edge of this wilderness, and we follow him in on our two legs.”

He glanced across at the mantel clock.

“If you’ll dress,” he said nervously, “we’ll go to some shop that outfits sportsmen for the North. Because, if we can, we ought to leave on the one o’clock train.”

She smiled; came up to him. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Because I also am nervous and tired; and I mean to make an end of every Yezidee remaining in America.”

“Sanang, too?”

They both flushed deeply.

She said in a steady voice: “Between God and Erlik there is a black gulf where a million million stars hang, lighting a million million other worlds.

“Prince Sanang’s star glimmers there. It is a sun, called Yrimid. And it lights the planet, Yu-tsung. Let him reign there between God and Erlik.”

“You will slay this man?”

“God forbid!” she said, shuddering. “But I shall send him to his own star. Let my soul be ransom for his! And may Allah judge between us—between this man and me.”

Then, in the still, sunny room, the girl turned to face the East. And her husband saw her lips move as though speaking, but heard no sound.

•      •      •      •      •      •

“What on earth are you saying there, all to yourself?” he demanded at last.

She turned her head and looked at him across her left shoulder.

“I asked Sansa to help me…. And she says she will.”

Cleves nodded in a dazed way. Then he opened a window and leaned there in the sunshine, looking down into Madison Avenue. And the roar of traffic seemed to soothe his nerves.

But “Good heavens!” he thought; “do such things really go on in New York in 1920! Is the entire world becoming a little crazy? Am I really in my right mind when I believe that the girl I married is talking, without wireless, to another girl in China!”

He leaned there heavily, gazing down into the street with sombre eyes.

“What a ghastly thing these Yezidees are trying to do to the world—these Assassins of men’s minds’!” he thought, turning away toward the door of his bedroom.

As he crossed the threshold he stumbled, and looking down saw that he had tripped over a white sheet lying there. For a moment he thought it was a sheet from his own bed, and he started to pick it up. Then he saw the naked blade of a knife at his feet.

With an uncontrollable shudder he stepped out of the shroud and stood staring at the knife as though it were a snake. It had a curved blade and a bone hilt coarsely inlaid with Arabic characters in brass.

The shroud was a threadbare affair—perhaps a bed-sheet from some cheap lodging house. But its significance was so repulsive that he hesitated to touch it.

However, he was ashamed to have it discovered in his room. He picked up the brutal-looking knife and kicked the shroud out into the corridor, where they could guess if they liked how such a rag got into the Ritz-Carlton.

Then he searched his bedroom, and, of course, discovered nobody hiding. But chills crawled on his spine while he was about it, and he shivered still as he stood in the centre of the room examining the knife and testing edge and point.

Then, close to his ear, a low voice whispered: “Be careful, my lord; the Yezidee knife is poisoned. But it is written that a poisoned heart is more dangerous still.”

He had turned like a flash; and he saw, between him and the sitting-room door, a very young girl with slightly slanting eyes, and rose and ivory features as perfect as though moulded out of tinted bisque.

She wore a loose blue linen robe, belted in, short at the elbows and skirt, showing two creamy-skinned arms and two bare feet in straw sandals. In one hand she had a spray of purple mulberries, and she looked coolly at Cleves and ate a berry or two.

“Give me the knife,” she said calmly.

He handed it to her; she wiped it with a mulberry leaf and slipped it through her girdle.

“I am Sansa,” she said with a friendly glance at him, busy with her fruit.

Cleves strove to speak naturally, but his voice trembled.

“Is it you—I mean your real self—your own body?”

“It’s my real self. Yes. But my body is asleep in my mulberry grove.”

“In—in China?”

“Yes,” she said calmly, detaching another mulberry and eating it. A few fresh leaves fell on the centre table.

Sansa chose another berry. “You know,” she said, “that I came to Tressa this morning,—to my little Heart of Fire I came when she called me. And I was quite sleepy, too. But I heard her, though there was a night wind in the mulberry trees, and the river made a silvery roaring noise in the dark…. And now I must go. But I shall come again very soon.”

She smiled shyly and held out her lovely little hand, “—As Tressa tells me is your custom in America,” she said, “I offer you a good-bye.”

He took her hand and found it a warm, smooth thing of life and pulse.

“Why,” he stammered in his astonishment, “you are real! You are not a ghost!”

“Yes, I am real,” she answered, surprised, “but I’m not in my body,—if you mean that.” Then she laughed and withdrew her hand, and, going, made him a friendly gesture.

“Cherish, my lord, my darling Heart of Fire. Serpents twist and twine. So do rose vines. May their petals make your path of velvet and sweet scented. May everything that is round be a pomegranate for you two to share; may everything that sways be lilies bordering a path wide enough for two. In the name of the Most Merciful God, may the only cry you hear be the first sweet wail of your first-born. And when the tenth shall be born, may you and Heart of Fire bewail your fate because both of you desire more children!”

She was laughing when she disappeared. Cleves thought she was still there, so radiant the sunshine, so sweet the scent in the room.

But the golden shadow by the door was empty of her. If she had slipped through the doorway he had not noticed her departure. Yet she was no longer there. And, when he understood, he turned back into the empty room, quivering all over. Suddenly a terrible need of Tressa assailed him—an imperative necessity to speak to her—hear her voice.

“Tressa!” he called, and rested his hand on the centre table, feeling weak and shaken to the knees. Then he looked down and saw the mulberry leaves lying scattered there, tender and green and still dewy with the dew of China.

“Oh, my God!” he whispered, “such things are! It isn’t my mind that has gone wrong. There are such things!”

The conviction swept him like a tide till his senses swam. As though peering through a mist of gold he saw his wife enter and come to him;—felt her arm about him, sustaining him where he swayed slightly with one hand on the table among the mulberry leaves.

“Ah,” murmured Tressa, noticing the green leaves, “she oughtn’t to have done that. That was thoughtless of her, to show herself to you.”

Cleves looked at her in a dazed way. “The body is nothing,” he muttered. “The rest only is real. That is the truth, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I seem to be beginning to believe it…. Sansa said things—I shall try to tell you—some day—dear…. I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

“Are you?” she murmured.

“And so glad to feel your touch…. I found a shroud on my threshold. And a knife.”

“The Yezidees are becoming mountebanks…. Where is the knife?” she asked scornfully.

“Sansa said it was poisoned. She took it. She—she said that a poisoned heart is more dangerous still.”

Then Tressa threw up her head and called softly into space: “Sansa! Little Silk-Moth! What are these mischievous things you have told to my lord?”

She stood silent, listening. And, in the answer which he could not hear, there seemed to be something that set his young wife’s cheeks aflame.

“Sansa! Little devil!” she cried, exasperated. “May Erlik send his imps to pinch you if you have said to my lord these shameful things. It was impudent! It was mischievous! You cover me with shame and confusion, and I am humbled in the dust of my lord’s feet!”

Cleves looked at her, but she could not sustain his gaze.

“Did Sansa say to you what she said to me?” he demanded unsteadily.

“Yes…. I ask your pardon…. And I had already told her you did not—did not—were not—in—love—with me…. I ask your pardon.”

“Ask more…. Ask your heart whether it would care to hear that I am in love. And with whom. Ask your heart if it could ever care to listen to what my heart could say to it.”

“Y-yes—I’ll ask—my heart,” she faltered…. “I think I had better finish dressing——” She lifted her eyes, gave him a breathless smile as he caught her hand and kissed it.

“It—it would be very wonderful,” she stammered, “—if our necessity should be-become our choice.”

But that speech seemed to scare her and she fled, leaving her husband standing tense and upright in the middle of the room.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Their train on the New York Central Railroad left the Grand Central Terminal at one in the afternoon.

Cleves had made his arrangements by wire. They travelled lightly, carrying, except for the clothing they wore, only camping equipment for two.

It was raining in the Hudson valley; they rushed through the outlying towns and Po’keepsie in a summer downpour.

At Hudson the rain slackened. A golden mist enveloped Albany, through which the beautiful tower and façades along the river loomed, masking the huge and clumsy Capitol and the spires beyond.

At Schenectady, rifts overhead revealed glimpses of blue. At Amsterdam, where they descended from the train, the flag on the arsenal across the Mohawk flickered brilliantly in the sunny wind.

By telegraphic arrangement, behind the station waited a touring car driven by a trooper of State Constabulary, who, with his comrade, saluted smartly as Cleves and Tressa came up.

There was a brief, low-voiced conversation. Their camping outfit was stowed aboard, Tressa sprang into the tonneau followed by Cleves, and the car started swiftly up the inclined roadway, turned to the right across the railroad bridge, across the trolley tracks, and straight on up the steep hill paved with blocks of granite.

On the level road which traversed the ridge at last they speeded up, whizzed past the great hedged farm where racing horses are bred, rushing through the afternoon sunshine through the old-time Scotch settlements which once were outposts of the old New York frontier.

Nine miles out the macadam road ended. They veered to the left over a dirt road, through two hamlets; then turned to the right.

The landscape became rougher. To their left lay the long, low Maxon hills; behind them the Mayfield range stretched northward into the open jaws of the Adirondacks.

All around them were woods, now. Once a Gate House appeared ahead; and beyond it they crossed four bridges over a foaming, tumbling creek where Cleves caught glimpses of shadowy forms in amber-tinted pools—big yellow trout that sank unhurriedly out of sight among huge submerged boulders wet with spray.

The State trooper beside the chauffeur turned to Cleves, his purple tie whipping in the wind.

“Yonder is Glenwild, sir,” he said.

It was a single house on the flank of a heavily forested hill. Deep below to the left the creek leaped two cataracts and went flashing out through a belt of cleared territory ablaze with late sunshine.

The car swung into the farm-yard, past the barn on the right, and continued on up a very rough trail.

“This is the road to the Ireland Vlaie,” said the trooper. “It is possible for cars for another mile only.”

Splendid spruce, pine, oak, maple, and hemlock fringed the swampy, uneven trail which was no more than a wide, rough vista cut through the forest.

And, as the trooper had said, a little more than a mile farther the trail became a tangle of bushes and swale; the car slowed down and stopped; and a man rose from where he was seated on a mossy log and came forward, his rifle balanced across the hollow of his left arm.

The man was Alek Selden.

•      •      •      •      •      •

It was long after dark and they were still travelling through pathless woods by the aid of their electric torches.

There was little underbrush; the forest of spruce and hemlock was first growth.

Cleves shined the trees but could discover no blazing, no trodden path.

In explanation, Selden said briefly that he had hunted the territory for years.

“But I don’t begin to know it,” he added. “There are vast and ugly regions of bog and swale where a sea of alders stretches to the horizon. There are desolate wastes of cat-briers and witch-hopple under leprous tangles of grey birches, where stealthy little brooks darkle deep under matted débris. Only wild things can travel such country.

“Then there are strange, slow-flowing creeks in the perpetual shadows of tamarack woods, where many a man has gone in never to come out.”

“Why?” asked Tressa.

“Under the tender carpet of green cresses are shining black bogs set with tussock; and under the bog stretches quicksand,—and death.”

“Do you know these places?” asked Cleves.

“No.”

Cleves stepped forward to Tressa’s side.

“Keep flashing the ground,” he said harshly. “I don’t want you to step into some hell-hole. I’m sorry I brought you, anyway.”

“But I had to come,” she said in a low voice.

Like the two men, she wore a grey flannel shirt, knickers, and spiral puttees.

They, however, carried rifles as well as packs; and the girl’s pack was lighter.

They had halted by a swift, icy rivulet to eat, without building a fire. After that they crossed the Ireland Vlaie and the main creek, where remains of a shanty stood on the bluff above the right bank—the last sign of man.

Beyond lay the uncharted land, skimped and shirked entirely in certain regions by map-makers;—an unknown wilderness on the edges of which Selden had often camped when deer shooting.

It was along this edge he was leading them, now, to a lean-to which he had erected, and from which he had travelled in to Glenwild to use the superintendent’s telephone to New York.

There seemed to be no animal life stirring in this forest; their torches illuminated no fiery orbs of dazed wild things surprised at gaze in the wilderness; no leaping furry form crossed their flashlights’ fan-shaped radiance.

There were no nocturnal birds to be seen or heard, either: no bittern squawked from hidden sloughs; no herons howled; not an owl-note, not a whispering cry of a whippoorwill, not the sudden uncanny twitter of those little birds that become abruptly vocal after dark, interrupted the dense stillness of the forest.

And it was not until his electric torch glimmered repeatedly upon reaches of dusk-hidden bog that Cleves understood how Selden took his bearings—for the night was thick and there were no stars.

“Yes,” said Selden tersely, “I’m trying to skirt the bog until I shine a peeled stick.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

An hour later the peeled alder-stem glittered in the beam of the torches. In ten minutes something white caught the electric rays.

It was Selden’s spare undershirt drying on a bush behind the lean-to.

“Can we have a fire?” asked Cleves, relieving his wife of her pack and striding into the open-faced camp.

“Yes, I’ll fix it,” replied Selden. “Are you all right, Mrs. Cleves?”

Tressa said: “Delightfully tired, thank you.” And smiled faintly at her husband as he let go his own pack, knelt, and spread a blanket for his wife.

He remained there, kneeling, as she seated herself.

“Are you quite fit?” he asked bluntly. Yet, through his brusqueness her ear caught a vague undertone of something else—anxiety perhaps—perhaps tenderness. And her heart stirred deliciously in her breast.

He inflated a pillow for her; the firelight glimmered, brightened, spread glowing across her feet. She lay back with a slight sigh, relaxed.

Then, suddenly, the thrill of her husband’s touch flooded her face with colour; but she lay motionless, one arm flung across her eyes, while he unrolled her puttees and unlaced her muddy shoes.

A heavenly warmth from the fire dried her stockinged feet. Later, on the edge of sleep, she opened her eyes and found herself propped upright on her husband’s shoulder.

Drowsily, obediently she swallowed spoonfuls of the hot broth which he administered.

“Are you really quite comfortable, dear?” he whispered.

“Wonderfully…. And so very happy…. Thank you—dear.”

She lay back, suffering him to bathe her face and hands with warm water.

When the fire was only a heap of dying coals, she turned over on her right side and extended her hand a little way into the darkness. Searching, half asleep, she touched her husband, and her hand relaxed in his nervous clasp. And she fell into the most perfect sleep which she had known in years.

•      •      •      •      •      •

She dreamed that somebody whispered to her, “Darling, darling, wake up. It is morning, beloved.”

Suddenly she opened her eyes; and saw her husband set a tray, freshly plaited out of Indian willow, beside her blanket.

“Here’s your breakfast, pretty lady,” he said, smilingly. “And over there is an exceedingly frigid pool of water. You’re to have the camp to yourself for the next hour or two.”

“You dear fellow,” she murmured, still confused by sleep, and reached out to touch his hand. He caught hers and kissed it, back and palm, and got up hastily as though scared.

“Selden and I will stand sentry,” he muttered. “There is no hurry, you know.”

She heard him and his comrade walking away over dried leaves; their steps receded; a dry stick cracked distantly; then silence stealthily invaded the place like a cautious living thing, creeping unseen through the golden twilight of the woods.

Seated in her blanket, she drank the coffee; ate a little; then lay down again in the early sun, feeling the warmth of the heap of whitening coals at her feet, also.

For an hour she dozed awake, drowsily opening her eyes now and then to look across the glade at the pool over which a single dragonfly glittered on guard.

Finally she rose resolutely, grasped a bit of soap, and went down to the edge of the pool.

•      •      •      •      •      •

Tressa was in flannel shirt and knickers when her husband and Selden hailed the camp and presently appeared walking slowly toward the dead fire.

Their grave faces checked her smile of greeting; her husband came up and laid one hand on her arm, looking at her out of thoughtful, preoccupied eyes.

“What is the Tchordagh?” he said in a low voice.

The girl’s quiet face went white.

“The—the Tchordagh!” she stammered.

“Yes, dear. What is it?”

“I don’t—don’t know where you heard that term,” she whispered. “The Tchordagh is the—the power of Erlik. It is a term…. In it is comprehended all the evil, all the cunning, all the perverted spiritual intelligence of Evil,—its sinister might,—its menace. It is an Alouäd-Yezidee term, and it is written in brass in Eighur characters on the Eight Towers, and on the Rampart of Gog and Magog;—nowhere else in the world!”

“It is written on a pine tree a few paces from this camp,” said Cleves absently.

Selden said: “It has not been there more than an hour or two, Mrs. Cleves. A square of bark was cut out and on the white surface of the wood this word is written in English.”

“Can you tell us what it signifies?” asked Cleves, quietly.

Tressa’s studied effort at self-control was apparent to both men.

She said: “When that word is written, then it is a death struggle between all the powers of Darkness and those who have read the written letters of that word…. For it is written in The Iron Book that no one but the Assassin of Khorassan—excepting the Eight Sheiks—shall read that written word and live to boast of having read it.”

“Let us sit here and talk it over,” said Selden soberly.

And when Tressa was seated on a fallen log, and Cleves settled down cross-legged at her feet, Selden spoke again, very soberly:

“On the edges of these woods, to the northwest, lies a sea of briers, close growing, interwoven and matted, strong and murderous as barbed wire.

“On the edges of these woods, to the northwest, lies a sea of briers, close growing, interwoven and matted, strong and murderous as barbed wire. Miles out in this almost impenetrable region lies a patch of trees called Fool’s Acre.

“At Wells I heard that the only man who had ever managed to reach Fool’s Acre was a trapper, and that he was still living. I found him at Rainbow Lake—a very old man, who had a fairly clear recollection of Fool’s Acre and his exhausting journey there.

“And he told me that man had been there before he had. For there was a roofless stone house there, and the remains of a walled garden. And a skull deep in the wild grasses.”

Selden paused and looked down at the recently healed scars on his wrists and hands.

“It was a rotten trip,” he said bluntly. “It took me three days to cut a tunnel through that accursed tangle of matted brier and grey birch…. Fool’s Acre is a grove of giant trees—first growth pine, oak, and maple. Great outcrops of limestone ledges bound it on the east. A brook runs through the woods.

“There is a house there, no longer roofless, and built of slabs of fossil-pitted limestone. The glass in the windows is so old that it is iridescent.

“A seven-foot wall encloses the house, built also of slabs blasted out of the rock outcrop, and all pitted with fossil shells.

“Inside is a garden—not the remains of one—a beautiful garden full of unfamiliar flowers. And in this garden I saw the Yezidee on his knees making living things out of lumps of dead earth!”

“The Tchordagh!” whispered the girl.

“What was the Yezidee doing?” demanded Cleves nervously.

Involuntarily all three drew nearer each other there in the sunshine.

“It was difficult for me to see,” said Selden in his quiet, serious voice. “It was nearly twilight: I lay flat on top of the wall under the curving branches of a huge syringa bush in full bloom. The Yezidees——”

“Were there two!” exclaimed Cleves.

“Two. They were squatting on the old stone path bordering one of the flower-beds.” He turned to Tressa: “They both wore white cloths twisted around their heads, and long soft garments of white. Under these their bare, brown legs showed, but they wore things on their naked feet which were shaped like what we call Turkish slippers—only different.”

“Black and green,” nodded Tressa with the vague horror growing in her face.

“Yes. The soles of their shoes were bright green.”

“Green is the colour sacred to Islam,” said Tressa. “The priests of Satan defile it by staining with green the soles of their footwear.”

After an interval: “Go on,” said Cleves nervously.

Selden drew closer, and they bent their heads to listen:

“I don’t, even now, know what the Yezidees were actually doing. In the twilight it was hard to see clearly. But I’ll tell you what it looked like to me. One of these squatting creatures would scoop out a handful of soil from the flower-bed, and mould it for a few moments between his lean, sinewy fingers, and then he’d open his hands and—and something alive—something small like a rat or a toad, or God knows what, would escape from between his palms and run out into the grass——”

Selden’s voice failed and he looked at Cleves with sickened eyes.

“I can’t—can’t make you understand how repulsive to me it was to see a wriggling live thing creep out between their fingers and—and go running or scrambling away—little loathsome things with humpy backs that hopped or scurried through the grass——”

“What on earth were these Yezidees doing, Tressa?” asked Cleves almost roughly.

The girl’s white face was marred by the imprints of deepening horror.

“It is the Tchor-Dagh,” she said mechanically. “They are using every resource of hell to destroy me—testing the gigantic power of Evil—as though it were some vast engine charged with thunderous destruction!—and they were testing it to discover its terrific capacity to annihilate——”

Her voice died in her dry throat; she dropped her bloodless visage into both hands and remained seated so.

Both men looked at her in silence, not daring to interfere. Finally the girl lifted her pallid face from her hands.

“That is what they were doing,” she said in a dull voice. “Out of inanimate earth they were making things animate—living creatures—to—to test the hellish power which they are storing—concentrating—for my destruction.”

“What is their purpose?” asked Cleves harshly. “What do these Mongol Sorcerers expect to gain by making little live things out of lumps of garden dirt?”

“They are testing their power,” whispered the girl.

“Like tuning up a huge machine?” muttered Selden.

“Yes.”

“For what purpose?”

“To make larger living creatures out of—of clay.”

“They can’t—they can’t create!” exclaimed Cleves. “I don’t know how—by what filthy tricks—they make rats out of dirt. But they can’t make a—anything—like a—like a man!”

Tressa’s body trembled slightly.

“Once,” she said, “in the temple, Prince Sanang took dust which was brought in sacks of goat-skin, and fashioned the heap of dirt with his hands, so that it resembled the body of a man lying there on the marble floor under the shrine of Erlik…. And—and then, there in the shadows where only the Dark Star burned—that black lamp which is called the Dark Star—the long heap of dust lying there on the marble pavement began to—to breathe!—”

She pressed both hands over her breast as though to control her trembling body: “I saw it; I saw the long shape of dust begin to breathe, to stir, move, and slowly lift itself——”

“A Yezidee trick!” gasped Cleves; but he also was trembling now.

“God!” whispered the girl. “Allah alone knows—the Merciful, the Long Suffering—He knows what it was that we temple girls saw there—that Yulun saw—that Sa-n’sa and I beheld there rising up like a man from the marble floor—and standing erect in the shadowy twilight of the Dark Star….”

Her hands gripped at her breast; her face was deathly.

“Then,” she said, “I saw Prince Sanang draw his sabre of Indian steel, and he struck … once only…. And a dead man fell down where the thing had stood. And all the marble was flooded with scarlet blood.”

“A trick,” repeated Cleves, in the ghost of his own voice. But his gaze grew vacant.

Presently Selden spoke in tones that sounded weakly querulous from emotional reaction:

“There is a path—a tunnel under the matted briers. It took me more than a week to cut it out. It is possible to reach Fool’s Acre. We can try—with our rifles—if you say so, Mrs. Cleves.”

The girl looked up. A little colour came into her cheeks. She shook her head.

“Their bodies may not be there in the garden,” she said absently. “What you saw may not have been that part of them—the material which dies by knife or bullet…. And it is necessary that these Yezidees should die.”

“Can you do anything?” asked Cleves, hoarsely.

She looked at her husband; tried to smile:

“I must try…. I think we had better not lose any time—if Mr. Selden will lead us.”

“Now?”

“Yes, we had better go, I think,” said the girl. Her smile still remained stamped on her lips, but her eyes seemed preoccupied as though following the movements of something remote that was passing across the far horizon.

XIV

A DEATH TRAIL

The way to Fool’s Acre was under a tangled canopy of thorns, under rotting windfalls of grey birch, through tunnel after tunnel of fallen débris woven solidly by millions of strands of tough cat-briers which cut the flesh like barbed wire.

There was blood on Tressa, where her flannel shirt had been pierced in a score of places. Cleves and Selden had been painfully slashed.

Silent, thread-like streams flowed darkling under the tangled mass that roofed them. Sometimes they could move upright; more often they were bent double; and there were long stretches where they had to creep forward on hands and knees through sparse wild grasses, soft, rotten soil, or paths of sphagnum which cooled their feverish skin in velvety, icy depths.

At noon they rested and ate, lying prone under the matted roof of their tunnel.

Cleves and Selden had their rifles. Tressa lay like a slender boy, her brier-torn hands empty.

And, as she lay there, her husband made a sponge of a handful of sphagnum moss, and bathed her face and her arms, cleansing the dried blood from the skin, while the girl looked up at him out of grave, inscrutable eyes.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The sun hung low over the wilderness when they came to the woods of Fool’s Acre. They crept cautiously out of the briers, among ferns and open spots carpeted with pine needles and dead leaves which were beginning to burn ruddy gold under the level rays of the sun.

Lying flat behind an enormous oak, they remained listening for a while. Selden pointed through the woods, eastward, whispering that the house stood there not far away.

“Don’t you think we might risk the chance and use our rifles?” asked Cleves in a low voice.

“No. It is the Tchor-Dagh that confronts us. I wish to talk to Sansa,” she murmured.

A moment later Selden touched her arm.

“My God,” he breathed, “who is that!”

“It is Sansa,” said Tressa calmly, and sat up among the ferns. And the next instant Sansa stepped daintily out of the red sunlight and seated herself among them without a sound.

Nobody spoke. The newcomer glanced at Selden, smiled slightly, blushed, then caught a glimpse of Cleves where he lay in the brake, and a mischievous glimmer came into her slanting eyes.

“Did I not tell my lord truths?” she inquired in a demure whisper. “As surely as the sun is a dragon, and the flaming pearl burns between his claws, so surely burns the soul of Heart of Flame between thy guarding hands. There are as many words as there are demons, my lord, but it is written that Niaz is the greatest of all words save only the name of God.”

She laughed without any sound, sweetly malicious where she sat among the ferns.

“Heart of Flame,” she said to Tressa, “you called me and I made the effort.”

“Darling,” said Tressa in her thrilling voice, “the Yezidees are making living things out of dust,—as Sanang Noïane made that thing in the Temple…. And slew it before our eyes.”

“The Tchor-Dagh,” said Sansa calmly.

“The Tchor-Dagh,” whispered Tressa.

Sansa’s smooth little hands crept up to the collar of her odd, blue tunic; grasped it.

“In the name of God the Merciful,” she said without a tremor, “listen to me, Heart of Flame, and may my soul be ransom for yours!”

“I hear you, Sansa.”

Sansa said, her fingers still grasping the embroidered collar of her tunic:

“Yonder, behind walls, two Tower Chiefs meddle with the Tchor-Dagh, making living things out of the senseless dust they scrape from the garden.”

Selden moistened his dry lips. Sansa said:

“The Yezidees who have come into this wilderness are Arrak Sou-Sou, the Squirrel; and Tiyang Khan…. May God remember them in Hell!”

“May God remember them,” said Tressa mechanically.

“And these two Yezidee Sorcerers,” continued Sansa coolly, “have advanced thus far in the Tchor-Dagh; for they now roam these woods, digging like demons, for the roots of Ginseng; and thou knowest, O Heart of Flame, what that indicates.”

“Does Ginseng grow in these woods!” exclaimed Tressa with a new terror in her widening eyes.

“Ginseng grows here, little Rose-Heart, and the roots are as perfect as human bodies. And Tiyang Khan squats in the walled garden moulding the Ginseng roots in his unclean hands, while Sou-Sou the Squirrel scratches among the dead leaves of the woods for roots as perfect as a naked human body.

“All day long the Sou-Sou rummages among the trees; all day long Tiyang pats and rubs and moulds the Ginseng roots in his skinny fingers. It is the Tchor-Dagh, Heart of Flame. And these Sorcerers must be destroyed.”

“Are their bodies here?”

“Arrak is in the body. And thus it shall be accomplished: listen attentively, Rose Heart Afire!—I shall remain here with——” she looked at Selden and flushed a trifle, “—with you, my lord. And when the Squirrel comes a-digging, so shall my lord slay him with a bullet…. And when I hear his soul bidding his body farewell, then I shall make prisoner his soul…. And send it to the Dark Star…. And the rest shall be in the hands of Allah.”

She turned to Tressa and caught her hands in both of her own:

“It is written on the Iron Pages,” she whispered, “that we belong to Erlik and we return to him. But in the Book of Gold it is written otherwise: ‘God preserve us from Satan who was stoned!’ … Therefore, in the name of Allah! Now then, Heart of Flame, do your duty!”

A burning flush leaped over Tressa’s features.

“Is my soul, then, my own!”

“It belongs to God,” said Sansa gravely.

“And—Sanang?”

“God is greatest.”

“But—was God there—at the Lake of the Ghosts?”

“God is everywhere. It is so written in the Book of Gold,” replied Sansa, pressing her hands tenderly.

“Recite the Fatha, Heart of Flame. Thy lips shall not stiffen; God listens.”

Tressa rose in the sunset glory and stood as though dazed, and all crimsoned in the last fiery bars of the declining sun.

Cleves also rose.

Sansa laughed noiselessly: “My lord would go whither thou goest, Heart of Fire!” she whispered. “And thy ways shall be his ways!”

Tressa’s cheeks flamed and she turned and looked at Cleves.

Then Sansa rose and laid a hand on Tressa’s arm and on her husband’s:

“Listen attentively. Tiyang Khan must be destroyed. The signal sounds when my lord’s rifle-shot makes a loud noise here among these trees.”

“Can I prevail against the Tchor-Dagh?” asked Tressa, steadily.

“Is not that event already in God’s hands, darling?” said Sansa softly. She smiled and resumed her seat beside Selden, amid the drooping fern fronds.

“Bid thy dear lord leave his rifle here,” she added quietly.

Cleves laid down his weapon. Selden pointed eastward in silence.

So they went together into the darkening woods.

•      •      •      •      •      •

In the dusk of heavy foliage overhanging the garden, Tressa lay flat as a lizard on the top of the wall. Beside her lay her husband.

In the garden below them flowers bloomed in scented thickets, bordered by walks of flat stone slabs split from boulders. A little lawn, very green, centred the garden.

And on this lawn, in the clear twilight still tinged with the sombre fires of sundown, squatted a man dressed in a loose white garment.

Save for a twisted breadth of white cloth, his shaven head was bare. His sinewy feet were naked, too, the lean, brown toes buried in the grass.

Tressa’s lips touched her husband’s ear.

“Tiyang Khan,” she breathed. “Watch what he does!”

Shoulder to shoulder they lay there, scarcely daring to breathe. Their eyes were fastened on the Mongol Sorcerer, who, squatted below on his haunches, grave and deliberate as a great grey ape, continued busy with the obscure business which so intently preoccupied him.

In a short semi-circle on the grass in front of him he had placed a dozen wild Ginseng roots. The roots were enormous, astoundingly shaped like the human body, almost repulsive in their weird symmetry.

The Yezidee had taken one of these roots into his hands. Squatting there in the semi-dusk, he began to massage it between his long, muscular fingers, rubbing, moulding, pressing the root with caressing deliberation.

His unhurried manipulation, for a few moments, seemed to produce no result. But presently the Ginseng root became lighter in colour and more supple, yielding to his fingers, growing ivory pale, sinuously limber in a newer and more delicate symmetry.

“Look!” gasped Cleves, grasping his wife’s arm. “What is that man doing?”

“The Tchor-Dagh!” whispered Tressa. “Do you see what lies twisting there in his hands?”

The Ginseng root had become the tiny naked body of a woman—a little ivory-white creature, struggling to escape between the hands that had created it—dark, powerful, masterly hands, opening leisurely now, and releasing the living being they had fashioned.

The thing scrambled between the fingers of the Sorcerer, leaped into the grass, ran a little way and hid, crouched down, panting, almost hidden by the long grass. The shocked watchers on the wall could still see the creature. Tressa felt Cleves’ body trembling beside her. She rested a cool, steady hand on his.

“It is the Tchor-Dagh,” she breathed close to his face. “The Mongol Sorcerer is becoming formidable.”

“Oh, God!” murmured Cleves, “that thing he made is alive! I saw it. I can see it hiding there in the grass. It’s frightened—breathing! It’s alive!”

His pistol, clutched in his right hand, quivered. His wife laid her hand on it and cautiously shook her head.

“No,” she said, “that is of no use.”

“But what that Yezidee is doing is—is blasphemous——”

“Watch him! His mind is stealthily feeling its way among the laws and secrets of the Tchor-Dagh. He has found a thread. He is following it through the maze into hell’s own labyrinth! He has created a tiny thing in the image of the Creator. He will try to create a larger being now. Watch him with his Ginseng roots!”

Tiyang, looming ape-like on his haunches in the deepening dusk, moulded and massaged the Ginseng roots, one after another. And one after another, tiny naked creatures wriggled out of his palms between his fingers and scuttled away into the herbage.

Already the dim lawn was alive with them, crawling, scurrying through the grass, creeping in among the flower-beds, little, ghostly-white things that glimmered from shade into shadow like moonbeams.

Tressa’s mouth touched her husband’s ear:

“It is for the secret of Destruction that the Yezidee seeks. But first he must learn the secret of creation. He is learning…. And he must learn no more than he has already learned.”

“That Yezidee is a living man. Shall I fire?”

“No.”

“I can kill him with the first shot.”

“Hark!” she whispered excitedly, her hand closing convulsively on her husband’s arm.

The whip-crack of a rifle-shot still crackled in their ears.

Tiyang had leaped to his feet in the dusk, a Ginseng root, half-alive, hanging from one hand and beginning to squirm.

Suddenly the first moonbeam fell across the wall. And in its lustre Tressa rose to her knees and flung up her right hand.

Then it was as though her palm caught and reflected the moon’s ray, and hurled it in one blinding shaft straight into the dark visage of Tiyang-Khan.

The Yezidee fell as though he had been pierced by a shaft of steel, and lay sprawling there on the grass in the ghastly glare.

And where his features had been there gaped only a hole into the head.

Then a dreadful thing occurred; for everywhere the grass swarmed with the little naked creatures he had made, running, scrambling, scuttling, darting into the black hole which had been the face of Tiyang-Khan.

They poured into the awful orifice, crowding, jostling one another so violently that the head jerked from side to side on the grass, a wabbling, inert, soggy mass in the moonlight.

And presently the body of Tiyang-Khan, Warden of the Rampart of Gog and Magog, and Lord of the Seventh Tower, began to burn with white fire—a low, glimmering combustion that seemed to clothe the limbs like an incandescent mist.

On the wall knelt Tressa, the glare from her lifted hand streaming over the burning form below.

Cleves stood tall and shadowy beside his wife, the useless pistol hanging in his grasp.

Then, in the silence of the woods, and very near, they heard Sansa laughing. And Selden’s anxious voice:

“Arrak is dead. The Sou-Sou hangs across a rock, head down, like a shot squirrel. Is all well with you?”

“Tiyang is on his way to his star,” said Tressa calmly. “Somewhere in the world his body has bid its mind farewell…. And so his body may live for a little, blind, in mental darkness, fed by others, and locked in all day, all night, until the end.”

Sansa, at the base of the wall, turned to Selden.

“Shall I bring my body with me, one day, my lord?” she asked demurely.

“Oh, Sansa——” he whispered, but she placed a fragrant hand across his lips and laughed at him in the moonlight.

XV

IN THE FIRELIGHT

In 1920 the whole spiritual world was trembling under the thundering shock of the Red Surf pounding the frontiers of civilisation from pole to pole.

Up out of the hell-pit of Asia had boiled the molten flood, submerging Russia, dashing in giant waves over Germany and Austria, drenching Italy, France, England with its bloody spindrift.

And now the Red Rain was sprinkling the United States from coast to coast, and the mindless administration, scared out of its stupidity at last, began a frantic attempt to drain the country of the filthy flood and throw up barriers against the threatened deluge.

In every state and city Federal agents made wholesale arrests—too late!

A million minds had already been perverted and dominated by the terrible Sect of the Assassins. A million more were sickening under the awful psychic power of the Yezidee.

Thousands of the disciples of the Yezidee devil-worshipers had already been arrested and held for deportation,—poor, wretched creatures whose minds were no longer their own, but had been stealthily surprised, seized and mastered by Mongol adepts and filled with ferocious hatred against their fellow men.

Yet, of the Eight Yezidee Assassins only two now remained alive in America,—Togrul, and Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.

Yarghouz was dead; Djamouk the Fox, Kahn of the Fifth Tower was dead; Yaddin-ed-Din, Arrak the Sou-Sou, Gutchlug, Tiyang Khan, all were dead. Six Towers had become dark and silent. From them the last evil thought, the last evil shape had sped; the last wicked prayer had been said to Erlik, Khagan of all Darkness.

But his emissary on earth, Prince Sanang, still lived. And at Sanang’s heels stole Togrul, Tougtchi to Sanang Noïane, the Slayer of Souls.

•      •      •      •      •      •

In the United States there had been a cessation of the active campaign of violence toward those in authority. Such unhappy dupes of the Yezidees as the I.W.W. and other radicals were, for the time, physically quiescent. Crude terrorism with its more brutal outrages against life and law ceased. But two million sullen eyes, in which all independent human thought had been extinguished, watched unblinking the wholesale arrests by the government—watched panic-stricken officials rushing hither and thither to execute the mandate of a miserable administration—watched and waited in dreadful silence.

In that period of ominous quiet which possessed the land, the little group of Secret Service men that surrounded the young girl who alone stood between a trembling civilisation and the threat of hell’s own chaos, became convinced that Sanang was preparing a final and terrible effort to utterly overwhelm the last vestige of civilisation in the United States.

What shape that plan would develop they could not guess.

John Recklow sent Benton to Chicago to watch that centre of infection for the appearance there of the Yezidee Togrul.

Selden went to Boston where a half-witted group of parlour-socialists at Cambridge were talking too loudly and loosely to please even the most tolerant at Harvard.

But neither Togrul nor Sanang had, so far, materialised in either city; and John Recklow prowled the purlieus of New York, haunting strange byways and obscure quarters where the dull embers of revolution always smouldered, watching for the Yezidee who was the deep-bedded, vital root of this psychic evil which menaced the minds of all mankind,—Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.

Recklow’s lodgings were tucked away in Westover Court—three bedrooms, a parlour and a kitchenette. Tressa Cleves occupied one bedroom; her husband another; Recklow the third.

And in this tiny apartment, hidden away among a group of old buildings, the very existence of which was unknown to the millions who swarmed the streets of the greatest city in the world,—here in Westover Court, a dozen paces from the roar of Broadway, was now living a young girl upon whose psychic power the only hope of the world now rested.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The afternoon had turned grey and bitter; ragged flakes still fell; a pallid twilight possessed the snowy city, through which lighted trains and taxis moved in the foggy gloom.

By three o’clock in the afternoon all shops were illuminated; the south windows of the Hotel Astor across the street spread a sickly light over the old buildings of Westover Court as John Recklow entered the tiled hallway, took the stairs to the left, and went directly to his apartment.

He unlocked the door and let himself in and stood a moment in the entry shaking the snow from his hat and overcoat.

The sitting-room lamp was unlighted but he could see a fire in the grate, and Tressa Cleves seated near, her eyes fixed on the glowing coals.

He bade her good evening in a low voice; she turned her charming head and nodded, and he drew a chair to the fender and stretched out his wet shoes to the warmth.

“Is Victor still out?” he inquired.

She said that her husband had not yet returned. Her eyes were on the fire, Recklow’s rested on her shadowy face.

“Benton got his man in Chicago,” he said. “It was not Togrul Kahn.”

“Who was it?”

“Only a Swami fakir who’d been preaching sedition to a little group of greasy Bengalese from Seattle…. I’ve heard from Selden, too.”

She nodded listlessly and lifted her eyes.

“Neither Sanang nor Togrul have appeared in Boston,” he said. “I think they’re here in New York.”

The girl said nothing.

After a silence:

“Are you worried about your husband?” he asked abruptly.

“I am always uneasy when he is absent,” she said quietly.

“Of course…. But I don’t suppose he knows that.”

“I suppose not.”

Recklow leaned over, took a coal in the tongs and lighted a cigar. Leaning back in his armchair, he said in a musing voice:

“No, I suppose your husband does not realise that you are so deeply concerned over his welfare.”

The girl remained silent.

“I suppose,” said Recklow softly, “he doesn’t dream you are in love with him.”

Tressa Cleves did not stir a muscle. After a long silence she said in her even voice:

“Do you think I am in love with my husband, Mr. Recklow?”

“I think you fell in love with him the first evening you met him.”

“I did.”

Neither of them spoke again for some minutes. Recklow’s cigar went wrong; he rose and found another and returned to the fire, but did not light it.

“It’s a rotten day, isn’t it?” he said with a shiver, and dumped a scuttle of coal on the fire.

They watched the blue flames playing over the grate.

Tressa said: “I could no more help falling in love with him than I could stop my heart beating…. But I did not dream that anybody knew.”

“Don’t you think he ought to know?”

“Why? He is not in love with me.”

“Are you sure, Mrs. Cleves?”

“Yes. He is wonderfully sweet and kind. But he could not fall in love with a girl who has been what I have been.”

Recklow smiled. “What have you been, Tressa Norne?”

“You know.”

“A temple-girl at Yian?”

“And at the Lake of the Ghosts,” she said in a low voice.

“What of it?”

“I can not tell you, Mr. Recklow…. Only that I lost my soul in the Yezidee Temple——”

“That is untrue!”

“I wish it were untrue…. My husband tells me that nothing can really harm the soul. I try to believe him…. But Erlik lives. And when my soul at last shall escape my body, it shall not escape the Slayer of Souls.”

“That is monstrously untrue——”

“No. I tell you that Prince Sanang slew my soul. And my soul’s ghost belongs to Erlik. How can any man fall in love with such a girl?”

“Why do you say that Sanang slew your soul?” asked Recklow, peering at her averted face through the reddening firelight.

She lay still in her chair for a moment, then turned suddenly on him:

“He did slay it! He came to the Lake of the Ghosts as my lover; he meant to have done it there; but I would not have him—would not listen, nor suffer his touch!—I mocked at him and his passion. I laughed at his Tchortchas. They were afraid of me!—”

She half rose from her chair, grasped the arms, then seated herself again, her eyes ablaze with the memory of wrongs.

“How dare I show my dear lord that I am in love with him when Sanang’s soul caught my soul out of my body one day—surprised my soul while my body lay asleep in the Yezidee Temple!—and bore it in his arms to the very gates of hell!”

“Good God,” whispered Recklow, “what do you mean? Such things can’t happen.”

“Why not? They do happen. I was caught unawares…. It was one golden afternoon, and Yulun and Sansa and I were eating oranges by the fountain in the inner shrine. And I lay down by the pool and made the effort—you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. My soul left my body asleep and I went out over the tops of the flowers—idly, without aim or intent—as the winds blow in summer…. It was in the Wood of the White Moth that I saw Sanang’s soul flash downward like a streak of fire and wrap my soul in flame!… And, in a flash, we were at the gates of hell before I could free myself from his embrace…. Then, by the Temple pool, among the oranges, I cried out asleep; and my terrified body sat up sobbing and trembling in Yulun’s arms. But the Slayer of Souls had slain mine in the Wood of the White Moth—slain it as he caught me in his flaming arms…. And now you know why such a woman as I dare not bend to kiss the dust from my dear Lord’s feet—Aie-a! Aie-a! I who have lost my girl’s soul to him who slew it in the Wood of the White Moth!”

She sat rocking in her chair in the red firelight, her hands framing her lovely face, her eyes staring straight ahead as though they saw opening before them through the sombre shadows of that room all the dread magic of the East where the dancing flame of Sanang’s blazing soul lighted their path to hell through the enchanted forest.

Recklow had grown pale, but his voice was steady.

“I see no reason,” he said, “why your husband should not love you.”

“I tell you my girl’s soul belonged to Sanang—was part of his, for an instant.”

“It is burned pure of dross.”

“It is burned.”

Recklow remained silent. Tressa lay deep in her armchair, twisting her white fingers.

“What makes him so late?” she said…. “I sent my soul out twice to look for him, and could not find him.”

“Send it again,” said Recklow, fearfully.

For ten minutes the girl lay as though asleep, then her eyes unclosed and she said drowsily: “I can not find him.”

“Did—did you learn anything while—while you were—away?” asked Recklow cautiously.

“Nothing. There is a thick darkness out there—I mean a darkness gathering over the whole land. It is like a black fog. When the damned pray to Erlik there is a darkness that gathers like a brown mist——”

Her voice ceased; her hands tightened on the arms of her chair.

“That is what Sanang is doing!” she said in a breathless voice.

“What?” demanded Recklow.

“Praying! That is what he is doing! A million perverted minds which he has seized and obsessed are being concentrated on blasphemous prayers to Erlik! Sanang is directing them. Do you understand the terrible power of a million minds all willing, in unison, the destruction of good and the triumph of evil? A million human minds! More! For that is what he is doing. That is the thick darkness that is gathering over the entire Western world. It is the terrific materialisation of evil power from evil minds, all focussed upon the single thought that evil must triumph and good die!”

She sat, gripping the arms of her chair, pale, rigid, terribly alert, dreadfully enlightened, now, concerning the awful and new menace threatening the sanity of mankind.

She said in her steady, emotionless voice: “When the Yezidee Sorcerers desire to overwhelm a nomad people—some yort perhaps that has resisted the Sheiks of the Eight Towers, then the Slayer of Souls rides with his Black Banners to the Namaz-Ga or Place of Prayer.

“Two marble bridges lead to it. There are fourteen hundred mosques there. Then come the Eight, each with his shroud, chanting the prayers for those dead in hell. And there the Yezidees pray blasphemously, all their minds in ferocious unison…. And I have seen a little yort full of Broad Faces with their slanting eyes and sparse beards, sicken and die, and turn black in the sun as though the plague had breathed on them. And I have seen the Long Noses and bushy beards of walled towns wither and perish in the blast and blight from the Namaz-Ga where the Slayer of Souls sat his saddle and prayed to Erlik, and half a million Yezidees prayed in blasphemous unison.”

Recklow’s head rested on his left hand. The other, unconsciously, had crept toward his pistol—the weapon which had become so useless in this awful struggle between this girl and the loosened forces of hell.

“Is that what you think Sanang is about?” he asked heavily.

“Yes. I know it. He has seized the minds of a million men in America. Every anarchist is to-day concentrating in one evil and supreme mental effort, under Sanang’s direction, to will the triumph of evil and the doom of civilisation…. I wish my husband would come home.”

“Tressa?”

She turned her pallid face in the firelight: “If Sanang has appointed a Place of Prayer,” she said, “he himself will pray on that spot. That will be the Namaz-Ga for the last two Yezidee Sorcerers still alive in the Western World.”

“That’s what I wished to ask you,” said Recklow softly. “Will you try once more, Tressa?”

“Yes. I will send out my soul again to look for the Namaz-Ga.”

She lay back in her armchair and closed her eyes.

“Only,” she added, as though to herself, “I wish my dear lord were safe in this room beside me…. May God’s warriors be his escort. And surely they are well armed, and can prevail over demons. Aie-a! I wish my lord would come home out of the darkness…. Mr. Recklow?”

“Yes, Tressa.”

“I thought I heard him on the stairs.”

“Not yet.”

“Aie-a!” she sighed and closed her eyes again.

She lay like one dead. There was no sound in the room save the soft purr of the fire.

Suddenly from the sleeping girl a frightened voice burst: “Yulun! Yulun! Where is that yellow maid of the Baroulass?… What is she doing? That sleek young thing belongs to Togrul Kahn? Yulun! I am afraid of her! Tell Sansa to watch that she does not stir from the Lake of the Ghosts!… Warn that young Baroulass Sorceress that if she stirs I slay her. And know how to do it in spite of Sanang and all the prayers from the Namaz-Ga! Yulun! Sansa! Watch her, follow her, hearts of flame! My soul be ransom for yours! Tokhta!”

The girl’s eyes unclosed. Presently she stirred slightly, passed one hand across her forehead, turned her head toward Recklow.

“I could not discover the Namaz-Ga,” she said wearily. “I wish my husband would return.”

XVI

THE PLACE OF PRAYER

Her husband called her on the telephone a few minutes later:

“Fifty-three, Six-twenty-six speaking! Who is this?”

“V-sixty-nine,” replied his young wife happily. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Is M. H. 2479 there?”

“He is here.”

“Very well. An hour ago I saw Togrul Khan in a limousine and chased him in a taxi. His car got away in the fog but it was possible to make out the number. An empty Cadillac limousine bearing that number is now waiting outside the 44th Street entrance to the Hotel Astor. The doorman will hold it until I finish telephoning. Tell M. H. 2479 to send men to cover this matter——”

“Victor!”

“Be careful! Yes, what is it?”

“I beg you not to stir in this affair until I can join you——”

“Hurry then. It’s just across the street from Westover Court——” His voice ceased; she heard another voice, faintly, and an exclamation from her husband; then his hurried voice over the wire: “The doorman just sent word to hurry. The car number is N. Y. 015 F 0379! I’ve got to run! Good-b——”

•      •      •      •      •      •

He left the booth at the end of Peacock Alley, ran down the marble steps to the left and out to the snowy sidewalk, passing on his way a young girl swathed to the eyes in chinchilla who was hurrying into the hotel. As he came to where the limousine was standing, he saw that it was still empty although the door stood open and the engine was running. Around the chauffeur stood the gold laced doorman, the gorgeously uniformed carriage porter and a mounted policeman.

“Hey!” said the latter when he saw Cleves,—“what’s the matter here? What are you holding up this car for?”

Cleves beckoned him, whispered, then turned to the doorman.

“Why did you send for me? Was the chauffeur trying to pull out?”

“Yes, sir. A lady come hurrying out an’ she jumps in, and the shawfur he starts her humming——”

“A lady! Where did she go?”

“It was that young lady in chinchilla fur. The one you just met when you run out. Yessir! Why, as soon as I held up the car and called this here cop, she opens the door and out she jumps and beats it into the hotel again——”

“Hold that car, Officer!” interrupted Cleves. “Keep it standing here and arrest anybody who gets into it! I’ll be back again——”

He turned and hurried into the hotel, traversed Peacock Alley scanning every woman he passed, searching for a slim shape swathed in chinchilla. There were no chinchilla wraps in Peacock Alley; none in the dining-room where people already were beginning to gather and the orchestra was now playing; no young girl in chinchilla in the waiting room, or in the north dining-room.

Then, suddenly, far across the crowded lobby, he saw a slender, bare-headed girl in a chinchilla cloak turn hurriedly away from the room-clerk’s desk, holding a key in her white gloved hand.

Before he could take two steps in her direction she had disappeared in the crowd.

He made his way through the packed lobby as best he could amid throngs of people dressed for dinner, theatre, or other gaiety awaiting them somewhere out there in the light-smeared winter fog; but when he arrived at the room clerk’s desk he looked for a chinchilla wrap in vain.

Then he leaned over the desk and said to the clerk in a low voice: “I am a Federal agent from the Department of Justice. Here are my credentials. Now, who was that young woman in chinchilla furs to whom you gave her door key a moment ago?”

The clerk leaned over his counter and, dropping his voice, answered that the lady in question had arrived only that morning from San Francisco; had registered as Madame Aoula Baroulass; and had been given a suite on the fourth floor numbered from 408 to 414.

“Do you mean to arrest her?” added the clerk in a weird whisper.

“I don’t know. Possibly. Have you the master-key?”

The clerk handed it to him without a word; and Cleves hurried to the elevator.

On the fourth floor the matron on duty halted him, but when he murmured an explanation she nodded and laid a finger on her lips.

“Madame has gone to her apartment,” she whispered.

“Has she a servant? Or friends with her?”

“No, sir…. I did see her speak to two foreign looking gentlemen in the elevator when she arrived this morning.”

Cleves nodded; the matron pointed out the direction in silence, and he went rapidly down the carpeted corridor, until he came to a door numbered 408.

For a second only he hesitated, then swiftly fitted the master-key and opened the door.

The room—a bedroom—was brightly lighted; but there was nobody there. The other rooms—dressing closet, bath-room and parlour, all were brilliantly lighted by ceiling fixtures and wall brackets; but there was not a person to be seen in any of the rooms—nor, save for the illumination, was there any visible sign that anybody inhabited the apartment.

Swiftly he searched the apartment from end to end. There was no baggage to be seen, no garments, no toilet articles, no flowers in the vases, no magazines or books, not one article of feminine apparel or of personal bric-a-brac visible in the entire place.

Nor had the bed even been turned down—nor any preparation for the night’s comfort been attempted. And, except for the blazing lights, it was as though the apartment had not been entered by anybody for a month.

All the windows were closed, all shades lowered and curtains drawn. The air, though apparently pure enough, had that vague flatness which one associates with an unused guest-chamber when opened for an airing.

Now, deliberately, Cleves began a more thorough search of the apartment, looking behind curtains, under beds, into clothes presses, behind sofas.

Then he searched the bureau drawers, dressers, desks for any sign or clew of the girl in the chinchillas. There was no dust anywhere,—the hotel management evidently was particular—but there was not even a pin to be found.

Presently he went out into the corridor and looked again at the number on the door. He had made no mistake.

Then he turned and sped down the long corridor to where the matron was standing beside her desk preparing to go off duty as soon as the other matron arrived to relieve her.

To his impatient question she replied positively that she had seen the girl in chinchillas unlock 408 and enter the apartment less than five minutes before he had arrived in pursuit.

“And I saw her lights go on as soon as she went in,” added the matron, pointing to the distant illuminated transom.

“Then she went out through into the next apartment,” insisted Cleves.

“The fire-tower is on one side of her; the scullery closet on the other,” said the matron. “She could not have left that apartment without coming out into the corridor. And if she had come out I should have seen her.”

“I tell you she isn’t in those rooms!” protested Cleves.

“She must be there, sir. I saw her go in a few seconds before you came up.”

At that moment the other matron arrived. There was no use arguing. He left the explanation of the situation to the woman who was going off duty, and, hastening his steps, he returned to apartment 408.

The door, which he had left open, had swung shut. Again he fitted the master-key, entered, paused on the threshold, looked around nervously, his nostrils suddenly filled with a puff of perfume.

And there on the table by the bed he saw a glass bowl filled with a mass of Chinese orchids—great odorous clusters of orange and snow-white bloom that saturated all the room with their freshening scent.

So astounded was he that he stood stock still, one hand still on the door-knob; then in a trice he had closed and locked the door from inside.

Somebody was in that apartment. There could be no doubt about it. He dropped his right hand into his overcoat pocket and took hold of his automatic pistol.

For ten minutes he stood so, listening, peering about the room from bed to curtains, and out into the parlour. There was not a sound in the place. Nothing stirred.

Now, grasping his pistol but not drawing it, he began another stealthy tour of the apartment, exploring every nook and cranny. And, at the end, had discovered nothing new.

When at length he realised that, as far as he could discover, there was not a living thing in the place excepting himself, a very faint chill grew along his neck and shoulders, and he caught his breath suddenly, deeply.

He had come back to the bedroom, now. The perfume of the orchids saturated the still air.

And, as he stood staring at them, all of a sudden he saw, where their twisted stalks rested in the transparent bowl of water, something moving—something brilliant as a live ember gliding out from among the mass of submerged stems—a living fish glowing in scarlet hues and winnowing the water with grotesquely trailing fins as delicate as filaments of scarlet lace.

To and fro swam the fish among the maze of orchid stalks. Even its eyes were hot and red as molten rubies; and as its crimson gills swelled and relaxed and swelled, tints of cherry-fire waxed and waned over its fat and glowing body.

And vaguely, now, in the perfume saturated air, Cleves seemed to sense a subtle taint of evil,—something sinister in the intense stillness of the place—in the jewelled fish gliding so silently in and out among the pallid convolutions of the drowned stems.

As he stood staring at the fish, the drugged odour of the orchids heavy in his throat and lungs, something stirred very lightly in the room.

Chills crawling over every limb, he looked around across his shoulder.

There was a figure seated cross-legged in the middle of the bed!

Then, in the perfumed silence, the girl laughed.

For a full minute neither of them moved. No sound had echoed her low laughter save the deadened pulsations of his own heart. But now there grew a faint ripple of water in the bowl where the scarlet fish, suddenly restless, was swimming hither and thither as though pursued by an invisible hand.

With the slight noise of splashing water in his ears, Cleves stood staring at the figure on the bed. Under her chinchilla the girl seemed to be all a pale golden tint—hair, skin, eyes. The scant shred of an evening gown she wore, the jewels at her throat and breast, all were yellow and amber and saffron-gold.

And now, looking him in the eyes, she leisurely disengaged the robe of silver fur from her naked shoulders and let it fall around her on the bed. For a second the lithe, willowy golden thing gathered there as gracefully as a coiled snake filled him with swift loathing. Then, almost instantly, the beauty of the lissome creature fascinated him.

She leaned forward and set her elbows on her two knees, and rested her face between her hands—like a gold rose-bud between two ivory petals, he thought, dismayed by this young thing’s beauty, shaken by the dull confusion of his own heart battering his breast like the blows of a rising tide.

“What do you wish?” she inquired in her soft young voice. “Why have you come secretly into my rooms to search—and clasping in your hand a loaded pistol deep within your pocket?”

“Why have you hidden yourself until now?” he retorted in a dull and laboured voice.

“I have been here.”

“Where?”

“Here!… Looking at you…. And watching my scarlet fish. His name is Dzelim. He is nearly a thousand years old and as wise as a magician. Look upon him, my lord! See how rapidly he darts around his tiny crystal world!—like a comet through outer star-dust, running the eternal race with Time…. And—yonder is a chair. Will my lord be seated—at his new servant’s feet?”

A strange, physical weariness seemed to weight his limbs and shoulders. He seated himself near the bed, never taking his heavy gaze from the smiling, golden thing which squatted there watching him so intently.

“Whose limousine was that which you entered and then left so abruptly?” he asked.

“My own.”

“What was the Yezidee Togrul Kahn doing in it?”

“Did you see anybody in my car?” she asked, veiling her eyes a little with their tawny lashes.

“I saw a man with a thick beard dyed red with henna, and the bony face and slant eyes of Togrul the Yezidee.”

“May my soul be ransom for yours, my lord, but you lie!” she said softly. Her lips parted in a smile; but her half-veiled eyes were brilliant as two topazes.

“Is that your answer?”

She lifted one hand and with her forefinger made signs from right to left and then downward as though writing in Turkish and in Chinese characters.

“It is written,” she said in a low voice, “that we belong to God and we return to him. Look out what you are about, my lord!”

He drew his pistol from his overcoat and, holding it, rested his hand on his knee.

“Now,” he said hoarsely, “while we await the coming of Togrul Kahn, you shall remain exactly where you are, and you shall tell me exactly who you are in order that I may decide whether to arrest you as an alien enemy inciting my countrymen to murder, or to let you go as a foreigner who is able to prove her honesty and innocence.”

The girl laughed:

“Be careful,” she said. “My danger lies in your youth and mine—somewhere between your lips and mine lies my only danger from you, my lord.”

A dull flush mounted to his temples and burned there.

“I am the golden comrade to Heavenly-Azure,” she said, still smiling. “I am the Third Immaum in the necklace Keuke wears where Yulun hangs as a rose-pearl, and Sansa as a pearl on fire.

“Look upon me, my lord!”

There was a golden light in his eyes which seemed to stiffen the muscles and confuse his vision. He heard her voice again as though very far away:

“It is written that we shall love, my lord—thou and I—this night—this night. Listen attentively. I am thy slave. My lips shall touch thy feet. Look upon me, my lord!”

There was a dazzling blindness in his eyes and in his brain. He swayed a little still striving to fix her with his failing gaze. His pistol hand slipped sideways from his knee, fell limply, and the weapon dropped to the thick carpet. He could still see the glimmering golden shape of her, still hear her distant voice:

“It is written that we belong to God…. Tokhta!…”

Over his knees was settling a snow-white sheet; on it, in his lap, lay a naked knife. There was not a sound in the room save the rushing and splashing of the scarlet fish in its crystal bowl.

Bending nearer, the girl fixed her yellow eyes on the man who looked back at her with dying gaze, sitting upright and knee deep in his shroud.

Then, noiselessly she uncoiled her supple golden body, extending her right arm toward the knife.

“Throw back thy head, my lord, and stretch thy throat to the knife’s sweet edge,” she whispered caressingly. “No!—do not close your eyes. Look upon me. Look into my eyes. I am Aoula, temple girl of the Baroulass! I am mistress to the Slayer of Souls! I am a golden plaything to Sanang Noïane, Prince of the Yezidees. Look upon me attentively, my lord!”

Her smooth little hand closed on the hilt; the scarlet fish splashed furiously in the bowl, dislodging a blossom or two which fell to the carpet and slowly faded into mist.

Now she grasped the knife, and she slipped from the bed to the floor and stood before the dazed man.

“This is the Namaz-Ga,” she said in her silky voice. “Behold, this is the appointed Place of Prayer. Gaze around you, my lord. These are the shadows of mighty men who come here to see you die in the Place of Prayer.”

Cleves’s head had fallen back, but his eyes were open. The Baroulass girl took his head in both hands and turned it hither and thither. And his glazing eyes seemed to sweep a throng of shadowy white-robed men crowding the room. And he saw the bloodless, symmetrical visage of Sanang among them, and the great red beard of Togrul; and his stiffening lips parted in an uttered cry, and sagged open, flaccid and soundless.

The Baroulass sorceress lifted the shroud from his knees and spread it on the carpet, moving with leisurely grace about her business and softly intoning the Prayers for the Dead.

Then, having made her arrangements, she took her knife into her right hand again and came back to the half-conscious man, and stood close in front of him, bending near and looking curiously into his dimmed eyes.

“Ayah!” she said smilingly. “This is the Place of Prayer. And you shall add your prayer to ours before I use my knife. So! I give you back your power of speech. Pronounce the name of Erlik!”

Very slowly his dry lips moved and his dry tongue trembled. The word they formed was,

“Tressa!”

Instantly the girl’s yellow eyes grew incandescent and her lovely mouth became distorted. With her left hand she caught his chin, forced his head back, exposing his throat, and using all her strength drew the knife’s edge across it.

But it was only her clenched fingers that swept the taut throat—clenched and empty fingers in which the knife had vanished.

And when the Baroulass girl saw that her clenched hand was empty, felt her own pointed nails cutting into the tender flesh of her own palm, she stared at her blood-stained fingers in sudden terror—stared, spread them, shrieked where she stood, and writhed there trembling and screaming as though gripped in an invisible trap.

But she fell silent when the door of the room opened noiselessly behind her;—and it was as though she dared not turn her head to face the end of all things which had entered the room and was drawing nearer in utter silence.

Suddenly she saw its shadow on the wall; and her voice burst from her lips in a last shuddering scream.

Then the end came slowly, without a sound, and she sank at the knees, gently, to a kneeling posture, then backward, extending her supple golden shape across the shroud; and lay there limp as a dead snake.

Tressa went to the bowl of water and drew from it every blossom. The scarlet fish was now thrashing the water to an iridescent spume; and Tressa plunged in her hands and seized it and flung it out—squirming and wheezing crimson foam—on the shroud beside the golden girl of the Baroulass. Then, very slowly, she drew the shroud over the dying things; stepped back to the chair where her husband lay unconscious; knelt down beside him and took his head on her shoulder, gazing, all the while, at the outline of the dead girl under the snowy shroud.

After a long while Cleves stirred and opened his eyes. Presently he turned his head sideways on her shoulder.

“Tressa,” he whispered.

“Hush,” she whispered, “all is well now.” But she did not move her eyes from the shroud, which now outlined the still shapes of two human figures.

“John Recklow!” she called in a low voice.

Recklow entered noiselessly with drawn pistol. She motioned to him; he bent and lifted the edge of the shroud, cautiously. A bushy red beard protruded.

“Togrul!” he exclaimed…. “But who is this young creature lying dead beside him?”

Then Tressa caught the collar of her tunic in her left hand and flung back her lovely face looking upward out of eyes like sapphires wet with rain:

“In the name of the one and only God,” she sobbed—“if there be no resurrection for dead souls, then I have slain this night in vain!

“For what does it profit a girl if her soul be lost to a lover and her body be saved for her husband?”

She rose from her knees, the tears still falling, and went and looked down at the outlined shapes beneath the shroud.

Recklow had gone to the telephone to summon his own men and an ambulance. Now, turning toward Tressa from his chair:

“God knows what we’d do without you, Mrs. Cleves. I believe this accounts for all the Yezidees except Sanang.”

“Excepting Prince Sanang,” she said drearily. Then she went slowly to where her husband lay in his armchair, and sank down on the floor, and laid her cheek across his feet.

XVII

THE SLAYER OF SOULS

In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.

And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.

Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.

But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.

Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.

And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.

But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.

Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.

In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.

But they never found Sanang Noïane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation—only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death—civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.

When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.

And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by God, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.

Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England—a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier. Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.

So,—their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow’s emergency call.

And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamer Nan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.

The third man who came to New York at Recklow’s summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.

His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.

Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.

The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.

She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:

“I am well, Victor,” she said in a low voice. “Why are you troubled?”

“I can’t bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more.”

“Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?” she asked calmly.

He remained silent.

So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber—husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss—two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth—yet utterly separated body and soul from each other—two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.

Tressa spoke first: “I must go. That was our bargain.”

The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.

“Bargain or no bargain,” he said, “I don’t want you to go because I’m afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one…. And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it.”

“And if I die?” she said in a low voice.

What answer she awaited—perhaps hoped for—was not the one he made. He said: “If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you.”

“That would not be true. It is you who have saved me.”

“I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself—if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself—if it is true you needed redemption—which I never believed——”

“Oh,” she sighed swiftly, “Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body—followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth—caught it there all alone—and—slew it!”

His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.

Presently he recovered his voice: “You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls,” he said, “but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!

“I suppose I—I know what you mean—having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies—but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you——”

“I—I fought him—soul battling against soul——” she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. “I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength—fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul—but there was no escape!—no escape,” she wailed. “For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik’s laughter—the dissonant mirth of hell——”

She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.

“There never has been,” she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her—“there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth—dared seek yours…. God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons…. My soul is ashamed…. And very lonely … very lonely … but no fit companion—for yours——”

Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.

“So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it,” he said.

She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her—closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.

Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his—her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze—felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband’s spirit in its white embrace—clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.

Far—far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers—heard her lips pronounce The Name—“Ata—Ata! Allahou——”

Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband’s face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.

Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.

“Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me…. When?… To-day?… Very well…. Yes, we’ll come at once…. Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes…. All right. Good-bye.”

He took his wife into his arms again.

“Dearest of all in the world,” he said, “Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! I can’t take you there!”

Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.

“I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang,” she said quietly. “And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik.”

“Must you do this thing, Tressa?”

“Yes, I must do it.”

“But—if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?”

“I know how.”

“Have you the strength?”

“Yes—the bodily and the spiritual. Don’t you know that I am already part of you?”

“We shall be nearer still,” he murmured.

She flushed but met his gaze.

“Yes…. We shall be but one being…. Utterly…. For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.

“I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!”

“No longer afraid to slay him?” he asked quietly.

A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.

“Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!” she said, in a hard, sweet voice. “It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more.”

She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.

From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.

Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:

“There is no god but God,” she whispered—“the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.

“For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.

“And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.

“And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.

“Thus it has been written.”

Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.

Her maid opened the door. “Hasten with my lord’s luggage!” she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.

“You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!”

She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.

“Horses for the lord of the Yiort!” she cried, laughingly. “Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!”

He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.

Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.

The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.

“Keuke Mongol—Heavenly Azure,” he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, “do you know how I have loved you—always—always?”

“No, I did not know that,” she said.

“Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you.”

“That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading…. Unglove your hand.”

She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.

“Aie,” she sighed, “you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us.”

“Heavenly Azure—my darling!”

“Oh-h,” she sighed, “your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions—may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!… Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?”

“Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure.”

“Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord.”

“Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul.”

“We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid.”

The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.

But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.

The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.

“It is in God’s hands, Heart of the World,” she said in a low voice. “We are one, thou and I,—or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul.”

“No…. But the danger—to your life——”

“I fear no Yezidee.”

“The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless.”

“Yes…. But I want you near me.”

“Do you imagine I’d leave you for a second? Good God,” he added in a strangled voice, “isn’t there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands——?”

“You must leave him to me, Victor.”

“And you believe you can slay him? Do you?”

She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

“My husband,” she said at last, “what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.

“For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds—planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth—a planet wrapped in darkness—a black star…. And upon it Erlik dwells…. And it is peopled by demons…. And from it comes sickness and evil——”

She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.

“From this black planet comes all evil upon earth,” she resumed in a hushed voice. “For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet,—all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals—all—all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik’s World. And—it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness—out across the gulf—drive his soul forth—hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.

“So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls…. May God remember him in hell.”

•      •      •      •      •      •

Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.

Recklow was awaiting them. He took Tressa’s hands in his and gazed earnestly into her face.

“Have you come to show us how to conclude this murderous business?” he asked grimly.

“I shall try,” she said calmly. “Where have you cornered Sanang?”

“Could you and Victor come at once?”

“Yes.” She turned and looked at her husband, who had become quite pale.

Recklow saw the look they exchanged. There could be no misunderstanding what had happened to these two. Their tragedy had ended. They were united at last. He understood it instantly,—realised how terrible was this new and tragic situation for them both.

Yet, he knew also that the salvation of civilisation itself now depended upon this girl. She must face Sanang. There was nothing else possible.

“The streets are choked with snow,” he said, “but I have a coupé and two strong horses waiting.”

He nodded to one of his men standing near. Cleves gave him the hand luggage and checks.

“All right,” he said in a low voice to Recklow; and passed one arm through Tressa’s.

•      •      •      •      •      •

The coupé was waiting on Forty-second Street, guarded by a policeman. When they had entered and were seated, two mounted policemen rode ahead of the lurching vehicle, picking a way amid the monstrous snow-drifts, and headed for the East River.

“We’ve got him somewhere in a wretched row of empty houses not far from East River Park. I’m taking you there. I’ve drawn a cordon of my men around the entire block. He can’t get away. But I dared take no chances with this Yezidee sorcerer—dared not let one of my men go in to look for him—go anywhere near him,—until I could lay the situation before you, Mrs. Cleves.”

“Yes,” she said calmly, “it was the only way, Mr. Recklow. There would have been no use shooting him—no use taking him prisoner. A prisoner, he remains as deadly as ever; dead, his mind still lives and breeds evil. You are quite right; it is for me to deal with Sanang.”

Recklow shuddered in spite of himself. “Can you tear his claws from the vitals of the world, and free the sick brains of a million people from the slavery of this monster’s mind?”

The girl said seriously:

“Even Satan was stoned. It is so written. And was cast out. And dwells forever and ever in Abaddon. No star lights that Pit. None lights the Black Planet, Yrimid. It is where evil dwells. And there Sanang Noïane belongs.”

And now, beyond the dirty edges of the snow-smothered city, under an icy mist they caught sight of the river where ships lay blockaded by frozen floes.

Gulls circled over it; ghostly factory chimneys on the further shore loomed up gigantic, ranged like minarets.

The coupé, jolting along behind the mounted policemen, struggled up toward the sidewalk and stopped. The two horses stood steaming, knee deep in snow. Recklow sprang out; Tressa gave him one hand and stepped lithely to the sidewalk. Then Cleves got out and came and took hold of his wife’s arm again.

“Well,” he said harshly to Recklow, “where is this damned Yezidee hidden?”

Recklow pointed in silence, but he and Tressa had already lifted their gaze to the stark, shabby row of abandoned three-story houses where every dirty blind was closed.

“They’re to be demolished and model tenements built,” he said briefly.

A man muffled in a fur overcoat came up and took Tressa’s hand and kissed it.

She smiled palely at Benton, spoke of Yulun, wished him happiness. While she was yet speaking Selden approached and bent over her gloved hand. She spoke to him very sweetly of Sansa, expressing pleasure at the prospect of seeing her again in the body.

“The Seldens and ourselves have adjoining apartments at the Ritz,” said Benton. “We have reserved a third suite for you and Victor.”

She inclined her lovely head, gravely, then turned to Recklow, saying that she was ready.

“It makes no difference which front door I unlock,” he said. “All these tenements are connected by human rat-holes and hidden runways leading from one house to another…. How many men do you want?”

“I want you four men,—nobody else.”

Recklow led the way up a snow-covered stoop, drew a key from his pocket, fitted it, and pulled open the door.

A musty chill struck their faces as they entered the darkened and empty hallway. Involuntarily every man drew his pistol.

“I must ask you to do exactly what I tell you to do,” she said calmly.

“Certainly,” said Recklow, caressing his white moustache and striving to pierce the gloom with his keen eyes.

Then Tressa took her husband’s hand. “Come,” she said. They mounted the stairway together; and the three others followed with pistols lifted.

There was a vague grey light on the second floor; the broken rear shutters let it in.

As though she seemed to know her way, the girl led them forward, opened a door in the wall, and disclosed a bare, dusty room in the next house.

Through this she stepped; the others crept after her with weapons ready. She opened a second door, turned to the four men.

“Wait here for me. Come only when I call,” she whispered.

“For God’s sake take me with you,” burst out Cleves.

“In God’s name stay where you are till you hear me call your name!” she said almost breathlessly.

Then, suddenly she turned, swiftly retracing her steps; and they saw her pass through the first door and disappear into the first house they had entered.

A terrible silence fell among them. The sound of her steps on the bare boards had died away. There was not a sound in the chilly dusk.

Minute after minute dragged by. One by one the men peered fearfully at Cleves. His visage was ghastly and they could see his pistol-hand trembling.

Twice Recklow looked at his wrist watch. The third time he said, unsteadily: “She has been gone three-quarters of an hour.”

Then, far away, they heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Nearer and nearer came the footsteps. Every pistol was levelled at the first door as a man’s bulky form darkened it.

“It’s one of my men,” said Recklow in a voice like a low groan. “Where on earth is Mrs. Cleves?”

“I came to tell you,” said the agent, “Mrs. Cleves came out of the first house nearly an hour ago. She got into the coupé and told the driver to go to the Ritz.”

“What!” gasped Recklow.

“She’s gone to the Ritz,” repeated the agent. “No one else has come out. And I began to worry—hearing nothing of you, Mr. Recklow. So I stepped in to see——”

“You say that Mrs. Cleves went out of the house we entered, got into the coupé, and told the driver to go to the Ritz?” demanded Cleves, astounded.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is that coupé? Did it return?”

“It had not returned when I came in here.”

“Go back and look for it. Look in the other street,” said Recklow sharply.

The agent hurried away over the creaking boards. The four men gazed at one another.

“The thing to do is to obey her and stay where we are,” said Recklow grimly. “Who knows what peril we may cause her if we move from——”

His words froze on his lips as Tressa’s voice rang out from the darkness beyond the door they were guarding:

“Victor I I—I need you! Come to me, my husband!”

As Cleves sprang through the door into the darkness beyond, Benton smashed a window sash with all the force of his shoulder, and, reaching out through the shattered glass, tore the rotting blinds from their hinges, letting in a flood of sickly light.

Against the bare wall stood Tressa, both arms extended, her hands flat against the plaster, and each hand transfixed and pinned to the wall by a knife.

A white sheet lay at her feet. On it rested a third knife. And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Instantly every man fired at him and the bullets whipped the plaster to a smoke behind him, but the slender, dark skinned young man stood motionless, looking at them out of brilliant eyes that slanted a trifle.

Again the racket of the fusillade swept him and filled the room with plaster dust.

Cleves, frantic with horror, laid hold of the knives that pinned his wife’s hands to the wall, and dragged them out.

But there was no blood, no wound to be seen on her soft palms. She took the murderous looking blades from him, threw one terrible look at Sanang, kicked the shroud across the floor toward him, and flung both knives upon it.

The place was still dim with plaster dust and pistol fumes as she stepped forward through the acrid mist, motioning the four men aside.

“Sanang!” she cried in a clear voice, “may God remember you in hell, for my feet have spurned your shroud, and your knives, which could not scar my palms, shall never pierce my heart! Look out for yourself, Prince Sanang!”

“Tokhta!” he said, calmly. “My soul be ransom for yours!”

“That is a lie! My soul is already ransomed! My mind is the more powerful. It has already halted yours. It is conquering yours. It is seizing your mind and enslaving it. It is mastering your will, Sanang! Your mind bends before mine. You know it! You know it is bending. You feel it is breaking down!”

Sanang’s eyes began to glitter but his pale brown face had grown almost white.

“I slew you once—in the Wood of the White Moth,” he said huskily. “There is no resurrection from such a death, little Heavenly Azure. Look upon me! My soul and yours are one!”

“You are looking upon my soul,” she said.

“A lie! You are in your body!”

The girl laughed. “My body lies asleep in the Ritz upon my husband’s bed,” she said. “My body is his, my mind belongs to him, my soul is already one with his. Do you not know it, dog of a Yezidee? Look upon me, Sanang Noïane! Look upon my unwounded hands! My shroud lies at your feet. And there lie the knives that could not pierce my heart! I am thrice clean! Listen to my words, Sanang! There is no other god but God!”

The young man’s visage grew pasty and loose and horrible; his lips became flaccid like dewlaps; but out of these sagging folds of livid skin his voice burst whistling, screaming, as though wrenched from his very belly:

“May Erlik strangle you! May you rot where you stand! May your face become a writhing mass of maggots and your body a corruption of living worms!

“For what you are doing to me this day may every demon in hell torment you!

“Have a care what you are about!” he screeched. “You are slaying my mind, you sorceress! You have seized my mind and are crushing it! You are putting out its light, you Yezidee witch!—you are quenching the last spark—of reason—in—me——”

“Sanang!”

His knife fell clattering to the floor. But he stood stock still, his hands clutching his head—stood motionless, while scream on scream tore through the loose and gaping lips, blowing them into ghastly, distorted folds.

“Sanang Noïane!” she cried in her clear voice, “the Eight Towers are darkened! The Rampart of Gog and Magog is fallen! On Mount Alamout nothing is living. The minds of mankind are free again!”

She stepped forward, slowly, and stood near him chanting in a low voice the Prayers for the Dead She bent down and unrolled the shroud, laid it on his shoulders and drew it up and across his face, covering his dying eyes, and swathed him so, slowly, from head to foot.

Then she gathered up the three knives, cast them upward into the air. They did not fall again. They disappeared. And all the while, under her breath, the girl was chanting the Prayers for the Dead as she moved silently about her business.

Shrouded to the forehead in its white cerements, the muffled figure of Sanang stood upright, motionless as a swathed and frozen corpse.

Outside, the daylight had become greyer. It had begun to snow again, and a few flakes blew in through the shattered windows and clung to the winding sheet of Sanang.

And now Tressa drew close to the shrouded shape and stood before it, gazing intently upon the outlined features of the last of the Yezidees.

“Sanang,” she said very softly, “I hear your soul bidding your body farewell. Tokhta!”

Then, under the strained gaze of the four men gathered there, the shroud fell to the floor in a loose heap of white folds. There was nobody under it; no trace of Sanang. The human shape of the Yezidee had disappeared; but a greyish mist had filled the room, wavering up like smoke from the shroud, and, like smoke, blowing in a long streamer toward the window where the draught drew it out through the falling snow and scattered the last shred of it against the greying sky.

In the room the mist thinned swiftly; the four men could now see one another. But Tressa was no longer in the room. And in place of the white shroud a piece of filthy tattered carpet lay on the floor. And a dead rat, flattened out, dry and dusty, lay upon it.

“For God’s sake,” whispered Recklow hoarsely, “let us get out of this!”

Cleves, his pistol clutched convulsively, stared at him in terror. But Recklow took him by the arm and drew him away, muttering that Tressa was waiting for him, and might be ill, and that there was nothing further to expect in this ghastly spot.

•      •      •      •      •      •

They went with Cleves to the Ritz. At the desk the clerk said that Mrs. Cleves had the keys and was in her apartment.

The three men entered the corridor with him; watched him try the door; saw him open it; lingered a moment after it had closed; heard the key turn.

At the sound of the door closing the maid came.

“Madame is asleep in her room,” she whispered.

“When did she come in?”

“More than two hours ago, sir. I have drawn her bath, but when I opened the door a few moments ago, Madame was still asleep.”

He nodded; he was trembling when he put off his overcoat and dropped hat and gloves on the carpet.

From the little rose and ivory reception room he could see the closed door of his wife’s chamber. And for a while he stood staring at it.

Then, slowly, he crossed this room, opened the door; entered.

In her bedroom the tinted twilight was like ashes of roses. He went to the bed and looked down at her shadowy face; gazed intently; listened; then, in sudden terror, bent and laid his hand on her heart. It was beating as tranquilly as a child’s; but as she stirred, turned her head, and unclosed her eyes, under his hand her heart leaped like a wild thing caught unawares and the snowy skin glowed with an exquisite and deepening tint as she lifted her arms and clasped them around her husband’s neck, drawing his quivering face against her own.

THE END

APPENDIX

H. P. LOVECRAFT
COMMENTS ON ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by du Maurier’s Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is “The Yellow Sign”, in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave worm’s. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of ’is fingers come off in me ’and.” An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head like thick oily smoke from a fat rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this: “Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up in the street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur—from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seems to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men’s minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor—two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, “That man must have been dead for months.”

It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.

From “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927)

INDEX OF TITLES

** = general fiction
‡‡ = generic poetry

A – L

Black Water, The
** Boy’s Sister, The
Bridal Pair, The
Carpet (The) of Belshazzar
Case (The) of Mr. Helmer

Cassilda’s Song
[POEM]

** Crime, The

Death Trail, A
CH. 14, THE SLAYER OF SOULS

Demoiselle d’Ys, The

Eggs (The) of the Silver Moon

‡‡ Envoi
[POEM]

** Ex Curia
** Ghost (The) of Chance
** Golden Pool, The

Grey Magic
CH. 3-4, THE SLAYER OF SOULS

Harbor-Master, The
CH. 1-5, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

Immortal, The

In Quest of the Dingue
CH 5-8, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

In Search of the Mammoth
[AKA “ONE OVER”]

In Search of the Unknown
[BOOK TITLE]

In The Court of the Dragon

** In The Name of the Most High

Is the Ux Extinct?
CH. 9-12, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

Key (The) to Grief

King (The) in Yellow
[BOOK TITLE]

King’s Cradle Song, The
[POEM]

Ladies (The) of the Lake

Little Gray Messenger
[POEM]

M – Z

Maker (The) of Moons
[BOOK TITLE]

Maker (The) of Moons
Man (The) at the Next Table
Mask, The
Matter (A) of Interest
Messenger, The

Mystery (The) of Choice
[BOOK TITLE]

One Over
[AKA “IN SEARCH OF THE MAMMOTH”]

Out of the Depths
Passeur
Pleasant Evening, A

Police!!!
[BOOK TITLE]

** Pompe Funèbre

‡‡ Prophets’ Paradise, The
[PROSE POEMS]

** Purple Emperor, The

Pythagoreans, The
CH. 22-25, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

SEE ALSO:  THE MAN AT THE NEXT TABLE
Repairer (The) of Reputations
** Rue Barrée

Samaris
CH. 17-20, THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS

Seal (The) of Solomon Cipher
CH. 7-10, THE TRACER OF LOST PERSONS

Sign (The) of Venus

Silent Land, The

Slayer (The) of Souls
[BOOK TITLE: NOVEL]

** Street (The) of Our Lady of the Fields
** Street (The) of the First Shell
Street (The) of the Four Winds
Swastika, The

Thermosaurus, The
CH. 17-20, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN
SEE ALSO:  A MATTER OF INTEREST

Third Eye, The

Tracer (The) of Lost Persons
[BOOK TITLE]

** Tree (The) of Dreams

Tree (The) of Heaven
[BOOK TITLE]

‡‡ Unnamed
[POEM]
(INTRODUCTION: THE MYSTERY OF CHOICE)

‡‡ Unnamed
[POEM]
(FOREWORD: POLICE!!!)

Un Peu d’Amour

What Is the Sphyx?
CH. 13-17, IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN

White Shadow, The

Yellow Sign, The

ABOUT THIS EBOOK

STRANGE VISIONS

AN OMNIBUS OF WEIRD TALES
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
(1865–1933)

With comments by
H. P. Lovecraft
(1890–1937)
(SEE APPENDIX)

The shadows lengthen …… In Carcosa.

Ranging from horror and the macabre to eerie eldritch fantasy to comic expeditions into the unbelievable, expertly woven with threads of poetically beautiful description, the supernatural writings of Robert W. Chambers will pique your imagination.

This omnibus presents all eight books of Chambers’ weird fiction. Included are:
the collections The King in Yellow (his masterpiece and one of the defining works of American horror), The Maker of Moons, The Mystery of Choice, The Tree of Heaven, and Police!!!; the humorous episodic “novels” In Search of the Unknown and The Tracer of Lost Persons; and his final venture into the supernatural, the novel The Slayer of Souls.

* * * *

Robert William Chambers (May 26, 1865 – December 16, 1933) was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories entitled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. Primarily due to that book, Chambers is credited as a major influence on many fantasy and horror writers, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Karl Edward Wagner, Lin Carter, James Blish, and others. More recently, the HBO television series True Detective drew upon the mythology of The King in Yellow.

Although he wrote a number of fantastic stories early in his career, he turned entirely to writing historical, adventure, and romance novels. Author of nearly 100 books, Chambers was one of the most successful and popular writers of his period, his later novels selling well and a handful achieving best-seller status. Some of his novels were adapted for film.

* * * *

[…] This wide scattering of his fantastic writing shows that Chambers never considered himself a writer of weird fiction in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce (although he was influenced by both), but seems to have written such work whenever the mood struck him.
[…] The wide range of Chambers’s weird work—from clutching horror to ethereal beauty—indicates that he was a master of tone, atmosphere, and prose rhythm; and it is these qualities that will allow his work to last well into the new millennium.
—S. T. Joshi, Introduction, The King in Yellow: The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading (2014)

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, August 2018, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The contents of this book were first published 1895 ~ 1920. Text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+80”or less, and in the USA.

Click here for editing notes.

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EDITING NOTES

MAIN ToC     ABOUT

This is my own compilation. Texts were obtained from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. PDF scans were obtained from the Internet Archive at www.archive.org:
kinginyellow00chamrich;
makerofmoons00chamrich;
mysteryofchoice00chamrich;
treeofheavan00chamrich;
insearchofunknow00cham;
policerobert00chamrich;
tracerpersons00chamrich;
slayerofsouls00chamiala.

OCR and typesetting errors were silently corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted. Added citations to some epigraphs, and some translations (some of which are extrapolated from various online translators).

Individual Tables of Contents and alphabetical Titles Index provide access to story titles; story titles are cross-linked to ToC on individual book titlepages. Embedded font “Typewriter” by Roger White used for special inserts.

Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.