.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 37412
   :PG.Title: The Empty Sack
   :PG.Released: 2011-09-12
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Darleen Dove
   :PG.Producer: Mary Meehan
   :PG.Producer: the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
   :PG.Credits:
   :DC.Creator: Basil King
   :MARCREL.ill:
   :DC.Title: The Empty Sack
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1921
   :coverpage: images/cover.jpg

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   :class: small-caps




==============
THE EMPTY SACK
==============

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   :align: center

.. class:: center x-large

  | THE EMPTY SACK
  | BY BASIL KING

.. class:: center large

  | AUTHOR OF THE INNER SHRINE, THE WILD OLIVE, :small-caps:`Etc.`

  | ILLUSTRATED

.. image:: images/tpdeco.jpg
   :align: center

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   | NEW YORK
   | GROSSET & DUNLAP
   | PUBLISHERS

   | Made in the United States of America

   | :small-caps:`The Empty Sack`

   | Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers
   | Printed in the United States of America

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.. figure:: images/illus1.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: DEAR OLD MA! STOP *CRYING*, MA!

   DEAR OLD MA! STOP *CRYING*, MA!

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.. contents:: CONTENTS
   :depth: 1
   :backlinks: entry

----

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    | THE EMPTY SACK


CHAPTER I
=========


"Mr. Collingham will see you in his
office before you go."

Having thus become the Voice of Fate, Miss
Ruddick, shirt-waisted and daintily shod, slipped
away between the pens where clerks were preening
themselves before leaving their desks for the
day.

The old man to whom she had spoken raised
his head in the mild surprise of an ox disturbed
while grazing. He, too, was leaving his desk for
the day, arranging his work with the tidy care
of one for whom pens, ink, and ledgers were the
vital things of life. Finishing his task, his hands
trembled. His smile trembled, too, when a
young man in a neighboring pen called out in
tones which mingled sarcasm with encouragement:

"Good luck, old top! Goin' to get your raise
at last!"

It was what he repeated to himself as he
shuffled after Miss Ruddick. He was obliged to
repeat it in order to steady his step. He was
obliged to steady his step because some fifteen
or twenty pairs of eyes from all the pens in the
office were following him as he went along. It
was the last bit of pride in the man marching
up to face a firing squad.

He had reached the glass door on which the
word "Exit" could be traced in reversed letters,
when a breezy young fellow of twenty startled
him by a sudden clap on the shoulder. The boy
had not come from a pen, but from the more
distant portion of the bank where a line of
tellers' cages faced the public.

"Hello, dad! Tell ma I'll be home for supper.
Off now for a plunge at the gym."

The boy passed on, leaving behind a vision of
gleaming teeth and the echo of gay tones.

Opening a glass door and entering a passageway,
the old man stumbled along it till another
door, standing open, showed Miss Ruddick,
beside her typewriter, assorting her papers before
going home. Miss Ruddick was a competent
woman of thirty-five. She was in her present
position of stenographer-secretary to the head
of the banking house because Mr. Bickley, the
efficiency expert, for whose opinion Mr. Collingham
had a kind of reverence, had selected
her for the job. Miss Ruddick cultivated her
efficiency as another woman cultivates her voice
or another her gift for dancing. Throwing off
the weaknesses that spring from affection and
softness of heart, she had steeled and oiled herself
into a swiftly working, surely judging, and
wholly impersonal business automaton. Ten
years ago she would have felt sorry for a man in
Josiah Follett's predicament. She would have
felt sorry for him now had she not learned to her
cost that sympathy diminished the accuracy of
her work. Now she could turn him off as easily
as an executioner the man condemned to death.

As a matter of fact, she knew that ten minutes
previously the efficiency expert had been closeted
with Mr. Collingham, dealing with this very case.
With her own ears she had heard Mr. Bickley
say:

"You will do as you think best, Mr. Collingham.
Only, I can't help reminding you that
once you admit any principle but that of supply
and demand, business methods are at an end."

Miss Ruddick knew Mr. Collingham's inner
struggle because she had been through it herself;
but she knew, too, that to Mr. Collingham the
efficiency expert was much what his physician
is to a king. His advice may be distasteful, but
it is a command. The most merciful thing now
was rapidity of action, as with the application
of the guillotine. It was mercy, therefore, to
throw open instantly the door of Mr. Collingham's
office, so that Josiah was forced to enter.

He stood meekly, feeling, doubtless, as the
psalmist felt when all the ends of the world had
come upon him. Confusedly he was saying to
himself that all the threads of his laborious life,
from the time when, as a boy in Canada, he had
begun to earn his living at sixteen, till now, when
he was sixty-three, had been drawn together
at just this point, where he was either to get his
raise or else——

The suspense was terrible. As the August
Presence into which he had been ushered was
engaged in examining the contents of a lower
drawer of the flat-topped desk at which It was
seated, It was only partly visible. All Josiah
could see was the shoulder of a portly form, the
edge of a pear-shaped pearl in a plum-colored
tie, and a temple of grizzled hair. The clerk
moved forward, coming to a halt midway between
the door and the desk till the Presence
should recognize his approach by raising Its head.

The Presence didn't quite raise Its head. It
merely glanced upward in a casual, sidelong way,
continuing the inspection of the drawer.

"Well, Follett, I suppose you know what I've
got to say?"

Follett betrayed the fact that he did know.

"Is it the same as you said two years ago,
sir?"

Thus challenged, the Presence lifted itself,
becoming to the full Bradley Collingham, the
distinguished banker, philanthropist, and American
citizen, so widely and favorably known for
his sympathetic personality. The essence of
these traits rang in the appealing quality of his
tone.

"What do you think, Follett? I told you
then that you were not earning your salary.
You haven't been earning it since. What can
I do?"

"I could work harder, sir. I could stay overtime,
when none of the young fellows want to."

"That wouldn't do any good, Follett. It isn't
the way we do business."

"I've been five years with you, sir, and all
my life between one banking house and another,
in this country and Canada. In my humble
way I've helped to build the banking business
up."

"And you've been paid, haven't you? I really
don't see that you've anything to complain of."

There was no severity in this response. It
was made only because the necessities of the case
required it, as Follett had the justice to perceive.

"I'm not complaining, sir. I only don't see
how I'm going to live."

The voice already distressed became more so.

"But that isn't my affair, is it, now? I'm
running a business, not a charitable institution.
It isn't as if you'd been with us twenty or thirty
years. You've shifted about a good deal in
your time——"

"I've had to better myself, sir—with a family."

"Quite so. And once you admit any principle
but that of supply and demand business methods
are at an end. Don't think that this isn't as
hard for me as it is for you, Follett, but——"

"If it was as hard for you as it is for me, sir,
you'd——"

But, the possibilities here being dangerous, the
banker was forced to cut in:

"Besides, you'll get another job. Stairs will
write you any kind of recommendation you ask
for."

"Recommendations won't do me any good, sir,
once I'm fired for old age. That's a worse brand
on you than coming out of jail."

The discussion growing painful, the banker
rose to put an end to it. Even so, he had something
still to say to justify himself.

"It isn't as if I hadn't warned you of this,
Follett. You've had two years in which"—it
was hard to find the right phrase—"in which to
provide for your future."

The clerk was unable to repress a dim, faraway
smile.

"Two years in which to provide for my future—on
forty-five a week! And me with five
mouths to feed, to say nothing of Teddy, who
pays his board!"

The banker found an opening.

"I made a place for him—didn't I, now?—as
soon as he was released from the navy. He
ought to be able to help you."

"He does help, sir, as far as a young fellow
can on eighteen a week with his own expenses to
take care of. But I've two little girls still at
school, and another, my eldest—"

A hint of embarrassment emphasized the
banker's words as he began moving forward to
show his visitor to the door.

"I understand that she's engaged as an artist's
model. That, too, ought to bring you in something."

"I suppose Mr. Robert told you that, sir."

This was inadvertent on Follett's part, and a
mistake. Any other distinguished man would
have stiffened at the use of the name of a member
of his family in a connection like the present one.
Bradley Collingham was admirably temperate
in saying:

"I don't talk of such matters with my son. I
merely understood that your eldest girl was
earning something—"

"She poses six hours a week for Mr. Hubert
Wray, at a dollar an hour."

"She could probably get more engagements.
I hear—I forget who told me—that she's the
type these artist people like to put into their
pictures."

Finding himself obliged to keep step with his
employer, Follett felt as if he was walking to his
soul's dead-march. Only the force of the conventions
in which everybody lives enabled him to
go on making conversation.

"We don't much like the occupation for a
daughter of ours, sir; and, besides, there's lots
who think that being an artist's model isn't
respectable."

"Still, if she can earn good money at it—"

To Collingham's relief, they were at the door,
which he opened significantly and without more
words. Follett looked into the outer world as
represented by Miss Ruddick's office as into an
abyss. For the minute it seemed too awful a
void to step into. When his watery blue eyes
again sought Collingham's face, it was with the
dumb question, "Must I?" which the banker
himself could only meet with Mr. Bickley's
manfulness.

He, too, spoke only with his eyes: "You must,
my poor Follett. There's no help for it. You
and I are both caught up into a vast machine.
I can't act otherwise than as I'm doing, and I
know you don't expect it."

Thus Follett stepped over the threshold and
the door closed behind him. So short a time had
passed since he had gone the other way that Miss
Ruddick was still beside her desk, putting away
her papers. Follett didn't look at her, but she
looked at him, finding herself compelled to hark
back to Mr. Bickley's axioms to check the tears
she couldn't allow to rise.




CHAPTER II
==========


Meanwhile there was that going on
which would have disturbed both these
elderly men had they known anything about it.

Jennie Follett, in a Greek peplum of white-cotton
cloth, her amber-colored hair drawn into
a loose Greek knot, was on her knees before a
plaster cast of Aphrodite, to which she was
holding up a garland of tissue-paper flowers.

While there was nothing alarming in this
pagan act, the freedom with which two young
men laid hands on her little person threw out
hints of impropriety.

The pretexts were obvious, and, in the case of
one of the young men, were backed by what
might have been called professional necessity.
One bare arm needed to be raised, the other to
be lowered. One sandaled foot was too visible
beneath the edge of the peplum, the other not
visible enough. Adjustments called for readjustments,
and readjustments for revisions of
the scheme. What one young man approved of
the other disallowed, to a running accompaniment
of Miss Follett's laughter.

"Do go away," she implored, when Mr. Bob
Collingham, with one hand beneath her elbow
and the other at her finger-tips, tilted her arm
at what seemed to him its loveliest angle.

"Clear out, Bob," the artist seconded, in half-vexed
good humor. "We'll never get the pose
with you here."

"You'd never get anything if I went away,
because Miss Follett wouldn't work. Would
you, Miss Follett?"

The artist having gone in search of something
at the far end of the studio, Miss Follett replied
to Mr. Collingham alone.

"I don't know what I'd do if you went away;
but if you stay I shall go frantic. If you touch
me again I shall get up."

"I'm not touching you again," he said, going
on to bend her left arm ever so slightly, "because
this is the same old time all along. The picture
is all I care about."

"But it's Mr. Wray's picture. It isn't yours."

"It will be if I buy it. I said I would if I
liked it, and I sha'n't like it unless I get it the
way I want it."

"You know you don't mean to buy it."

"I don't mean to let anybody else buy it; you
can lay down your life on that."

There was so much earnestness in this declaration
that Miss Follett laughed again. It was an
easy, silvery laugh, pleasant to the ear, and not
out of keeping with the medley of beautiful
things round her.

"Jennie's value in a studio is more than that
of a model," Wray had recently confided to his
friend, Bob Collingham. "It's as if she extracted
the beauty from every bit of tapestry or bronze
and turned it into animate life."

"By doing nothing or standing still," Collingham
had added, "she can pin your eyes on
her as other girls can't by frisking about. And
when she moves—"

An exclamation from Wray conveyed the fact
that Jennie's motion was beyond what either of
these young experts in womanhood could possibly
put into words.

But that Jennie knew where to draw a certain
kind of line became evident when, either by
inadvertence or design, the back of Bob Collingham's
hand rubbed along her cheek. With a
smile at once kindly and cold she put away his
arm and rose. In the few yards she placed between
them before she turned again, still with her
kind, cold smile, there was rebuke without
offense.

Being fair, the young man colored easily.
When he colored, the three inches of scar across
his temple which he had brought home from the
war became a streak of red. It was one of the
reasons why Jennie, who was sensitive to the
physical, didn't like to look at him. Not to
look at him, she pretended to arrange the folds
of her peplum, which kept her gaze downward.

But had she looked, she would have seen that
he was hurt. His face was of the honest, sympathetic
cast that quickly reflects the wounding
of the feelings. If men had prototypes in dogs,
Bob Collingham's would have been the mastiff
or the St. Bernard—big, strong, devoted, slow
to wrath, and with an almost comic humiliation
at sound of a harsh word. Though there was no
harsh word in Jennie's case, Bob was sure he
detected a harsh thought. It hurt him the more
for the reason that she was a model, while he
had advantages of social consideration. Little
as he would have been discourteous to a girl of
his own station, he would have thought it unworthy
of a cad to profit by Jennie's helplessness
in a place like a studio.

"I hope you didn't think I was trying to be
fresh."

Now that she felt herself secured by distance,
she laughed again.

"I didn't think anything at all. I just—just
don't like people touching me."

"Not any people?"

"Not any I need speak about to you."

"Why me?"

"Because I hardly know you."

"You could know me better if you wanted to."

"Oh, I could know lots of people better if I
wanted to."

"And you don't want to—for what reason?"

"It isn't always a reason. Sometimes it's just
an instinct."

"And which is it in my case?"

"In your case, it doesn't have to be discussed.
I shouldn't know you, anyhow. We're like
creatures in different—what do they call it?—not spheres—elements, isn't it?—We're like
creatures in different elements—a bird and a
fish—that don't get a point of contact."

"You mayn't *see* the points of contact—"

"And if I don't see them they're not there."
She turned toward Wray, who was coming
back in their direction, addressing him in the
idiom she heard among young native-born
Americans, and which accorded best with her
position in the studio. "Oh, Mr. Wray, could
you let me off posing any more to-day? This
friend guy of yours has got me all on springs."

"Clear out, friend guy. Can't you see you're
in the way?"

She continued to take the tone she was trying
to make second nature, since it was not first.

"That's something he wouldn't notice if a
car was running over him. But please let me
go. There's a quarter of an hour left on to-day,
but I'll make it up some other time."

She moved down the studio with as much
seeming unconcern as if she didn't know that
two pairs of eyes were following her. Picking
her way between old English chairs with canvases
stacked against their legs, past dusty
brocade hangings, and beneath an occasional
plaster cast lifted on a pedestal, she went out
at the model's exit without a glance behind her.

Bob spoke only when she had disappeared.

"Listen, Hubert. I'm going to marry that
girl."

Wray stepped back to the front of the easel,
flicking in a touch or two on the rough sketch of
the Greek girl kneeling before Aphrodite.

"I was afraid you were getting some such bug
in your head."

Bob limped to a table on which he had thrown
his hat and the stick that helped his lameness.

People at Marillo Park, where the Collinghams
lived for most of the year, said that, with the
wounds he had got while in the French army in
the early days of the war, he had brought back
with him a real enhancement of manhood.
Having come through Groton and Harvard little
better than an uncouth boy, his experience in
France had shaped his outlook on life into something
like a purpose. It was not very clear as
yet, or sharply defined; but he knew that certain
preliminary conditions must be met before
he could settle down. One of these had to do
with Miss Jennie Follett; and what Hubert
called "a bug in his head" was, in his own mind,
at least, as vital to his development as his braving
his family in going to the war.

That had been in the famous year when the
American nation was trying to be "neutral in
thought." "I'm not neutral in thought," Bob,
who had only that summer left Harvard, had
declared to his father. "I'm not neutral in any
way. Give me my ticket over, dad, and I'll do
the rest myself."

He got his ticket over, and fifteen months
later, bandaged and crippled, a ticket back.
On the return voyage he had as his companion
a young American stretcher-man who had helped
to carry him off the battlefield, and who, a few
weeks later, nervously shattered, had joined him
in the hospital. Wray, who, on the outbreak of
war, had been painting in Latoul's atelier, had
now got what he called "a sickener of Europe,"
and was glad to hang out his shingle in New York.
A New England man of Gallicized ways of
thinking, he had means enough to wait for
recognition, so long as he kept his expenses within
relatively narrow bounds.

With his soft hat plastered provisionally on the
back of his head, Bob leaned heavily on his stick.

"I've got to marry some one," he said, as if
in self-defense. "I'm that kind. I can't begin
fitting my jig saw together till I do it."

Wray kept on painting.

"Why don't you pick out a girl in your own
class? Lots of nice ones at Marillo."

"You don't marry girls just because they're
nice, old thing. You take the one who's the
other half of yourself."

"I don't see that you're the other half of Miss
Follett."

"Well, I am."

"Miss Follett herself doesn't think so."

"She'll think so, all right, when I show her
that she can't do without me."

"Some job!" Wray grunted, laconically.

"Sure it's some job; but the bigger the job
the more you're on your mettle. That's the
way we're made."

The artist continued to add small touches to
the shadows of the Aphrodite cast as he changed
his tactics.

"If you married Miss Follett, wouldn't your
family raise hell?"

"They'd raise hell at first, and put a can on it
afterward. Families always do."

"And what would Miss Follett feel—before
they'd put on the can?"

Bob limped uneasily toward the door.

"Life wouldn't be all slip-and-go-down for
her, of course; but that's what I should have to
make up to her."

"Oh, you'd make it up to her."

With his hand on the knob, Collingham turned
in mild indignation.

"Say, Hubert, what do you think I'm made of?
A girl I'm crazy about—"

"Oh, I only wondered how you were going to
do it."

"Well, wonder away." A steely glint came
into the deep-set, small gray eyes as he added,
"That's something I don't have to explain to you
beforehand, now do I?"

Left alone, the painter went on painting. As
it always does, the house of Art opened its door
to the troubles of the artist. Wray neither
turned his head as his friend went out nor muttered
a farewell. He merely laid on his strokes
with an emotional vigor which hardened the
surface of the plaster cast into marble. Neither
did he turn his head nor utter a greeting when he
became aware that Jennie, in her sport suit of
tobacco color set off with collar and cuffs of ruby
red, was moving toward him among the studio
properties. It was easier to work his desire to
look at her into this swift, sure wielding of the
brush.

In the spirit rather than with the eyes he
knew that she had paused within ten or twelve
feet of him, that her kind, soft, bantering glance
was resting on him as he worked, and that a
kind, soft, bantering smile was flickering about
her lips. With a deft force, he found the colors
and gave this expression to the mouth and eyes
of the kneeling girl. It was the work of a second—the
merest twist of the fingers.

"I just wanted to say," Jennie explained,
after waiting for him to see her, "that I'm sorry
to have been so horrid just now, and I'd like to
know when I'm to come again."

"You could marry Bob Collingham—if you
wanted to."

His efforts had become so passionately living
that he couldn't afford to look up at her now,
even had he wished to do so. He did not so wish,
because he knew, still in the spirit, how she
would take this announcement—without the
change of a muscle, without a change of any
kind beyond a flame in the amber depths of the
irises. It would be a tawny flame, with an indescribable
red in it, and he managed, on the
instant, to translate it into paint. The girl on
her knees was getting a soul as the lumpish white
of the plaster cast was taking on the gleam of
ancient, long-worshiped stone.

"And would you advise me to do that?"

The voice had the charm of the well-placed
mezzo, the enunciation a melodious precision.
Born in Halifax, where she had spent her first
twelve years, the English tradition of musical
speech, which in that old fortified town makes
its last tottering stand on the American continent,
had been part of her inheritance.

Still working at his highest pitch of tensity,
Wray considered his answer.

"I shouldn't advise you to do that—if I
thought about myself."

"Then why say anything about it?"

"Because I thought I ought to put you wise."

"What's the good of that, when I don't like
him?"

"Girls often marry men they don't like when
they have as much money as he'll have."

"Money's an object, of course; but when a
fellow—"

"He's not so bad. I like him. Most men
do."

"Most men wouldn't have to stand his pawing
them about. I like him, too—except for the
physical."

"Then you wouldn't marry him?"

"Not unless it was the only way not to starve
to death."

"But you'll marry some one."

"Probably; and, probably—so will you."

Her voice was as cool and unflurried as if the
words were tossed off without intention.

Both knew that an electric change had come
into the mental atmosphere. Of the two, the
girl was the less perturbed. Though beneath her
feet the floor seemed to heave like the deck of a
ship in a storm, she could stand in a jaunty
attitude, her hands in her ruby-red pockets, and
throw up at its sauciest angle her daintily
modeled chin.

With him it was different. He had two main
points to consider. In the first place, Bob Collingham
had just made an announcement to
which he, Wray, was obliged to give some
thought. He didn't need to give much to it,
because the conclusions were so obvious. Jennie
had hit the poor fellow in the eye, and, instead
of viewing the case in a common-sense, Gallicized
way, he was taking it with crazy American
solemnity. There was nothing to it. The
Collinghams would never stand for it. It would
be a favor to them, as well as to Bob himself, to
put the whole thing out of the question.

"So that settles that," he said to himself.

Because as he continued to reflect he worked
furiously, Jennie saw in him the being whom the
lingo of the hour had taught her to call a caveman.
In the motion-picture theaters she generally
frequented, cavemen struggled with vampires
in duels of passion and strength. Jennie
longed to be loved by one of this race; and a
caveman who came to her with violet eyes and
a sweeping brown mustache possessed an appeal
beyond the prehistoric. In spite of the challenge
in her smile and the daring angle at which she
held her chin, she waited in violent emotion for
what he would say next.

"Oh, I sha'n't marry for years to come," he
jerked out, still going on with his work. "Sha'n't
be able to afford it. If I didn't have a few, a
very few, hundred dollars a year, I couldn't pay
you your miserable six a week."

She took this manfully. The head, with its
ruby-red toque, to which a tobacco-colored
wing gave the dash which was part of Jennie's
personality, was perhaps poised a little more
audaciously; but there was no other sign outside
the wildness of her heart.

"Oh, well; you're only beginning your career as
yet. One of these days you'll do a big portrait—"

"But, Jennie, marriage isn't everything."

It was the caveman's plea, the caveman's tone;
and though Jennie knew she couldn't respond to
it in practice, the depths of her being thrilled.

"No it isn't everything; but for a girl like me
it's so much that—"

"Why specially for a girl like you?"

"Because her ring and her marriage lines are
about all she's got to show. No woman can hold
a man for more than—well, just so long; and
when his heart's gone where is she, poor thing,
except for the ring and the parson's name?"

"A woman's heart is as free as a man's; and
when he goes his way—"

"She's left standing in the same old place.
We'd all be better off if we felt as free to wander
as the men; but most of us are made so that we
don't want to. God! what a life!" she moaned,
with a comic grimace to take the pain from the
exclamation. "But, tell me, Mr. Wray, what
day do you want me to come again?"

He asked, as if casually:

"Why do you say, 'God! what a life'?"

"Oh, I don't know. I suppose because it's
the only thing *to* say. Wouldn't you say it if—"

"If what?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Is it anything to do with me?"

"No—not specially. It's everything—beginning
with being born."

"I shouldn't think you had any kick against
being born—with a face and a figure like yours."

"What good are they to me? My mother
used to be—Well, I'm only pretty, and she
was a great beauty—but look at her now."

"But you don't have to go the same way."

"All women of our class go the same way.
It's awful to spend your whole life toiling and
aching and worrying and scraping and paring
just on the hither side of starving to death; and
yet, if it was only yourself, you could stand it.
But when you see that your father and mother
did it before you, and that your children will
have to do it after you—"

"Not in this country, Jennie," he put in, sententiously.
"This country gives everyone a chance."

She gave another of her comic little moans.

"This country is like every other country.
It's a football field. If you're big enough and
tough enough, with skin padded and conscience
wadded, and legs to kick hard enough—you get
a chance—yes—and one man in a hundred
thousand is able to make use of it. But if you're
just a decent, honest sort, willing to do a decent,
honest day's work, your only chance will be to
keep at it till you drop."

"Aren't you rather pessimistic?"

She ignored this question to pace up and
down with little tossings of the hands which
Wray found infinitely graceful.

"Look at my father. He's worked like a convict
all his life, just to reach the magnificent
top-notch of forty-five a week. We've been
praying to God to give him a raise—"

"And perhaps God will."

She snapped her fingers. "Like that he will!
God has no use for the prayers of the decent,
honest sort. He's on the side of the football
tough with the biggest kick in the scrimmage—Ah,
what's the use? I'm born, and I've got to
make the best of it. Tell me when to come
again, and let me go."

Laying aside his brushes and palette, he went
close to her. All the poetry in the world seemed
to Jennie to vibrate in his tones.

"Making the best of it because you're born is
loving and letting yourself be loved, Jennie."

"So it is." She laughed, with a ring of the
desperate in her mirth. "You don't have to tell
me that."

His voice sank to a whisper.

"Then why not do it?"

"I would like a shot if I had only myself to
think about."

"In love, there are only two to think about,
Jennie."

She laughed—a hard little laugh, in spite of
its silvery tinkle.

"When I love I've got two sisters and a
brother, all younger than myself, to bring into
the little affair, to say nothing of a nice old dad
and a mother that I'm very fond of. I've got to
love for them as well as for myself—"

"Then why don't you love Bob Collingham?"

She threw him a reproachful look.

"Don't! Please don't! That's brutal of you!
But then, you are brutal, aren't you? I suppose,
if you weren't, I shouldn't—"

A little nondescript gesture expressed her
thought better than she could have put it into
words; and with this tribute to the caveman she
slipped away again amid the brocades, pedestals,
and old furniture.




CHAPTER III
===========


Marillo Park, N. Y., is more than a
park; it is a life. When a social correspondent
registers the fact that Mr. and Mrs.
Robert Bradley Collingham, Miss Edith Collingham,
and Mr. Robert Bradley Collingham,
Junior, have arrived at Collingham Lodge,
Marillo Park, from their camp in the Adirondacks,
their farm in Dutchess County, or their
apartment in Fifth Avenue, the implications are
beyond any that can be set forth in cold print.
Cold print will tell you that a man has died,
but it can convey no adequate notion of the
haven of peace into which presumably he has
entered.

Cold print might describe Marillo Park as it
might describe Warwick Castle or the Château
of Chenonceau, with a catalogue of landscapes
and architectural minutiæ. It could tell you of
charming houses set in artfully laid-out grounds,
of gardens, shrubberies, and tennis courts, of
the club, the swimming pool, the riding school,
the golf links; but only experience could give
you that sense of being beyond contact with
outside vulgarity which is Marillo's specialty.
Against its high stone wall outside vulgarity
breaks as the sea against a cliff; before its beautiful grille gate it swirls like a river at the foot
of a lawn with no possibility of overflow. As
nearly as may be on earth, the resident of
Marillo Park can be barricaded against the sordid,
and withdrawn from all things inharmonious
with his own high thought.

But every Eden has its serpent, and at Collingham
Lodge on that October afternoon this
Satan had taken the form of a not very good-looking
young man who was pacing the flagged
terrace side by side with Miss Edith Collingham.
I emphasize the fact that he was not good-looking
for the reason that, in his role of Satan,
it was an added touch of the diabolic. Tall,
thin, and stormy eyed, his knifelike features
were streaked with dark shadows which seemed
to fall in the wrong places in his face. When it
is further said that he was a young professor of
political economy in a near-by university, without
a penny or much prospect in the world, it
will easily be seen how devilish a creature he
was to have crept into such a paradise.

He had crept in by means of being occasionally
invited by young Sidebottom, whose family
had the next estate to Collingham Lodge. Walls
and hedges being unknown at Marillo, the lawns
melted into one another with no other hint of
demarcation than could be sketched by clumps
of shrubs or skillfully scattered trees. You
could be off the Collingham grounds and on to
those of the Sidebottoms without knowing you
had crossed a boundary. Between trees and
shrubs you could slip from the one place to the
other and not be seen from either.

"She might meet him a thousand times and
you or I wouldn't know it," Mrs. Collingham
had pointed out to her husband when her
suspicions were first roused. "All she's got to
do is to go round that lilac bush and she might
do anything."

True; besides which, the mere chances of
that hospitality without which Marillo could
not be Marillo would throw together any two
young people minded so to come. In such
spacious freedom, an ineligible young professor
could touch the hem of the garment of a banker's
daughter without forcing the issue in any way.

With the conversation between Miss Edith
Collingham and Professor Ernest Ayling we have
almost nothing to do. It is enough to say that,
from the rapidity of the young pair's movements
and the animation of their gestures, Mrs. Collingham
judged that they were very much in
earnest. Looking out from what was known as
the terrace drawing-room, she was convinced
that no two young people could talk like that
without an understanding between them.

She had been led to the terrace drawing-room
by the sound of voices and the fact that it was
the end of the house toward the Sidebottoms'
premises. Against a background of cannas,
dahlias, and gladioli, with maples flinging their
flame and crimson up into a golden sky, the two
figures passing and repassing the long French
windows were little more than silhouettes. Such
scraps of their phrases as drifted her way told
her that they were up to nothing more criminal
than settling the affairs of a distracted universe,
but she had no intention that they should settle
anything. At the appropriate moment she
decided to make her presence felt.

In doing this she was supported by the
knowledge that her presence was a presence to
be felt impressively. Of her profile, it was mere
economy of effort to say that it was like a cameo,
aristocratically regular and clear-cut. Her hair,
prematurely white, lent itself to the simplest
dressing, too classic to be a mode. A figure, of
which it would have been vulgar to use the word
"plump," carried the most sumptuous costumes
with regal suitability. Studied, polished, and
perfected, she wore her finish as a mask that concealed
the lioness mother which she was.

It was the lioness mother who confronted the
young couple as they turned in their promenade.
Edith alone came forward. Her professor being
given a bow so cold that it was tantamount to a
dismissal, as a dismissal was obliged to take it.
Within a minute, he was down both the flowered
terraces and out of sight behind the lilac bush.

Mrs. Collingham's enunciation had the exquisite
precision of the rest of her personality.

"I thought I asked you, dear, not to encourage
that impossible young man to come here."

"But I can't stop his coming without encouragement,
can I, mother darling?"

Mother darling moved to the edge of the
flagged pavement, looking down on the blaze of
summer's final fireworks. On each of the two
lower terraces fountains played, their back drops
falling on the water lillies in the basins. It being
the moment for a strong appeal, she sounded the
first note without turning round.

"Edith, I wonder if you have the faintest idea
of a mother's ambitions for her children?"

Instinct had taken her to the root of the whole
difference between the two generations in the
family. Instinct took Edith to the same spot in
her reply.

"I think I have. But, on the other hand, I
wonder if a mother has the faintest idea of her
children's ambitions for themselves."

Following an outflanking movement, Mrs.
Collingham threw her line a little farther.

"It's curious how, as your father and I approach
middle age, we feel that you and Bob
are going to disappoint us."

"I'm sure I speak for Bob as well as for myself
when I say that we wouldn't disappoint you
willingly. It's only that the things we want are
so different."

"Ours—your father's and mine—are simple
and natural."

"That's the way Bob's and mine seem to us."

She was in a tennis costume carelessly worn
and not very fresh. A weatherbeaten Panama
pulled down to shade her eyes gave a touch of
cowboy picturesqueness to an *ensemble* already
picturesque rather than pretty or beautiful.
Leaning nonchalantly against the high, carved
back of a teakwood chair, the figure had a
leopard grace to which the owner seemed indifferent.
Indifference, boredom, dissatisfaction
focused the expression of the delicate, irregular
features to a wistful longing as far as possible
from the mother's brisk self-approval. All this
was emphasized by a pair of restless, intelligent
eyes, of which one was blue and the other brown.

The mother turned round with an air of
expostulation.

"I'm sure I can't see what you want to make
of your life. You seem to have no ideals, not
any more than Bob. You're not pretty, but
you're not ugly; and you've a kind of witchiness
most pretty girls have to do without. If you'd
only dress with some decency and make the best
of yourself, you could take as well as any other
girl."

"Yes; if the game was worth the candle."

"But surely *some* game is worth the candle."

"Oh, certainly; only, not this one, of taking—in
the way you seem to think girls want to take."

"Some girls do."

"Oh, some girls, of course—only, not—not
my kind."

"But what *is* your kind? That's what I
can't understand."

The girl smiled—a dim, distant, rather wistful
smile that merely fluttered on the lips and died
like a feeble light.

"And that's what I can't explain to you,
mother darling."

"Are we so far apart as that?"

"We're not far apart at all. It's only that I'm
myself, while you want me to be a continuation
of you."

"I don't want anything but what will make
for your happiness."

"My happiness as you see it for me—not as I
see it for myself."

"But you're my child, Edith. I can't be without
hopes for you."

Another dim, quickly dying smile was the
only answer to this as Edith picked up her
racket from the teakwood chair and moved
toward the house. On a note that would have
been plaintive had it not been so restrained, Mrs.
Collingham continued:

"Edith darling, I don't think there's been a
moment since you were born when I haven't
dreamed of a brilliant future for you, and
now—"

"But, oh, mother dear, what's the use of a
brilliant future, as you call it, when your whole
soul is set on something else?"

The lioness mother was roused.

"But it shouldn't be set on something else.
That's what I resent. Don't think for a minute
that your father and I mean to stand by and see
you throw yourself away."

"I didn't know there was any question of my
doing that."

"That boy will never be anything better than
a university professor—never in this world; and
if it comes to our forbidding it, forbid it we shall
without hesitation."

The girl's head was flung up. Boredom and
indifference passed out of the strange eyes. For
an instant the conflict of wills seemed about to
break out into mutual challenge. It was Edith
who first regained enough mastery of self to say,
quietly.

"You surely wouldn't take that responsibility—whatever
I did."

The soft answer having warned the mother of
the danger of collision, she subsided to an easier,
if a more fretful, tone.

"And Bob's such a worry, too. If your father
knew about this Follett girl, I think he would
go wild."

"But we don't know anything ourselves—beyond
the few hints dropped by Hubert Wray
which I'm sure he didn't mean."

"Well, I'm worried. It's the war, I suppose.
If he'd only settle down to work—"

"He won't settle down till he marries; and
if he marries, it will have to be some girl he's in
love with."

"If he were to marry a girl of that class—"

"Girl of what class? What's the good word?"

Mrs. Collingham turned on her son, who
stood on the threshold of one of the French
windows.

"We're talking about men and women marrying outside of their own class, Bob, and I was
trying to say how fatal it was."

"Good Lord! mother, do people still think
things like that? I thought they'd rung the
bells on them even at Marillo. Wasn't it one of
the things we fought for in the war—to wipe out
the lines of caste?"

"But not to wipe out ideals, Bob. What
fathers and mothers have worked to build up
their sons fought to maintain."

Max, the police-dog puppy, who had been
poking his nose between Bob's legs, now squeezed
his vigorous person through the opening and
came out on the terrace joyously. Wagging his
powerful tail and sniffing about each of the
ladies in turn, he seemed to be saying: "Don't
you see that I'm here? Now cheer up, everybody,
and let's have a good time."

Bob made a feint at seconding this invitation.
Going up to his mother, he slipped an arm round
her waist and kissed her.

"Old lady, you're years behind the times.
What fathers and mothers built turned out to
be a rotten old world which they've handed to us
to bolster up. We're tackling the job as well as
we can, but you must give us a free hand."

Releasing herself from his embrace, she stood
with an air of authority.

"If giving you a free hand means looking on at
the frustration of our hopes, you'll have to learn,
Bob, that your father and mother still have some
of the energy that placed you where you are."

"Of course you've placed us where we are,
mother dear," Edith agreed, pacifically, "but
that's just the point. Because we are where
you've placed us, we're crazy to go on to something
else. Isn't that the way of life—the perpetual
struggle for what we haven't got? Because
you and father didn't have a big house
and a big position to begin with, you worked
till you got them. Bob and I were born to them,
and so—"

"It's this way, old lady," Bob broke in.
"All your generation had bigness on the brain.
It was a kind of disease like the water that
swells a baby's head. They used to think it was
a specially American disease till they found out
it was English, French, German, and every other
old thing. The whole lot of you puffed up till
the earth hadn't room for you, and you made the
war to push one another off."

"I didn't make the war, Bob. I've never
been anything but a poor mother, striving and
praying for her children."

"Well, you did push one another off—to the
tune of ten or twelve millions, mostly the young.
Since then, the universal disease of swelled head
is being got under control, as they say of epidemics.
Only the left-overs catch it still, and
Edith and I aren't that. Hardly anyone of our
age is. We just don't take the germ. Not that
we blame you and your lot, old lady—"

"Thanks, Bob."

"Oh, don't thank me. I'm just telling you."

"And the point of your homily is—"

"That our generation all over the world has
got out of Marillo Park. Marillo Park is a back
number. It's as out of date as the hat you wore
five years ago. You couldn't give it away to the
poor, because the poor don't wear that kind of
thing, and the rich have gone on to a new fashion.
Listen, old lady. The thing I'd hate worst of
all for dad and you is to see you left behind,
trying to put over the footlights a lot of old gags
that the audience swallowed in its time, but
which don't get a laugh any more. The actor
who tries to do that is pass-ay forever—"

"If you'd keep to English, Bob, I should
understand you a little better."

Bob grew excited, laying down the law on the
palm of his left hand with the forefinger of the
right, while Max, all aquiver, scored the points
with his terrific tail.

"I'll not only keep to English, but I'll tell you
the line to take if you want to remain the up-to-date,
bright-as-a-button old lady you are."

"I should be grateful."

"Then here goes. Take a long breath. Keep
your wig on. Put your feet in plaster casts so as
not to kick." He summoned his forces to speak
strongly. "If Edith was to pick out a man she
wanted to marry—and I was to pick out a girl—no
matter who—it would be the chic new stuff
for father and you—"

But the chic new stuff for father and her was
not laid down on the palm of the hand for the
reason that a portly shadow was seen to move
within the dimness of the drawing-room. At the
same time, Max's joy was stifled by the appearance
on the terrace of Dauphin, the Irish setter,
who was consciously the dog *en tître* of the
master of the house. Mrs. Collingham composed
herself. Edith picked up a tennis ball from the
flags and jumped it on her racket. Bob put a
cigarette in his mouth and struck a match. It
was the unwritten law of the family not to risk
intimate discussion before a tribunal too august.

Once he had reached the terrace, it was plain
that Collingham was tired. His shoulders were
hunched; his walk had no spring in it.

"I'm all in," he sighed, sinking into the
teakwood chair.

"Poor father!"

Edith dropped a hand on his shoulder. He
drew it down to his lips and kissed it.

"You'd like your tea, wouldn't you?" The
solicitude was his wife's. "We were just going
to have it. Bob, do find Gossip and tell him to
bring it here."

Bob limped into the house and out again. By
the time he had returned, his father was saying:

"Yes; it's been a trying day. Among other
things I've had to dismiss old Follett."

"The devil you have!"

The exclamation was so heartfelt as to turn all
eyes on the young man.

"Why, Bob dear," his mother asked, craftily,
"what difference does it make to you?"

Bob did his best to recapture a position he
was not yet ready to abandon.

"It may not make any difference to me, but—but
how is he going to live?"

"Is that your responsibility?"

Edith came to her brother's rescue.

"It's some one's responsibility, mother."

"Then let some one shoulder it. Bob doesn't
have to saddle himself with it, unless—"

Convinced that, in the presence of his father,
his mother wouldn't speak too openly, Bob felt
safe in a challenge.

"Yes, mother? Unless—what?"

Mother and son exchanged a long look.

"Unless you go—very far out of your way."

"Well, suppose I did go—very far out of my
way?"

"I should have to leave it with your father to
deal with that."

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time dad's
been philanthropic."

Collingham looked up wearily. He was sitting
with one leg thrown across the other, his left
hand stroking Dauphin's silky head.

"You can be as philanthropic as you like outside
business, Bob," he said, with schooled,
hopeless conviction. "Inside, it's no go. Once
you admit the principle of treating your employees
philanthropically, business methods are
at an end."

"I don't think modern economics would agree
with you, daddy," Edith objected. "Aren't we
beginning to realize that the well-being of employees,
even when they're no longer of much
use—"

Collingham looked up with a kind of longing
in his eyes.

"I wish I could believe that, Edie, but an
efficiency expert wouldn't bear you out."

"An efficiency expert doesn't know everything.
He studies nothing but the individual private,
whereas a political economist knows what's
going on all up and down the line."

To Collingham this was like the doctrine of
universal salvation to a Calvinist theologian.
He would have seized it had he dared, but for
daring it was too late. He had trained himself
otherwise. On a basis of expert advice and individual
efficiency Collingham & Law's had been
built up. All he could do was to grasp at the
personal.

"Where did you hear that?"

"You can read all about it in Mr. Ayling's
last book, *The Economic Value of Good Will*."

As she passed through the French window into
the house, her mother turned with a gesture of
both outspread hands.

"There! You see! What did I tell you? She
has the effrontery to read his books and name
him openly."

But too dispirited to take up the gauntlet,
Collingham looked, with welcome, toward Gossip,
who appeared in the doorway with the tea.




CHAPTER IV
==========


The Folletts came together every evening
about six, chiefly by the process known to
American cities as commuting. Commuting
brought them to Number Eleven Indiana Avenue,
Pemberton Heights. Seen from the New
York river-front, Pemberton Heights, on top
of a great cliff on the New Jersey side of the
Hudson, suggests a battlemented parapet. By
day, its outline is a fringe against the sky; by
night, its clustering lights are like a constellation.

Indiana Avenue is one of those rare spots in
the neighborhood of New York where a measure
of beauty is still reserved for the relatively poor.
The heights are too high for the railways to scale,
too inconvenient for factories. The not-very-well-to-do
can find shelter there, as the mediæval
peoples of the Mediterranean coast found it in
the rock towns where the pirates couldn't follow
them. It is hardly conceivable that industry will
ever climb to this uncomfortable perch, or that
much competition will put up rents. Too inaccessible
for the social rich, and too isolated for
the still more social poor, Pemberton Heights is
the refuge of those who don't mind the trouble
of getting there for the sake of the compensation.

The compensation is largely in the way of air
and panorama. Both have a tendency to take
away your breath. You would hardly believe
that so much of New York could be visible all
at once. The gigantic profile of Manhattan is
sketched in here with a single stroke, while the
river is thronged like a busy street seen from the
top of a tower. City smoke rolls up and ocean
mist rolls in while you are looking on. Sunrise,
moonrise; moonset, sunset; stars in the heaven
and lights along the darkened waterway, afford
to the not-very-well-to-do, cooped up all day in
kitchens, offices, and factories, a morning and
evening glimpse into the ecstatic.

Number Eleven was somewhat withdrawn
from all this toward the middle of the plateau.
Built at a period when an architect's ambition
was chiefly to do something singular, it had a
great deal of sloping roof, with windows where
you would not expect them. Pemberton Heights
being held up bravely to rain and snow, the color
of the house was a weatherbeaten brown. Two
hydrangea trees, shaped like open umbrellas,
and covered now with white blossoms fading to
rose, stood one on each side of the front door in
the center of two tiny grassplots. There was a
piazza, of course, where most of the family leisure
was passed, and in the yard behind the house
there stood a cherry tree. All up and down the
street for the length of about half a mile were
similar little houses, each with its piazza and its
architectural oddity, homes of the not-very-well-to-do,
content with their relative poverty.
Among themselves they formed a society as distinct
and as active as that of Marillo Park, and
out of it they got as much pleasure as the Sidebottoms
and Collinghams from their more
exclusive forgatherings.

In this soil, the Folletts had taken root with the
ease of transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Drawn to Pemberton Heights by the presence
there of other Canadians, Josiah had bought the
little house for seven thousand dollars. On this
he had paid four, raising the other three on a
mortgage which it was his ruling desire to pay
off. The mild, tenacious optimism of his nature
convinced him he should be able to do this, in
spite of the danger of being "fired" hanging over
him for two years. The fact that, though the
months kept passing, that sword didn't fall inspired
the belief that it never would. He had
grown so sure of this that with regard to the
warning issued by Collingham he had never
taken his wife into his confidence. For one thing,
it was useless to alarm her when it might be
without cause, and for another....

But that was the secret tragedy of Josiah's
life. He had not made good the promise he gave
when Lizzie Scarborough married him, and the
falling of the sword would be the final proof of
it. It would mean that his whole patient, painstaking
life had fitted him for nothing better
than the scrap heap. That he should come to
such an end he couldn't believe possible. That
after nearly fifty years of uncomplaining drudgery he should be flung aside as useless to man in
general and worse than useless to his family
was not, he argued, in keeping with the will of
God. It was to the will of God he trusted more
than to the mercy of Bradley Collingham,
though he trusted to them both.

When he married Lizzie in the little town of
Lisgar, Nova Scotia, he had been a bank clerk.
A bank clerk in Canada is a kind of young nobleman
at the beginning of what may be a striking
career, after the manner of a fledgling in diplomacy.
The banking institutions being few and
large, the employees are moved from post to
post, much like *attachés* or army officers. As
moves bring promotion, the clerk becomes a
teller and the teller a cashier and the cashier a
branch manager and the branch manager a
wealthy man in touch with world-wide issues.
It was the kind of progress Josiah expected when
he married Lizzie Scarborough, the kind of future
they dreamed of and talked about, and which
never came.

Josiah lacked something. You couldn't put
your finger on the flaw in his energy, but you
knew it was there. He was moved about, of
course, but with little or no promotion. Other
men got that, but he was ignored. Harum-scarum
young fellows whose ignorance of bookkeeping
was a scandal were lifted over his head,
while he and Lizzie stared at each other in
perplexity.

Hardest of all for him was that, as years went
by, Lizzie herself lost belief in him. More
tender with him for his failure, she nevertheless
saw that he was not the man she had supposed
in the gay young days at Lisgar, and he saw
that she saw. She gave up the hope of promotion
before he did. The best to which they came
to aspire was a "raise."

It was bitter for Lizzie because, as she was
fond of saying to herself, and now and then to
the children, she had been born a lady. This
was no more than the truth. Whatever the
meaning given to the word, Lizzie fulfilled it,
though her claims were more than moral ones.
The Scarboroughs had been great people in
Massachusetts before the Revolution. The old
Scarborough mansion, still standing in Cambridge,
bears witness to the generous scale on
which they lived. But they left it as it stood,
with its pictures, its silver, its furniture, its
stores, rather than break their tie with England.
Scorned by the country from which they fled,
and ignored by that to which they remained
true, their history on Nova-Scotian soil was
chiefly one of descent. A few of them prospered;
a few reached high positions in the adopted land,
but most of them lacked opportunity as well as
the will to create it. True, Lizzie's father was a
clergyman; but her sisters married poorly, her
brothers dropped into any chance jobs that came
their way, while she herself got only such fulfillment
of her dreams as she found at Pemberton
Heights. Even the move to New York which
Josiah had made when convinced that the Bank
of the Maritime Provinces held no further hope
for him had not greatly prospered them. Five
years of drifting between one bank and another
were followed by five steady years with Collingham
& Law; but even that peaceful time was
now at an end.

While the Collinghams were drinking tea on
the flagged terrace, and Jennie was on the ferryboat,
and Teddy dressing and skylarking after
his plunge at the gym, and Follett nearing home,
Lizzie was on her knees pinning up the draperies
she was "making over" for Gussie. Pansy, the
daughter of a bulldog and a Boston terrier,
whose pansy-face had in it a more than human
yearning, stood looking on, with forelegs wide
apart.

Gussie was fifteen, pretty, pert, and impatient.

"Everyone'll see that it's the old thing you've
been wearing since I dunno when."

Accustomed to this plaint, Lizzie thought it
useless to reply.

"I'd rather not have a rag to wear than a thing
everyone's sick of the sight of. Momma, why
can't I have a new dress, right out and out?"

"My darling, you'll have a new dress when
your father gets his raise. It must come before
long; but I can't possibly give it you till
then."

"I wish you'd stop talking," came from
Gladys, who was busy with her lessons in a
corner. "How can I study with all this row
going on? Momma, what's the meaning of
'coagulation'?"

Coagulation explained, the fitting finished, and
a dispute adjusted between the two children,
Lizzie began to spread the table for supper,
Gussie helping her. Most of the downstairs portion
of the house being thrown into one large
living room, the dining table stood at the end
nearest the kitchen and pantry. It was a pleasure
to watch the supple movements of Gussie's
figure, and the flittings of her slim-wristed hands
as she took the plates and laid them in their
places. Most people said she would one day be
prettier than Jennie, but as yet that was only
promise.

Quite apparent was the fact that the mother
had been more beautiful than any of her daughters
was ever likely to become. At fifty-odd, it
was a beauty that still had youth in it. Worn
with the duties of providing for a husband and
four children, it retained a quality proud and
aloof. In her scouring and cooking and endless
domestic round, Lizzie was like an actress
dressed and made up for a humble part rather
than really living it. The Scarborough tradition,
which had first refused to bend to king against
people and again to yield to people against king,
had survived in this woman fighting for her inner
life against failure, poverty, and sordidness.

She was singing at her work when the front
door opened and Josiah came in. He stood for a
minute in the little entry, surveying the living-room absently, while Pansy pranced about his
feet. Gladys was still at her lessons, Gussie
laying out the knives and forks.

"Where's your mother?"

Gladys jumped up and ran to him. She was
his youngest, his darling, just over twelve. He
had always hoped to do better by her than by the
older ones.

"Hello, daddy!" With her arms round his
neck, she was pulling his face down to hers.

"Where's your mother?" he asked of Gussie,
having advanced into the room.

Gussie looked up from her task to inform him
that her mother was in the kitchen, but, seeing
his gray face and shambling gait, she paused
with a fork in her hand.

"You're all right, daddy, aren't you?"

The sound of voices having called Lizzie from
her work, she stood on the threshold of the pantry,
drying her hands on the corner of her apron.
Before he said a word she knew that the calamity
which forever threatens those dependent on a
weekly wage had fallen on the family.

"Lizzie, I'm fired."

She had never had to take a blow like this, not
even when the three who came before Jennie
had died in babyhood. This was the worst and
hardest thing her imagination could conjure up,
because it meant not only the sweeping away of
their meager income, but her husband's defeat as
a man.

Going to him, she laid her hands on his shoulders and tried to look into the eyes that avoided
hers in shame.

"We'll meet it, Jo," she said, quietly. "We've
been through other things. I've saved a little
money ahead—nearly a hundred dollars. Don't
feel badly. I'm glad you're out of Collingham
& Law's, where you've said yourself that your
desk was in a draught. You'll get another job,
with bigger pay, and perhaps"—she sprang to the
great glorious hope she was always cherishing—"and
perhaps Teddy will earn more money and
be a great success."

"*Hel*-lo, ma!"

Teddy himself was swinging down the room,
Pansy capering round him with her silvery bark.
Having tossed his cap on the sofa, he caught his
mother in a bearish hug. Fresh from his bath,
gleaming, ruddy, clear-eyed, stocky rather than
short, he was a Herculean cub, the makings of
a man, but as yet with no soul beyond play. No
one had ever seen him serious. It was a drawback
to him at Collingham & Law's, where he
skylarked his way through everything. "You
must knock the song-and-dance out of that
young blood," was Mr. Bickley's report on him,
"or he'll never earn his pay."

Before his mother could say anything he was
tickling her under the chin with little "clks!"
of the tongue, Pansy assisting by springing halfway
to his shoulder. The sport ended, he held
her out at his strong arm's length, laughing down
into her eyes.

"Good old ma!—the best ever! What have
you got for supper?"

She told him, as nearly as possible as if nothing
else was on her mind. Then she added:

"You've got to know, Teddy darling. They've
discharged your father from Collingham &
Law's."

Confusedly, Teddy Follett knew he had received
a summons, the call to be a man. Hitherto
he had been a boy; he had thought himself a
boy; he had called himself a boy. Even in the
navy he had been with boys who were treated
as boys. The pang of agony he felt now was
that he was a boy still—with a man's part to
play.

He did his best to play it on the instant.

"Oh, is he? Then that's all right. I'll be
making more money soon and be able to swing
the whole thing."

Gussie was here the discordant element.

"You've got to make it pretty quick, then,
and be smarter than you've ever been before."

He turned away from the group in which his
mother watched him with adoring eyes while
his father stood with gaze cast down like a
criminal.

"I'm sorry to put the burden on you at your
age, my boy," he said, brokenly, "but perhaps I
may get another job, after all, and one that'll
pay better."

Teddy didn't hear this, not that he was so far
away, but because he was listening to that call
which seemed so impossible to respond to. He
would *have* to be a man; he would *have* to earn
big money, and at present he didn't see how.
Fifty bucks a week, he was saying to himself, was
hardly enough to run the family, and he had
only eighteen!

He was standing with his back to them all,
his hands in his pockets, when the front door
opened again. Jennie came in all aglow and
abloom after her walk from the street cars.

"Well, what's the pose?" she asked, briskly, of
Teddy, beginning to take off her jacket. "You
ought to be model to a sculptor."

"Jen," he whispered, hoarsely, before she
could join the others, "pa's fired."

To take this information in, Jennie paused
with her arms still outstretched in the act of
taking off her jacket.

"Do you mean they don't want him any more
at Collingham & Law's?"

"That's the right number."

"But—but what are we going to do?"

"That's for you and me to say. It's up to us,
Jen. Pa'll never get another job, not on your
life, unless it's running a lift. We've got to
shoulder it—you and me between us."

Jennie passed on into the room and down to
the group round the table. The glow had gone
out of her cheeks, but she was free from her
brother's dismay. To begin with, she was a
woman, and he was only a man. All his adventures
would have to be dull ones in the line of
work whereas hers.... She could hear Wray
saying, as he had said only two hours ago,
"You could marry Bob Collingham if you
wanted to."

She didn't want to—as far as that went; but
if the worst were to come to the worst and they
should be in need of bread....

"Hello, mother! Hello, daddy!" Jennie was
quite self-possessed. "Teddy's been telling me.
Too bad, isn't 't? But something will turn up.
What is there for supper, Gus?"

Gussie minced round the table, putting on the
salt cellars.

"There's pickled humming birds for princesses,"
she said, witheringly. "After that
there'll be honey-dew jam."

"Then I'll go up and take my hat off."

This coolness had the inspiriting effect of an
officer's calm on a sinking ship. It was an indication
that life could go on as usual; and if
life could go on as usual, all wasn't lost.

"And for mercy's sake," Jennie added, turning
to leave them, "don't everybody look so glum.
Why, if you knew what I could tell you you'd
all be ordering champagne."

So they were tided over the dreadful minute,
which meant that they found power to go on
with the preparations for supper and to sit down
to supper itself. There the old man cheered up
sufficiently to be able to tell what had passed
between him and the head of the firm. He was
still doing this when Teddy sprang to his feet,
striking the table with a blow that made the
dishes jump.

"God damn Bradley Collingham!" he cried,
with his mouth full. "I'll do something to get
even with him yet—if I have to go to the chair
for it."

"Sit down, you great gump—talking like
that!" Gussie pulled her brother by the coat
till he sank back into his seat. "Momma, you
should send him away from the table."

"That's a very wicked thing to say, my boy—"
Josiah was beginning.

"Let him talk as he likes," the mother broke
in, calmly. "Going to the chair can't be so
terrible—if you have a reason."

She went on carving as if she had said nothing
strange.

"Well, ma, I call that the limit," Jennie
commented.

"Oh no, it isn't," the mother returned, with
the new strength which seemed to have come to
her within half an hour. "I'm ready to say a
good deal more."

She looked adoringly toward Teddy, who after
his outburst had returned sheepishly to his
plate, while Pansy stood apart from them all,
wise, yearning, and yet implacable, a little
doggy Fate.




CHAPTER V
=========


No difference of standard in the Collingham
household was so obvious as that between
Dauphin, the Irish setter, and Max, the police
dog. The situation was specially hard on
Dauphin. To have owned Collingham Lodge
and its occupants during all his conscious life,
and then one day to find himself obliged to share
this dominion with a stranger had given him in
his declining years a pessimistic point of view.
It had made him proud, cold, withdrawn, like a
crusty old aristocrat forced in among base company.
To the best of his ability he ignored the
police dog, though it was difficult not to be
aware of the presence of a being too exuberant to
appreciate disdain.

For Dauphin, the most beastly experience of
the day began about four each afternoon, at the
minute when the dog-clock told him that his
master might be expected home. That was the
hour at which from time immemorial he had
taken possession of the great front portico where
the distant burr of the motor-car first reached
him. When the burr became a throb he knew it
was passing the oak that marked the Collingham
boundary; and, since it had arrived on his own
ground, he could run down the driveway to meet
it. This had been his exclusive right. To be
joined daily now by a frisky, irrepressible pup
made him feel like an old man tied to an insupportable
young wife from whom his own death
will be the sole deliverance. Life to Dauphin
had thus become a mingling of impatience and
anguish, poorly masked beneath an air of dignity.

And as far as he could judge, his master's wife,
of whom he had no great opinion, had begun to
share these emotions. Anguish and impatience
had become of late the chief elements in the
aura she threw out, and by which dogs take their
sense of men. It was not that her words or
expressions betrayed her. It was only that when
she came within his sphere of perception he was
aware that she felt the kind of passion the police
dog roused in himself.

He was aware of it on this May afternoon,
more than six months after she had first learned
of Bob's infatuation for the Follett girl, when
she came out on the portico to listen for the
expected car. She would come out, listen, and
go in. Each time she came out, each time she
listened, each time she retired, he felt the sweeping
to and fro of an imperious will worried or
frustrated, though he sat on his haunches and
gave no sign. He couldn't give a sign, because
Max would misunderstand it. There he was,
down on the lawn before the portico, grinning,
prancing, joking, calling names—names quite
audible in dog intercourse, though a human being
couldn't catch them—and the least little movement Dauphin made would be taken as concession.
The old setter was sorry. He would have
liked showing his master's wife—he didn't consider
her his mistress—that he understood her
distress; but he was nailed to the doorstep by
*force majeure*.

And the woman envied him. He was perfectly
aware of that. She assumed that dogs had no
social problems. All he had to do, she thought,
was to sit and blink at the magnolias, hawthorns,
and lilacs pursuing one another into bloom. All
he had to think of was the up hill and down dale
of the view before him, a haze of blue and green
and rose melting to the mauve of hills.

As a matter of fact, this was something like
what was passing through her mind. A masterful
woman, she was nevertheless reaching that
point of self-pity where she envied the untroubled
dogs. While she carried the cares of so many
others, no one else carried hers. All through the
winter she had had Edith and Bob on her mind,
and now she had Bradley. On leaving for the
bank that morning, he had been so terribly upset
that she couldn't rest till knowing how he
had got through his day. She was the more
worried because of being entirely alone and thus
thrown in on herself.

Edith had gone to stay with people in the
Berkshires. Of that her mother was glad. She
meant for the present to keep her there. With
her queer ideas, she would only make her brother
the more difficult to deal with, though she had
not been difficult herself. Nearly seven months
had passed, and yet her affair with Ayling was
exactly where it had been in the previous October.
That was the advantage of a girl; you could
always tell where she stood. Edith was tenacious,
but not defiant. Though capable of
engaging herself to this young man, she would
hardly marry him in face of her father's opposition.

Bob, on the other hand, was not only head-strong,
but unreasonable. He would marry the
Follett girl if she would marry him, whatever
might be the consequences. She, his mother,
had it "out" with him, and he had said so. It
was a terrible thing to have their whole domestic
happiness hang on the whim of a creature like
the Follett girl; but apparently it did.

She had not spoken to Bob till Hubert Wray
had surrendered all he had to tell. He had done
this through a process of "pumping" of which
he himself had hardly been aware. Having
ascertained that his New England connections
were unexceptional, Junia had been attentive
to him through the winter, making him feel
that Collingham Lodge was a second home.
What he didn't tell to her he told to Edith, and
what Edith knew the mother had no great difficulty
in finding out. Thus when, on the previous
Saturday, Bob was about to leave for a party on
Long Island, they had had the plain talk which
could no longer be deferred.

They had had it after lunch, seated on a bench
overlooking the tennis court. They had come out
ostensibly to talk over the sacrifice of the pink-and-white
hawthorn in the shade of which they
sat in favor of extending the court so that Bob
and Edith could both have parties simultaneously.
While the new court would be an improvement,
they would regret the celestial
flowering of the hawthorn whenever, as at
present, it was May.

"Not that it would make so very much difference
to your father and me," Junia began, in a
quavering tone, "if things we're afraid of were
to happen."

So the subject was opened up. Bob could
only ask, "What things?" and his mother could
only tell him.

"It's quite true, old lady," he confessed.
"You might as well know it first as last."

Junia had not brought up her children without
having learned that, while Edith could be controlled,
Bob could only be managed. With Edith,
she could say, "I forbid," with Bob, it had to
be, "I suffer."

"Of course, dear," she said now, "I'm your
mother, and whatever you do I shall try to
accept. It will be hard, naturally—it's hard
already—but you can count on me."

He took her hand and squeezed it.

"Thanks, old lady."

"Of course I can't answer for your father.
You know for yourself how stern and unyielding
he is."

"Oh, I'm not so sure about that. It's always
seemed to me that he'd give in to a lot of things,
if you'd only let him."

This perspicacity being dangerous, she glided
to another aspect of her theme.

"What I don't understand is why, if you've
been in love with her for seven or eight months,
and you mean to marry her, you haven't done it
already."

He took two or three puffs at his cigarette
before tossing off:

"I'd do it like a shot, if she would."

"And she won't?"

"Not yet."

"And you think she will?"

"I'm sure she will."

"What makes you so certain?"

"Nothing. I just know."

Having had her fears verified, Junia had no
object in pushing the inquiry further. Her duty
in life was to take events as they touched her
family and mold them for the best. When she
called it "the best" she meant it as the best.
She was not a worldly woman with mere fashionable
ends in view. Eager for the good of her
children, she was conscientious in pursuit of the
things she truly believed to be worthiest.

All through Sunday she took counsel with
herself, going to communion at the restful little
Marillo church, and putting new intensity into
her devotion. She had guests at lunch and
went out to dinner, and, though equal to all the
social demands, her mind did not relinquish the
purpose she had in view. Could she have accomplished
it without her husband's aid, she would
probably not have taken him into her confidence.
It being her special task to deal with the children,
the less he knew of their mistakes and
escapades the simpler it was for them all.

It may be an illuminating digression here to
say that there had been a time, some fifteen
years earlier, when Junia had had an experience
as difficult as the one she was facing now. Nothing
but a trained subconsciousness had carried
her through that, and she looked for the same
mainstay of the self to come to her aid again.
One of the lessons she had learned at that time
was the value of quietude, of reserve in "giving
herself away." She was not one to whom this
restraint came natural; but for the very reason
that it was acquired, it had the intenser force.

It was at a time when they had lived in the
Marillo house only a little while, and the Bradley
of that day was not the portly, domesticated
bigwig of the present. He was a tempestuous
sea of passions right at the dangerous flood-tide,
the middle forties. The first ardor of married
life was at an end for both of them; but while,
for her, existence was running more and more
into one quiet purposeful stream, for him it was
raging off in new directions.

Whatever Junia suspected she was too wise to
know it as a certainty. Knowing, she argued,
would probably weaken her and do nothing to
strengthen him. Already she was more intensely
a mother than she was a wife, living in the amazing
careers she was planning for her children.
Edith would marry an English peer, while Bob
would take a brilliant place in his own country.
Their victories would be her victories, till, in
some far-distant, beatified old age, she would be
translated to the stars.

And then one afternoon, when the flagged
pavement had only recently been laid and they
were drinking tea on it, Bradley had said, right
out of a clear sky:

"Junia I don't know whether you've suspected
it or not, but for some time past I've had a
mistress."

That was the instant when she first learned
the value of a schooled subconsciousness. It
seemed to her that she had been slain; and yet,
with a nerve little less than miraculous, she went
on with her tasks among the tea things.

"If you've done it so far without telling me,
Bradley," she said, at last, with only the slightest
tremor in her tone, "why shouldn't you let me
remain ignorant?"

"Does that mean that you don't care if I go
on?"

"I think you can answer that as well as I.
What I don't care for is to be drawn into an
affair from which your own good taste—merely
to put it on that ground—should be anxious to
leave me out."

He looked at her savagely.

"Don't you resent it any more than that?"

"Is that why you're giving me the information—to
see how much I resent it?"

"Partly."

"Then I'm afraid you will have your labor for
your pains. You'll never see more than you're
seeing at this instant."

That stand was a master stroke. It gave her
the advantage of being enigmatic. It enabled
her to take blows without seeming to have felt
them, and to deliver them without betraying the
quarter from which the next would come.

Right there and then Bradley had been
monstrous enough to suggest that, since she
liked Collingham Lodge, she should remain there
and let him go away. He would make generous
provision for her and the children, and in return
expect his divorce.

But she had taken her stand—the enigmatic.
She didn't argue; she didn't plead; she didn't
reproach him; she didn't treat him to the scene
through which weaker women would have put
him.

"Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with
me," were the only words she used.

And he had remained. Less than two years
later, it was she who fixed the sum the other
woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her.
She was sufficiently in sympathy with her sex
to insist on the terms being liberal. "I think she
should have fifty thousand dollars," she declared,
and fifty thousand dollars the woman received.

So that, if Bradley had lost the first passion
of his love for her, he had gained vastly in respect.
Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous,
imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her
curb and compress these qualities till they became
a prodigious motor force. If she had not
mastered herself, she had mastered the expression
of herself till she was an instrument at her
own command.

It was as an instrument at her own command
that, on the Wednesday morning, before he went
to town, she gave her husband as much information
as she thought he ought to possess about
his son.

"Would you mind sitting down for a minute,
Bradley? I've something important to say."

He had come up to her room, as she took her
breakfast in bed, after he had had his own downstairs.
Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a
boudoir cap, she was propped up with pillows,
a wicker tray with legs on the coverlet before her.
In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old rich-grained
walnut, raised six inches above the floor,
she suggested an eighteenth-century French
princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire,
receiving a courtier at her *levée*.

Luxurious with a note of chastity was the rest
of the chintzy room. The pictures on the walls
were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters.
A *prie-dieu* in a corner supported a bible and a
prayer-book in tooled bindings with a coat of
arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen
through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept
sacristy. Perfumed air came in through the
open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the
trees.

Reminding her that Tims, the chauffeur, would
soon be at the door to take him to the bank, Collingham
sank into the armchair nearest to the
bed. His thoughts were on the amount in the
proposed issue of Paraguayan bonds the house
would be able to carry.

"It's about Bob," she began, in a tone little
more than casual. "Did you know he was in a
scrape?"

He started, firing off his brief questions rapidly:

"Who? Bob? What kind of scrape? With a
girl?"

"Exactly. With a girl who may give us a
good deal of trouble unless the thing is stopped."

If Collingham's heart sank it was not wholly
because of the scrape with the girl, but because
he was afraid of chickens coming home to roost.
Though he had never broached the subject with
the boy, he had often wondered as to how he
met sexual temptation; and now he was to learn.

"Is it anything very wrong?"

"Only in intention." She sipped her coffee
before letting him have the full force of it. "He
wants to marry her."

He felt some slight relief.

"Oh, then it's not—"

"No; not as far as he's concerned. As to her—well
I presume that she's the usual type."

"Did he tell you himself?"

"He told me himself."

"His job at the bank pays him only two thousand
dollars a year. Did he say what else he
expected to marry on?"

"We didn't discuss that; but I suppose it
would be what he expects you to give him."

"And if I don't give him anything?"

"That's what I wanted to know. If you
didn't—"

"He'd call it off?"

"No; perhaps not. But she would."

"Have you any special reason for thinking
so?"

"None but my knowledge of—of that kind of
woman in general." She went on as quietly as
if the incident of fifteen years previously had
never occurred. "Men are so guileless about
women who have—who have love to sell. They're
such simpletons. They so easily think these
women like them for themselves when all the
while they're only gauging the measure of the
pocketbook."

Collingham endeavored not to hang his head,
but it seemed to go down in spite of him as the
placid voice sketched his program for the day.

Junia had heard her husband say that Mr.
Huntley, his second in command, was to go to
South America in connection with the issue
of Paraguayan bonds. Why shouldn't Bob be
sent with him? It would add to his experience
and make him feel important. After he had
left Asuncion, reasons could be found for keeping
him at Lima, Rio, or Buenos Aires till the whole
thing blew over. Having accepted the suggestion
gratefully, Collingham came to the question
he had up to now repressed.

"Who's the girl? I suppose you know."

"She's been posing for Hubert Wray. Bob
met her at the studio. Her name is—"

Grasping the arms of the chair, he strained
forward.

"Not—not Follett's girl?"

"Yes; that *is* the name. You dismissed her
father from the bank last year." Her eyes followed
him as he stumbled to his feet. "But
what difference does it make whether it's she or
some one else?"

He couldn't tell her. The fear of the vague
nemesis he called "chickens coming home to
roost" was too obscure. Listening in a daze to
the rest of his instructions, he seized them
chiefly because they would ease the line he was
to take with Bob.

He was to give him no hint that he, the father,
had heard anything of the Follett girl. The
South American mission could stand on its own
merits as extremely flattering. Whatever reluctance
Bob might feel, he would see the opportunity
as too important to forego. All Junia
begged of her husband was to know nothing of
Bob's love affairs. If Bob himself brought the
subject up, it would be enough to remain firm
on the question of money. Of the rest, Junia
was willing to take charge, as she would explain
to him when he came home in the afternoon.

These instructions Collingham did his best to
carry out. At lunch, in the house's private room
at the Bowling Green Club, he approached Mr.
Huntley on the subject of being responsible for
Bob on the errand to Asuncion, and Mr. Huntley
expressed himself as delighted. On returning to
the bank, Collingham asked Miss Ruddick to
bring the young man to the private office.

"Hello, Bob! How are things going?"

"So, so, dad," Bob admitted, guardedly.

"Sit down. I want to talk to you."

Bob sat down gingerly, warily, scenting something
in the wind, much like Max or Dauphin
from a person's atmosphere. Whatever his
mother had been told on Saturday, his father
might have learned by Wednesday. Bob would
have been sure of this were it not that his mother
often had curious reserves.

For Collingham there was nothing to do but
to plunge on the subject of South America, and
he plunged. But, in his dread of the roosting
chicken, he plunged nervously, with a tendency
to redden, to stammer, and otherwise to betray
himself. Before he had finished Bob was saying
inwardly: "Mother's put him wise to Jennie
and I'm to be packed off. Well, we'll see."

"It's thumping good of you and Mr. Huntley,
dad," he said, aloud; "and I suppose it would
do if I gave you my answer in a day or two."

"That's the girl," the father thought; but he
obeyed Junia's injunction as to not being explicit
when it came to words.

"You see, it's this way, Bob: It's not exactly
an invitation that I'm giving you; it's—it's a
decision of the bank of which you're an employee.
We take it for granted that you'll go if
we want to send you."

"And I take it for granted that you won't
send me if I don't want to go."

Not to force the issue, Collingham left the
matter there, preferring to consult Junia as to
what he should do next. To this end, he drove
home earlier than usual.

It added to Dauphin's irritation that Max
should hear the motor first. With ears cocked
like a donkey's, how could he help it? There
was nothing in the world that Dauphin despised
as he despised the police dog's ears. They were
forever pointed, alert, inquisitive, ignoble. But
there it was! Max was bounding down the
driveway, covering yards at a spring, before the
setter could drag himself from his haunches.
It was Max, too, who, when the motor passed
the oak, gave the first yelp of delight.

But it was Dauphin who, as his master descended
from the car, entered into his depression.
It was he, too, who perceived the conflict of
auras when wife and husband met. Waves of
unreasoned dread on the one side encountered a
force of clear-eyed determination on the other as
the weltering sea comes up against the steadfast
rocks.

They began talking as they turned to enter
the house, continuing the conversation within
the great hall, where only the strip of red carpet
running its length and up the fine stairway, two
or three bits of old carved English oak, and the
brass touches on the wrought-iron baluster,
relieved the admirable nudity.

"Now come in here," she said, briskly, having
heard all that had passed between him and Bob.

He followed her into the library, where she led
the way to the desk.

"Read that."

He ran his eye over the lines written in her
legible, decorative hand.


    | :small-caps:`Collingham Lodge,`
    |     :small-caps:`Marillo Park.`

    | :small-caps:`Dear Miss Follett`:

    My husband and I would be greatly obliged if you could
    give us a half hour of your time to talk over matters which
    may prove as important to you as to us. If you could
    make it convenient to come here to-morrow, Thursday,
    afternoon, you would find a very good train at three-twenty-five,
    and one by which to return at five-forty-seven.
    I inclose a time-table, and you would be met at
    Marillo Station.

    | Yours sincerely,
    |       :small-caps:`Junia Collingham`.

He looked at her wonderingly.

"What's the big idea?"

"A very big idea. Don't you see? We can
cut the ground right from under his feet without
his ever thinking we had anything to do with it.
You personally needn't be supposed to know
that this nonsense has ever been in the air. It's
too late for me, of course, because he and I have
already talked of it. But for you—"

He tapped the paper in his hand.

"But this move I don't understand."

"Well, sit down and I'll tell you."




CHAPTER VI
==========


At the minute when Junia Collingham was
laying before her husband a plan which
would bring comparative wealth to the Follett
family, a number of things were happening in
and about New York.

First, Lizzie Follett had dropped into a chair
to think, an action rare with her. She generally
thought as she whisked about her work, but this
problem called for concentration. Briefly, it was
as to how to cook the supper without heat. The
gas-man had just gone away, and the gas for
the range had been cut off because she couldn't
pay a bill of twenty-nine dollars and sixty-seven
cents, or anything on account. This was
Wednesday, and she would have no more money
till the children got their various pay-envelopes
on Saturday.

Though in the back of her mind she blamed
herself for an unwise distribution of the week's
funds, it was one of those situations in which you
blame yourself without seeing how you could
have done otherwise. With six to feed, and all
the subsidiary expenses of a family to meet, she
had twenty-two dollars a week. Of his eighteen,
Teddy gave her fifteen, three being needed for
car fares and other small necessities. From the
six she earned at the studio, Jennie contributed
three. Gladys, who was now a cash girl on seven
a week, was able to turn in four. Gussie brought
nothing to the common fund as yet, for the reason
that the three-fifty which Madame Corinne conceded
for the privilege of "teaching her the
millinery" allowed no margin over what she had
to spend.

To Lizzie, during the past six months, life had
become an exciting game. How to pay the
minimum on every account and yet keep alive
her credit had been the calculation with which
she rose in the morning and lay down at night.
It was a game that could be played successfully
for two months, or three months, or four. When
it came to six, the heaping-up of unpaid balances
made it harder to go on.

It was making it impossible to go on. During
the past fortnight she had found her credit
stopped at three places in The Square where
Pemberton Heights did its shopping. In vain
she had tried to transfer her account elsewhere,
but Pemberton Heights is no more than a huge
village where the status of most families is known.
More and more her small amount of cash was
needed for cash purposes in order that the
family might live.

Lizzie sat down to cast up her assets. She had
the small remnants of a ham which could be
eaten cold. She had bread and butter. If she
could only make tea.... She might have done
that in a neighbor's house, but she shrank from
exposing a situation which a lucky stroke might
change.

----

At the same moment Josiah was turning away
from a wooden bar which shut off an office from
the public. He had entered and stood there,
meek, unobtrusive, trembling, while none of the
young men or young women busy at desks or
with one another paid him any attention. When
a girl with hair combed over her ears, very bright
eyes, and very short skirts, tripped by him accidentally,
he managed to stammer out something
in which she caught the word "job." The word
being significant, and Josiah's appearance more
so, she whispered to a gentleman, who left his
desk and came forward.

"No; I'm very sorry. We can't do anything
for you."

He hadn't waited for the word "job"; he
hadn't waited for Josiah to speak at all. He
knew the situation so well that his method was
to end it there and then. Josiah turned away
meekly as he had entered, and with no sinking
of the heart. His heart used to sink; but that
was four and five months previously, before he
had exhausted his emotions. Now the bitterness
of death was past. It had passed day by day and
inch by inch, by stages of slow agony, leaving him
with a dried soul that couldn't suffer any more.

----

And also at this minute Teddy was standing
in his cage at the bank in a very peculiar situation. At least it struck him as peculiar, because
for the first time he perceived its opportunities.

For Teddy, too, six months had been a period
of development, just as it is for a green fruit
when you pick it and lay it in the sun. It
ripens, but it ripens green. When you eat it, it
has a green flavor, or a flat flavor, or none at all.
Teddy was a fruit to be left on the tree to take
its time. He was now twenty-one, with the
promptings of sixteen. At his own rate of
progress, he would probably have reached twenty
by the time he was twenty-two, but thirty at
twenty-five.

As it was, he had been called on to be thirty
when his growth was just beginning. Not merely
the circumstances had made this demand on
him, but the dependence, more or less unconscious,
of the members of the family. They
looked to him to do something big because he
was a young man. Having heard of other young
men who had been financially heroic, they expected
him to be the same. The possibilities,
open to a bank clerk of twenty-one had no relation
to their hopes. Even his mother, chiefly
because of her adoration, seemed to feel that he
should spring from eighteen to a hundred dollars
a week by the force of inner flame.

She didn't say so, of course. She only revealed
her sentiments as Pansy revealed hers, by an
inextinguishable look. The father did no more
than throw emphasis on the boy's responsibility.
Jennie and Gladys never said anything at all,
but Gussie was quite frank.

"A great big fellow like you and only making
eighteen per! Look at poor momma, working
her fingers to the bone. I'd be ashamed if I were
you. Why, Fred Inglis orders his clothes at
Love's and keeps his own Ford."

It was all there in a nut shell—his inability
to rise to the occasion in a land where everyone
else who was worth his salt had only to shake
the money tree and pick up coin. How Fred
Inglis did it Teddy couldn't think, when your
value by the week was so definitely fixed and a
raise lay so far ahead. If he had developed
during the past six months, it was mainly through
a carking sense of inefficiency.

Meanwhile, he had to do what Gussie told
him—watch his mother work her fingers to the
bone. In spite of a tendency to squabble, the
Folletts were an affectionate family, and the
mother was the center of their love. Teddy
didn't stop to analyze what she was to them;
he only knew that there was nothing he
wouldn't be to her. If he could only have
compassed it, she would have had a bar-pin like
their neighbor, Mrs. Weatherby; she would
have worn the skunk neckpiece for which he
had once heard her utter a desire; she would
have gone out in his Ford oftener than Fred
Inglis's mother in his. These things he would
have done for her and more, had he but been the
financial Titan all American example called on
him to become. Between Gussie's taunts and
his own What lack I yet? he was reaching a
condition of despair.

And now, on this particular afternoon, when
nearly everyone had left the bank and Mr.
Brunt, to whom he was specially attached, was
working later than usual, there was the fruit of
the money tree piled up on the ground. Mr.
Brunt had gone to the other end of the main
office, and would return presently to stow these
piles of bills in the safe. These bills were money.
Teddy had never consciously dwelt on that fact
before. He had been in this same situation a
thousand times, when he had nothing to do but
put out his hands and stuff his pockets with food
and fuel and gas and the interest on the mortgage,
and all the other things of which there was
such a lack at home, and had never considered
that the needed things were here.

He remembered that as a child in Nova
Scotia he would occasionally swipe an apple from
a cart-load, knowing that the owner couldn't
miss it, and had the same sensation now. Here
were the piles of bills, all arranged in rows according
to their values—a pile of hundreds, a
pile of fifties, a pile of twenties, and so on down.
Mr. Brunt would come back, as he had done at
other times, and put them away without counting
them. Having counted them already, he would
accept this reckoning for the day. He, Teddy,
was left there to see that nothing happened to
this treasure.

He was never able to tell how it came about,
but without seemingly being able to control the
action of his hand he had slipped a twenty-dollar
bill from the top of the pile into his own
pocket. It was an instant's weakness, followed
the next instant by repentance. Teddy knew
what theft was. He had not, through his father,
had so much to do with banks without being
fully aware of the sure and pitiless punishment
meted out to it. He didn't mean to steal. He
was horror-stricken at the act. Quick as a flash
his hand went into his pocket again—but Mr.
Brunt was back. The thing that could have been
done at once had to be deferred.

Looking for a chance to drop the bill to the
floor and make restitution by picking it up, it
was annoying that Mr. Brunt should give him
none. Mr. Brunt seemed possessed by a demon
of speed, so quickly had he locked all the piles in
the safe, and then locked the cage behind him.
Teddy found himself outside with the bill still
burning in his pocket.

Even so there were other possibilities. Going
to the washroom, he hung on there till Mr. Brunt
had gone home. The cage was made of open
wire-work. It was a simple thing to slip a bill
through one of the interstices. It would be found
next morning on the floor and a fresh running-over
of accounts would show where it belonged.
Mr. Brunt would wonder how he came to be so
careless, but with his balance straight he would
be satisfied.

But as Teddy reached the cage, there was
Doolan, the night watchman. Doolan was an
ex-policeman, too old for public office, but equal
to sounding an alarm in case the bank was being
robbed. He was a friendly soul, and in strolling
up to Teddy had no motive beyond asking after
the "ould man" and whether or not he had yet
found a job. But Teddy suspected that he was
being watched. He didn't know but that Doolan
might have seen the movement of the hand
which snatched the bill from the pile. When he
stirred to go homeward, Doolan might clutch
him by the neck. It was a strange, new sensation
to feel that within a minute, within a few seconds,
the law might have its grip on him. Having
said good-by to Doolan and turned away, he
took the first steps in expectation of a stern
command to come back.

It was another strange new sensation to be
walking the familiar ways of Broad Street and
Wall Street with this strange new consciousness.
There were thousands of bright young men and
women streaming to electrics, subways, and
ferries in the first stages of commuting, and
among them he bore a secret mark. Tramping
along in the crowd, he felt like a soldier marching
with his comrades to the trenches, but knowing
himself picked for death. Luckily, his folly was
not even now beyond reparation. He would
get to the bank early in the morning, discover
the cursed bill lying in some artfully chosen
corner of the floor, and restore it to Mr. Brunt.
All the same, it was a relief to get away from the
fear of detection which he felt to be haunting
the streets by plunging into the maw of the
subway, where his identity was swallowed up.

----

At this minute, too, in the studio, Hubert
Wray was leaning over Jennie Follett's shoulder
and placing before her a rough pencil sketch.

"Take it away!" Jennie cried, tearfully. "I
don't want to look at it."

"But, Jennie, I only wish you to see how little
it involves."

It was a drawing of a nude woman, her hair
coiled on the top of her head, sitting very upright
in a marble Byzantine chair, her knees pressed
together in the manner of the Egyptian cat-goddess.
On a level with her face and poised on
the tips of her fingers, she held a human skull
which she inspected with slanting, mysterious eyes.

Wray continued to keep the sketch before
Jennie, hanging over her shoulder. He was so
close that she felt his breath on her neck. He
could easily have pressed his lips against her
amber-colored hair, and Jennie wished he would.
But having long ago made up his mind that she
could best be won by a system of starving out,
he refrained from doing it. As, however, she
persisted in brushing the sketch aside, he straightened
himself up.

"Then, Jennie, I'm afraid I can't use you any
more—that is, for the present. Since you won't
do it, I must get some one who will."

"You could paint another kind of picture,"
she argued indignantly, "with me with clothes
on."

"You don't understand. I'm an artist. An
artist doesn't paint the picture he chooses, but
the one that's given him to paint."

"No one gave you this to paint. It isn't a
commission. It's just your own bad mind."

"I'm not ready to explain what it is. You
wouldn't understand. Something comes to you.
You've got to obey it. This is the picture I've
seen and which I'm obliged to do next. And,
besides, it isn't a bad mind, Jennie. The human
form is the most—"

"Oh, you don't have to hand me out any
hokum about the human form. It's all very
well in its place. But you fellows are crazy—the
way you stick it up where it doesn't belong.
Look at that picture of Sims's you were all so
wild about—three women walking in a field,
and not a stitch between them. Who'd go out
like that? There's no sense in it—"

"It isn't a question of sense, Jennie; it's one
of business. If you want to be a model, you
must *be* a model and meet the demands of the
market."

She wore the cheap linen suit that had been
her best last summer, and the corresponding
hat; but her beauty being of the type which
subordinates externals to itself, she was more
than adorable; she was elegant. With tears
still rolling down her cheeks, she pointed at the
sketch Wray held in his hand as he stood before
her at a distance.

"Do you know what my father would do if
he thought I was going to be painted like that?
He'd turn me out of doors."

Wray tossed the sketch on the table.

"Then, Jennie, there's no use talking of it any
more. You're not that kind of a model, and it's
that kind of a model I'm looking for."

"I'm the kind of model you were looking for
when you put that advertisement in the paper
nearly a year ago. I answered it because you
said a pretty girl, not a professional—"

"Yes; that was a year ago. That's what I
wanted then. But now it's something else. It
doesn't follow that because you're satisfied with
an egg for breakfast, that an egg will be enough
for every meal all the rest of your life."

She looked up reproachfully.

"Yes; all the rest of your life! That's the
way you talk. Nothing will ever be enough for
you all the rest of your life."

"No, Jennie; nothing—not as far as I see
now."

"And yet you expect me to stake everything—"

"You must choose your words there, Jennie.
I don't *expect* you to do anything. There may
have been a time when I hoped—but that's all
over. We won't talk of it. You've made up your
mind; I must make up mine. There's nothing
between us now but a question of business.
I'm looking for a model who does this kind of
thing, and it doesn't suit you to serve my turn.
Well, that settles it, doesn't it? Our little account
is paid up to date, and so—"

She stumbled to her feet. The only form her
resentment took was a trembling of the lip and
the streaming of more tears.

"But what can I *do*?"

"Do you mean for a living?"

As she nodded speechlessly, he smiled, with a
faint shrug of the shoulders.

"That's not for me to decide, is it, Jennie?
Once you've left me—"

"I'm not leaving you. You're driving me
away."

"Suppose we said that life was separating us?
Wouldn't that express it better? We've—we've
liked each other. I've never made any secret
of it on my side—have I, Jennie?—though
you're so terribly discreet on yours. And yet
life—"

"I've only been discreet about one thing."

"But that one thing is the whole business."

"And I wouldn't be discreet about that if
there was any other way."

"There's the way I've told you about."

"Yes; and be left high and dry after two or
three years, neither one thing nor the other."

"Isn't that looking pretty far ahead?"

"It's not looking farther ahead than a girl
has to. It's easy enough to talk. There *you'd*
be, able to walk off without a sign on you;
whereas I'd have to lie down and die or—or find
some one else."

"Well, there'd be that possibility, wouldn't
there? They're not so difficult for a pretty girl
to find when—"

She stamped her foot.

"I hate you!"

"Oh no, you don't, Jennie. You love me—only,
you won't let yourself—"

"And I never will—never—never—never! Not
if I was starving in the streets—so help me God!"

She was running toward the model's exit
when he called after her.

"Then you leave me to work with another
woman, Jennie—another woman sitting in your
place—another woman—" When she threw
him a despairing glance he snatched the sketch
from the table and held it up to her. "Another
woman—dressed like that!"

But out on the stairs she paused. Anger was
giving place to fear. It was, first of all, a fear
of the other woman *dressed like that*, and then it
was a fear not less agonizing of the loss of her
six a week.

Her six a week was all that stood between
Jennie and the not very carefully veiled contempt
of the family. In the testing to which the past
half year had subjected them all, Jennie had not
made very good. Six a week had been her
measure. For obscure reasons which none of
them could fathom, she had proved incapable of
really lucrative work. She had tried to get employment with other artists who would leave her
free for her hours with Wray, but she had failed.
She had failed, too, in stores, factories, offices,
and dressmaking establishments. Perhaps they
saw she was only half hearted in her attempts;
perhaps her air of helplessness told against her.
"She was too much like a lady," had been one
employer's verdict, and possibly that was true.
Whatever the reason, she seemed a creature not
primarily meant to work, but to be utilized in
some other way. The question was as to that
way. "You're splendid to love," little Gladys
had whispered one day, when Jennie was crying
to herself, and much in her recent experience
confirmed this opinion. In her applications for
something to do, it had more than once been
made plain to her that money could be made by
other means than by punching a time clock at
seven.

But she couldn't retrace her steps and go back
to Wray. She thought of it. She had chosen to
descend by the stairs instead of by the lift which
served the huge studio building, in order to give
herself the chance of changing her mind. She
went down a few steps and stood still, then a
few more steps and stood still. If it had been
only a question of the money she might have
swallowed her pride and returned to throw herself
at his feet.

But there was the other woman—\ *dressed like
that*! He had dared to invoke her. Well, let him
invoke her. Let him paint her; let him do anything he liked. She, Jennie, would break her
heart over it; but it would be easier to break
her heart than go back.

And yet not to go back made her feet like lead
as she dragged herself down the interminable
steps.




CHAPTER VII
===========


"Shall I ever go in or out of this door
again?"

Jennie lingered on the threshold to ask herself
this question, and, as she did so, saw Bob Collingham
lift his hat.

For the time being she had forgotten him.
That is, she had a way of putting him out of her
mind except when, as he expressed it to herself,
he came bothering her. Bothering her meant
asking her to marry him, which he had done perhaps
twenty times. Each time she refused him
she considered that it was for good. There was
a quality in him that raised her ire—a certainty
that, pressed by need, she would one day come
to him. That, Jennie said to herself, would be
the last thing! She wouldn't do it as long as
there was any other possibility on earth. In
view, however, of the state of things at home
and Wray's cold-bloodedness at the studio it had
sometimes seemed to her of late as if earth would
not afford her any other possibility.

If she welcomed him now, it was chiefly as a
distraction from thoughts which, were she to
keep dwelling on them, would drive her mad.
Her temperament being naturally happy, anguish
was the more anguishing for being so unnatural.
The mere necessity of having to strive with Bob
called forth in her that spirit of sex-wrestling
which was not so much second nature in her as
it was first.

She greeted him, therefore, with a sick little
smile, and allowed him to limp along beside her.
The studio building was in a street in the Thirties
and east of Lexington Avenue. To take the way
by which she usually went, they sauntered
toward the sunset.

"You're in trouble, Jennie, aren't you?"

The kindly tone touched her. He was always
kind. He was always looking for little things
he could do. It was part of the trouble with
him from her point of view that he was so
watchful and overshadowing. He poured out so
much more than her cup was able to receive
that he frightened her. All the same, his sympathy,
coming at this minute, started her tears
afresh.

"Is it things at home?" he persisted, when
she didn't respond.

Thinking this enough for him to know, she
admitted that it was.

"I've got something in my pocket that would—that
would help all that—in the long run."

From anyone else this would have alarmed her.
She would have taken it to mean money, money
which she would in her own way be expected to
repay. As it was she merely turned her swimming
eyes toward him in mild curiosity.

"Look!"

Seeing a little white box which could contain
nothing but a ring held between his thumb and
forefinger on the edge of his waistcoat pocket,
she flushed with annoyance.

"I think you'd better go away," she said,
coldly, pausing to give him the chance to take
his leave.

"And chuck you back upon your trouble?"

The argument was more effective than he
knew. Jennie became aware that even this little
bit of drama had put home conditions and Wray's
cruelty a perceptible distance behind her. It
was sheer terror at being thrown on them again
that induced her to walk on, tacitly permitting
him to stay with her.

"You can't be saved from one kind of trouble
by getting into another," she argued, ungraciously.
"The fire's not much of a relief from the
frying pan."

"It is if it doesn't burn you—if it only warms
and comforts you and makes it easier to live."

"This fire would burn me—to death."

"Oh no, it wouldn't; because I'd be there.
I'd be the stoker, to see that it was kept in the
furnace. The furnace in the house, Jennie, is
like the heart in the body—something out of
sight, but hot and glowing, and cheering everybody
up." If she could have listened to such
words from Hubert Wray, she thought, how
enraptured she would have been. "Did you
ever hear the story of the guy who gave us fire
in the first place?" Bob continued, as she walked
on and said nothing. "You know we didn't have
any fire on earth—at least, that's the tune to
which the rig is sung. The gods had fire in
heaven, but men had to shiver."

"Why didn't they freeze to death?''

"They did—in a parable way. It wasn't life
they lived; it was a great big creeping horror
on the edge of nothing. Then this old bird—I
forget his name—went up to heaven—"

"How did he do that?"

"The story doesn't tell; but up he went,
stole the fire, and brought it down. After that,
they were able to open the ball we call 'civilization,'
which gives every one a good time."

"Oh, does it? Much you know!"

"I know this much, Jennie—that I could
give you a good time if you'd let me."

"You couldn't give me the good time I want."

"But I could make you want the good time
I'd give you, which would come to the same
thing. I imagine the folks on earth didn't think
much of the fire from heaven—beforehand; but
once they'd got it, they knew what it meant to
them. That's the way you'd feel, Jennie, if you
married me. You can't begin to fancy now—"
On coming in sight of a line of taxicabs drawn
up before a hotel, he broke off to say, "Do you
see those taxis, Jennie?"

She replied that she did.

"Well, one of them may mean a great deal to
you and me."

"Which one of them?"

"Whichever one we get into."

"Why should we get into it?"

"Because"—he tapped the white box in his
waistcoat pocket—"this little thing I've got in
here wouldn't do us any good without something
else. We should have to go after it together."

Her mystified expression told him that she
was in the dark.

"It's something we should have to ask for, and
to sign—Robert Bradley Collingham, bachelor,
and Jane Scarborough Follett, spinster—I believe
that's the way it runs."

"Oh!" The low ejaculation was just enough
to show that she understood.

"Why shouldn't we, Jennie? It wouldn't
take half an hour to get there and back."

"'Back?'" She was so dazed that she echoed
the word more or less unconsciously.

They came in sight of a low brown tower at
which he pointed with his stick. "Do you see
that church? Well, that church has got a parson—quite
a decent sort for a parson—"

"How do you know?"

"Because I talked to him—about half an hour
ago. I said that if he was going to be at home,
we might look in on him toward the end of the
afternoon."

"You had no right to say anything of the
kind."

"I know I hadn't, but I took a chance. Won't
you take a chance, too, Jennie? It would mean
the beginning of the end of all your troubles.
In the long run, if not in the short run, I could
take them off your hands."

That she should be dead to this argument was
not in human nature. Her basic conception of
a man was of one who would relieve her of her
burdens. Helplessness was a large part of her
appeal. That marriage meant being taken care
of imparted, according to her thinking, its chief
common sense to the institution. She shrank
from marrying *just* to be taken care of; but if
there was no other way, and if in this way she
could bring to the family the stupendous Collingham
connection in lieu of her six a week....
She made up her mind to temporize.

"What makes you in such an awful hurry?
We could do it any other day—"

"Did you ever see a sick man who wasn't in
an awful hurry to get well?"

"You're not as bad as all that."

"Listen, Jennie," he said, with an ardor enhanced
by her hints at relenting; "listen, and
I'll tell you what I am. I'm like a chap that's
been cut in two, who only lives because he knows
the other half will be joined to him again."

"That's all very well; but where's the other
half?"

"Here." He touched her lightly on the arm.
"You're the other half of me, Jennie; I'm the
other half of you."

She laughed ruefully.

"That's news to me."

"I thought it might be. That's why I'm
telling you. You don't suppose any other fellow
could be to you what I'd be, do you?"

"I don't know what you'd be to me because
I've so many other things to think of first."

"What sort of things?"

"What your folks would say, for one."

He replied, with a shade of embarrassment:
"They'd say some pretty mean things, to
begin with."

"And to end with?"

"They'd give in. They'd have to. Families
always do when you only leave them Hobson's
choice."

She dropped into the studio idiom.

"That wouldn't be all pie for me, would it?"

"Is anything ever all pie? You've got to
work for your living in this old world if you want
to eat. I'm ready to work for this, Jennie. I'm
ready to move mountains for it, and, by God!
I'm going to move them! But do you know
why?"

She said, shyly, "I suppose because you like
me."

"I don't know whether I do or not. That's
not what I think about first." Though they had
not yet reached the line of taxicabs, he paused
to make an explanation. "Suppose you were
inventing a machine and had got it pretty well
fitted together, only that you couldn't make it
work. And suppose, one day, you found the
very part that was missing—the thing that
would make it run. You'd know you'd have to
have that one thing, wouldn't you? You'd have
to have it—or your life wouldn't be worth
while."

"I never heard any other man talk like
that."

"Listen, Jennie. There are men and men.
They'll go into two big bunches. To one kind
women are like whisky—some better than others,
but all good. If they can't have Mary, Susan'll
do, and when they're tired of Susan they'll run
after Ann. That's one kind of fellow, and he's
in the great majority. They're polygamous by
nature, those chaps. I suppose the Lord made
them so. Anyhow, as far as I can see—and I've
seen pretty far—they can't help themselves."
He drew a long breath. "Then there's another
kind."

If Jennie listened with attention, it was not
because she was interested in him, but in Hubert
Wray. Hubert had more than once said things
of the same kind. He had declared male constancy
to be outside the possibilities of flesh and
blood, and, with her preference for cave men,
Jennie had agreed with him. That is, she had
agreed with him as to everyone but himself.
Others could take their pleasure where and as
they found it; but she could not conceive of any
man loving her, or of herself loving any man,
unless it was for life. On the subject of constancy
or inconstancy, this was her sole reservation.

"You'll think me an awful chump, Jennie, but
I'm that other kind."

She threw him a sidelong glance of some
perplexity.

"You mean the kind that—"

"I'm not polygamous," he declared, as one
who confessed a criminal tendency. "There it
is, laid out flat. I'm—" He hesitated before
using the term lest she might not understand it.
"There's a word for my kind," he went on,
tenderly. "It's monogamous."

She made a little sound of dismay at the
strangeness, it almost seemed the indecency, of
the syllables.

"Yes; I thought you might never have heard
it," he pursued, in the same tender strain, "but
it means the opposite of polygamous. A polygamous
guy wants to marry all the wives he can
make love to. A one-wife chap like me asks for
nothing so much as to be true to the girl he loves.
I'm that kind, Jennie."

To his amazement, and somewhat to his joy,
he saw a tear trickle down her cheek. It was a
tear of regret that Hubert couldn't have expressed
himself like this, but Bob thought her
touched by his appeal. It encouraged him to
continue with accentuated warmth.

"You've heard of what they call the battle of
the sexes, haven't you?"

She thought she had.

"Well, that's what it comes from chiefly—the
crowds of polygamous men and the small number
of polygamous women; or else it's the crowds of
monogamous women and the small number of
monogamous men. Out of every hundred men,
about ninety are polygamous, and ten want only
one woman for a lifetime. Out of every hundred
women, ninety are satisfied to love one man, and
the other ten are rovers. Don't you see what a
bad fit it makes?"

"Yes; but how do you know I'm not one of the
rovers?"

"You couldn't be, Jennie. Even if I thought
you might be, I'd be willing to take a chance.
And the reason I've spun this rigmarole to you
is because, if you don't take me, it'll be ten to
one that you'll fall into the hands of one of the
gay ninety who'll make your life a hell. I'd hate
that. God! how I should hate it! Even if I
didn't care anything about you, I should want
to marry you, just to save you from some fancy
man who'd think no more of breaking your heart
than he would of smashing an egg-shell."

As they walked on toward the row of public
conveyances, he explained himself further. On
Monday next he might sail for South America.
But he couldn't do this leaving everything at
loose ends between them. If she married him,
he could go off with an easy mind, and they could
keep their secret till his return. In the meanwhile
he would be able to supply her with a
little cash, not much, he was afraid, as dad kept
so tight a rubber band round the pocketbook.
It would, however, be something, and he would
know that she could give up her work at the
studio without danger of starving to death.

"And you might as well do it first as last,
Jennie," he summed up, "because I mean that
you shall do it sometime."

"And suppose," she objected, "that you came
back from South America in six months' time—and
were sorry. Where should I be then?"

He argued that this was impossible. A monogamous
man always knew his mate as a monogamous
bird knew his. It was instinct that told
them both, and instinct never went wrong.

They reached the row of taxis, and, in spite of
the queer looks of the passers-by, he took her
by the hand.

"Come, Jennie, come!"

But she hung back.

"Oh, Bob, how can I? All of a sudden like
this!"

"It might as well be all of a sudden as any
other way, since you're my woman and I'm your
man."

"But I don't believe it."

"Then I'll prove to you that it's so."

Though he could not do this, she went with him
in the end. She was not won; she was not more
moved by his suit than she had been at other
times; she still shrank from the scar on his brow
and the touch of his tremendous hands. But she
was afraid of letting him go, of dropping back
into the horror of no lover in the studio and no
money to bring home. To do this thing would
save her from that emptiness, even if it led to
something worse. Worse would be easier to
bear than returning to nothing but a void; and
so slowly, reluctantly, with anguish in her heart,
she let herself be helped into the shabby vehicle.

----

An hour or so later, Teddy reached home.
He arrived breathless, because he had run nearly
all the way from the street-car. In the empty
spaces of Indiana Avenue he felt himself conspicuous.
He knew it was fancy, that no hint
of his folly could have come to this quiet suburb,
and that his theft could not possibly be discovered
as yet, even by those most concerned. But
he was not used to a guilty conscience. Already
in imagination he saw himself tried, sentenced,
and serving a long sentence at Bitterwell, of
which he had once seen the grim gray walls.

"God! I'd shoot myself first!" was his comment
to himself, as he hurried past the trim
grassplots where care-free men in shirt sleeves
were watering their bits of lawn.

It was Pansy who first knew that something
was amiss. At sound of his hand on the door
knob she had come scampering, with little
silvery yelps, and had suddenly been checked by
the atmosphere he threw out. Pansy knew what
wrongdoing was; she knew the pangs of remorse.
She had once run away from being shut up in the
coalbin, her fate when the family went to the
movies, and had been lost for half a day. The
agony of being adrift and the joy of seeing
Gussie come whistling and calling down the
Palisade Walk formed the great central escapade
in Pansy's memory. For days afterward, whenever
the family spoke of it, she would stand
with forepaws planted apart, and head hanging
dejectedly, aware that no terms could be scathing
enough fully to cover her guilt.

And here was Teddy in the same state of mind.
Pansy had learned that the great race could
suffer; but she hadn't supposed that it could
get into scrapes like herself. All she could do on
second thoughts was to creep forward timidly,
raise herself on her hind legs, with her paws
against his shin, and tell him that whatever the
trouble was she had been through it all.

He paid her no attention because, as he looked
into the living room, Gladys was seated at a
table, crying, her hands covering her face. At
the same time Gussie was peacocking up and
down the room, saying things to her little sister
that were apparently not comforting. Now that
Gussie, at Madame Corinne's request, had "put
up" her hair, her great beauty was apparent.
Her face had not the guileless purity of Jennie's,
but it had more intellectual vigor and much
more fire.

Gladys was Teddy's pet, as she was her
father's. Of the three girls, she was the plain
one, a little red-haired, snub-nosed thing, with
some resemblance to Pansy, and a heart of gold.
Teddy went over and laid his hand on her fiery
crown.

"Say, poor little kiddie, what's the matter?"

"It's my feet," Gladys moaned.

"And she thinks that learning the millinery
at three-fifty per is all jazz and cat-step,"
Gussie declared, grandly. "Well, let her try it
and see. She's welcome. My soul and body!
Corinne would blow her across the river when
she got into a temper. I say that if you're a
cash girl you've got to take the drawbacks of a
cash girl, and what's the use of kicking? If
you're on your feet, you're on your feet. Rub
'em with oil and buck up. That's what I say."

"It's all very well for you to talk, spit-cat,"
Gladys retorted. "All you've got to do is to
play with ribbons as if you were dressing a doll.
If you had to run like Pansy every time some
stuck-up thing calls, '*Ca-ash!*'—"

Gussie undulated her person and her outstretched
arms in sheer joy of the dancing step
as she strutted up and down.

"That's right, old girl. Blame it on me.
I'm always the one that's in the wrong in this
house. If Master Teddy lets a glass fall and
breaks it, as he did last night, I pushed it out of
his hand on purpose, though I'm in the next
room. All the same, I say, 'Buck up,' and I
don't care who says different. Sniffing won't
cure your feet or give you a brother like Fred
Inglis who can pay for a woman to do all the
heavy work, and his mother hardly lifting a
hand."

Teddy passed on to the kitchen to see if his
mother was there.

She was seated at a table with a ham bone
before her, and from it was paring the last rags
of the meat. He tried to take his old-time tone
of gayety.

"Hello, ma! At it again? What are you giving
us for supper? Something good, I'll bet."

Lizzie went on working without lifting her
eyes. She didn't even smile. Teddy sensed
something new in the way of care, as Pansy
had sensed it in him. He stood at a little
distance, waiting for the look that had never
failed to welcome him, but which this time
didn't come.

"What's the matter, ma? Has anything gone
wrong?"

Putting down the ham, Lizzie raised her eyes,
though with no light in them.

"It's nothing so very wrong, dear, but I
haven't told your sisters because it's no use to
worry them if—"

"What is it, ma? Out with it."

She told him. If it was necessary to go without
a hot meal between Wednesday and Saturday,
of course it could be done; but even on
Saturday the gas people would demand fifteen
dollars on account before the gas would be
turned on again. There were just two possibilities:
The father might come home with the news
that he had found a job, or Teddy might have—she
didn't believe it, but he had talked of saving
for a new suit of clothes—Teddy might have
fifteen dollars laid away.

He turned his back and walked out of the
kitchen. He did it so significantly that it seemed
to the mother there could be only one meaning
to the act. He had saved the money and resented
being robbed of it. She knew he was
something of a coxcomb, and had always been
proud that he could look so neat. He had only
two suits, a common one and a best one, but
even the common one was as brushed and pressed
and stylish as if he had a valet. Nevertheless,
his great activity and his love of rough-and-tumble
skylarking made him hard on clothes in
the sense of wear, and the common one was
growing shiny at the seams and thin where there
was most attrition. A new suit was an urgent
necessity; so that if he had a few dollars put
away toward getting it, it would be no wonder if
it hurt him to be asked to give them up.

But Teddy had no few dollars put away.
When the fund for the new suit could be counted
otherwise than in pennies, some special need had
always swept it into the family treasury. Teddy
had let it go without a sigh. He would have let
it go without a sigh to-day, only that he had
nothing saved. Being naturally of a loving, care-taking
disposition, it meant more to him that
Gussie or Gladys should have a new pair of shoes
than that he should be able to emulate Fred
Inglis in ordering a suit at Love's.

Having left the kitchen, he did not go farther
than the living room, where, Gussie having
taken herself upstairs, Gladys was drying her
eyes. He merely walked to the end of the room,
his hands in his pockets, as he stared above one
of the hydrangea trees into Indiana Avenue.
The windows being open, the voices of playing
children mingled with the even-song of birds.
To Teddy, there was mockery in these cheerful
sounds. There was mockery in the westering
May sunshine, mockery in the groups of girls,
bareheaded and arm in arm, as they strolled
toward Palisade Walk; mockery in the ruddy-faced
men who watered their shrubs and grass;
mockery in the aproned women who came to
windows or doors in the intervals of preparing
supper. It all spoke of a homey comfort and
content, with no bluff behind it. In the Follett
house all was bluff—and misery.

Somehow, for reasons he couldn't fathom, the
cutting off of the gas from the range seemed the
last humiliation. In the matter of food, if one
thing was too dear, you could eat another. So
it was in the whole round of essentials in living.
You could get a substitute or you could go without.
But for heat there was no substitute, and
you couldn't go without it. It ranked with
clothes and shelter as a necessity even among
savages. And yet here they were, a civilized
family, living in a civilized house, in a suburb
of New York, deprived of what even Micmacs
could have at will. It was one of the happenings
that could never have been foreseen as
possibilities.

His hands being in his pockets, Teddy fingered
the twenty-dollar bill. He did this unconsciously, merely because it was there. It did
occur to him to wish it was his own; but his
wishes went no farther.

They had gone no farther when he swung on
his heel to go back to the kitchen. He must tell
his mother that he didn't have fifteen dollars put
away. He hadn't done so at once merely because
his emotions had been too strong for him.

He pulled his burly figure down the length of
the room as one who has to drag himself along.
If he had only been Fred Inglis, he would have
handed his mother a sheaf of bills with instructions
to buy all she wanted. Why couldn't he,
Teddy Follett, do the same? He was, as Gussie
phrased it, a great big fellow of twenty-one—and
his value was only eighteen per. He had
proved that to his own satisfaction, for in secretly
trying to unearth a better place he had
been offered less than he got at Collingham &
Law's.

What were the shackles that bound him?
Were they of his own creation, or were they
forced on him by the world outside? He was as
industrious as his father had been, and, except
for a tendency to do his work with a broad grin,
just as wholehearted. If good intentions had
commercial value, both father and son should
have been rated high; but here was his father
a bit of old junk, while he himself, having
reached man's estate, having served his country,
having tacitly offered himself to the limit of his
strength, was rewarded with a wage on which he
could hardly live, to say nothing of helping
others live.

Madly, wildly, these thoughts churned in his
mind as he lurched down the room toward the
kitchen, while Pansy watched him with a look
into which she was putting all her soul.

He knew what he would say. He would say:
"Ma, it's no go. I haven't a red cent. We've
got to eat cold and wash cold till Saturday, anyhow.
We'll not look farther ahead than that.
When Saturday comes, we'll see."

But, on the threshold of the kitchen, he saw
something which brought a new sensation. In
free fights while in the navy he had thought he
had seen red; but he had never seen red like this.
He had never supposed it possible that this torrent
of wrath, tenderness, and pity should rise
within himself, a fountain spouting at the same
time both sweet water and bitter.

His mother was seated at the table, crying.
The ham bone was before her, the rags of meat
on the plate, and the knife on top of them. But
she, like Gladys a few minutes previously, had
covered her face with her hands, while her
shoulders rocked.

In all his twenty-one years Teddy had never
seen his mother cry. He had cried; the girls
had cried; his father had very nearly cried; but
his mother never. The strong spirit had grieved
in strong ways, but not in this way. Now it
seemed as if all the griefs she had laid up since
the days when she was Lizzie Scarborough had
heaped themselves to the point at which these
strange, harsh, unnatural tears were their only
assuagement.

Teddy was down on his knees beside her, his
arm flung round her neck.

"Ma! Good old ma! Dear old ma! Don't
cry! For God's sake don't cry! Stop *crying*,
ma!" he shouted, in an imploring passion as
strange, harsh, and unnatural as her own.
"Here's the money I had saved for my new
clothes. Take it and go and pay something on
the gas bill. There! There! Stop! For God's
sake! For your little boy's sake! I love you,
ma. Only stop! There! That's better! Calm
down, ma! Everything will be all right, and I'll—I'll
get the new clothes by and by."

But in his heart he was saying, "To hell with
Collingham & Law's!" as he laid the bill before
her.




CHAPTER VIII
============


Jennie cried herself to sleep that Wednesday
night, and, in the morning, cried herself
awake. She was in no doubt as to the motive of
her tears; she was sorry for having put a gulf
between her and the man she loved by marrying
one she didn't care for.

Why she didn't care for him was beyond her
power of analysis. He was good and kind and
tender; he was rocklike and steady and strong.
In a forceful way he was almost handsome, and
some day he would be rich. But there was the
fact that, her heart being given to the one man,
her nerves shuddered at the other. The explanation
she used to give, that the lividness of the
scar on his forehead frightened her, was no longer
tenable, since the mark tended to fade out. The
other infirmity, his limp, was also less conspicuous,
for, though he would never walk as if his
foot had not been crushed, he walked as well as
many other men. It wasn't these peculiarities;
it wasn't any one thing in itself; it was simply
that she didn't love him and never would.

Whereas, she did love another man. She loved
his violet eyes, his brown mustache, his flashing
teeth, his selfishness, his cruelty. She loved his
system of starving her out, his habit of keeping
her in anguish. Too much reasonableness was
hard for her to assimilate, like too much water
to a portulaca.

And Bob had been so reasonable. He had
tried to explain himself. He had used words
that scared, that shocked her. Polygamous!
Monogamous! The very sounds suggested anatomy
or impropriety.

Nevertheless, she could have pardoned this
language as an eccentricity if, in the dimness of
the parson's hall, he hadn't taken her in his arms
and kissed her. This possibility was something
she forgot when she followed him up the rectory's
brownstone steps. For the inadvertence she
blamed herself the more, since, throughout the
winter, she had never once lost sight of it.
Whenever he had proposed to her, the advantages
of marrying so much money had been offset by
her terror at his "pawing her about." With no
high-flown ideas as to virtue, Jennie would have
fought like a wildcat for her virginity of mind
and body till ready of her own free will to give
them up. And here she had sold herself to Bob
Collingham, a man whose touch made her
shrink.

"I can't live with you!" she had cried, as she
tore herself from his embrace.

And poor Bob had been reasonable again.

"Of course not, Jennie darling—not yet.
When I come back—"

She hadn't let him finish. She had dashed
through the door and down the steps, so that he
had some ado to keep up with her.... Even then,
if he had only dragged her away and been a
cave man....

And the evening at home had been one of the
oddest she had ever spent under her father's roof.
Everyone was so queer—or else she was queer
herself. Gussie and Gladys, reconciled after their
squabble, had both been in high spirits, and
Teddy almost hysterical. He gave imitations of
the men with whom he worked most closely at the
bank, of Fred Inglis, of Mrs. Inglis, of Dolly,
Addie, and Sadie Inglis, which made everyone
feel that a great actor was being lost to the
stage; but on top of these exhibitions he would
fall into spells of profound reverie. The father
had been apathetic, but he was always apathetic now;
the mother, on the other hand, more
serene than usual. More than usual, too, her
eyes applauded Teddy's high spirits with a
quiet, adoring smile. Altogether, the supper
had been a merry one, and yet, to Jennie's thinking,
merry with a mysterious note in the merriment—a
note which perhaps only Pansy's intuitions
could have really understood.

But sitting on the edge of her bed in the
morning, she saw a ray of hope. There was
divorce. Marriage wasn't the irreparable thing
which their family traditions assumed it to be.
As a tolerably diligent reader of the personal
items in the papers, Jennie had more than once
read of divorces granted to young couples who
had parted at the church door. Naturally, she
shrank from the fuss it would involve, but better
the fuss than....

Having got up, for the reason that she couldn't
stay in bed, she dressed slowly, because none of
the family was as yet astir. She would surprise
her mother by lighting the gas range and making
the coffee before anyone came down. Thus it
happened that she saw the postman crossing the
street with a letter in his hand. Though letters
were not rare in the family, they were rare enough
to make the arrival of one an incident. She went
to the door to take it from the postman's hand.
Seeing it addressed to Miss Follett and bearing
the postmark "Marillo," her knees trembled
under her.

Having read what Mrs. Collingham had
written, Jennie's first thought was that her early
rising enabled her to keep this missive secret.
What it could portend was beyond her surmise.
It was not unfriendly, but neither was it cordial.
It took the guarded tone, she thought, of a
woman who meant to see her face to face before
being willing to commit herself. As success on
meeting people face to face had mostly been
Jennie's portion, she was not so much afraid of
the test as of what it might bring afterward.

What it might bring afterward was the recognition
of her marriage and her translation into
a rich family. This would mean the end of her
father's and mother's material cares, Teddy's
advancement at the bank, and brilliant careers
for Gussie and Gladys in New York social life.
Jennie could think of at least half a dozen
picture plays in which the sacrifice of some
lovely, virtuous girl had done as much as this
for her relatives.

So, all that day, sacrifice was much in her
mind. Against a vague background of grandeur,
it had the same emotional effect as of passion
sung to the accompaniment of a great orchestra.
To see herself with a limousine at her command,
and the family established in a modest villa
somewhere near Marillo Park, if not quite within
it, enabled her mentally to face another embrace
from Bob in the spirit of an early—Christian
maiden thinking of the lions awaiting her in the
arena. It would be terrible—but it could be met.

The vision of the limousine at her command
seemed to have come partly true as a trim
chauffeur stepped up to her in the station at
Marillo, touching his cap and asking if he spoke
to Miss Follett. He touched his cap again when
he closed the door on her, and the car tooled
away along a road which bore the same relation
to the roads with which Jennie was familiar as a
glorified spirit to a living man.

The park was not so much a park as it was a
country. It had hills, valleys, landscapes, lakes,
and what seemed to Jennie immense estates for
which there was plenty of room. There were
houses as big as hotels and much more beautiful.
Trees, flowers, lawns, terraces, fountains, tennis
courts, dogs, horses, and motor cars were as
silver in the building of the Temple of Jerusalem—nothing accounted of. Jennie had seen high
life as lived by the motion-picture heroine, but
she had not believed that even wealth could buy
such a Garden of Eden as this. Expecting to
reach Collingham Lodge a few minutes after
passing the grille, she had gone on and on, over
roads that branched, and then branched, and
then branched again, like the veinings of a leaf.

After descending at the white-columned portico,
she went up the steps in a state bordering
on trance. She knew what to do much as Elijah,
having come by the chariot of fire to another
plane of life, must have known what to do when
required to get out and go onward. Since a man
in livery opened a door of wrought-iron tracery
over glass, she had no choice but to pass through.

It is possible that Max, by his supersenses,
knew that she belonged to his master, for, springing
toward her, he nosed her hand. It was, as
she put it to herself, the only human touch in
the first stages of her welcome. Thenceforward,
during all the forty or fifty minutes of her stay,
he kept close to her, either on foot or crouched
beside her chair, till a curious thing happened
when she regained the car.

I have said in the first stages of her welcome,
for as soon as she entered the hall she heard a
cheery voice.

"Oh, so it's you, Miss Follett! So glad you've
come. It's really too bad to bring you so far—only,
it seemed to me we might be cozier here
than if I went up to town."

Adown the golden space which seemed to
Jennie much too majestic for anyone's private
dwelling, a brisk figure moved, with hand outstretched.
A few seconds later Jennie was
looking into eyes such as she didn't suppose
existed in human faces. Beauty, dignity, poise,
white hair dressed to perfection, and clothes
such as Jennie had never seen off the stage—and
rarely on it—were all subordinated to a
hearty, kindly, womanly greeting before which
they sank out of sight. Overpowered as she was
by the material costliness of all she saw, the girl
was well-nigh crushed by this unaffected affability.
Like the Queen of Sheba at the court of
Solomon, to be Scriptural again, there was no
more spirit left in her.

Mrs. Collingham went on talking as, side by
side, they walked slowly up the strip of red
carpet into the cool recesses of the house.

"I hope you didn't find the train too stuffy.
It's too bad they won't give us a parlor car on
the locals. For the last three or four years we
only have a parlor car on what they call the
'husbands' trains'—one in the morning and one
in the afternoon, and, my dear, they make us pay
for it as if—"

A toss of the hands proved to Jennie that Mrs.
Collingham knew the difference between cheap
and dear, which again took her by surprise.

They passed through the terrace drawing-room,
which Jennie couldn't notice because she
trod on air, and came out to the flagged pavement. Even here, Mrs. Collingham didn't
pause, but, leading the way to the end of it, she
went round a corner to the northern and more
private side of the house, which looked into a
little wood.

"Mr. Collingham's at home—just driven
down—but I'm not going to have him here.
Men are such a nuisance when women talk
about intimate things, don't you think? They
make such mountains of molehills. It's just as
when you have a cry. They think your heart
must be breaking, and never seem to understand
that it gives you some relief."

Jennie was still more astounded. That the
mistress of Collingham Lodge, a great figure in
Marillo Park, and therefore high up in the peerage
of the United States, could have the same
feelings as herself seemed the touch of nature
that makes the whole world kin to a degree she
had put beyond the limits of the human heart.

They came to a construction like a giant birdcage—a
room out of doors, yet sheltered from
noisome insects like their own screened piazza,
furnished with an outdoor-indoor luxury.

"We don't have many mosquitoes at Marillo,"
Mrs. Collingham explained, as she led the way
in, "but in spring they can be troublesome.
So we'll have our tea here. Gossip will bring it
presently. Where will you sit? I think you'll
like that chair. There! What about a cushion?
Oh, I'm sure you don't need it at your age, but,
still, one likes to be comfortable. No, Max;
stay out. Well, if you must come in, come in.
He seems to like you," she chatted on. "He's
Bob's dog, and I suppose he takes to Bob's
friends."

Rendered speechless by this frank reference
to the man who was the bond between them,
there was, fortunately, no immediate need for
Jennie to speak, since Gossip appeared in the
doorway pushing the tea equipage. It was a
little table on wheels, and on it Jennie noticed,
in a general way, every magnificent detail—the
silver tray, the silver kettle, the silver teapot,
the silver tongs, the silver spoons. "And all of
them solid," she said to herself, awesomely.
She regretted that she wouldn't be at liberty to
recount these marvels at home. At home, they
thought her merely at the studio, while she had
been borne away through the air as by a witch
on a broomstick.

Jennie would have said that Mrs. Collingham
had hardly looked at her, but then, she reflected,
every woman knew how little *looking* you had
to do to grasp the details of another woman's
personality. You took them all in at a glance,
as if you brought seven or eight senses into play.
Each time her hostess, now settled behind the
tea table, lifted her fine eyes, Jennie was sure
they "got" her, like a camera.

"You pose, don't you?" The words came out
in a casual, friendly tone, as she busied herself
with the spirit lamp. "That must be so interesting.
I often wonder, when I'm in the big
galleries, what the immortal women would have
said had they known how their features would
go down through the ages. Take Dorotea
Nachtigal, for instance, the original of Holbein's
'Meyer Madonna' in Darmstadt—the most
wonderful of all the Madonnas, I always say—and
how queer I suppose she would have felt if
she'd known that we should be adoring her when
she's no more than a handful of dust. Or the
model who posed for the Madonna di San Sisto!
Or the young things who sat to Greuze! Did you
ever think of them?"

Jennie saw how Bob could have come by words
like "polygamous" and "monogamous." People
at Marillo Park spoke a language of their own—"English
with frills on it," was the way she put
it to herself. From the intonation, she was able
to frame her answer in the negative, while, once
more, the superb eyes, which were oddly like Bob's
little steely ones, were lifted on her with a smile.

"You know, I should think people would be
crazy to paint you. How do you like your tea?
Sugar? Cream? One lump? Two lumps?"
Having flung out answers at random, Jennie
leaned forward to take her cup, while the kindly
voice ran on: "Just as you sit there you're a
picture. Funny I should have given you a tan-colored
cushion, because it tones in exactly."

Jennie explained that the various shades of
brown and some of the deeper ones of red were
among her favorites.

"Because they go so well with your hair," her
hostess said, comprehendingly, and studying her
now more frankly. "My dear, you've got the
most lovely hair! It isn't auburn; it isn't coppery;
it isn't red. It's—what is it? Oh, I see!
It's amber—it's the extraordinary shade Romney
gets into some of his portraits of Lady Hamilton.
You see it in the one in the Frick gallery,
if I remember rightly. You must look the next
time you're there."

Jennie tried to stammer that she would, only
that her syllables ran into one another and became
incoherent.

"But Romney couldn't paint *you*," Mrs.
Collingham declared, enthusiastically, putting
her cup to her lips. "He's too Georgian. You're
the twentieth century. You're the perfect spirit
of the age—restless, rebellious, wistful, and delicate
all at once. Girls nowadays remind me of
exquisite fragile things like the spire of the
Sainte Chapelle, only built of steel. You've got
the steel look—all slender and unbendable.
It's curious that—the way women look like the
ages in which they're born. You've only to go
through a portrait collection to see that it's so.
Take the Stuart women, for instance—the Vandyke
and Lely women—great saucer-eyed things,
with sensual lips and breasts. And then the Holbein
women, so terribly got up in their stiff
Sunday clothes, which they must have hurried
to put into their cedar chests the minute they
got home from mass. But they belong to their
time, don't you think?"

Jennie could only say she did think, vowing in
her heart that the next day would see her going
round the Metropolitan Museum with a catalogue.

"But you! Hubert Wray says he's done a
wonderful study of you, and I'm crazy to see it.
The only thing I don't like from his description
is that he's got you in a Greek dress and attitude,
and *I* think, now that I've seen you, that
the day after to-morrow is your style. What do
you say yourself?"

"I don't know about the day after to-morrow;
I'm so busy with to-day."

Mrs. Collingham took this with a pleasant
little laugh.

"You clever thing! You won't give yourself
away." She mused a few seconds, a smile on her
lips, and then said, with a sudden lifting of the
eyes, "What do you think of Bob?"

The girl could only stammer:

"Think of him—in what way?"

"Do you think he looks like me?"

In this rapid, unexpected shifting of the
ground, Jennie was like a giddy person trying to
keep her head.

"Well, yes—in a way; only—"

Mrs. Collingham laughed again.

"I see that, too. He does. I can't deny it.
Often when I look at him, I see myself, only—you'll
laugh, I know—only myself as I'd be
reflected in the back of a silver spoon. That's
the trouble with Bob—he's so unformed. You
must have noticed it. I suppose it's the war;
and yet I don't know. He's always been like
that—a dear fellow, but no more than half
grown. I dare say that by the time he's fifty
he'll be something like a man."

As there seemed to be no absolute need for a
response to this, Jennie waited for more. It
came, after another little spell of musing.

"He's talked to me so much about you all
through the winter. That's why I asked you to
come down. Mr. Collingham and I feel so tremendously
indebted to you for the way you've
acted."

Jennie could only repeat feebly, "The way
I've acted?"

"I mean the way you've understood him.
Almost any other girl—yes, girls right here in
Marillo Park—would have taken him at his
word." Jennie's lips were parted, but unable to
frame a question. Mrs. Collingham eyed the
spirit lamp. "All the same, that doesn't excuse
*him*. Even a fellow who isn't half grown should
have more sense than to make love to every girl
he spends an hour with. One of these days, some
girl will catch him, and then he'll be sorry.
That's why we've been so thankful for the kind
of influence you've had over him, and why my
husband and I thought we'd like to do something—well,
something a little audacious."

Jennie was twisting her fingers and untwisting
them, but luckily her hostess, by keeping her
eyes on the spirit lamp, didn't notice this sign
of nervousness. Once more she spoke, with a
musing half smile.

"We—we see a good deal of some one else
who keeps talking about you; and—you won't
mind, will you?—of course we've drawn our
conclusions. We couldn't help that—could we?—when
they were staring us in the face."

"Do you mean Mr. Wray?" Jennie asked,
with the point-blank helplessness of one who
doesn't know how to hedge.

"Oh, I didn't use the name, now did I? And,
as I've said, what we've seen we've seen, and we
couldn't help it. But, of course, if it hadn't been
for Bob, we shouldn't have seen so quickly."

"But he doesn't know?" Jennie cried, more as
query than as affirmation.

"No; I suppose he doesn't. I only mean that
as you refused Bob so many times—he told me
that—we naturally thought there must be some
one else, and when everything pointed that way
and Hubert talked of you so much—" She
kept this line of reasoning suspended while once
more she shifted her ground suddenly. "I
wonder if you've ever realized how hard it is to
show your gratitude toward people to whom you
truly and deeply feel grateful?"

Jennie mumbled something to the effect that
she had never been in that situation.

"Well, it *is* a situation. People are so queer
and proud and *difficile*. I suppose it's we older
people who run up oftenest against that; but if
Mr. Collingham and I could only do for people
the things we *might* do, and which they won't
let us do—"

Once more the idea was suspended to give
Jennie time to take in the fact that a good thing
was coming her way; but all she could manage
was to stare with frightened, fascinated eyes and
no power of thought.

"Do you know, my dear," the artless voice
ran on, "now that I'm face to face with you, I'm
really afraid? I told my husband that, if he'd
leave us alone together, I shouldn't be—and,
after all, I am." She leaned forward confidentially.
"How frank would you let me be? How
much would you be willing for me to say?"

But before the girl could invent a reply the
voice kept up its even, caressing measure.

"*I* know how things are with you—at least, I
think I do. I've been young, my dear. I know
what it is to be in love. You're coloring, but you
needn't do it—not with me. You're very *much*
in love, aren't you?"

Jennie bowed her head to hide her tears. She
hadn't meant to admit how much in love she
was, but this sympathy unnerved her.

"You do love Hubert, don't you?"

"Yes, but—"

"And that's why you told Bob you couldn't
marry him?"

"That's one of the reasons, but—"

"One of the reasons will do, my dear. You
don't know how much I feel with you and for
you. I could tell you a little story about myself
when I was your age—but, then, old love tales
are like dried flowers, they've lost their scent
and color. Mr. Collingham and I are very fond
of Hubert, and, of course, he doesn't make enough
to marry on as things are now. He has a little
something, I suppose, and, with the work he's
doing, the future is secure. You'll find, one day,
that he'll be painting you as Andrea del Sarto
painted Lucrezia, and Rembrandt Saskia—their
wives, you know—"

"Oh, but, Mrs. Collingham—"

"There, there, my dear! I'm not going to say
anything more about that. I know Hubert and
what he wants, and so my husband and I thought
that if we could show our gratitude to you and
make things easier for him—"

"Oh, but you couldn't!"

"We couldn't unless you helped us. That goes
without saying, of course. But we hoped you
would. You see, when people have so much—not
that we're so tremendously rich, but when
they have enough—and when they know as we
do what struggle is—and there's been anyone
whom they admire as we admire you, after all
you've done for Bob—we thought that if we
could give you a little present—a wedding present
it would be—only just a little in anticipation—we
thought five thousand dollars—"

She ceased suddenly because Jennie appeared
as one transfixed. She sat erect; but the life
seemed to have gone out of her.

Mrs. Collingham was prepared for this; she
had discounted it in advance. "She's playing
for more," she said to herself. Luckily, she had
named her minimum only, and had arranged
with her husband for a maximum. The maximum
was all the same to her so long as she
saved Bob. Having given Jennie credit for seeing
through the game all along—such girls were
quick and astute—she had expected that the
first figure of the "present" would meet with
just this reception.

But Jennie was saying to herself, "Oh, if this
kind offer had only come yesterday!" Five
thousand dollars was a sum of which she could
not see the spending limitations. It meant all
of which the family had need and that she herself
had ever coveted. With five thousand dollars,
she could not only have put her father on
his feet, but have come before Hubert as an
heiress.

"If you don't think it enough," Mrs. Collingham
said, at last, with a shade of coldness in her
tone, "I should be willing to make it seven—or
ten. Perhaps we'd better say ten at once, and
end the discussion. My husband's willing to
make it ten, but I don't think he'd give more.
Our son is very dear to us"—the realities seeped
through in spite of her attempts at comedy—"and,
oh, Miss Follett, if you'll only help us to
keep him for ourselves as you've helped us
already—"

Jennie staggered to her feet. Her arms hung
lax at her sides. Ten thousand dollars! The sum
was fabulous! It would have meant all cares
lifted from the home—and Hubert! She was
hardly aware of speaking as she said:

"Oh, Mrs. Collingham, I can't take your
money. I wish I could. My God! how I wish I
could! But—but—"

"But, for goodness' sake, child, why can't
you?"

"Because—oh, because—I'm married to Bob
already."




CHAPTER IX
==========


It was one of those occasions when the auditory
nerve seems to connect imperfectly with the
brain. Mrs. Collingham placed her cup on the
table and leaned forward, puzzled, tense.

"What did you say? Sit down. Tell me that
again."

Jennie collapsed against the tan cushion of
the chair, and repeated her confession. Her
hostess's brows knitted painfully.

"But I don't understand. When did you
marry him?"

The girl explained that it had been on the
previous afternoon.

"But—but—you said just now that you were
in love with some one else."

"So I am—only—only, Bob made me."

"Made you what?"

"Made me go and get a license and marry
him. He said"—her lips and tongue were so
parched that it was hard to form the words—"he
said he was going away in a few days to
South America, and that he couldn't go unless
he knew I was his wife. I begged him to let me
off, but he—he wouldn't. Oh, Mrs. Collingham,
what am I to do?"

The appeal helped Junia to rally her stricken
powers. It enabled her to say inwardly: "I
must act through this girl herself. If I estrange
her, I may lose my son." A flash of the lioness
wrath with which she trembled might lead to an
irretrievably false step. So she made her tone
kindly, sympathetic, almost affectionate.

"And Bob—does he know that—that you care
for some one else?"

"He never asked me."

"But don't you think you should have told
him?"

"That's not so very easy when—"

"But there was some sort of understanding
between you and Hubert, wasn't there?"

Jennie's only answer to this was to clasp her
hands and say,

"Oh, Mrs. Collingham, how do people get
divorces?"

This being more than Junia had hoped for, she
tried to use the opening to the best of her ability.

"They—they do something that—that makes
the other person want to be free." Trying to
explain this further, she ran the risk of citing a
case perhaps too close to the point. "For instance,
if my husband wanted to be free, he'd do
something that would make me willing to divorce
him."

"And would you?"

"You see, I'm taking the case of *his* wanting
to be free. In that situation, *he's* the one who
would do the thing. If I wanted to be free, I
suppose—I suppose I should do it."

"So that if I wanted to be free, it would be
up to me to do the thing rather than up to
Bob."

A moral issue being here at stake, Junia was
obliged, in the expressive American phrase, "to
sidestep," though she supposed that the suggestion
in the air was of no more than Jennie
had done already. As an artist's model, it would
be part of her professional occupation.

"I'm not giving you advice, my dear; I'm
only trying to answer your question. I'm so
sorry for you that I'd do anything I could to
help you unravel the tangle."

"Then you think there are ways of unraveling
it?"

"Oh, certainly, if you were willing to—"

"To what, Mrs. Collingham. There's almost
nothing I wouldn't do—to get us all out—when
you've been so kind to me."

Having a conscience of her own, Junia continued
to "sidestep."

"My dear, I can't tell you what to do. I'm
not sure that I know—very well. You see, it's
your trouble, and you must get out of it. I'll
help you. I *will* do that. In every way I can
I'll make it easy for you. But I couldn't advise—or—or
put anything in your way that might
be considered as—as temptation."

But conscientious scruples were not in Jennie's
line. When eager to reach a point, she went to
it straight.

"If Bob came back from South America and
found I was living with Hubert, wouldn't he have
to divorce me then?"

Junia rose in the agitation of one unused to
plain talk, and shocked by it.

"Jennie—your name *is* Jennie, isn't it?—I
must go and speak to Mr. Collingham. You'll
stay here—won't you?—till I come back. I may
have something then rather important to say."

The girl sat still, looking up adoringly.

"Are you going to tell him?"

"No; I think not. But there's something I
want to ask him. I don't think that either you
or I had better say anything to anyone. What do
you think?"

Jennie shook her head.

"I don't want to. I wish nobody would ever
have to know."

"I wish Hubert didn't have to know. Perhaps
he won't; and yet—Let us think." She
dropped into a chair nearer to Jennie than the
one behind the tea table. "One thing I *must*
ask you. What happened after you and Bob
went through that ceremony yesterday afternoon?"

"Nothing happened. He motored back to his
friends on Long Island and I took the ferry and
went home. He said he'd see me on Saturday to
say good-by."

"Where?"

"Oh, I don't know. In Central Park, I expect.
He's asked me to meet him there once or twice
already."

"But I wouldn't go anywhere else with him
if I were you—not into a house, or anything."

"I won't if he doesn't make me."

"I'd be firm about that. You see, if you did—well,
I'm sure you understand—it might—it
might make it harder for you to find your way
out to where you'd be happy again. Are you
sure you see what I mean?"

"I've had that out with him. He'd said that
nothing would happen till he got back from
South America."

Relieved by this simple statement, Junia
went on.

"And if I were you, I wouldn't say a word to
anybody—not even to your own father and
mother. Your mother is living, isn't she? Don't
even tell Bob that you've seen me. Don't tell
anyone anything. Let it be your secret and
mine. I want you to feel that I'm your friend
and anxious to help you out of the muddle in
which you've tied up your happiness. At first,
when you told me, I thought more of Hubert;
but now that we've talked I'm thinking of you,
too, and how much I should like to see you—"
A dim smile conveyed the rest of the thought
while she rose again. "Now I'll go. Don't be
alarmed if I'm a little long. Max will take care
of you."

Left to herself, Jennie's emotions came in
waves of conflicting calculation. Had she only
been in love with Bob, and not with Hubert, all
this graciousness would have lapped her round
in silk and softness. Nothing would have been
denied her from a limousine to pearls. There
would have been the villa for the family, with
Gussie and Gladys turned into "buds."

But, as an offset to it, there would be the renunciation.
Somehow, since cutting herself
away from Hubert by the ceremony with Bob,
he seemed nearer to her than before. Things
she had supposed to be out of the question now
presented themselves as more in the line of those
that could be done. Within twenty-four hours
she had lived much; she had ripened much.
Now that she had had this talk with Mrs. Collingham,
Hubert became more definitely an
alternative. She could choose him and let this
wealth and beauty go, or she could choose the
wealth and beauty and let him....

But at the thought of turning her back on
him something seemed to choke her. To choose
what money could buy instead of this great love
was treachery to all she knew as sublime. She
clutched herself over the heart. It was as if she
were going to die. Max was so startled that he
sprang upon her with his mighty paws in the
roughness of young consternation.

On the other hand, home conditions were well-nigh
imperative. Love and Hubert were all very
well, but they were part of the world of romance.
The family, with their concrete needs, were
actuality. Jennie thought of each one of them
in turn, but of Teddy most of all. Among those
of her own generation, he was her favorite. If
she became openly Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham,
Junior, of Marillo Park, Teddy would go
far. He might have a place like Mr. Brunt's.
Only the other day her father had said of Mr.
Brunt, "There's one who don't have any trouble
in pickling down his ten a week." To see Teddy
pickling down his ten a week, which would be
more than five hundred dollars in a year, Jennie
was ready to submit to almost anything—even
Bob's hands on her person. She might get used
to them, and, if she didn't, why, the daily sacrifice
would be not without its reward.

She had reached something like this decision
when Mrs. Collingham came back. Watching
her from the minute when she rounded the corner
of the flagged pavement, Jennie noted a rapid
change in her expression. At first it was terrible—that
of a queen in wrath. As she approached
the bird cage, however, it cleared so quickly that
by the time she reached the threshold it was
almost tender.

"That's because she likes me," Jennie said to
herself. She was accustomed to being liked,
though especially by men. "I think it will cheer
her up if I say right off that I've come to stay
with her."

To make this announcement she had risen to
her feet, with lips already parted; but Mrs.
Collingham forestalled her.

"Sit down again, my dear. I want to talk to
you some more. I must tell you about Mr. Collingham."
She herself sank into the chair near
Jennie which she had already occupied. She
panted as after a difficult experience. "Oh dear!
It's been so trying! You don't know him, do
you? Well, he's a good man—kind and just in
his way—but oh, so stern and relentless! If he
knew what Bob had done in going through that
mad thing with you, he'd turn the boy adrift."

Having reseated herself already, Jennie now
closed her lips. She had forgotten Mr. Collingham.
Coming to stay was meeting a new
obstacle.

"It's only fair to you to make you understand
what kind of man my husband is. Of course,
he's a strong man, otherwise he wouldn't have
accomplished all he has. My son, my daughter,
I myself—we're but puppets on his string. His
word has to be law to us. And with Bob the way
he is—wanting to marry every girl he meets—and
forgetting her next day—his father has no
patience. You don't know how hard it is for me,
my dear, always to have to stand between them."

As she paused to dab her eyes, Jennie saw the
limousine, the villa, with Teddy's chance of
pickling down ten a week, fading out like a
picture in the movies.

"I wouldn't dare to tell him of the great wrong
Bob has done to you. He'd disinherit him on the
spot. If Bob were to insist on having this escapade—you
wouldn't really call it a marriage,
would you?—but if he were to insist on its being
made public, why, there'd be an end of his relations
with his father. My husband would neither
give him a cent nor leave him a cent. I must say
that Bob would deserve it; but, Jennie, I'm
thinking of you. You'd have forsaken the man
you loved, married a man you didn't care for,
and got nothing in the world to show for it.
That's where you'd have to suffer, and I can see
well enough that you're suffering already."

There was every reason now that Jennie's
tears should begin to flow. Flow they did while
her companion watched.

"And yet, as you'll see, Mr. Collingham is not
an unkind man. When I explained to him that
we might be more indebted to you than I had
thought at first, he said—"

With a look of anticipation, Jennie stopped
crying suddenly, though the tears already shed
were glistening on her cheek.

The point was now to find phraseology at
once clear enough and delicate enough to suggest
a course and yet not shock the sensibilities.

"You see, my dear, it's this way. One has to
keep one's ideals, hasn't one? That goes without
saying. Once we let our ideals go"—she flung
her hands outward—"well, what's the use of
living? My own life hasn't been as happy as
you might think; and if it hadn't been for my
ideals—"

Jennie broke in because she couldn't help it.

"Mr. Wray is ideal for a man, don't you think,
Mrs. Collingham?"

It was the lead Junia needed.

"He's perfect, Jennie, in his way; and, oh,
how I wish you were as free as forty-eight hours
ago! You could be, of course, if—But I mustn't
advise you, must I? I don't know how to. I'm
just as lost as you are. Only, if you could find a
way to cast the burden of the whole thing on
Bob—"

"Do you mean to make him get the divorce?"

"In that case, we should want to feel that you
had something to fall back upon. And so my
husband thought that perhaps twenty-five thousand
dollars—"

Jennie gave a great gasp. Her head began to
swim. Not villas and limousines rose before
her, but cloud-capped towers and gorgeous
palaces.

"Poor daddy," she thought, "wouldn't have
to hunt for a job any more, and momma'd have
nothing to do for the rest of her life but sit in a
chair and rock."

Yet that was only part of the vision. The rest
did not go so easily into words. She had only to
hurry to the studio, fling herself into the arms
she was longing to feel clasped round her—and
become fabulously rich.

That would be if Bob took the opening she
offered him. If he didn't—

"But suppose Bob won't?" she asked, in terror
lest he should not.

"I've thought of that, too," came the prompt
answer. "He will, of course. But suppose he
didn't. Well, we're not hagglers, my dear.
We're only simple people trying to do right, just
as you're trying to do right yourself. If Bob is
only in a position in which he *can* undo his
wrong, whether he undoes it or not, you shall
have your twenty-five thousand just the same."

"Could I have it as early as—as next week?"

"If the conditions are fulfilled, certainly."

Jennie was anxious to free herself from the
charge of cupidity.

"The reason I say next week is that my father
is worried about the interest on the mortgage
and the taxes. He didn't pay the interest last
time, and the taxes are two months overdue. If
he can't find the money by next week—"

"You yourself can be in a position to take all
the worry off his hands—once the conditions are
fulfilled."

Little more was said after this. There was
little more to say. The necessities of the case
being once understood, Junia steered her guest
back to the car which waited at the door.

But into the leave-taking Max threw an odd
note of hostility. As if he resented some baseness
toward his master, he pressed his flank
against Jennie with such force as almost to
knock her down, and when she sprang away
from him into the car he growled after her.




CHAPTER X
=========


"So you can do it and get away with it."
This was Teddy's reflection as he left the
bank on that Thursday afternoon. He had
spent an infernal day, but it was over, and over
safely. Of the missing twenty dollars he had
neither heard a word nor caught a sign of anxiety.
Mr. Brunt had been methodical and taciturn as
usual. Always keeping a gulf between Teddy
and himself, it was neither more nor less a gulf
to-day than it was on other days. As to whether
he missed twenty dollars or whether he did not,
Teddy could form no idea.

In the middle of the morning there had been
a terrifying incident.

"See that guy over there?" Lobley, one of his
colleagues, had asked him.

He saw the guy over there—a crafty, clean-shaven
Celt—and said so.

"That's Flynn, the detective who copped
Nicholson, the teller at the Wyndham National."

"O my God! I'm pinched!" Teddy exclaimed
to himself. "If I had a gun or a dose of poison,
he'd never get me alive."

But Flynn only chatted with Jackman, one
of the house detectives, laughed, cashed a check
at a wicket, and left the bank.

Teddy breathed again, wondering if he had
given anything away to Lobley. Was it possible
that Lobley could have heard of the twenty
dollars and been set to try him out? No; he
didn't believe so. Lobley had merely pointed
out Flynn as a notable character, and gone about
his business.

"I shall never forget that mug," Teddy
thought, as he summoned his *sang-froid* to go on
with his work. "The mug of a guy without
guts," he added, further to define the pitiless set
of Flynn's features. "I sure would kill myself
before I let him touch me."

There was no other alarm that day; there was
only the incessant fear, the incessant watchfulness
that made him shrink from every eye that
glanced his way, and which, when office hours
were over, sent him scuttling to the subway like
a rabbit to its hole.

At supper, his father brought up again the
subject of the taxes and the interest on the
mortgage. The latter would be due at the end
of the following week, and the former was long
overdue. With the added interest on both, he
owed two hundred and sixty-odd dollars, of which
he had borrowed from old friends a hundred and
fifteen. Between the sum due and that in hand,
there was a gap which he didn't see how to fill.

"We'll get it somehow, daddy," Jennie said,
encouragingly. "Don't begin worrying."

"No; Ted'll rob the bank," Gussie laughed,
flippantly.

Teddy was on his feet, shaking his fist across
the table.

"See here, Miss Gus; that's just about—"

Gussie laughed up at him, still more flippantly.

"You haven't robbed it already, have you?
Momma, do make him behave."

"Children, don't squabble, please! Teddy
darling, Gussie was only poking a little fun. Sit
down and have some more hash. It's made with
beets in it, just the way you like it. I was
reading," she continued, to divert the minds of
the company, "of that teller at the Wyndham
National—"

"Nicholson," Josiah put in. "I used to know
him when I was at the Hudson River Trust.
Sharp-eyed little ferret face, he was. Twenty-three
thousand, extending over a period of five
years. Often had lunch with him at the same
counter. Blueberry pie was a favorite of his."

"Twenty-three thousand, extending over a
period of five years!" Teddy repeated that to
himself. He wondered that it hadn't struck him
when he heard the fellows at the bank discussing
the arrest. One of them had claimed "inside
dope" as to how Nicholson had covered up his
tracks, and explained the process. Teddy hadn't
listened to that, because the magnitude of the
theft had excluded its bearing on his own.

But there it was forcing itself on his attention,
like Pansy's cold nose pressed at that minute
against his hand. You could have five years'
leeway, and never be suspected. He pumped his
father for further details as to Nicholson's life,
learning that he had owned his home at Leffingwell
Manor, where he had been a member of the
golf club and a church goer.

At his own fears Teddy smiled inwardly.
Twenty dollars, which would certainly be paid
back in the course of a few weeks! Already he had
saved seventy cents toward the restoration, just by
going without his lunch, with a few economies
in car fares. If he could pawn his best suit of
clothes, he would have the whole sum within a
fortnight. The suit had been bought for twenty-six
dollars, and would certainly bring in ten. It
would be a matter of dodging his mother and
getting it out of the closet in her room, where
she kept it in order to regulate his use of it.

As supper went on, it was little Gladys who
brought up the question which some one older
might have asked.

"What would happen, daddy, if you couldn't
pay the interest and the taxes?"

"They could sell us out of house and home."

But this possibility being more than a week off,
the statement brought no fears with it. Like
all people who at the best of times are dependent
on a weekly wage, the Folletts had the mental
attitude best described as "from hand to mouth."
That is, once the dinner was secure, there was no
will to worry as to where the supper was to come
from. It was fundamentally a question of outlook.
People used to being provided for naturally
looked ahead; but where your most extended
view could take you no more than from one meal
to another your powers of forecast grew limited.
Doubtless the provision was merciful, for, in the
case of the Folletts, even the parents felt the
futility of dreading a calamity more than a week
away.

Of all the six, Jennie was the only one with a
power of making comparisons and drawing contrasts.
She had had, that day, a glimpse of a
world as different from her own as paradise from
earth. It was no use saying that it was different
only in degree; it was different also in kind. It
was different in values, in textures, in amplitudes.
It was another thing, not another aspect
of the same thing. Junia Collingham might be a
human being like herself; but in all that was of
practical account, she was as widely separated
from Jennie Follett as a New Yorker from a
Central African.

That was as far as Jennie got. Her mind was
not given to deduction or her spirit to asking
questions. Not having a God in particular, she
had nothing to act as a great touchstone, to praise
or to blame. Some human beings had everything;
others had next to nothing. The Folletts
were among "the others." Jennie didn't know
how or why. She didn't ask to know. Knowing
would perhaps be worse than not knowing, since
it might stir rebellion where there was now only
lassitude and resignation. But there was the
fact. The Collinghams could throw her twenty-five
thousand dollars as she threw a titbit to
Pansy, while her father might be sold out of house
and home for lack of a hundred and fifty.

Jennie mused, but she did no more. Life was
too big a mystery to grapple with. If she tried
it, it made her unhappy. It made her unhappy
that Max should have been friendly at first, and
then growled at her so resentfully. She wondered
if dogs had a scent for moral and emotional
atmospheres. She couldn't express this last in
words, but she did it very well by thought. She
often had thoughts for which she had no words,
so that her inner life was broader than that
which she showed outside. It was one of the
things she had noticed about Mrs. Collingham—that
she had words for everything. It was like
her possession of the house, the gardens, the
beautiful things. They gave her spaciousness.
Her spirit moved with a larger swing. She could
think, feel, express herself strongly, vividly,
commandingly, while they, the Folletts, had to
creep and sneak timidly along the back lanes of
life.

"That's why I'm doing it," she reasoned with
herself, "because I'm in the back lanes of life.
I can creep and sneak along, and I can't do anything
else. It was all very well for him to jostle
me with his lean, iron flank and to growl; but
he didn't know what twenty-five thousand would
mean to me."

Along the line of these musings, Teddy said,
suddenly:

"Saw young Coll to-day. Came up and spoke
to me. Not half a bad sort when you get to
know him."

Jennie felt a little faint, but no one noticed it,
because Gussie threw back the ball.

"Tell him to come up and speak to me. Any
afternoon at half past five, when I leave Corinne's."

"Say, Gus," Gladys giggled; "wouldn't you
like a guy with all that wad waitin' for you every
day when Corinne shuts down the lid? My!
The ice-cream sodas he could blow you to!"

Lizzie was pained. It seemed to her that the
process of Americanization which her children
were undergoing lay chiefly in the degradation
of their speech.

"Gladys darling, can't you find proper words
to—"

"Oh, momma dear," Gladys complained,
"do put a can on all that. If you're a cash girl,
you've got to talk English, or the other girls'll
whizzy you round the lot."

"Young Coll is going to South America,"
Teddy informed the party. "Sails with Huntley
on Monday. Gosh! Wouldn't I like to be going,
too! Say, dad, why do some fellows come into
the world with the way all smoothed for them
and their bread buttered in advance?"

"Because," Gussie declared, loftily, "they're
clever and can get ahead, like Fred Inglis. I'll
bet that if *his* father wanted his taxes and the
interest on a mortgage, he wouldn't have to
raise the wind among his old friends. Fred'd be
Johnny-on-the-spot with the greenbacks."

Teddy could only gulp, hang his head over his
plate, and choke himself with hash, as he muttered
to his soul; "God! I'll shoot that Fred
Inglis if I ever get a gun."

And just as if she knew that Teddy needed
comforting, Pansy sprang upon his knees, pushing
her face up along his breast till she could lick his
chin.

----

Twenty-four hours later Max was vexing his
soul with the difficulty of transcending planes.
There was so much of which he could have
warned his master, now that he had got him
back from Long Island; but there was neither
speech nor language, neither symbol nor sign, to
make human beings understand anything but
the most primitive needs and concepts. Obedience!
Disobedience! Hunger! Thirst! Sorrow!
Joy! These sentiments could be put over
from the dog plane to the human plane, but
without shadings, subtleties, or any of the marvels
of untuitive knowledge by which dogs could
enlighten men if men had open faculties. To
another dog, he could have flashed his information
in an instant; whereas human beings could
only seize ideas when they were beaten into
them with verbal clubs.

Edith and Bob voted Max a nuisance because,
in his agony of impotence, he pranced restlessly
about the bedroom, lashing his tail in one tempo
and pointing his ears in another. Edith had
come down from the Berkshires on hearing by
wire that Bob was to leave next Monday for
South America. She was seated now on the bed,
her back against the footboard.

"What I don't quite see," she was saying, "is
how you can be so sure."

Bob looked at her as he stood taking the studs
from the soft-bosomed evening shirt in his hand
to transfer them to the clean one lying on the
bed.

"How can you be so sure about Ayling?"

"Well, that's a little different. Ernest speaks
our language; he has our ways. Dad and
mother make a fuss because he hasn't a lot of
money; but that means no more than if he didn't
wear a certain kind of hat. He's our sort, just
the same."

"And I'm her sort. I can't explain it to you,
Edie, but she needs me."

"How do you know she needs you? Has she
ever admitted it?"

"I haven't asked her to admit it. I can see."

"Yes, that's all very fine, but—did it ever
strike you, when Hubert's been talking about
her, that—"

Bob made an inarticulate sound of scorn as he
inserted the cuff links into a cuff.

"Oh, Hubert's a top-hole chap, all right; but
my Lord!—Jennie wouldn't look across the street
at him."

"But he might look across the street at Jennie;
and with you so far away—"

He smiled, with something like a wink.

"Don't you fret about that. She's the kind of
little woman to be true. You can't mistake 'em."

"We've known a good many men who have
mistaken them."

"You haven't known my kind to make that
sort of tumble. Love can be blind; but instinct
can't be. Edie, I believe so much in that girl
that, if she was to play me false—But there—good
Lord!—she couldn't; so why talk about it
any more? See here," he added. "If you're
going to change your dress, you'll have to
scuttle—and I must get into my waiter's togs."

----

Meanwhile Dauphin's struggles were of another
order. It was the hour of the day which
he was accustomed to spend with Collingham,
and to spend it undisturbed. In this lovely
spring weather they strolled about the gardens,
peeped into the hotbeds, dropped in aimlessly
at the stable or the garage, exchanged odds and
ends of observation with the men working around
the place. After this, they returned to the
house, where, upstairs, in a comfortably, masculine
bedroom, the man made changes in his
outer fur, while the setter, less concerned about
trifles, stretched himself out on the floor and
blinked. It was a restful time, suited to a mind
which after the stormier years was growing more
and more content with material prosperity, and
to a heart that was always content with its master's
contentment.

But, of late, poor Dauphin had been painfully buffeted by waves of agitation. They
emanated from his master, like circlets round a
stone thrown into a pool. When his master's
wife came into the scene the conflict of forces
was terrible. She was not straight with her lord.
She was using him, hoodwinking him. Dauphin
would have sprung at her throat had it not been
for the knowledge that, were he to do so, he
would be beaten and kicked by the object of his
defense. No; you couldn't deal with human
beings sensibly. The wise thing to do was to
stretch on the floor and pretend to snooze while
they fought their own fight.

They didn't precisely fight their own fight
just now. Collingham merely accepted terms.
He was picking up his evening jacket from the
bed on which his valet had laid it out. Junia,
dressed exactly to the mean between too little
and too much suited for a family dinner, had
crossed the threshold of his room, where she stood
adjusting a fall of lace.

"As I told you yesterday after she went away,
she's just what you'd expect from such a girl,
certainly no better and possibly a little worse.
She's a mousey little thing, with a veneer of
modesty; but 'mercenary' isn't the word. It's
just a question of money, Bradley; and if you'll
leave it to me to deal with—"

"Leave it to you to deal with—to the tune of
twenty-five thousand dollars," he said, morosely,
pulling his coat into shape round his shoulders
as he looked into the long glass.

"Well, that's only half what it might have
been. I thought at one time that we might have
to make it fifty thousand—"

He was not sure, but he thought she finished
with the word "again." If so it was uttered too
softly for him to be obliged to take note of it,
so that he merely picked up a hairbrush and put
another touch to his hair.

She was now at work on the great string of
pearls which, to keep them alive, she wore even
in domestic privacy. Her object was to get the
famous Roehampton pearl, from the late Lady
Roehampton's collection, which had been the
seal of her reconciliation with Bradley fifteen
years earlier—to get this jewel right in the center
of her person, to make the string symmetric.

"My point in bringing it up now," she said,
speaking into her chin as her eyes inspected the
long oval of the necklet, "is to remind you that
you don't know anything. You haven't seen
Bob for nearly a week, and after Monday you
won't see him for two or three months at least.
Don't let him suspect that you've anything on
your mind. As a matter of fact, you haven't,
except what I tell you—and I may not tell you
everything."

"And that may be what I complain of."

"You can't complain of it when I give you the
results—now can you? You don't complain of
Mr. Bickley, or ask him for all the reasons he has
for saying this or that. You leave him a free
hand, and are ruled by him—you've often said
it—even when your own preference would be to
do something else, as it was in the case of this
man Follett. Now I only claim to be the Mr.
Bickley of the family."

That he had rights as father Collingham was
aware, though he was shy of putting them forward.
Having left them so much in abeyance,
it would have been as ridiculous to emphasize
them now as to dispute Bickley as efficiency
expert at the bank. Moreover, the uneasiness
which seizes on a man when his chickens come
home to roost inclined him still further to passivity.
If Bob was "knocking about town," as
he seemed to be, he might know about his father
what Junia did not—or presumably did not—that
the woman who received the fifty thousand
dollars had had her successors, and that even
now the line was not extinct. While he knew of
amusing incidents of fathers and sons meeting
on this ground, any such *contretemps* in his own
case would have shocked him profoundly. Junia
might go beyond her powers in prescribing his
course, and yet, for a multitude of reasons too
subtle for him to phrase, it seemed wise to
follow what Junia prescribed.

So the family dined and spent the evening
together as tourists walk across the Solfatara
crater. The ground was hot beneath their
tread, and here and there a whiff of sulphuric
vapor poured through a fissure in the crust;
but only Max and Dauphin sensed the volcanic
fire.

Later in the evening, Junia knelt at her *prie-dieu*
with the armorial books of devotion.

"And, O heavenly Father," she added, to her
usual prayer, "have mercy upon that poor
erring girl and help her to repent. Grant that
my son may extricate himself from the toils in
which he is entangled. Enable my daughter to
see that her duty lies in the station of life to
which thou hast been pleased to call her. Give
my husband the wisdom to seek advice and to
follow it. Lead me with thy counsel so that I
may do what is best for all my dear ones, through
Jesus Christ, Our Lord, Amen."

Having thus poured out her heart, she rose
feeling stronger and more comforted.




CHAPTER XI
==========


It should be said for Jennie Follett that, in the
matter of her course toward Bob Collingham,
she had few of those convictions of sin and
righteousness which restrain a proportion of
mankind. As with the other members of her
family, her conduct followed certain lines "because
she couldn't help it." That is as far as
her analysis would have carried her, though
analysis didn't give her much concern. Having
so much to do to get food and clothes, the higher
laws were outside her sphere of interest. Her
chief law was Necessity, and it covered so much
ground that there was little place for any other law.

It may be well to state here that the Folletts
belonged to that vast American contingent who
have practically no religion. They had had a
religion in Canada, where they had attended the
church of a local god who seemed to hold no
sway over the United States. They never found
that church in the suburbs of New York, or, if
they found it nominally, it didn't, in their
opinion, "seem the same." There were no local
suasions and compulsions to bring them to its
doors, and so, after a few spasmodic efforts to
re-establish the connection, they gave up the
attempt.

Perhaps this failure was due to the fact that,
in the depths of her strong, proud heart, Lizzie
didn't believe in God. Josiah did—or, at least,
he had believed in him up to the time of being
thrown upon the scrap heap. But Lizzie's faith
in God had died with the dying of her faith in
man. She had never said so, because she kept her
deeper thoughts to herself; but along these lines
her influence on her children had been negative.

So Jennie had missed those counsels to do
right which sometimes form a part of domestic
education. With so little latitude for doing anything,
there was not—apart from the grosser
vices—much latitude in the Follett family even
for doing wrong. They did what they "couldn't
help" doing, and there was an end of it. A
kind of inborn rectitude kept them from offenses
of which the public would have taken note, but
behind it there was little in the way of principle.

Jennie went to her farewell meeting with Bob
untroubled by qualms of conscience. Even if
scruples had worried her, they would have been
allayed by the knowledge, imparted by Bob's own
mother, that he had done her a great injury.
He made the same kind of love to every girl he
had known for an hour, and forgot her the next
day. "One of these days," the mother had said,
"some girl would catch him, and then he would
be sorry." A girl hadn't caught him in this case,
but he had caught a girl, and didn't know what to
do with her. Having compelled her to go through
a form of marriage—it was no more than a form—he was sailing off to the ends of the world,
leaving her not so much as the protection of his
name. She owed him nothing; and only the
goodness of his angel mother was making up for
what he owed to her.

And, on his side, Bob was so carried away by
his romance as to have no conception of Jennie's
attitude toward him. Seeing himself as a knight
riding to the relief of a damsel in distress, it did
not occur to him that the damsel could have a
preference as to her deliverer. It was a matter
of course that, from the window of the tower in
which she was a prisoner, she would drop into his
arms.

In other words, Bob had his own view of the
advantages of being a Collingham. They were
great advantages, since they gave him the opportunity
of being generous. He was in love
with Jennie largely because she was an exquisite
object on which to spend himself. She was a
gem, not in the rough, and yet in need of polishing,
and though his own refinement was not so
very great, he could throw refinement in her way.

That is to say, love for Bob was very much
a matter of giving himself out. Girls who could
have brought him everything—and they were
not scarce at Marillo Park—didn't interest him.
They left no place for the selflessness which was
the basis of his character. He couldn't precisely
be called kind, since kindness implies some deliberation
of the will. As the impulse of a fountain
is to pour itself out, so Bob's impulse was
to give, while Jennie was a crystal chalice wide
open to receive.

"I want you to have everything in the world,
Jennie darling," he declared, bending above her
as lovingly as a bench in the park would permit.
"I can't give it to you right off the bat, worse
luck, but sooner or later I'll be able to dope you
out every little wish. Good Lord! How I'll
enjoy it."

"What do you mean by sooner or later?"
Jennie asked, with eyes downcast.

"When I get the family broken to the bit.
I can't tell you in dates or time. They'll be hard
in the mouth at first; and mother pulls like the
devil."

At this false witness, Jennie was revolted.
No one knew better than herself the bigness of
that maternal heart which, as early as next week,
would give liberal proof of its sincerity, when
Bob's promises would still be in the air.

Bob had the afternoon at his disposal. The
park offered itself as a delicious trysting place,
because it was the month of May. In a nook
where lilac and syringa overshadowed them and
water glinted between lawns and glades, they
sat discreetly side by side, and she permitted him
to hold her hand.

He went on to sketch his plans for the immediate
future. His most trying lack was that of
ready cash. The parental system had always
been generous as to things, but penurious in
money. In the matter of things, he would be as
extravagant as he reasonably liked, so long as
the bills were sent to dad. Before he went to
work at the bank, his allowance in money
wouldn't have kept him in cigarettes. Even now,
he was only on the weekly pay roll for thirty-eight
dollars and sixty-six cents per, handed him
in a pay envelope. Food, lodging, clothes,
saddle horses, motor cars—all these were thrown
in extra; but in actual coin he didn't handle
more than his two thousand dollars a year,
like any other clerk.

Jennie could see, therefore, that, to begin with,
their position would be difficult, though only to
begin with. He could send her a little money
while he was away, but it wouldn't be very
much.

"I don't want you to send me any," she said,
hastily.

"You forget that I'm your husband, dear.
If I didn't, you could bring an action for divorce
on the ground of nonsupport."

This idea being new to Jennie, she had it
explained to her, rejecting it as a resource because
it was unromantic.

"And so, to be on the safe side against that,"
he laughed, "I've got this for you now."

Slipping an envelope from his pocket, he forced
it into the hand he was holding.

"It's only a hundred dollars—" he was beginning
to explain.

She snatched her hand away as if she had been
stung.

"Oh, Bob, I can't!"

That situation amused him. It was one more
proof of the naïve honesty of the little girl. He
knew how hard up she was, how hard up all the
family must be, and yet money didn't tempt her.

"You're a funny little kid," he laughed,
drawing her as near to him as the park laws
would permit. "You'd think I didn't have a
right to take care of you."

But Jennie was feeling that if she took this
money she would be bound to him by principles
more acute than the promises she had made
before the parson.

"No, Bob, I can't. Please don't make me—\ *please*!"

But in the end he forced it on her, and she
stowed it away in her little bag. By that time,
too, she had reviewed the family situation. With
a hundred dollars in her possession they could
less easily be sold out of house and home at the
end of the following week. That calamity, at
least, could be dodged, whatever other misfortune
might overtake herself. She might decide
that to be sold out of house and home would be
easier than to bind herself further to Bob by
using his money; but, still, she would have the
choice. As to the twenty-five thousand, there
was always the possibility that it might not come
in time. She had not yet seen Hubert; she
couldn't see him till Bob had sailed. When she
did, the other woman might be in her place and
her heart would have to break in spite of everything. Better it should break with a hundred
dollars in her pocket than that she should be
helpless to stay the family disaster.

But when Bob sailed on the Monday she was
free to make the great test. Notwithstanding
his definite farewells on the Saturday, he had
tried to see her again on the Sunday, but the
necessity for secrecy made it possible for her to
put him off. For one thing, she couldn't go
through a second time such a good-by as that of
Saturday. Bob had been too much overcome.
As unexpectedly to himself as to her, he had
broken down. Braving all publicity, he had suddenly
seized her hand, pressed it to his lips, and
as he bent over it she could feel his tears against
her fingers. He hadn't exactly cried; he had
only breathed hard, with two great sobs.

"My God! how I love you, Jennie!" she had
heard him muttering. "How I love you! How I
love you! How can I do without you all the time
till I come back?" When he raised his head he
laughed sheepishly, though the tears were still
on his cheeks. "Forget it, little girl," he begged,
unsteadily, wiping his cheeks and blowing his
nose. "I just worship you, and that's all there
is about it. It breaks me all up to go away and
leave you; but the time will pass, and, if I can
help it, I shall never go away from you again."

Defying the park laws once more, he had
kissed her and kissed her. She had let him do
it because she was so unnerved. Besides, she
was sorry for him, and would have been sorrier
still if she hadn't known that by to-morrow he
would have forgotten her. That was always the
way with fellows who took things so hard. The
true love was too stern and strong to show
emotion.

Nevertheless, she had had an unhappy Sunday
thinking of those two sobs. It was not until
after ten o'clock on Monday morning that she
was able to turn again to the compulsion of the
man she loved. At ten, Bob sailed, and that
episode in Jennie's life was probably behind her.
By the time he came back, he would be in love
with a girl of his own class and eager to seize
the freedom she, Jennie, would be in a position
to deliver him. At last the way was clear. She
had only to go to her lover and tell him she was
there.

She went that afternoon. Her plan was
simple. She would say that if he had not yet
found a model for the girl in the Byzantine
chair, she was ready to do the work. The rest
would come as a matter of course.

Now that she was face to face with the task,
her heart was oddly apathetic. "I might be out
to buy postage stamps," she said to herself,
while crossing the ferry.

None the less, she wished she didn't have to
look at this water down which Bob had sailed
only four or five hours previously. Off toward
the south, in the haze of the warm May afternoon,
there was a giant steamer lying as if becalmed.
It might be his. There was one still
farther out to sea. That, too, might be his. Far
down on the horizon, just passing out of sight,
there was a little black spot with a pennon of
black smoke. That could very easily be his.
She watched it. It might be carrying him away
to where he would forget her. Perhaps he had
forgotten her already. His mother had said—and
his mother must know him—that he made
love to girls one day and forgot them on the
next, and it was already two days since Saturday.
Very well! Let him forget! Only, it didn't seem
as if those kisses and those tears were quite in
keeping with a heart which treated love so easily.

She was glad when the ferryboat bumped
softly against its pier and she could get away
from the great stream of which the very smells
and sounds would now begin to make her think
of him. She wished there was another means of
returning home. She wished he had gone by
train. She wished....

At the door of the studio building she was
seized with a great terror. She began to understand
what it was she had come to do. She had
come to give herself up. She was to say, in fact,
"Here I am—take me." And he would take
her—if he hadn't already taken some one else.
The betrayal of a husband who was hardly a
husband was no longer in her mind. She was
appalled at this yielding of herself.

Yet she did everything as she had been accustomed
to do it and entered the studio by the
door she generally used.

At first she thought there was no one there.
Certainly the other woman was not there, and
that was so far a relief. Slowly, cautiously, she
made her way between the brocades, old furniture,
and pedestals. Then she saw Hubert and
Hubert saw her.

She stood very much as a deer stands when
surprised in the bracken—head erect, eyes curious.
Till he gave her a sign she made no movement
to go farther. And for a minute he gave
her no sign. He only remained seated and looked.
He looked, with a sketch and pencil in his hand.
He had been occupied in touching something up.

But she couldn't mistake it. It was the girl
in the Byzantine chair. Her heart, which seemed
to swell to thrice its size, thumped painfully.

Then, at last, a smile broke over his face,
lifting his mustache and mounting to his violet
eyes. He didn't speak; he didn't move. He
only looked, hushed, enraptured, as the hunter
at the startled deer.




CHAPTER XII
===========


Feeling that an explanation of her presence
in the studio should come from herself,
Jennie faltered:

"I—I only looked in to say that if you hadn't
found a model for—for the picture you wanted
to paint, I might—I might be able to pose."

Though she hadn't advanced and he hadn't
moved, the extraordinary light in his eyes made
her heart thump more wildly.

"You'd do it"—he held up the sketch—"dressed
like that?"

She remembered his own phrase, "If I'm to
be that kind of a model I must *be* that kind of
a model—and do what's expected."

The process of starving out being so far successful,
Wray felt it well to push it a little more.
He rose with an air of distress.

"I wish you could have told me this last week,
Jennie. As it is—"

"You've got some one else?"

"Not definitely. I've tried out three—two of
them no good, though the third might—"

"Might do as well as me?"

"Perhaps better in some ways. I mean," he
added hastily, as she seemed about to go, "that
she's a real professional model, and for this kind
of job, of course, a professional would be—let us
say, more at her ease."

So many good things had, during the past few
days, swum into Jennie's vision, only to swim
out again, that she had grown almost used to
this fading of her hopes. Nevertheless, the bliss
of loving Hubert and getting twenty-five thousand
dollars for it had seemed tolerably sure.
To lose it now would be hard; but harder still,
for the moment, at least, was this tone of detachment,
of indifference. That another woman
should, in some ways, do better than herself
was worse than the last indignity. Her lip
trembled. She was about to turn away with that
collapse of the figure which marks the woman
who has lost all hope.

He hurried up to her, laying his hand on her
arm in a way that made a thrill run through her
frame.

"Wait a minute, Jennie! I'd like to talk it
over. If you want me to try you out—"

"What does that mean—try me out?"

"Oh, simply that you'd take the pose, so that
I could see how nearly you'd come up to what I
want."

"And then if I didn't—"

He smiled. "Oh, but you will—at least I
think so."

"When would you do it?"

"Oh, right now. As soon as you like. I've
got the time."

She looked at him inquiringly, but there was
nothing in his eyes to answer the question she
was asking.

"Oh, very well," she said, dully, and once
more turned toward the little door.

She had taken a step or two when he said,
suddenly,

"Jennie, what made you come back?"

She paused, turned again, and pulled herself
together. It was necessary to take the old
bantering tone. After all, she could fence in her
way as well as anybody else.

"Oh, I don't know," she threw off carelessly.
"I thought I might as well."

"Might as well what?"

"Oh, go in for the whole thing. As you
say yourself, if you're to be that kind of a
model—"

"And was that all?"

"'All?' It was a good deal, I should say."

"It was a good deal, yes—but I asked if it
was all."

"Well, ask away, my boy. I don't have to
answer you or go to jail, now do I?"

Extraordinary the relief of falling back on
studio badinage! It took her off the Collingham
stilts, away from the high-wrought Collingham
emotions. She began to see what the trouble
was with Bob. His touch wasn't light enough.
He was too purposeful. He seemed to think you
must mean something all the time. Mrs. Collingham,
too, seemed to think so. It was not in
Bob's language so much as in his cast of mind;
but it was in his mother's cast of mind, and in
her language, too.

Jennie thought of this as she stood before the
pier-glass in the little dressing-room, first taking
off her jacket, and then unpinning her hat. She
would have to do her hair on the top of her head
like the girl in Hubert's sketch. "And that's all
the clothes I shall need to put on," she tried to
say flippantly. She tried to say it flippantly,
because that, too, would be along the line that
people took who weren't Collinghams.

People who weren't Collinghams! That meant
all the people in Indiana Avenue, all the people
in Pemberton Heights, the vast majority of the
people in the United States, not to speak of any
other country. Jennie had a good many acquaintances,
and the family, taken as a whole,
had more; but she couldn't think of anyone in
their class who took life as more than a skimming
on the surface. Outside the bounden
duties which they couldn't avoid they chiefly
liked being silly.

She thought of that, too, loosening her hair
and letting it fall in amber wavelets over her
shoulders and down her back. Mrs. Collingham
had said that it was lovely hair, but she hadn't
really seen it. There was so much of it that,
when she piled it up like the girl in the sketch,
it almost overweighted her delicate little face.

No; whatever you could say about people
like the Collinghams, you couldn't say they
were silly. They had motives, opinions, points
of view. They had minds, and they used them.
They might not use them well, but to use them
at all was better than to let them grow atrophied.

Jennie, as has been said, had no words to express
these thoughts, but, like Pansy, she could
do without a vocabulary. She felt; she vibrated.
She, too, had a mind, though she was
afraid of putting it to work. Lingering over the
piling of her hair, she wondered if the use or
nonuse of the mind marked the real line between
people like the Collinghams and people like the
Folletts. Was that why the country was divided
into highbrows and lowbrows—those who
made the best of what they had, and those who
disqualified themselves for all the stronger purposes?
Since her peep at Marillo Park, she saw
that something admitted one to such a haven,
and something kept one out. There was money,
of course, and position; but back of both position
and money wasn't it the case that there was
mind?

She threw off her blouse and lingered again
to examine her arms and bust. She lingered on
purpose, putting off the extraordinary thing she
had to do to the latest possible minute.

At Collingham Lodge, she had caught glimpses
of books, papers, and magazines. Even in the
bird cage they were lying on the table and chairs.
The Folletts hardly ever read a book. The only
work of the kind she could remember the family
ever to have bought was one called *Ancient
Rome Restored*, which her mother had subscribed for in monthly parts when an agent
brought a sample to the house. It was at a
time when Lizzie was afraid that her children—they
were children still—would grow up without
cultivation. *Ancient Rome Restored*, being
abundantly illustrated, called out in the young
Folletts the almost extinct Scarborough tradition.
Having no other important picture book
to look at, they pored over the glories of the
Forum, of Hadrian's Villa, of the Baths of
Caracalla, till an odd, incipient love of classic
beauty began to stir in them. But there their
cultivation ended. In the papers they studied
only the murders, burglaries, and comic cuts.
In the way of general entertainment, the movies
formed their sole relaxation, but unless the play
was silly they complained. Anything that asked
for thought they kicked against, and Pemberton
Heights kicked with them. Was that why there
was a Pemberton Heights and a Marillo Park?
Did the power of thought control the difference
between them? Was it that where there was
little or no power of thought, there was little or
nothing of anything else?

She unhooked her skirt and let it slip down to
a circular heap about her feet. She wondered
if the girl who would, in some ways, do better
than herself were as lithely built as she. Mrs.
Collingham had likened her to—oh, what was
it? It was a spire. It sounded like a chapel.
She had tossed it off as something that everybody
knew about. So she had tossed off other
names, taking it for granted that Jennie would
have them at her fingers' ends.

The more she pondered the more sure of it
she became—that she and her kind were poor
and helpless chiefly because they wouldn't take
the trouble to be otherwise. Not to stray from
the childish, the sentimental, and the obvious
gave them the relief she found in returning to the
lingo she had always used with Wray.

She had used it with Bob, too—only, with
Bob she had used it differently. Perhaps it was
he who had used it differently. Between her and
Wray, it had never been more than the medium
of chaff, except on those occasions when it had
become the vehicle of a half-acknowledged passion.
Bob had tried to say something with it,
even when slangy or colloquial. He had treated
her as if she was worth talking to. He had
tried to make her feel that she could talk on
better themes than any they ever broached.

Poor Bob—sailing away to the south, thinking
that where he left her there he would find her!
Little he knew! If he could only see her now!
If he could only dream of what she would be
doing in ten minutes' time! If he only....

Something made her shudder. She felt cold.
Perhaps the wind had changed outside, as it
often did in May. She stooped, picked up her
skirt, and mechanically hooked it round her.
Still feeling chilled, she crossed her arms and
hugged herself. A minute or two later she had
put on her blouse and her jacket. She meant
to take them off again as soon as she stopped
shivering. Already Hubert would be cursing her
delay.

She thought of the light in his eyes when she
told him that, after all, she had come to pose.
The memory of it made her heart jump again,
with a great, single throb. It was the cave man's
light. She never saw it in Bob's, and never would.
Bob's eyes were twinkling and kind. She didn't
suppose she would ever see such kind eyes in anyone
else. If kindness were what she wanted....

Beginning to feel warmer, she noticed how
grotesque her hair was with her spring sport
suit. She had stuck through it a great skewer,
with a handle of artificial jade, which she had
used with some other costume. But the high
crown of hair was so little in keeping with the
rest of her that she pulled out the skewer and
the other pins, again letting the glinting cataract
tumble down.

Why had Bob never asked her if she loved him?
Hubert had done it a hundred, perhaps a thousand
times. Bob had seemed to think that his
loving her covered all possible conditions. What
he had to give her was always the theme of his
enthusiasm, as if she were a beggar who could
give nothing in return. With Hubert, it was
what he was to get from her. She was the richly
dowered one who could offer or withhold. He
would take all—and give nothing.

Well, let him! It was what she wanted—to
be drained dry. If she was to give herself up,
she would give herself up. When Hubert had
done with her, he would chuck her on the scrap
heap like her father. That was the way she
loved him. That was the way to be loved.
Cave men didn't watch lest you should get damp
feet, or have their lives insured for you. Their
love was passion, a fire that burned you up and
left you a white bit of ash.

And yet to be burned up and left a white bit of
ash was something for which she was not yet
prepared. She didn't say this to herself. All of
a sudden she was terrified. Whatever instinct
governed her went into the nimbleness of her
fingers as she began flattening her hair so as to
put on her hat. She didn't know why she was
doing this. She didn't even know that she
wanted to get away. It was just a wild impulse
to be back as the everyday Jennie Follett. The
girl in the Byzantine chair was out of the question—for
to-day. To-morrow, perhaps!—probably—quite
surely! But for to-day she must still
belong for a few more hours to herself. Hubert
might come thumping any minute on the door,
and if he found her dressed for the street....

And just then he did come thumping on the
door.

"Jennie, for God's sake, what's the matter?
Are you dead?"

She gasped. It would have been a relief if
she could have fainted. All she could do was to
thrust the last pin into her hat and go to the
door and open it.

Hubert stood aghast.

"Well, by all the holy cats—!"

"I'm not well, Mr. Wray," she pleaded, with
sudden inspiration.

"Ah, go on, Jennie! You were well enough
twenty minutes ago."

"Yes; but since then I've been feeling chilled."

He strode into the dressing-room, which he
was not supposed to do.

"Chilled—hell! Why, this hole's as hot as
blazes."

"It isn't that. I think it's a germ-cold I'm
taking."

"See here, Jennie," he said, sternly. "You're
going to funk it. All right! It doesn't make
much difference to me. The other girl—it's
Emma Brasshead—you know!—she was the
middle one in Sims's three nudes—perfectly
stunning hips—"

"I'll be here to-morrow—right on the dot."

He wheeled away as far as the space of the
dressing-room would permit.

"Oh, well, Jennie, I don't know that it would
be of much use, after all. Emma's the type, you
see. You'd be too—"

"You can't tell that till—till you've tried me
out."

"I can try you out right through your clothes.
What's a man a painter for?"

"If you can do that, why did you want me
to—"

He turned sharply.

"Jennie, you're not straight with me."

"Oh, but I am! I'm as straight with you as—as
you are with me. But I can't help being
sick."

"You can't help being Jennie," he muttered,
brokenly, "the girl I worship and who worships
me. Jennie! Jennie! Jennie!"

"Oh, don't, Hubert; don't!" she begged.
"To-morrow! I'll come to-morrow, and then—"

But he smothered these protests.

"You wildcat! You adorable tigress!"

"Yes, Hubert—but to-morrow—"

"No, no!"

His kisses, his brutalities, were agony to her,
and yet they were bliss. She didn't know why
she fought them off, or what instinct led her to
defend herself, or how she found herself out on
the stairs.

She went down slowly. She was not angry;
she was only excited and a little amused. Sex
fury was less romantic than she had supposed;
but as an exhibition of the human being at his
most animal, it was "some curtain raiser." If
she had to go through it again....

But as she jogged toward the ferry in the
street car, this mood passed off. She grew sick
with a sense of failure. Love and twenty-five
thousand dollars were at stake, and she had
funked the game. She was not a sport; she
wondered if she were a woman. If she couldn't
play up better than this, she would have Bob
back on her hands again and be shamed forever
before Mrs. Collingham, who had been so good
to her. Moreover, if she continued to play fast
and loose with Wray he would certainly return
to Miss Brasshead.

She dreaded reaching the ferry and having to
go on the boat. The river was now haunted by
Bob, like the sea by a phantom ship. While
crossing, she sat with her eyes closed so as to
shut out this memory by not looking at the
water.

Arrived on the New Jersey side, she was so
much earlier than she usually returned, and so
dispirited, that she decided to walk home,
threading the way through sordid streets till she
climbed the more cleanly ascent to the Heights.
The Heights has a common as well as a square,
and Jennie's way took her through the great
shady grassplot, where men were lounging on
benches, nurses wheeling their babies, and boys
playing baseball. Round the common are the
civic monuments of Pemberton Heights, the
bank, the post-office, the hospital, the engine
house, and the public library. Jennie looked at
this last as if she had never seen it before.

As a matter of fact, she never had seen it
before. She had looked at it more times than
she could count, but with the eyes only. She
knew what it was. She had actually watched the
coquettish red-brick building, with its glass dome
and white Grecian portico rising at the command
of the great philanthropist whose name the
building bore; but she had never been conscious
of its purpose as related to herself. Now, for
the first time, it occurred to her that here was a
place where a reader could find books.

With no very clear idea in mind, she stepped
within. The interior was hushed, rather awesome,
yet sunny and sweetly solemn like the
temple of some cheerful god. Finding herself
confronted by a kindly, bookish little lady
seated at a table behind a wooden barrier, it
was obviously Jennie's duty to address her.

"I wonder if—if I could borrow a book."

She was informed that she could borrow three
books at a time, as soon as certain inquiries as
to her identity and residence were carried out,
and this would take a few days. But in a few
days, Jennie knew that her desire to read might
be dead, and said so. The object of the library
being to encourage young people to read rather
than to be too particular about their addresses,
the kindly little lady, after some consultation
with a kindly little gentleman, filled out Jennie's
card.

"What sort of book were you thinking of? A
novel?"

Jennie said, "Yes," if it was a good one.

"This is one of the best," the little lady went
on, pushing forward a volume that happened to
be lying at her hand, "if you'd care to take it."

It was *The Egoist*, by George Meredith, and
Jennie accepted it as something foreordained.

"You could have two more books if you wanted
them—now that you're here."

Jennie made a plunge.

"Have you anything about—about spires?"

The lady smiled gently.

"About church spires?"

The girl thought it was—chapel spires—especially
French ones.

The kindly little gentleman, being accustomed
to this kind of search, was called into counsel.

In the end she selected a work on the old
churches of Paris, which she thought might give
her the information she desired.

"And now a third book?"

Here she was on safer ground. The English
name had caught her ear with more precision
than the foreign ones.

"Have you got anything about a Lady
Hamilton?"

"You mean Romney's Lady Hamilton?"

Again there was an echo from Jennie's memory.
Romney was the man who couldn't paint *her*
because he was too Georgian. She began to see
how Mrs. Collingham could play with names as
she might with tennis balls. Since there was
everything else at Marillo Park, there must also
be a public library.

Arrived at home, she secreted her volumes
under her bed. She could read at night, and by
scraps in the daytime. If Ted or Gussie were to
learn that she was trying to inform her mind,
they would guy her with as little mercy as if
they caught her in that still more offensive
crime, the improvement of her speech.




CHAPTER XIII
============


That Bob Collingham was at ease in his conscience
as to sailing to South America and
leaving behind him an unacknowledged wife
will hardly be supposed; but the true situation
did not present itself to him till after he and
Jennie had said their good-bys. He had tried
to see her again on the following day to take
counsel as to the immediate publication of their
marriage, and only her refusal to meet him had
frustrated that intention. But the more he
pondered the more the thing he had done seemed
little to his credit. On the morning of the day
on which he sailed, he rose with the resolve to
tell the whole truth to his father.

Had he known the facts, that Jennie had
actually been to Collingham Lodge, that his
mother knew of the marriage, that his father,
without knowing of the marriage, was aware of
his infatuation, he would have made a clean
breast of it. But the habit of domestic life being
strong, it seemed impossible to spring the confession
in the middle of a peaceful breakfast.
His mother had come down to the table for this
parting meal and was already half in tears;
his father concealed a genuine emotion behind
the morning paper; Edith said she wondered
what would happen to them all before they met
again. The possibilities evoked were so significant
that the mother said, sharply:

"I hope it may be God's will that we shall
meet exactly as we are—a united family."

"We could still be a united family," Edith
ventured, "and not meet exactly as we are."

"Edith—please!" her mother had begged, and
Bob felt it out of the question to add to her distress.

Edith having driven to the dock with his
father and himself, there was only the slightest
opportunity for a private word between the
father and the son. That came at a minute
when Edith was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Huntley
on the deck of the *Demerara*.

"Dad," Bob asked, awkwardly and abruptly,
"do you feel quite at ease in your mind as to
old man Follett?"

Passengers and their friends were pushing
and jostling. Collingham was obliged to brace
himself against the rod running along the line of
cabins before he could reply.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because I don't."

"You don't with regard to my stand—or with
regard to your own?"

The boy looked his father in the eyes.

"With regard to yours, dad."

"That's very kind of you, Bob; but may I
suggest that you'll have all you can do in repenting
of your own sins without trying, in addition,
to repent of mine?"

Nevertheless, when the minute came the parting
was affectionate. Neither father nor son
was satisfied with a handshake. Throwing
their arms about each other, they kissed as in
the days when Bob was a little boy.

Perhaps it was the warmth of this farewell
that induced the father, on arriving at the bank,
to ask Miss Ruddick to invite Mr. Bickley to the
private office in case he should look round that
afternoon. Mr. Bickley did look round that
afternoon and was accordingly ushered in.

He was a delicately built man whose appearance
produced that effect of accuracy you get
from a steel trap. Constructed to do a certain
kind of work, it can do that work and no other.
Two minutes after Bickley had looked at a man,
he knew both his weak points and his aptitudes,
and could tell to a nicety the job it was best to
put him to. Forehead, nose, jaw, lips, eyes, and
ears were to him as the letters of the alphabet.
More than once he had transferred a teller to
the accounting department, or made an accountant
a detective by his reading of facial
lines.

Having put his man in an armchair and given
him one of the Havanas he kept for social intercourse,
Collingham waited for the mellow moment
when the cigar was smoked to half its
length.

"Do you know, Bickley," he said then, "I've
never been quite at ease in my mind about the
way we shelved that old fellow, Follett. It
seems to me we showed—well, let us call it a
want of consideration."

Bickley's eyes measured what was left of his
cigar as he held it out before him horizontally.

"Consideration for whom, Mr. Collingham?"

"For the old man himself."

"Oh, I didn't know but what you were going
to say for your stockholders." Before the banker
could parry this thrust, the expert went on:
"I looked in yesterday at the court room where
they were trotting out that fellow Nicholson of
the Wyndham National. If they'd ever asked
me, I could have told them long ago that they'd
lose money by him in the end."

"Oh, but Follett isn't in that box."

"He is, if you drop money by him. I'm speaking
not of the ways you drop money by a man,
but only of the fact that you drop it. Your
business, I suppose, Mr. Collingham, is to make
money for your shareholders and yourself. It's
to help out that, I take it, that you send for me
and go by my advice."

"Then you'd class Follett and Nicholson
together?"

"I don't class them at all. Whether a man
steals the bank's money or you give it to him as
a gift isn't to the point. My job is over when I
tell you that he gets what he doesn't earn. The
rest, Mr. Collingham, is up to you—or the district
attorney, as the case may be."

"I'm afraid I don't see it that way."

"It's your affair, Mr. Collingham, not mine.
I only venture to remind you that we've had this
little tussle over almost every man we've ever
bounced. It does great credit to your kindness
of heart, and if you want to go on supporting
Follett and his family for the rest of your life—"

Collingham winced at this hint that his kindness
of heart was greater than his business capacity.
It was a point at which he always felt
himself vulnerable.

"Speaking of Follett's family," he said, gliding
away from the main topic, "we've got that boy
of his here. How is he getting on?"

"Ah, there you have a horse of another color.
My first report on him was not so favorable;
but now that we've knocked the high jinks out
of him—"

"Oh, we've done that, have we?"

"He's on the way to become a valuable boy.
Good worker, cheery, likable. If he can get over
his one defect, he'll be worth hanging on to."

"And his one defect is—"

"Liable to get excited and lose his head.
Type to see red in a fight, and do something
dangerous."

----

Unaware of the effort which his former employer's
good will was vainly putting forth on
his behalf, Josiah arrived in front of his pair of
grassplots in Indiana Avenue. It was a trim
little place, meeting all the wishes for a roof
above his head which his soul had ever formed.
He stood and looked at it, thinking of the days
when little Gladys used to play "house" beneath
one of the umbrella-shaped hydrangea
bushes.

That was not so long ago—only six or eight
years. It was nine since he had bought Number
Eleven, paying out three thousand dollars that
had come to him from a matured twenty years'
endowment policy, together with another thousand
Lizzie had inherited from an aunt. They
had thought it a good investment because, if
the worst ever came to the worst—and they
didn't know what they meant by that—they
would always have a home. Now the home was
in danger because he couldn't raise a hundred
and forty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents.
He had been everywhere trying to borrow more,
and he had failed. He had got to the point
where his acquaintances in the different offices
were putting him down as an "old bum." To
Josiah, knowing all the shades of meaning in
the term, it was a dreadful name as applied to
himself; and he had heard it that very afternoon.
An old friend, who had promised to lend
him five of the hundred and fifteen already
raised, had said on seeing him approach:

"Here comes that old bum again."

Josiah had turned about there and then.
Giving up trying any more to raise the hundred
and forty-seven, he had wandered home. He,
Josiah Follett, an old bum!

Having hidden her three volumes under the
bed, Jennie looked out and saw him. He didn't
look specially dejected, yet she knew he was.
She knew it by the way he stared at the hydrangea
bush, or by the fact that he had renounced
his search for another job so early in
the afternoon. Like herself, he seemed thrown
on his own resources for company, finding little
or nothing there. She ran down to meet him.
She would do that rare thing in the Follett
family, take him for a walk.

He turned with her obediently. It was a relief
to him not to be obliged to go in at once and tell
Lizzie he had no good news. Lizzie was still his
great referee, as he was hers. The children were
still the children, not to be taken into confidence
till there was nothing else to be done.

But this afternoon life, for the first time,
looked different. It was as if, unaided, he
couldn't carry the burden any more. There
were younger shoulders than his, and perhaps
it was time now to call on them to share the
task.

"I'm an old man, Jennie," he said, as they
began to move slowly toward Palisade Walk.
"I haven't felt old till lately; but now—now
I'm all in. I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance
to do a day's work again."

When she rallied him on this, he told her the
story of his day, omitting the "old bum" incident.
He must spare his children that, even if he
couldn't have been spared himself.

This tale, delivered without emphasis, was
more terrible to Jennie than all the pangs of
conscience. Had she but been true to the
promises made to Mrs. Collingham, she could
have said, "Father dear, you'll never have to
worry any more." Two hours earlier, twenty-five
thousand dollars had been within her grasp,
and she had let it go. "All that money," she
sighed to herself, "*and love*!"

But since it would be within her grasp to-morrow,
a new thought came to her. The hundred
dollars she would ultimately return to Bob
need not be in exactly the same bills. There was
no reason why she should not use this amount
and restore it from the wealth to come. Bob
couldn't possibly tell the difference between the
paper that made up one sum of a hundred dollars
and the paper that made up another. She
would have preferred to hand it back without
touching it, but, in view of the family need,
fastidiousness was out of place.

As they emerged into Palisade Walk and the
vast panorama lay below them, she slipped her
arm through his.

"Daddy," she said, caressingly, "what should
you say if you saw me with a hundred dollars?"

To Josiah, it was the kind of question children
ask when their imaginations go off on flights.
It would have been the same thing had she said
a thousand or a million. Nevertheless, he replied,
more gravely than she had expected:

"What should I say, my dear? I should say
you couldn't have come by it honestly."

"Oh, but if I could?"

"It's no use talking about that, my dear,
because I know you couldn't. If you had a
hundred dollars, some man would have given it
to you, and no man would give it to you
unless—"

He didn't finish the sentence, because she
hurried on ahead. He reached her only when
she stood still, looking down on the river, to
spring the question prepared on second thoughts.

"But, daddy, if I had a hundred dollars, you'd
use it for the taxes—wouldn't you?—even if I
hadn't got it honestly."

A spasm crossed his face. He laid his hand
on her shoulder roughly. She could think of
nothing but the stern father of a wayward girl
as she had seen him pictured in the movies.
She hadn't supposed that such dramatic parents
existed off the screen.

"Jennie, you haven't got a hundred dollars!
Tell me you haven't! Don't let me think that
the worst thing of all has overtaken us."

Amazed as she was, her feminine quick-wittedness
came to her aid.

"Oh, you funny daddy!" she laughed, drawing
his hand from her shoulder and again slipping
it through her arm. "You're not a bit good at
making pretend."

"Excuse me, my dear," he said, humbly, as
they strolled on once more. "I'm a little nervous.
I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
do a day's work again."

Jennie, too, was a little nervous, though she
did her best to hide the fact. She had not expected
him to take this tragically moral point
of view. It made so many new complications
as to her twenty-five thousand that she didn't
know where she stood. Her mother might agree
with him. Teddy and the girls might agree
with her. To act in opposition to them all was
outside her sphere of contemplation.

Indiana Avenue was indeed not so primitive
but that the subject of ladies who chose their
own way was frequently under discussion, and
Jennie had never heard much condemnation of
this liberty except where the associations were
considered "low." Where, on the contrary, the
situation was on a large financial scale and
carried with a lordly hand, opinion, while not
approving, was in a measure deferential. It was
no secret that Mrs. Inglis had a sister, mysteriously
known as "Mrs. Deramore," whose career
had been of the most romantic; and whenever
her limousine drove up to the Inglis door, as it did
perhaps twice a year, all the women crowded
to the windows to see the fair occupant get in and
out. On one occasion Jennie had heard her
mother say to their next-door neighbor, Mrs.
Weatherby, "After all, with the kind of world
we've got to-day, why shouldn't she?"

Jennie had not thought of herself as a
second Mrs. Deramore. She had hardly
thought of herself at all. The combination of
Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from
penury had precluded speculation as to what
she might become. She made no attempt to call
up this vision even now. The irony of a situation
in which she had a small fortune tucked away
in the glove-and-handkerchief box in her top
bureau drawer, and yet was helpless to make
use of it, was enough for her to deal with.

Palisade Walk is protected by a row of small,
irregular, upright boulders like the dragon's
teeth. At a spot where a low flat stone forms a
seat between two granite cones Jennie sat down
sidewise to the river, to think her situation out.
Josiah, too, came to a standstill, leaning on the
stick which lifelong British habit put into his
hands whenever he went out-of-doors, and
gazing at a scene whose very mightiness smote
him through and through with a sense of his
futility.

It was a view of New York which few New
Yorkers know to exist, and which those who
know it to exist mainly ignore. Rio from the
Pão d'Assucar, Montreal from Mount Royal,
Quebec from the St. Lawrence, San Francisco
from the Golden Gate, are all of the earth, earthy.
Manhattan as viewed from the Hudson's western
bank is like the city which rose when Apollo
sang, or that beheld in the Apocalypse of John.

From the dragon's teeth, the precipice broke
in terraces and shelves hung with ash, sumach,
and stunted oak. Wherever there was a hand's
breadth of soil, a dandelion or a violet, a buttercup
or a lady-fern, nestled in the keeping of the
cliff as a bird's nest on a branch. Creepers and
vines threw their tangles of tassels down to
where the chimneys clustering along the river's
brink blackened them with smoke. Small
water-worn docks, sheltering nameless craft,
battered, ancient, and grotesque, crept in and
out among factories and coal yards, linking up
with one another in a line of some twenty miles.
Straight as the cut of a knife, the river clove its
tremendous gash from Adirondacks to Atlantic—a
leaden, shimmering, storied streak, too deep
within its bed to catch the westering sunlight.
The westering sunlight itself was silvered in the
perpetual misty haze hanging over the island
like an aureole, through which the city glimmered
in mile after mile of gable and spire, of dome
and cube, silent, suspended, heavenly.

There is nothing in the world like this cloud-built
vision garlanded along the sky. No sound
breaks from it, no sign of our earth-born life.
The steel-blue-gray of a gull's wing swooping
above the water is gross as compared with its
texture. The violet and the lady-fern are not so
delicate as the substance of its palaces. It
might be dream; it might be mirage; it might
be the city which came down from God as a
bride adorned for her husband. Beginning too
far away for the eye to reach, and ending where
the gaze can no longer follow, it is immense
and yet aërial, a towered, battlemented, mighty
thing, yet spun of the ether between the worlds.

Though Jennie and her father had looked at
this mystic wraith of a city so often that they
hardly noticed it any more, they were never
free from its ecstatic influence. That is, it moved
them to aspirations without suggesting the
objective to which they should aspire. Caught
in the web of daily circumstance, entangled,
enmeshed, helplessly captive amid hand-to-mouth
necessities, their thoughts were rarely
at liberty to wander from the definite calculation
as to how to live. They didn't so wander even
now. Even now, lifted up as they were among
spiritual splendors, food, clothes, gas, taxes, and
the mortgage were the things most heavily on
their minds; but something else stirred in them
with a sluggish will to live.

"Jennie, do you believe in God?"

For a minute Jennie gazed sidewise at the
celestial city in the air and made no answer.
Josiah himself hardly knew why he had asked
the question unless it was because of vague new
fears as to Jennie's associations. Of these he
knew almost as little as the parent bird of its
offspring's doings when the young have taken
flight. This was the custom of the family, the
custom of the country. But he had never been
free from misgivings that Jennie's calling of
artist's model was "not respectable," and now
this mention of a hundred dollars, even though
it were but in jest, roused some little-used sense
of paternal responsibility.

"I don't know that I do," Jennie said, at last.
She added, after another minute's thought,
"What's the good of God, anyhow?"

"People say he can take you to heaven when
you die, or send you to the other place."

"I'm not worrying about what will happen
when I die; I've got all I can attend to here.
Can God help me about that?"

It was the test question of Josiah's inner life.
His faith stood or fell by it. He would have
been glad to tell his child that she could be aided
in her earthly problems, but, unlike Job, hadn't
he himself served God for naught?

"He don't seem able to do that, my dear,"
he sighed, as if the confession of unbelief forced
its way out in spite of himself.

"Well, then"—Jennie rose, wearily—"what's
the use? If God can put me off till I die, I suppose
I can put him off in the same way, can't I?
Do you believe in him, yourself, daddy?"

"I used to."

And that was all he could say.

As the sun sank farther into the west, the
celestial city which had hitherto been of a
luminous white was shot with rose and saffron.
Within its heart lay Broadway, Fifth Avenue,
Wall Street, and the Bowery, shops, churches,
brothels, and banks, all passions, hungers, yearnings,
and ambitions, all national tendencies
worthy and detestable, all human instincts holy
and unclean, all loveliness, all lust, all charity,
all cupidity, all secret and suppressed desire,
all shameless exposure on the housetops, all sorrow,
all sin, all that the soul of man conceives of
evil and good—and yet, with no more than these
few miles of perspective and this easy play of
light translated into beauty, uplifting, unearthly,
and ineffable.

For a minute longer Jennie and her father
looking on the vision as it melted from glory to
glory in this pageantry of sky. Then, with arms
linked as before, they turned their backs on it.




CHAPTER XIV
===========


For the next twenty-four hours Jennie did
her best to suspend the operation of thought.
Thought got her nowhere. It led her into so
many blind alleys that it made her head ache.
She had once heard a returned traveler describe
his efforts to get out of the labyrinth at Hampton
Court, and felt herself now in the same situation.
Each way seemed easy till she followed it and
found herself balked by a hedge.

But the fact that her head ached gave her an
excuse for going to her room and locking herself
in. She could thus pull her books from beneath
the bed without fear of detection. The points
as to which she needed enlightenment being
spires and Lady Hamilton, she went at her task
with the avidity of a starving person at sight of
food.

As to spires, she was quickly appeased, for her
volume on the old churches of Paris had the
Sainte-Chapelle as its frontispiece. Now that
she had seen the name in print, she was sure of
it. Because of being so little taxed, her memory
was the more retentive. Every sound that had
fallen from Mrs. Collingham's lips was stamped
on her mind like a footprint hardened into rock
on a bit of untracked soil. Within half an hour,
she had learned the outlines of the history of
the Sainte-Chapelle, and, with some fluttering
of timid vanity, had grasped the comparison of
its strong and exquisite grace with her own
personality.

But, after all, the Sainte-Chapelle was a thing
of stone, whereas Lady Hamilton—she loved,
the name—must have been of flesh and blood.
Here, too, there was a frontispiece, the very
Dian of the Frick Gallery to which Mrs. Collingham
had referred. Unfortunately, the illustrations
were in black and white, so that she
could get no adequate idea as to the complexion
or the color of the hair. The face, however, with
its bewitching softness, its heavenly archnesses,
bore some resemblance to her own.

It was a shock to learn that the possessor of
so much beauty, the bearer of so melodious a
title, had begun life as Emma Lyon, a servant
girl, but, after all, she reflected, the circumstance
only created analogies with herself. There were
more analogies still. Emma Lyon had been an
artist's model. In an artist's studio she had
made the acquaintance of men of lofty station,
just as she herself had met Bob. She had loved
and been loved. Romney was perhaps her
Hubert Wray. Her career had been exciting
and dramatic—the friend of a queen, the
more-than-wife of one of the great men of the
age. The tragic, miserable death didn't frighten
Jennie, since misery and tragedy always stalked
on the edge of her experience. She fell asleep
amid vast, vague concepts of queens and heroes
beset with loves and problems not unlike Jennie
Follett's.

All through the next day she stilled the working
of thought by application to *The Egoist*. She
took to it as to a drug. In the intervals of her
household duties, or whenever her mind became
active over her affairs, she ran to her room to
begin again, "Comedy is a game played to throw
reflections upon social life, and it deals with human
nature in the drawing-room of civilized
men and women, where we have no dust of the
struggling outer world, no mire, no violent
clashes, to make the correctness of the representation
convincing." She got little farther, since,
for her purpose, this was far enough. She was
drugged already, as by dentist's gas. The more
she read the more she felt herself wandering sleepily
through realms of dream, where words, as she
understood them, had ceased to have significance.

So, by sheer force of will, she brought herself
to that moment in the afternoon when she stood
at the studio door. She hadn't thought; she
hadn't, in her own phrase, *imagined*. She had
allowed herself no instant in which to count the
cost or to shrink from paying it. Hubert, love,
and the family deliverance from poverty would
be hers before nightfall, and she meant not to
look beyond. She opened the door softly.

Before showing herself, she stopped and
listened. There was not a sound. It was often
so if Hubert was painting, and the silence only
assured her that if he was there, as he probably
was, he was waiting for her alone. He was
waiting for her alone with that look in his eyes,
that maddened animal look which she had seen
yesterday, so bestial and yet so compelling!
Still more softly she moved forward among the
studio odds and ends.

Then she saw—and stopped.

In the Byzantine chair, a nude woman, seated
in the manner of the Egyptian cat-goddess, was
holding up a skull. Though the woman looked
the other way, Jennie could see her as a lovely
creature, straight, strong, triumphant, and unashamed.
Hubert was painting, busily, eagerly.
He raised his eyes, saw Jennie as she cowered,
took no notice of her at all, and went on with
his work. It passed all that she had ever imagined
of cruelty that, as she turned to make her
way out again, he should glance up once more—and
let her go.

Hubert—and the woman *dressed like that*!
The woman *dressed like that*—in this intimacy
with Hubert! She herself shut out—cast out—sent
to the devil! Some one else in her place,
when she might so easily have kept it!

Jennie's suffering was in the dry and stony
stage at which it hardly seemed suffering at all.
Yes, it did; she knew it was suffering—only, she
couldn't feel. She could think lucidly and yet
put the whole situation away from her for the
reason that it would keep. Anguish would keep;
tears would keep. She could postpone everything, since she had all the rest of her life to give
to its contemplation. Just for the present, the
memory of the woman in the chair with *Hubert
looking at her* was so scorching to the mind that
she could do nothing but snatch her faculties
away from it.

Coming to Fifth Avenue and seeing an electric
bus stop near the curb, she climbed into it.
It was the old story of not knowing where to go
or what to do once her simple round of habits
had been upset. Snuggled close to a window,
she could at least be jolted along without effort
of her own while she still fought off the consciousness
of the frightful thing that had happened.
It was not merely Hubert and the
woman; it was everything. So much was
included that she couldn't bear to think of this
ruin to her beautiful house of cards.

Such wealth and beauty in the shop windows!
Such streams of people in their new spring
clothes! She had heard it said that every heart
had its bitterness, but she didn't think that
that could be possible. If everyone had a heartache
like hers, or even the memory of such a
heartache, it would make too monstrous a world,
too deplorable a human race. After all, there
must be *some* sense in the presence of mankind
on earth, and if all were kicked about and bruised,
there would be none. She preferred to think that
the people on the pavements and in the limousines
were as happy as they looked, and that she alone
was selected for bewilderment and pain.

She wondered where she was going. There
was a ferry far up on the Riverside Drive which
would take her across to New Jersey, and thence,
by a combination of trolley-cars, she could work
her way southward to Pemberton Heights.
This would consume an hour and more, and so
eat up part of the afternoon. What she would
do when she arrived home with her dreams all
shattered God alone knew. If she could only
have seen her friend, Mrs. Collingham, clinging
to that kind hand as she poured out her heart....

Just then a huge building came into sight on
the left, and with it a new impulse. She had
often meant to visit it, though the day never
seemed to come. Gussie had once gone to the
Metropolitan Museum in company with Sadie
Inglis, since when she had been in the habit of
saying that she had as good as taken a trip
abroad. Jennie didn't want a trip abroad; she
wanted soothing, comforting, affection. She
wanted another drop of that experienced, womanly
sympathy, instinct with kindliness and
knowledge of the world which she had tasted
for the first and only time on that blissful afternoon
at Collingham Lodge.

.. figure:: images/illus2.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: JENNIE, YOU HAVEN'T GOT A HUNDRED DOLLARS! TELL ME YOU HAVEN'T!

   JENNIE, YOU HAVEN'T GOT A HUNDRED DOLLARS! TELL ME YOU HAVEN'T!

It was to get nearer to Collingham Lodge that
she left the bus to drag herself up the long flight
of steps and into the vast, cool hall. There were
others going in, chiefly the Slavs and Italians for
whom she felt a legitimate Anglo-Saxon contempt,
so that she had nothing to do but to
follow them. Thus she found herself at the top
of another long flight of steps, gazing about her
in an awe that soon became an intoxicating sense
of beauty.

It was Jennie's first approach to beauty on
this scale of immensity and variety. It was her
first draught of Art. Her childhood's poring
over *Ancient Rome Restored* had given her a
feeling for line and economy, but she had never
dreamed that color, substance, and texture could
be used with this daring, profuse creativeness.
Having no ability to seize details, she drifted
helplessly up and down aisles of splendor and
gleam. Here there were gold and silver, here was
tapestry, here crystal, here enamel. The pictures
were endless, endless. She could no more
deal with them than with a sunset. Life came to
the Scarborough tradition in her as it does to a
frozen limb, with distress and yet with an element
of ecstasy. A soul that had passed to a
higher plane of existence, whom there was no
one to welcome and guide, might have ventured
timidly into the celestial land as Jennie among
these lovely things outside her comprehension.

She came to herself, as it were, on hearing a
man's voice say, in a kind of tone and idiom with
which she was familiar:

"Have you looked at this Cellini now? That's
the only authentic bit of Cellini in the United
States. There's six or seven other pieces in
different museums that people says is Cellini,
but there's always a hitch in the proof."

Turning, she saw a stocky man in custodian's
uniform who was addressing a group of Italians,
two bareheaded women, three children between
ten and fifteen, and a man. All were interested.
All studied the gold shell with its dragon-shaped
handle in purplish enamel. They commented,
criticized, appraised, even the children pointing
out excellencies to one another. When they had
drifted away, Jennie turned to the kindly Irishman,
who, by dint of living with beauty, had
grasped its spirit, and put a hesitating question.
She asked him to repeat the name of the gold-smith,
pronouncing it after him till she registered
it on her mind as she had that of Lady Hamilton.

"Sure, there was an artist for you," the custodian
went on. "The breed is dead and gone.
Hot-timpered fellow, though. Had more mistresses
and killed more men than you could
count. Should read about him in a book he
wrote himself." He looked at Jennie from the
corner of an eye, accustomed to "size up" an
individual here and there among the thousands
who floated daily through his little domain,
apparently finding in her something that merited
further favors. "Are you wise to this Memling?"
he asked, leading the way to a corner of the wall
where hung a small portrait. "There's only two
other men in the wor-rld that could have painted
that head, and that's Holbein and Rembrandt.
Memling himself never did it but just that
wance."

Jennie looked, registering Memling's name.
It was the head of an elderly man; so living,
kindly, and humorous that she loved him.
When she turned to her guide he stood with a
smile of curiosity, like that of a mother showing
her baby to a friend.

"What d'ye say to that now?"

Jennie said what she could—that it was marvelous,
but that she didn't know anything about
art. Since he was so kind, she ventured, however,
on another question. Did the museum
contain a portrait of Lady Hamilton?

He pursed up his nose. Not a good one. Not
a Romney. There was one in gallery twenty-four,
but it was by John Opie, of whom he had
no high opinion. In comparison with Romney,
he thought Opie big and coarse, but, since there
was nothing better to be seen, Jennie might
choose to glance at this second-rate specimen.

"And I'll tell you another thing," he went on,
confidentially. "You're not used to looking at
pictures and such like, are you, now?"

Jennie said she was not.

"Well, then, go to gallery twenty-four. Find
your Opie, which you'll see hanging over one of
the doors—and don't look at anything else.
You'll have seen all you can absor-rb in wan
day. Come back to-morrer, or anny other toime,
and come straight to me. You'll find me here,
and I'll tell you what to look at next. But don't
take more to-day than you can enjoy."

He walked with her till she reached the
boundary of his realm.

"You look like a gur-rl that'd have an eye and
a taste for beauty. You don't find them often
among Americans, and when you do it's a god-send.
Poles, Jews, Russians, yes. When the
French and Italian officers was in New York,
their eyes 'd fairly eat the museum up. But
Americans—they don't know and they don't
want to know—not wan in a hundred thousand.
Well, good-day to you and good luck. I'm always
here, and I'm just the wan to tell you which is
the things to pick out."

But by the time she discovered her Lady
Hamilton she had only the courage to note
listlessly that the hair *was* somewhat the color
of her own—not chestnut, not russet, not copper,
not red-gold, but perhaps a combination of them
all. She had reached her limitations unexpectedly.
The tide she had dammed had burst
its barriers and rushed in on her. She sank to
a chair in the middle of the almost empty room,
her eyes blinded by sudden tears.

Hubert was still with that woman! The
woman was perhaps resting now and they were
talking! She would be so much at her ease that
she would talk without taking the trouble to
throw her wrap round her. Hubert, too, would
be at ease, preferring her without her wrap rather
than with it. In vain she reminded herself that
the situation was one to which an artist was
accustomed. She hadn't been in a studio for a
year without learning that much, though she
got no comfort from it now. No comfort was
possible with the vision of this naked magnificence seared on her memory. Hubert had
let her come without a welcome, and go without
a protest. He was probably glad when she went
so that he might be alone with this wanton who
didn't know shame.

In the end, she saw but one course before her.
She would make the best of Bob. To do so
would mean that Bob would be disinherited by
his ogre of a father, but with Mrs. Collingham's
aid a counteracting influence might be found.
Moreover, she could thus return home, confess
herself Bob's wife, and offer the hundred dollars
to her father as cash lawfully her own. Life
would be simplified in this way, even though
happiness were dead.

She was the last of the commuting family to
reach the house that evening, and on crossing
the threshold was greeted with a sense of cheer.
It did not mean much to her at first, for, with
the optimism of a hand-to-mouth existence, a
sense of cheer was the last thing the family ever
abandoned. She herself cast all outward air of
trouble away from her on opening the door, because
it was in the tradition.

Her father was seated quietly smoking his
pipe, which he had not done for the past week
or more. Gussie held the middle of the floor,
her arms extended in a serpentine wave, humming
a dance tune and practicing the step. To
mark the rhythm, Gladys was clapping her
hands with a slow, tom-tom beat. Pansy alone
stood apart, blinking and unresponsive, as if
for reasons of her own she considered this mirth
ill-timed.

"Look, Jen!" Gladys giggled, as her eldest
sister passed down the room. "This is the new
thing at the Washington. Gus has got it so you
wouldn't know her from Samarine herself."

Jennie went on to the kitchen, where, as she
expected, her mother was getting the supper, and
did her best to be nonchalant.

"Hello, momma! What's the good word?
What makes everyone so gay?"

Lizzie looked up, a cover in one hand and a
spoon in the other. Her face was so radiant
that Jennie was still more mystified.

"Oh, Jennie darling, your father has the
money! He can make the payment to-morrow,
and everything will come right."

So Jennie's plans recoiled upon herself. She
had meant to tell her mother here and now that
for four days past she had been Bob Collingham's
wife, and had a hundred dollars in her top
bureau drawer. Her mother was to tell her
father, and her father Teddy and the girls. But
now—well, what would be the use? By keeping
her secret she might put off inevitable fate a
little longer.

"Who lent it?" Jennie asked, after she had
chosen her line of action.

"Nobody; that's the wonderful part of it.
It's a hundred and fifty dollars Teddy has
earned."

"'Earned!' How?"

"Selling bonds for a man he knows. He
doesn't want anything said about it, because
it's what he calls 'on the side.' If the house
knew of it—that he was working in off times for
some one else—he might lose his job. But, oh,
Jennie, isn't it wonderful?"

Jennie thought it wonderful for other reasons
than Teddy's glory and the peace of the family
mind. It was less easy to renounce Hubert
than it had been an hour or two earlier. If he
snapped his fingers she had said to herself, while
crossing the ferry, she would run to him like a
dog, in spite of everything; and if she did it,
she would want to be free from the complications
that must ensue if she were to proclaim
herself Bob's wife.

Having assented to her mother's praise of
Teddy, she went back through the living room
and on upstairs to take off her hat and coat.
Near the top of the stairs, the door of the
bathroom opened suddenly and Teddy appeared
in his shirt sleeves. There being nothing
unusual in that, she was about to say,
"Hello, Ted!" and ascend the few remaining
steps to her room.

But seeing her moving upward in the dim hall
light, Teddy started back within the bathroom,
and, with a movement he couldn't control,
slammed the door noisily. The action was so
odd that she called out to him:

"It's only me, goose! What's the matter
with you? Have you got the jumps?"

The door opened and Teddy reappeared,
grinning sheepishly.

"I—I didn't have my coat on," was the only
explanation he could find.

"Dear, dear!" Jennie threw over her shoulder,
as she passed into her own room. "We've got
terribly modest all of a sudden, haven't we?"

But weeks later she recalled this lame excuse.




CHAPTER XV
==========


During the next few days, Wray snapped
his fingers twice, and on each occasion
Jennie ran to him like a dog, as she had foreseen
she would.

The first time was in response to a telegram.
The telegram said, simply:

    Studio Thursday, 3 P.M.

There was no signature, but Jennie knew what
it meant. By one o'clock she was dressing feverishly;
by two, she had said good-by to her
mother and was on her way. She was not
thinking of her twenty-five thousand dollars
now, or of any offering up of herself. Her one
objective was to drive that woman from the
Byzantine chair so that Hubert shouldn't look
at her again.

But she had not got out of Indiana Avenue on
her way to the trolley car when something happened
which had never happened in her life
before. She received another telegram, the
second in one day. The messenger boy, who was
a neighbor's son, had hailed her from across the
street.

"Hello, Jennie! Are you Miss Jane Scarborough Follett? That's a name and a half,
ain't it?"

Her first thought was that Hubert was wiring
to put her off because he wanted the other
woman, after all. Her second, that he had
already addressed her as "Miss Jennie Follett,"
and she doubted if he knew her full baptismal
name. Only in one connection had it been used
of late, and that recollection made her tremble.

This message, too, was unsigned, and, being so,
it puzzled her:

    Always close to you in spirit and loving you.

That wasn't like Hubert—and Bob was on the
sea.

She walked slowly, reading it again and again,
till her eyes caught the address in a corner—Havana.
She remembered then that the *Demerara*
was to touch at that port, and understood.
Crushing the telegraphic slip into the bottom of
her handbag, she made her way to the square
and took her place in the car.

As she jolted down the face of the cliff she
wished that this message hadn't come till after
her return from the studio. Then it wouldn't
have mattered. It would have been too late to
matter. Not that it mattered now—only, that
the way in which Bob expressed himself made her
feel uneasy. "Always close to you in spirit."
She didn't want him to be close to her in any
way, but in spirit least of all. Latterly, she had
heard Mrs. Weatherby, a convert to some school
of New Thought, discourse on the unreality of
separations and the bridging power of spirit, and
while these ideas made no appeal to her, they
endued Bob's telegram with a ghostly creepiness.
If he was close to her in spirit on an errand like
the present one....

So she turned back from the very studio door.
She couldn't go in. She couldn't so much as put
her hand on the knob. Knowing that Hubert
was within a few yards of her, eager to be hers
as she was to be his, she crept guiltily down the
stairs.

She cried all night from humiliation and repentance.
It was as if Bob had laid a spell on
her. Unless she could break it, her life would be
ruined.

But the opportunity to break it came no later
than the very next day. Chancing to look out
into Indiana Avenue, she saw Hubert scanning
Number Eleven from the other side of the street.
He must indeed want to see her, since he had
taken this journey into the unknown.

Picking up a sunshade, she went out and
spoke to him. He refused to come in, but
begged her to take a little walk.

"Jennie, what's your game?" he asked,
roughly, as they sauntered down the avenue
toward the edge of the cliff. "Why don't you
come to the studio when I ask you? What are
you afraid of?"

"I did come—the other day—but—"

"Why didn't you stay? I thought you would.
Brasshead wouldn't have minded it, and you
could have seen how the thing is done."

"What's the good of seeing how it's done when—when
you've got some one else?"

"But, good Lord! Jennie, this is not the only
picture of the kind I shall ever paint! Even if I
go on using Emma for this, I shall want you for
another one—and I'm not sure that I shall go
on using Emma. Do you see?"

She was so perturbed that she launched on a
question without knowing what she meant to
ask.

"Isn't she—"

"Oh, she's all right as far as the figure goes.
Features coarse. Not a bit what I'm trying to
get. Have to keep toning down and modifying
to give her the spiritual look that you've got,
Jennie, to throw away. I keep thinking of you
all the time I'm doing it. Look here, if you'll
come to-morrow, I'll pay Brasshead off and you
shall have the job."

By the time they reached Palisade Walk the
business was settled on a business basis. Not
once did he depart from the professional side of
the affair, and not once did she allude to the
scene in her dressing-room. But what was understood
was understood, not less certainly for
its being by passionate mental vibration, without
a word, or a glance, or a pressure of the
hand.

But the next day, as Jennie was leaving the
house to keep her appointment, Josiah, who had
gone out as usual to look for work, had dragged
himself home and fainted at the door.

"I'm all in," he mumbled, on his return to
consciousness. "I don't suppose I shall ever
get a chance to do a day's work again."

Jennie was so much alarmed that she forgot
to telephone her inability to go to the studio till
after her father had been put to bed and the
doctor had come and gone.

"Oh, it's all right," Hubert had said, listlessly.
"I didn't expect you. I knew that if it wasn't
one excuse, it would be another—"

"But I *will* come," Jennie had interrupted,
tearfully.

"Do just as you like about that. Emma's
here, and, as you're so uncertain, I've decided to
go on and finish the picture without making a
change."

He put up the receiver on saying this, so that
Jennie was left all in the air with her love and
her distress.

When Teddy appeared that evening, it was
she who told him of their father's breakdown.

"The doctor says it's worry," she explained,
"and lack of nutrition. He says he must stay in
bed a week, and we've got to feed him up and not
let him worry again."

Teddy's face grew longer and longer.

"Then we'll have to have more money."

"You poor Ted, yes; but then you're making
money on the side, aren't you?"

Reminding himself, as he did a hundred times
a day, that Nicholson had had five years in
which to get away with it, Teddy passed on upstairs
to his father's bedside.

"It's all right, dad," he tried to smile. "Don't
you worry. I'm here. I'll take care of ma and
the girls. You just make your mind easy and
give yourself up to getting well."

Jennie's attendance at the studio was thus
put out of the question for many days, and in
the meantime she had a letter posted at Havana.
Fearing that it would come and attract attention
in the family, she watched the postman, getting
it one morning before breakfast. Bob wrote:

    There is a love so big and strong and sure that separations
    mean nothing to it, because it fills the world. That's
    my kind of love, Jennie darling. You can't get out of it—I
    can't get out of it—even if we would. At this very minute
    I'm sailing and sailing; but I'm not being carried
    farther away from you. The love in which you and I are
    now leading our lives is wider than the great big circle
    made by the horizon. Don't forget that, dear. I'm always
    with you. Love doesn't recognize distance. Love isn't
    physical or geographical. It's force, power, influence. I
    love you so much that I know I can keep you safe even
    though I'm on the other side of the world. I can't fend
    troubles away from you, worse luck, but I can carry you
    through them. I know that till I come back you'll be
    having a hard time; but my love will hang round you like
    an enchanted cloak, and nothing will really get at you.
    You're always wearing that cloak, Jennie; you always
    walk with it about you.

While Jennie was reading this, Edith Collingham,
at breakfast at Marillo Park, was springing
a question on her father. She sprang it at breakfast
because it was the only time she was sure
of seeing him alone.

"Father, how far are children obliged to marry
or not to marry in deference to their parents'
wishes, and how far have fathers and mothers
the right to interfere?"

Dauphin, who was on his haunches near his
master's knee, removed himself to a midway
position between the two ends of the table, as if
he felt that in the struggle he perceived to be
coming he couldn't throw his influence with
either side. Through the open window Max
could be seen in perpetual motion on the lawn,
yet pausing every two minutes to look wistfully
down the avenue in the hope of some loved
approach.

Without answering at once, Collingham tapped
an egg with a spoon. The broaching of so personal
a question between one of his children and
himself was something new. It had been an
established rule in the household that, however
free the intercourse between the boy and the
girl and their mother, the approach to their
father was always indirect. Junia had made it
her lifelong part to explain the children to their
father and the father to his children, but rarely
to give them a chance of explaining themselves
to each other. Collingham had acquiesced in
this for the reason that the duties of a parent
were not those for which he felt himself, in his
own phrase, specially "cut out."

The duties for which he did feel himself cut
out were those that had to do with the investment
of money. On this ground, he spoke with
authority; he was original, intuitive, inspired.
When it came to a flair for the stock which was
selling to-day at fifty and which to-morrow would
be worth five hundred, he belonged to the *illuminati*.
This being the highest use of intelligence
known to man, he felt it his duty to
specialize in it to the exclusion of everything
else.

As already hinted, there were two Collinghams.
There was the natural man, a kindly, generous
fellow who would never have made a big position
in the world; and there was the other Collingham,
standardized to the accepted, forceful,
American-business-man pattern, and who, now
that he was sixty-odd, was the Collingham who
mainly had the upper hand.

Mainly, but not completely. The natural
Collingham often made timid attempts to speak
and had to be stifled. He was being stifled while
the standardized Collingham tapped his egg.
It was the pupil of Junia, Bickley, and the
business world who finally sought to gain time
by asking a counter-question.

"What do you want to know for?"

Edith was prepared for this.

"Because I may make a marriage that you
and mother wouldn't like; and I think it possible
that Bob may do the same."

Whatever the natural Collingham might have
said to this, the man who had been evolved from
him could have but one response.

"People who act on their own responsibility
should be prepared to go the whole hog."

Edith sipped her coffee while she worked out
the significance of this.

"Does that mean that you wouldn't give us
any money?"

"Rather that, being so extremely independent,
you wouldn't ask for it."

"Oh, ask for it—no; and yet—"

"And yet you think I ought to hand it out."

"I was thinking rather of a kind of *noblesse
oblige*—"

"In which all the *noblesse* must be mine."

"Not exactly that. In which perhaps the
*noblesse* should be *ours*. Even if I should marry
a poor man, I can't help being a Collingham, a
member of a family with large ideas and a large
way of living."

"Yes; but, you see, you'd be giving them up."

"You can't give up what's been bred into you.
And in my case I should be bringing the man—you
must let me say it, dad—I should be bringing
the man I—I *love*—so little—"

"He's probably counting on a great deal.
Poor men who marry rich men's daughters
generally do."

"I was going to say that while he'd be giving
me so much, all I could offer him would be
money; and if I didn't bring that—"

"Well? Go on."

"If I didn't bring that, I should feel so humiliated
before him—"

He affected an ignorance which was not a
fact.

"Who *is* this paragon, anyhow?"

"I thought mother might have told you. It's
Mr. Ayling."

"Oh, that teacher fellow!"

"He's more than that, dad. He's a professor
in one of our greatest universities. He's a
writer beginning to be recognized as having
ideas. He has a position of his own—"

"Yes; but only an intellectual one."

She raised her eyebrows.

"'Only'?"

He straightened himself and prepared for
business.

"Look here, Edith, don't kid yourself. An
intellectual position in this country is no position
at all. The American people have no use for the
intellectual, and they've made that plain."

She could hardly express her amazement.

"Why, dad! There's no country in the world
where people go in more for education, where
there are more men who go to colleges—"

"Yes—to fit them for making money, not to
turn them into highbrows. You must have a
spade to dig a garden, but it's the garden you're
proud of, not the spade."

"And the very President of the country—"

"Is what you call an intellectual man; but
that's a bit of chance. He's not President because he was a college professor, but because he
was a politician. If he hadn't been a politician—something
that the country values—he'd still
be rotting in some two-by-three university.
Listen, Edith!" He emphasized his point by
the movement of his forefinger. "We've a rule
in business which is the test of everything. So
long as you stick to it you can't go wrong in your
estimates. *The value of a thing is as much money
as it will bring.* You know the value of the intellectual
in American eyes the minute you think
of what the American people is willing to pay
for it. You say your intellectual man has a position
of his own. Well, you can see how big the
position is by what he earns. He doesn't earn
enough decently to support a wife, and so long
as the American people have anything to say to
it, he never will. You can box the whole compass
of fellows who live by their wits—teachers,
writers, journalists, artists, musicians, clergymen,
and the whole tribe of them. We don't
want them in this country, except as you want a
spade and a hoe in your tool-house. When they
try to get in, we starve them out; and, Collingham
as you are, once you've married this fellow
you'll go with your gang." He pushed back his
chair and rose. "That's all I've got to say.
Think it over." As he passed out through the
French window to the terrace beyond he snapped
his fingers. "Dauphin, come along!"

But, perhaps for the first time in his life,
Dauphin didn't immediately follow him. Instead, he went first to Edith, laying his long
nozzle in her lap.

For five or ten minutes, as Collingham smoked
his morning cigar while visiting the stables, the
garage, and the kitchen garden, the natural man
tried to raise his voice.

"Why didn't you say, 'Marry your man,
Edith, my child, and I'll give you ten thousand
a year?' Poor little girl," this first Collingham
went on, "she's so frank and true and high
spirited! You've made her unhappy when you
could so easily have made her glad."

"You said what any other American father
in your position would have said," the pupil of
Bickley and Junia argued, on the other side.
"True, you've made her unhappy, but young
people often have to be made unhappy in order
that the foolish dictates of the heart may be
repressed. There are millions of people all over
the world whose lives would have been spoiled
if such early emotional impulses hadn't been
thwarted."

And, after all, it was true that the intellectual
was not respected. The public pretended that it
was, but when it came to the test of social and
financial reward—the only rewards there were—the
pretense was apparent. There were no intellectual
people at Marillo Park; there were none
whom he, Collingham, knew in business. There
were men with brains; but to distinguish
them from the intellectual they were described
as brainy. Edith as the wife of an intellectual
man would be self-destroyed; and it was his
duty as her father to stop, if he could, that
self-destruction.

By the time he had reached the point in his
morning ritual which brought him to Junia's
bedside, he was standardized again, even though
it was with a bleeding heart. He could more
easily suffer a bleeding heart than he could the
fear of not being an efficient man of business.

"What use have you had for the twenty-five
thousand I've paid in your account?" he asked,
before he kissed her good-by.

She concealed her anxiety that so many days
had passed without a sign from Jennie under an
air of nonchalance.

"No use as yet, but I expect to have. I shall
let you know when the time comes."

But no sign could come from Jennie, for the
reason that her father died in mid-July, and
during the intervening weeks she was tied to his
bedroom. As the eldest daughter and the only
one at home, all her other functions were absorbed
in those of nurse. Luckily, there was
money in the house, for Teddy had been successful
in his efforts "on the side," and Bob continued
to transmit small sums to herself, which
she added to the hundred dollars in the top
bureau drawer. Bob, Hubert, Collingham Lodge,
her ambition, and her love became unreal and
remote as she watched the setting of the sun to
which her being had been turned. In the eyes of
others, Josiah might be feeble and a failure, but
to Teddy and his sisters he was their father, the
pivot of their lives, the nearest thing to a supreme
being they had known.

Lizzie's grief was different. Her heart didn't
ache because he was dying. Life having become
what it was, he was better dead. If she could
have died herself, she would have gone to her
rest gladly, had it not been for the children.
For their sake, she remained sweet, calm, active,
brewing and baking, sweeping and cleaning,
sitting up at night with Josiah while they were
asleep, and hiding the fact that instead of a
heart she felt nothing within her but a stone.

Her grief was not for Josiah; it was for the
futility of the best things human beings could
bring to life. Honesty, industry, thrift, devotion,
ambition, and romance had been the
qualifications with which Josiah Follett and
Lizzie Scarborough had faced the world; and
this was the best the world could do with them.
"It isn't as if we ever faltered or refused or
turned aside," she mused to herself, as she hurried
from one task to another. "We've been
absolutely faithful. We've had pluck in the face
of every discouragement and eaten ashes as if
it were bread, and, in the end, we come to this.
It makes no difference that we didn't deserve it;
we get it just the same."

Josiah's wanderings as his mind grew feebler
turned forever round one central theme: A job!
a job! To be allowed to work! To have a chance
to earn a living! It was his kingdom of heaven,
his forgiveness of sins, his paradise of God. In the
middle of night he would open his eyes and say:

"I've got a job, Lizzie. Fifty a week!"

"Yes, yes," Lizzie would say, drawing the
sheet about his shoulders. "Yes, yes; you'll go
to town in the morning. Now turn over, dear,
and go to sleep again."

These excitements were generally in the small
hours of the morning. By day, he was less
cheerful.

"I'm all in, Jennie darling," he would say
then. "I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to
do a day's work again."

But one hot afternoon in the middle of July
he woke from a long sleep with a look that
startled her. Jennie had never seen the approach
of death, but, now that she did, she knew it could
be nothing else. He had simply rolled over on
his back, staring upward with eyes that had become
curiously glassy and sightless. Jennie ran
to the head of the stairs.

"Momma! Momma! Come quick!"

He said nothing till Lizzie had reached the
bedside. Though he didn't move his head or
look toward her, he seemed to know that she was
there.

"Here's mother, Lizzie." He raised his hands,
while a look of glad surprise stole over his face.
"There's a country," he stammered on, brokenly,
"no, it isn't a country—it's like a town—they're
working—they've got work for me—and—and
they're never—they're never—fired."

The hands fell, but the look of glad surprise
was only shut out of sight by the coffin lid.

Teddy paid for the lot in the cemetery, as well
as the other expenses of the funeral, within a week
of his father's death. "Now I'm through," he
said to himself, with a long sigh of relief.

"You darling Ted," was Jennie's commendation.
"You must have given momma five hundred
dollars at least. Now I hope you'll be able
to save a little for yourself."

At the bank, Teddy's younger colleagues
were sympathetic, Lobley especially doing him
kindly little turns. He asked him to supper one
evening at a restaurant, where they talked of
marksmanship, at which Teddy had been proficient
in the navy. He was out of practice now,
he said, to which Lobley had replied that it was
a pity. He, Lobley, had an automatic pistol
illegally at home, and if Teddy would like to
borrow it he could soon bring himself back to
his old form. Teddy did so like, and went back
to Pemberton Heights with the thing secreted on
his person. It went with him to the bank next
day—and every day.

For Teddy had begun to notice symptoms to
which one less keenly suspicious would be blind.
Nothing was ever said of money missing, and no
hint thrown out that he himself was not trusted
as before. He had nothing to go on except that
Mr. Brunt became more taciturn than ever, and
once or twice he thought he was being watched.
The eyes of Jackman, the principal house detective, wandered often toward him, and twice
he, Teddy, had seen Jackman in conference with
Flynn.

"They'll never get me alive," was his inner
consolation, though immediate suicide suggested
itself as an alternative, and flight, disappearance,
an absolute blotting out was a third
expedient.

Yet nothing was sure; nothing was even remotely
sure. By becoming too jumpy he might
easily give himself away. Nicholson had had
five years. In two years, in one, Teddy meant to
be square with the bank again.

But one afternoon, as he emerged into Broad
Street on his way home, Jackman and Flynn
were talking together on the opposite pavement.
The boy jumped back, though not before he saw
Jackman make a sign to Flynn which said as
plainly as words, "There he is now."

To Teddy, it was the end of the world. All the
past, all the future, merged into this single
second of terror. He looked across at them; they
looked across at him. There was a degree of confession
in the very way in which his blanched
face stared at them through the intervening
crowds.

Jackman's lips formed half a dozen syllables,
emphasized by a nod and a lifting of the brows.

"That's the guy all righty," were the words
Teddy practically heard.

Like a startled wild thing, he had but one impulse—to
run. Actual running in Broad Street
at that hour of the day being out of the question,
he dived into the procession mounting toward
Wall Street, ducking, dodging, pushing, almost
knocking people down, and mad with fear.
"They'll never get me alive," he was saying to
himself; but how in that crowd to find space in
which to turn the pistol to his heart already
puzzled him.

At the corner of Wall Street he summoned
courage to look over his shoulder. They might
not be after him. If not, it would prove a false
alarm, such as he had had before. But there
they were—Jackman scrambling laboriously up
the other side of Broad Street, and Flynn crossing
it, picking his way among the vans and motor
cars.

Like a frightened rabbit, Teddy scurried on
again, meaning to gain Nassau Street and somehow
double on his tracks.




CHAPTER XVI
===========


But Teddy did not double on his tracks in
Nassau Street, for the reason that, in again
looking over his shoulder, he saw that Flynn had
taken one side of that thoroughfare and Jackman
the other. They were burly men, who moved
heavily, while he, in spite of his stocky build,
glided in and out among the pedestrians with the
agility of a squirrel. He was putting distance
between himself and them, and five minutes'
leeway would be enough for him. All he needed
was the space and privacy in which to shoot
himself.

At the corner of John Street he turned to the
left and made toward Broadway. They would
expect him to do this, his chief hope being that
among the homing swarms they would already
have lost sight of him. His mind was not working.
He was not looking ahead, even over the
few minutes he had still to live. All his instincts
were fused into the fear of the hand of the law
on his person. It was like Jennie's terror of the
hand of a man she didn't love—a frenzy for
physical sanctity stronger than the fear of
death.

At the same time, he couldn't run the risk of
being more noticeable than the majority of people
going his way. As he pushed and dodged, a
young man whom he had jostled called out, in
ironic good humor, "Say, is the cop after you?"
at which Teddy almost lost his head. He expected
a crowd to gather, and three or four men
to hold him by the arms till Jackman and Flynn
came up. But nothing happened. The protesting
young man was lost in the scramble, and
he, Teddy, found himself in Broadway.

Paying no heed to the jam of street cars, lorries,
private cars, and motor trucks, he dashed
into the interlaced streams of traffic. He dashed—and
was held up. He dashed again—and was
held up a second time. He was held up a third
time, a fourth, and a fifth. With every spurt of
two or three feet, cries warned him and curses
startled him. "Say, sonny, your ma must have
lost you," came from a jocose chauffeur beside
whose machine Teddy had been brought to a
halt. "I'd damn well like to run over you,"
shouted the driver of a van who had narrowly
escaped doing it. Teddy wished he had. If he
could only be sure of being killed, it might have
been the easiest way out.

Reaching the opposite pavement, he had time
to see that Jackman had crossed lower down and
more easily than he, and was lumbering toward
him from the downtown direction. Jackman
could have shouted to the passers-by to lay hold
of Teddy, only that, from a distance and among
such numbers, he couldn't indicate his victim.
Being younger than Flynn and of lighter build,
he could move in his own way almost with
Teddy's rapidity. The boy didn't dare to run,
because the action would have marked him out,
but he started again on his snakelike gliding
between pedestrians. He must gain some doorway,
some cellar, some hole of any sort, in which
to draw his pistol. He would have drawn it
there and then, only that a hundred hands
would have seized him.

All at once he saw the open portal of a great
mercantile building, leading to a vast interior
with which he was familiar. There were several
exits and many floors. Once he had turned in
here, he could cross the scent. In he went, with
scores who were doing likewise, passing scores
who were coming out. His first intention was to
avoid the conspicuous exit toward Dey Street
and make for the less obvious one into Fulton
Street; but in doing that, he passed a line of
some twenty lifts, of which one was about to
close its door. He slipped into it like a hare into
its warren. The door clanged; the lift moved
upward with an oily speed. Among his companions
he was hot, flurried, breathless, and yet
not more so than any other young clerk who had
been doing an errand against time.

There were nearly thirty floors, and he got off
at the twenty-third. He chose the twenty-third
so as not to get off too soon, and yet not call
attention to himself by remaining in the lift
when most of its occupants had left it. The floor
was spacious and almost empty. A few people
were waiting for a lift to take them down; a
few were going in and out of offices, but otherwise
he had the place to himself.

Mechanically he walked to a window and
looked out. He seemed to be up in the sky, with
only the tops of a few giant cubes on a level with
himself. "Skyscrapers" they were called, and
skyscrapers they seemed up here even more than
down below. The tip of the great city, the
stretches of the bay, the green slopes of Staten
Island, and the far-off colossal woman with a
torch were all within his vision, with the oblique
strip that was Broadway, a tiny, ugly gash in
which bacteria were squirming, deep down and
cutting across the foreground.

Except for the dull roar that came up and the
clang of an occasional footstep along the hallways,
it was so still and pleasant that the need
to shoot himself seemed for the minute less insistent.
It would have to be done sooner or
later, but when it comes to suicide, even a few
minutes' respite is something. He could have
done the thing right there and then by the
window, where the few people within hearing
would have run to him at sound of the shot. If
the shot didn't kill him, they would keep him
from firing another. Publicity, distasteful in
itself, might lead to ineffectuality.

He must find a lavatory, and so began walking
up and down the corridors, looking at doors
discreetly placed in corners. When he came to
his objective, it was locked. Again it was reprieve. The same door would be on other
floors, but he was not ready for the moment to
forsake his shelter. It was true that at any
minute Flynn and Jackman might emerge from
the lift, but there were nearly thirty chances
that if they had followed him so closely they
would not select this landing. Even more were
the chances that they had not seen him slip into
the building at all.

Fevered and thirsty, he stooped to drink at
the fountain crowning the head of a little bronze
woman with a pair of dolphins on her shoulders.
She seemed to be of Maya type, and a uniformed
guardian had once told him that a great modern
sculptor had molded her. With a difference in
dolphins, she was repeated on every floor, forever
diademed in water.

Teddy's mind had so far suspended operation
as to his immediate plight that he went back to
the morning, seven or eight months previously,
when an errand from Mr. Brunt had brought
him into the great ground-floor atrium, revealing
the Basilica Julia or the Basilica Emilia of
*Ancient Rome Restored* right there in lower
Broadway. Simplicity, immensity, the awesome
beauty of mere form! The wide spaces,
the mighty columns, the tempered white light of
majestic Roman windows! The absence of
striving for effect! The peace, the restfulness,
the cheerfulness, when striving for effect are
abandoned, dwarfing the magnitude of crowds
and reducing their ebbings and flowing to mere
vanity! Like Jennie with her emotions, like
Pansy with her intuitions, Teddy had no words
for these impressions; but the Scarborough
tradition, nursed on *Ancient Rome Restored*,
vibrated to their music.

"And here I am, trapped like a rat in a hole!"

So he came back to it. He wondered if he
were awake. Was it possible that ten or fifteen
minutes could have transformed him from a
hard-working, home-loving boy into a fugitive
who had no choice left but to shoot himself?
As for facing the disgrace, he did not consider
it. To stand before his mother charged with
theft, even if it was on her behalf, was not to be
thought of. He couldn't do it, and there was an
end to it. Still less could he go through the other
incidentals, handcuffs, a cell, the court, the
sentence, Bitterwell, and the lifetime that would
come after his release. He could put the pistol
to his heart and, if necessary, he could burn in
hell—if there was a hell; but he couldn't do the
other thing.

And yet to put the pistol to his heart and burn
in hell formed a lamentable choice on their side.

"I'm not a thief," he protested, inwardly. "I
took the money—how could I help it, with dad
sick and ma at the end of everything?—but *I'm
not a thief*."

He was sure of that. It became a formula,
not perhaps of comfort, but of justification.
Had he been a thief, he told himself, he could
have faced the music; but it was precisely because he had taken money while preserving his
inner probity that he refused to be judged by the
standards of men. Once more he couldn't express
it in this way to himself; but it was the
conclusion to which his instincts leaped. Only
one tribunal could discern between the good and
evil in his case; so he was resolved to go before it.

In a quiet corner he began to cry. He was
only a boy, with a boy's facility of emotion,
especially of distress. He cried at the thought
of his mother and the girls, with no one to fend
for them, and no Teddy coming home in the
evenings. It was true that, apart from his
filchings, he had been able to fend for them only
to the extent of eighteen per, but there was
always a chance of better days ahead. Even at
the worst of times, they had a good deal of fun
among themselves, and now....

Now his mother would be in the kitchen, beginning
to get supper, and each of the girls would
be making her way back to Indiana Avenue.
Pansy's dog clock would tell her when to watch
for them, and the loving little creature would be
eying the door, ready to welcome each of them
in turn. If she had a preference, it was for
himself, and the feeling of her gentle paws
against his shin was connected with the tenderest
things he knew.

No; it wasn't possible. He couldn't be skyed
on that twenty-third floor, unable to come down,
unable to go home. It *must* be a nightmare.
Such things didn't happen. He was Teddy
Follett, a good boy at heart, with an honorable
record in the navy. He had never meant to
steal, but what could he do? The money was
there, to be stacked in the vaults of Collingham
& Law's, not to be touched for months, very
likely, and the home needs imperative. He
couldn't see his father and mother turned out of
house and home because they couldn't pay their
taxes. It was not in common sense. Nothing
was in common sense. That he should be
dragged into court, that his mother should break
her heart, that shame should be showered on his
sisters was ridiculous. Somewhere in the universe
there was a great big principle that was on
his side, though he didn't know what it was.

What he did know was that crying was unmanly.
Sopping up his tears and trying not to
think, he jumped into the first lift that stopped
and got out at floor eleven. There he went
straight to the lavatory, which he now knew how
to place, and once more found the door locked.

Though again it was reprieve, it was reprieve
almost unwelcome. The first passing lift was
going upward, and so he ascended to floor seventeen.
Here again the lavatory was locked, as
it was on floors nineteen and twenty-five, both
of which he tried. He began to understand that
they were locked according to a principle, and
that for those seeking privacy in which to shoot
themselves they offered no resource.

Moreover, offices were closing and the great
building emptying itself rapidly. The rush was
all to the lifts going downward. He, too, must
go downward. To be found skulking in corridors
where he had no business would expose him
to suspicion. After nearly an hour spent above
he descended to the atrium, where Flynn and
Jackman might be watching the cages disgorge,
knowing that in time he must appear from one
of them.

But he walked out without interference. A
far hint of twilight was deepening the atmosphere
round the heads of the great columns, and the
waning sunshine spoke of workers seeking rest.
Streams of men and women, mostly young, were
setting toward each of the exits, to Broadway,
to Fulton Street, to Dey Street; and he had only
to drop into one of them. He chose that toward
Dey Street, finding himself in the open air, in
full exercise of his liberty.

Once more it was hard to believe that there
was a difference between this day and other
days. It would have been so natural to go to
the gym for a plunge or a turn with the foils,
and then home to supper. He discussed with
himself the possibility of a last night with the
family, recoiling only from the fact that it was
precisely there that they would look for him.
Much reading of criminal annals had printed
that detail on his brain—the poor wretch torn
from the warm shelter of his home, with his
wife's arms round him and the baby sleeping in
the cradle. There was no wife or baby in this
case; but to have the thing happen to himself,
with his mother and the girls vainly trying to
stay the course of the law, would be worse than
going to the chair.

He was in the uptown subway, with no outward
difference between himself and the scores
of other young men scanning the evening papers.
Because he didn't know what else to do, he got
out at Chambers Street. He got out at Chambers
Street because there was a ferry there which
would take him over to New Jersey. He went
over to New Jersey because it was his habit at
this hour of the day, and to follow his habit
somehow preserved his sanity. To be on the
same side of the river as his home was a faint,
futile consolation.

And while on the ferryboat a new idea came
to him. In the Erie station he should find a
telephone booth from which he could ring up his
mother and inform her that he was not to be
home that night. Though it would do no good
in the end, it would at least save her from immediate
alarm. Flynn and Jackman were
unknown by face to the family, and if they rang
at the door in search of him they would probably
not tell their tale. Before he reached the
other side he had concocted a story of which his
only fear was as to his ability to tell it on the
wire without breaking down.

It was a bit of good luck to be answered by
Gladys, whom he could "bluff" more easily
than the rest of them.

"Hello, Gladys! This is Ted. Tell ma I'm
in Paterson and shall not get home to-night or
to-morrow night."

He could hear Gladys calling into the interior
of the house:

"Well, *what* do you know about that? Ted's
at Paterson and not coming home to-night or
to-morrow night." Into the receiver she said,
"But, Ted, what'll they say at the bank?"

"I may not go back to the bank. This is a
new job. You remember the fellow I was working
for on the side? Well, he's put me into this,
and perhaps I'm going to make money."

"Oh, Ted," Gladys called, delightedly, "how
many plunks?"

"It—it isn't a salary," he stammered. "I—I
may be in the firm. To-morrow I may have to
go to Philadelphia. Tell ma not to worry—and
not to miss me. I'll try to call up from
Philadelphia, but if I can't—Well, anyhow,
give my love to ma and everybody, and if I'm
not home the day after to-morrow, don't think
anything about it."

He put up the receiver before Gladys could
ask any more questions, and felt ready to cry
again. In order not to do that, he walked out
of the station into the street, where the presence
of the crowds compelled him to self-control.
Having nothing to do and nowhere to go, he
walked on and on, getting some relief from his
desolation by the mere fact of movement.

So he walked and walked and walked, headed
vaguely toward the outskirts of the town.
There were vast marshes there into which he
could stray and be lost. The rank grasses in this
early August season were almost as high as his
shoulders, so that he could lie down and be
beyond all human ken. His body might not be
found for weeks, might never be found at all.
Teddy Follett would simply disappear, his fate
remaining a mystery.

Toward seven o'clock, the shabby suburbs
began to show their primrose-colored lights—a
twinkle here, a twinkle there, stringing out in
longer streets to scattered bits of garland. Teddy
felt hungry. Counting his money and finding
that he had two dollars and thirty-one cents, he
was sorry not to be able to transmit the two
dollars to his mother.

Growing more and more hungry, and knowing
he must keep up his nerve, he spied a little
bread-and-pastry shop just where the houses
were thinning out and the marshes invading the
town, as the ocean invaded the marshes. On
entering, he asked for two tongue sandwiches
and half a dozen doughnuts. The woman who
wrapped up the sandwiches and dropped the
doughnuts into a paper bag was an English-speaking
foreigner of the Scandinavian type,
blond, dumpy, with a row of bad teeth and
piercing blue eyes. As she performed her task,
she seemed not to take her eyes from off him,
though her smile was kind, and she called his
attention to the fact that she was giving him
seven doughnuts for his six.

"You don't lif rount here?" she asked, in
counting out the change for his dollar.

"No; just going up the road."

"Well, call again," she said, politely, as he
took his parcels and went out.

Having eaten his two sandwiches, he felt
better, in the sense of being stronger and more
able to face the thing that had to be done. He
was not quite out on the marshes, the long, flat
road cutting straight across them to the nearest
little town. The lights were rarer, but still
there were lights, their saffron growing more
and more luminous as the colors of the sunset
paled out. An occasional motor passed him,
but never a man on foot.

He could have turned in anywhere, and perhaps
for that reason he put off doing so. It
would be easier, he argued, to shoot himself
after dark. It was not dark as yet—only the
long August gloaming. Moreover, the tramping
was a relief, soothing his nerves and working off
some of his horror. He wished he could go on
with it, on and on, into the unknown, where he
would be beyond recognition. But that was
just where the trouble was. For the fugitive
from justice recognition always lay in wait.
He had often heard his father say that in the
banking business you could get away with a
thing for years and years, and yet recognition
would spring on you when least expected. As
for himself, recognition could meet him in any
little town in New Jersey. They would have his
picture in the paper by to-morrow—and, besides,
what was the use?

The dark was undeniably falling when he
noticed on the right a lonely shack with nothing
but the marsh all round it. Coming nearly
abreast of it, he detected a rough path toward
it through the grass. He had no need of a path,
no need of a shack, but, the path and the shack
being there, they offered something to make for.
Since he was obliged to turn aside, he might as
well do it now.

So aside he turned. The path was hardly a
path, and had apparently not been used that
year. Wading through the dank grasses which
caught him about the feet, he could hear small
living things hopping away from his tread, or a
marsh bird rise with a frightened whir of wings.
Water gushed into his shoes, but that, he declared,
wouldn't matter, as he would so soon be
out of the reach of catching cold.

The building proved to be all that fire had left
of a shanty knocked together long ago, probably
for laborers working on the road. The walls were
standing, and it was not quite roofless. There was
no door, and the window was no more than a hole,
but as he ventured within he found the flooring
sound. At least, it bore his weight, and, what was
more amazing still, he tripped over a rough bench
which the fire had spared and the former occupants
had not thought worth the carting away.

It was the very thing. Shooting oneself was
something to be performed with ritual. You
lay down, stretched yourself out, and did it with
a hint of decency.

Teddy groped his way. First he drew the
pistol from his hip pocket, laying it carefully on
the floor and within reach of his hand. Next he
sat down for a minute, but, fearing he would
begin to think, lifted his feet to the bench,
lowered his back, and straightened himself to his
full, flat length. Putting down his hand, he
found he could touch the pistol easily, and therefore
let it lie. He let it lie only because he had
not yet decided where to fire—at his heart or
into his temple.

Outside the hut there was a hoarse, sleepy
croak, then another, and another, and another.
The dangers of light being past, the frogs were
waking to their evening chant. Teddy had always
loved this dreamy, monotonous lullaby,
reminiscent of spring twilights and approaching
holidays. He was glad now that it would be the
last sound to greet his ears on earth. Since he
had to go, it would croon to him softly, cradle
him gently, letting the night of the soul come
down on him consolingly. He was not frightened;
he was only tired—oddly tired, considering
where he was. It would be easier to fall asleep
than do anything else, listening to the co-ax, co-ax,
co-ax, with which the darkness round was filled.

----

And right at that minute, Flynn, with low
chuckles of laughter, was telling Mrs. Flynn of
the extraordinary adventure of the afternoon.

"We didn't have nothin' on the young guy at
all till we seen him look over at us scared-like,
and he tuck to his heels."

It was a cozy scene—Flynn, in his shirt sleeves
and slippers, smoking his pipe in the dining-room
of a Harlem apartment, while his wife, a plump,
pretty woman, was putting away the spoons and
forks in the drawer of the yellow-oak sideboard.
The noisy Flynn children being packed off to
bed, the father could unbend and become
confidential.

"It's about three weeks now since Jackman
put me wise to money leakin' from Collingham &
Law's, and we couldn't tell where the hole was.
First we'd size up one fella, and then another;
but we'd say it couldn't be him or him. We
looked over this young Follett with the rest, but
only with the rest, and found but wan thing
ag'in' him."

"Didn't he lose his father a short while back?"

"Yes; and that was what made us think of
him. Old Follett was fired from the bank eight
or nine months ago, and yet the family had gone
on livin' very much as they always done."

"That'd be to their credit, wouldn't it?" Mrs. Flynn
suggested, kindly.

"It'd be to some one's credit; and the thing
we wanted to know was if it was to Collingham
& Law's. But we hadn't a thing on him. We
found out he'd paid for the old man's funeral,
and the grave, and all that; but whether old
Follett had left a little wad or whether the
young guy'd found it lyin' around loose, we
couldn't make out at all. And then this afternoon,
as Jackman and me was talkin' it over on
the other side o' Broad Street, who should come
out but me little lord! Well, wan look give the
whole show away. The third degree couldn't ha'
been neater. The very eyes of him when he seen
us on the other side o' the street says, 'My God!
they've got me!' So off he goes—and off we
goes—up Broad Street—into Wall Street—across
to Nassau Street—up Nassau Street—round the
corner into John Street—up to Broadway—over
Broadway—and then we lost him. But we've
done the trick. To-morrow, when he comes to
the bank, we'll have him on the grill. Sooner or
later he'd ha' been on the grill, anyhow."

"But suppose he doesn't come?"

"That'll be a worse give-away than ever."

She turned from the drawer, asking of the
Follett family and learning whatever he had to tell.

"And you say he's a fine boy of about twenty-one."

"That'd about be his age. Yes, a fine, upstanding
lad—and very pop'lar with Jackman
he's always been."

She waited a minute before saying, "Oh, Peter,
I wish you'd let him off."

"Ah, now, Tessie," he expostulated, "there
you go again! If you had your way, there'd be
no law at all."

"Well, I wish there wasn't."

He laughed with a jolly guffaw.

"If there was no law, and no one to break it,
where'd your trip to the beach be this summer, and
the new Ford car I'm goin' to get for the boys?
Anyhow, even if we do get him with the goods
on him, which we're pretty sure o' doin' now,
he'll be recommended to mercy on account of
his youth, and p'raps be let off with two years."

"Yes—and what'll he be when he comes out?"

Getting up, he pulled her to him, with his
arm across her shoulder.

"Ah, now, Tessie, don't be lookin' so far
ahead. That's you all over."

And he kissed her.

----

Gladys, that evening, kissed her mother, in
the hope of kissing away her foreboding. Lizzie
had not been satisfied with Teddy's story on the
telephone.

"I don't understand why he didn't ask to
speak to me," she kept repeating.

"Oh, momma," Gussie explained to her,
"don't you see? It was a long-distance call.
Three minutes is all he was allowed, and of
course he didn't want to pay double. Here's his
chance to make money that we've all been
praying for since the year one; and you pull a
long face over it. Cheer up, momma, *do*! Smile!
Smile more! There! That's better. Ted said
himself that you were not to miss him."

So Lizzie did her best to smile, only saying in
her heart, "I don't understand his not speaking
to *me*."




CHAPTER XVII
============


Teddy woke to a brilliant August sunshine,
and that calling of marsh birds which is
not song. He woke with a start and with terror.
He was still on the bench, though turned over on
his side, and with the pistol in view. He needed
a minute to get his wits together, to piece out
the meaning of the blackened walls, the sagging
floor, and the sunlight streaming through the rent
in the roof. A hole that had once been a door
and another that had once been a window let the
summer wind play over his hot face, bringing a
soft refreshment.

Dragging himself to a sitting posture, his first
sensation was one of relief. "I'm alive!" He
hadn't done the thing he had planned last night!
Merciful sleep had nailed him to the bench,
keeping him motionless, unconscious. The pistol
had lain within reach of his hand, and was there
still; it could do duty still, but for the moment
he was alive. Had he ever asked God for help
or thanked Him when it came, he would have
gone down on his knees and done it now; but
the habit was foreign to the Follett family. He
could only thank the purposeless Chance, which
is the god most of us know best.

But he was glad. Twelve hours previously he
had not supposed it possible ever to be glad
again. It *had* been a nightmare, he reasoned now,
or, if not a nightmare, it had been thought out
of focus. He hadn't seen straight and normally.
It was as if he had been drunk or mildly insane.
He recalled experiences during naval nights
ashore, at Brest or Bordeaux or Hampton Roads,
when, after a glass or two of something, his
mind had taken on this fevered twist in which
all life had gone red.

Bickley had read this from the lines of his
profile. "Forehead slightly concave; mouth
and chin distinctly convex; tends to act before
he thinks." The other traits had been satisfactory,
indicating pluck, patience, fidelity, and
cheerfulness of outlook.

The cheerfulness of outlook asserted itself
now. Since he was alive on a glorious summer
morning, the two great assets of a man, himself
and the outside world, were still at his command.
Nevertheless, he didn't blink the facts.

"I'm not a thief—but I took the money.
They're after me, and they mustn't get me. I'll
shoot myself first; but I don't have to shoot
myself—yet."

He would not have to shoot himself so long
as he was safe, and safety might take many turns.
The abandoned, half-burnt sty in which he had
found refuge was a fortress in its very loneliness.
Close to the road, close to Jersey City, not very
far from Pemberton Heights, it had probably no
visitor but a toad or a bird or a truant boy from
twelvemonth to twelvemonth.

His chief danger was that of being seen. The
door and the window were both on the side
toward the road. By avoiding the one and
ducking under the other, he could move, but he
could move very little. That little, however,
would stretch his muscles and relieve the intolerable
idleness.

The idleness, he knew, would be irksome. By
looking at his watch, which had not run down,
he found it was six o'clock. The six o'clock stir
was also in the air. Motors had begun to dash
along the road, and market garden teams were
lumbering toward the big town. He was hungry
again, but with his seven doughnuts still in the
bag he couldn't starve to death.

By getting on the floor he found a peephole
just above the level of the grass through which
he could see without detection. This must be
his spying place. Unlikely as it was that anyone
would track him to this lair, he must be carefully
on the lookout. What he should do if threatened
with a visitor was not very clear to him. There
being no exit except by the door, and the door
being toward the road from which a visitor would
naturally approach, there was no escape on that
side. Escape being out of the question, there
would only remain—the other thing. The other
thing was always the great possibility. He hadn't
abandoned the thought of it; he had only postponed
the necessity. He would live as long as he
could; and yet the necessity of the other thing
would probably arise. If it arose, he hoped he
should get through it by that tendency which he
recognized in himself as clearly as Mr. Bickley
had read it from his profile—to act before he
thought.

With this as a possibility, he got down to his
peephole, put the pistol near him on the floor,
and began on his doughnuts. For breakfast, he
allowed himself three, keeping the rest for his
midday needs. When darkness fell he would
steal out and buy more. He could do this as
long as his money held out, and before it was
spent something would probably have happened.
What that something would be he did not forecast.
He was in a fix where forecasting wasn't
possible. The minute was the only thing, and a
thing that had grown precious.

Even the family had somehow become subordinate
to that. In the strangeness of his night,
he seemed to have traveled away from them. A
man clinging to a spar on the ocean might have
had this sense of remoteness from his dear ones
safe on shore. Since they were safe on shore,
that would be the main thing. Since his mother
and sisters could come and go in Indiana Avenue,
he could wish them nothing more. That was
the all-essential, and they had it. Want, anxiety,
grief, "and no Teddy coming home in the evenings,"
were trifles as compared with this priceless
blessing of security.

So he settled down amid filth and slime and the
debris of charred wood to watch and wait and
cling to his life till he could cling to it no longer.

Later that morning, Mrs. Collingham motored
from Marillo to see Hubert Wray's much-discussed
picture, "Life and Death," in a famous
dealer's gallery in Fifth Avenue. It had hung
there a week, and though the season was dead, it
was being talked about. Among the few in New
York who care for the art of painting, the picture
had "caught on." The important critics had
honored it with articles, in which one wrote
black and another white with an equal authority.
The important middlemen had come in to look
at it, saying to one another, "Here's a fellow
who'll go far—\ *en voilà un qui va faire son chemin*."
The important connoisseurs had made a point of
viewing it, with their customary fear of expressing
admiration for the work of a native son. From
the few who knew, the interest was spreading to
the many who didn't know but were anxious to
appear as if they did.

Junia's introduction to the picture had caused
her some chagrin. She had not ranked Hubert
among the important family acquaintances, and
when he came down to Collingham Lodge, for a
night or two, as occasionally he did, she presented
him to only the more negligible neighbors.
"A young man Bob met in France," was all the
explanation he required.

But in dining out recently she had been led
in to dinner by a man of unusual enlightenment,
with whose flair and discernment she liked to
keep abreast. To do this she was accustomed
to fall back on such scraps of reviews or art notes
as drifted to her through the papers, bringing
them out with that knack of "putting her best
goods in the window" which was part of her
social equipment. Books and the theater being
too light for her attention, she was fond of
displaying in music and painting the *expertise* of
a patroness. She could not only talk of Boldini
and Cezanne, of Paul Dukas and Vincent d'Indy,
but could throw off the names of younger men
just coming into view as if eagerly following
their development.

Her neighbor's comments on the new picture,
"Life and Death," at the Kahler Gallery were of
value to her chiefly because they were up to
date and told her what to say. "A reaction
against the cubists and post-impressionists in
favor of an art rich in color, suggestion, and significance,"
was a useful phrase and one easy to
remember. But not having caught the painter's
name, she felt it something of a shock when,
with the impressiveness of one whose notice
confers recognition, her escort went on to remark:
"I'm going to look up this young
Hubert Wray and ask him down to Marillo.
You and Bradley will be interested in meeting
him."

Junia's chagrin was inward, of course, and
arose from the fact of having had a budding
celebrity like a tame cat about the house, not
merely without suspecting it, but without keeping
in touch with the thing he was creating. At the
same time, she couldn't have been the woman
she was had it not been for the faculty of tuning
herself up to any necessary key.

Her smile was of the kind that grants no
superiority even to a man of unusual enlightenment.

"You can't imagine how interested I am in
hearing your opinion of the dear boy's work, and
so I've been letting you run on. He happens to
be a very intimate friend of ours—he comes
down to stay with us every few weeks—and I've
been watching his development so keenly. I
really do think that with this picture he'll arrive;
and to have a man like you agree with me delights
me beyond words."

It was also the excuse she needed for calling
Hubert up. More than two months had passed
since her meeting with Jennie, and the twenty-five
thousand dollars was still lying to her credit
at the bank. She was not unaware of a reason
for this, in that Bradley had told her of old
Follett's death, and even a "bad girl" like
Jennie must be allowed some leeway for grief.
But Follett had been nearly two weeks in his
grave, and still the application for the twenty-five
thousand didn't come. Unless a pretext
could be found for keeping Bob in South America,
he would soon be on his way homeward, and
she, Junia, was growing anxious. To be face to
face with Hubert would give her the opportunity
she was looking for.

He met her at the street entrance to the Kahler
Gallery, conducting her through the main exposition of canvases to a little shrine in the rear.
It was truly a shrine, hung in black velvet,
and with no lighting but that which fell indirectly
on the vivid, vital thing just sprung
into consciousness of life, like Aphrodite risen
from the sea foam. But, just sprung into consciousness
of life, she had been called on at once
to contemplate death, eying it with a mysterious
spiritual courage. The living gleam of flesh, the
marble of the throne, and the skull's charnel
ugliness stood out against a blue-green atmosphere,
like that of some other plane.

Junia was startled, not by the power and
beauty of this apparition, but by something
else.

"You've—you've changed her," she said, with
awed breathlessness, after gazing for three or
four minutes in silence.

"You mean the model?"

She nodded a "Yes," without taking her eyes
from the extraordinary vision.

"You've seen her?" he asked, in mild surprise.

"Just once."

"The figure is exact," he explained, "but I
did have to make changes in the features. It
wouldn't have done, otherwise."

"No, of course not."

More minutes passed in silent contemplation,
when she said:

"I thought there was more of the gleam of the
red in amber in the hair. This hair is a brown
with a little red in it."

"I got it as nearly as I could," he felt it
enough to say. "The shade and sheen and silkiness
of hair are always difficult."

After more minutes of hushed gazing, Junia
made a venture. She spoke in that insinuating,
sympathetic tone which in moments of tensity
a woman can sometimes take toward a man.

"You're in love with her—aren't you?"

He jerked his head in the direction of the nude
woman.

"With her? That model? Why, no! What
made you think so?"

Junia was disconcerted.

"Oh, only—only the hints that have seeped
through when you didn't think you were giving
anything away."

He said, with some firmness:

"I never meant to give that away—or to hint
that it was—that it was love—a *rouleuse* of the
studios, whom any fellow can pick up."

Junia felt like a person roaming aimlessly
through sand who suddenly stumbles on gold.
There was more here than, for the moment, she
could estimate. All she could see were possibilities;
but there was one other point as to
which she needed to be sure. It was conceivable
that the thing might have been painted long ago,
before Bob's departure for South America, in
which case it would lose at least some of its value
for her purpose.

"When did you do this, Hubert?"

"Oh, just within the last few weeks."

This was enough. With her usual swiftness of
decision, she had her plans in mind.

"What are you asking?"

He named his price. It was a large one, but
her balance at the bank was large. It could be
put to this use as well as to another.

"I'll take it," she said, after a minute's consideration,
"if you could let me have it within a
few days."

Not to betray the eagerness he felt, he said
that it would give him publicity to keep it on
view as long as possible.

"It will be almost as much publicity to have it
on view at Marillo."

And in the end he agreed that this was so.

He walked back to the studio as if wings on his
feet were lifting him above the pavement. It
was the seal on his success. "Sold to a private
collector" would be a bomb to throw among the
dealers, who had been taking their time and
dickering. It was more than the seal on this one
success; it was a harbinger of the next success.
And with this thing behind him, the next success
was calling to him to begin.

He already knew what he should begin on.
It was to be called, "Eve Tempting the Serpent."
He was not yet sure how he should treat the idea,
but a lethargic semihuman reptile was to be
roused to the concept of evil by a woman's
beauty and abandonment. The thing would be
daring; but it couldn't be too daring, or it would
bring down on him the recrudescent blue-law
spirit already so vigorous through the country.
He couldn't afford a tussle with that until he was
better established.

But he had made some sketches, and had
written to Jennie that he should like to talk the
matter over on that very afternoon. She had
written in reply that, at last, she would be free
to come. For the first few days after the funeral
she had been either too grief stricken or too busy;
but now the claims of life were asserting themselves
again and she was trying to respond to
them. He must not expect her to be gay; but
she would grow more cheerful in time.

So he went back to the studio to lunch and
to wait for her coming. Till she had ceased
coming he hadn't known how much the daily
expectation of seeing her had meant to him. The
very occasions on which she had, as he expressed
it, played him false had brought an excitement
which he would have been emotionally poorer
for having missed. He could not go through the
experience often; he could, perhaps, not go
through it again. But for that test he was apparently
not to be called upon. She was coming.
She knew what she was coming for. The very
fact that she had written meant surrender.

And that, indeed, was what Jennie had been
saying to herself all through the morning. Now
that there had been this interval, she knew that
her latitude for saying "Yes" and acting "No"
was at an end. If she went at all, she must go all
the way. To go once more and draw back once
more would not be playing the game. She was
clear in her mind that the day would be decisive.
As to her decision, she was not so sure.

That is, she was not sure of its wisdom, though
sure what she would do. She would do what she
had meant to do more than two months earlier.
There was no reason why she shouldn't, and the
same set of reasons why she should. Not only
were the money and release imperative, but
Hubert meant more to her than ever. His sympathy
through her sorrow had touched her by
its very novelty. He had written, sent flowers,
and kept himself in the background. Bob would
have done more and moved her less, for the reason
that doing all and giving all were in his nature.
The rare thing being the most precious thing,
she treasured the perfunctory phrases in Hubert's
scrawl of condolence above all the outpourings of
Bob's heart.

Nevertheless, she treasured them with misgivings.
The consciousness of being married had
acquired some strength from watching the effect
of her father's death on her mother. She had
known, ever since growing up, that her father
and mother had been unequally mated. It was
not wholly a question of practical failure or
success—it was rather that the balance of moral
support had been so shifted between them that
the mother had nothing to sustain her. "Poor
momma," had been Jennie's way of putting it,
"has to take the burden of everything. She's
got us on her shoulders, and poppa, too." And
yet, with Josiah's death, some prop of Lizzie's
inner life seemed to have been snatched away.
She was not weaker, perhaps, but she was more
detached, and stranger. To her children, to her
neighbors, she had always been strange, always
detached, but now the aloofness had become
more significant. With Josiah alone she had
lived in that communion of things shared which
leads to understanding. Now that he was gone,
something had gone with him, leaving Lizzie
like an empty house.

Jennie was thrown back on what Bob had
repeated so often: "You're the other half of me;
I'm the other half of you." Whether it came
through some impulse of affinity, or whether it
was the chance of conscientiously living together,
Jennie wasn't sure; but it began to seem
as if in the mere fact of marriage there was a
naturally unifying principle. To go against it
was, in a measure, to go against the forces of the
universe; and though she had only been nominally
married to Bob, she was preparing to go
against it. Had she been a rebel at heart, it
would have been easier; but she was docile,
loving, eager to be loved, with nothing more
daring in her soul than the wish to live at peace
with the world she saw round her.

Bob's letters were disturbing, too. In the way
of a happy future, he took everything for granted.
He reasoned as if, now that they had gone
through a certain form together and signed it
with a parson's name, she had no more liberty
of will than a woman in a harem. Little as she
was rebellious, she rebelled against that, preferring
an element of chance in her love to a love
in which there was no choice. Bob wrote as if
her love was of no importance, as if he could
love enough for two—did, in fact, love enough
for two—so that the whole need of loving was
taken off her hands.

    I feel, as if my love was the air and you were a plant to
    grow in it. It's the sunshine to which your leaves and
    blossoms will only have to turn.

"That's all very well for him," she said, falling
back with a grimace on the language Gussie
brought home with her from vaudeville shows,
"but I ain't no blooming plant."

Hubert's love, she thought at other times,
was like a rare and precious cordial, of which a
few drops carefully doled out ran like fire through
the veins. Bob's was a rushing torrent which,
without saying with your leave or by your leave,
carried you away. She preferred the cordial, of
which you could take up the glass and put it
down according as you wanted less or more; but,
on the other hand, when there was a flood which,
without asking your permission, poured all over
you, what were you to do? She knew what she
meant to do; but it was the difficulty of doing it
and facing that terrific tide which made her
stand aghast. If Bob would only let her alone....

But, then, Bob couldn't let her alone. He
himself would have argued that you might as
well ask a man to let a hand or a foot alone while
it is aching. At the minute when Jennie was
thinking these thoughts as she flitted about the
house, he was seated at an open hotel window on
the Santa Thereza hill above Rio de Janeiro, looking
down on an iridescent city creeping round
the foam-fringed edges of a turquoise sea, and
saying to himself: "I'm watching over you,
Jennie. I'm here, but my love is there and fills
all the space between us. I came away and left
you exposed to all sorts of trouble. I shouldn't
have done that; I'm sorry now I did. I thought
that if we were married the rest would take
care of itself; but I see now it couldn't. You're
having a harder time than I ever supposed
you'd have, and you're having it all alone; but
my love is with you, Jennie, and the worst can't
happen while it protects you. Dangers will
threaten you, but you'll go to meet them with
my love closing you in, and something will ward
them off."

"I wish he'd stop thinking about me like
that."

Jennie's reference, while she stood at the
mirror putting the last touches to her costume,
was to this same thought as expressed in the
letters she received from South America. Its
appeal to her imagination was such as to create
an atmosphere wrapping her about as a halo
wraps a saint. She couldn't get away from it.
In going to meet Hubert, as she would do in a
few minutes, it would go with her, an embarrassing
witness of the sin against itself.

For the minute, the action of her mind was
twofold. She was making this protest as to Bob
and was also giving minute attention to her
dress. Not only was it her first appearance in
public since her father's funeral but it was a
moment at which the victim must be neatly
decked for the altar. Having no money to spend
on "mourning," she had put deft touches of black
on a last year's white summer suit, to which a
black hat thrown together by Gussie, with the
black shoes and stockings already in her possession,
added their mute witness that she was
grieving for a relative. Having, moreover, the
native *chic* which counts for most in the art of
dressing, she was one more instance of the girl
of the humbler walks in life who, by some secret
of her own, confounds the product of the Rue de
la Paix.

She was to leave for the studio as soon as her
mother got up from her early-afternoon rest.
The early-afternoon rest had become a necessity
for Lizzie ever since the day when Josiah had
been laid away.

"You'll call me if Teddy rings," she had stipulated,
before lying down, and Jennie had promised
faithfully.

As to Teddy's message, nominally sent from
Paterson, Lizzie had betrayed a skepticism which
the three girls found disconcerting. She said
nothing, but it was precisely the saying nothing
that puzzled them. When they themselves grew
expansive over the things they would buy with
the money Teddy was going to make, the mother's
faint smile was alarming. It was alarming
chiefly because it combined with other things to
produce that effect of strangeness they had all
noticed in her since their father died. Though
they couldn't define it for themselves, it was as
if she had renounced any further effort to make
life fulfill itself. She was like a man on a sinking
ship, who, after casting about as to how he may
save himself, knows there is no choice left but to
go down, and so becomes resigned. Having
thrown up her hands, Lizzie was waiting for the
waters to close over her. Jennie was thus uneasy
about her mother, as she was uneasy about Bob,
uneasy about Hubert, and, most of all, uneasy
about herself.

By the time she was ready she heard Lizzie
stirring in her bedroom. It was the signal agreed
upon. She was free to go, which meant that she
was free to turn her back on all her more or less
sheltered past and strike out toward a terrifying
future. She felt as she had always supposed she
would feel on leaving her home on her wedding
day; and she would do as she had decided she
would do in that event. She would go without
making a fuss, without anything to record that
the going was different from other goings, or
that the return would be different from other
returns. She would make her departure casual,
without consciousness, without admitted intentions. She merely called to her mother, therefore,
through the closed door, that she was on
her way, and her mother had called out in
response, "Very well." This leave-taking making
things easier—all Jennie had to do was to
gulp back a sob.




CHAPTER XVIII
=============


But as Jennie opened the door to let herself
out, two men were standing on the cement
sidewalk in front of the grassplots, examining the
house. They were big, heavily built men, who,
although in plain clothes, suggested the guardianship
of law. It came to Jennie instantly that
their examination of the house was peculiar; and
of that peculiarity she divined with equal
promptness the significance. The men declared
afterward that in her manner of standing
on the step and waiting till they spoke to her
there was the same kind of "give-away" as when
her brother had eyed them across Broad Street.

The older and heavier of the two advanced
up the walk between the grassplots.

"This is the Follett house, ain't it, miss?"

Jennie replied that it was.

"And you're Miss Follett?"

She assented again.

"Is your brother in?"

"N-no; he's not in town."

The big man turned toward his taller and
slighter colleague, whatever he had to say being
communicated by a look. Having expressed this
thought, he veered round again toward Jennie,
speaking politely.

"Maybe we could have a word with you,
private-like."

"Won't you step in?"

Presently they were all three seated in the
living room, the big man continuing as spokesman.

"Ah, now, about your brother, Miss Follett;
you're sure he isn't anywheres around?"

The inference from the tone was that somehow
Jennie was secreting him.

"He isn't to my knowledge. He called up
last evening to say that he wouldn't be home
to-day, and perhaps not to-morrow."

The two men being seated within range of
each other's eyes, some new understanding was
flashed silently.

"Did he, then? And where would he have
called up from?"

"From Paterson."

"From Paterson, was it? And what made you
think it was from Paterson?"

"He said so."

"And that was all you had to go by?"

"That was all."

"Well, well, now! He said so, did he? And
he didn't come home last night?"

Jennie shook her head.

For a third time Flynn's eyes telegraphed
something to Jackman's, and Jackman's responded.
What they said to each other Jennie
didn't try to surmise, for the reason that she was
listening to a call. It was the call that Teddy
had heard on the night when his father had
brought home the news that he was "fired"—the
call to assume responsibilities. Her father
had gone; her mother was collapsing; Teddy had
broken beneath the strain. "And now it's up to
me." Mentally, she spoke the words almost
before she was conscious of the thought. "And
that settles it." These words, too, she spoke
mentally, but in them the reference was different.
The vision of love and twenty-five thousand
dollars, of bliss for herself and relief for the
family, which had waxed and waned so often,
now faded out forever behind a mass of storm-clouds.
But of all this she gave no sign as she
waited for the burly man to speak again.

"And when your brother called up from
Paterson—let us say it was Paterson—didn't
you ask him no questions at all?"

"He didn't speak to me. I wasn't at home.
It was to my little sister. I understood that he
rang off before she could ask him anything."

"Oh, he did, did he?" The telegraphy between
the two men was renewed. "And didn't
he say nothin' about what had tuck him to a
place like Paterson?"

"I think he said it was business."

"'Business,' was it? Ah, well, now! And
what sort of business would that be?"

"I don't know."

"And would you tell me now if you did
know?"

Jennie looked at him with clear, limpid eyes.

"I'm not sure that I would. I don't know
what right you have to ask me questions as it is."

"This right." Turning back the lapel of his
coat, he displayed a badge. "We don't want to
frighten you, Miss Follett, my friend and me,
we don't; but if you know anything about the
boy, it'll be easier in the long run both for him
and for you—"

"What do you want him for?"

Lizzie's voice was so deep that it startled. On
the threshold of the little entry she stood, tall,
black robed, almost unearthly. At the same
time Pansy, who had also come downstairs, crept
toward Flynn with a low, vicious growl. Both
men stumbled to their feet, awed by something
in Lizzie which was more than the majesty of
grief.

"Ah, now, we're sorry to disturb you, ma'am,
my friend and me. We know you've had trouble,
and we wouldn't be for wantin' to bring more
into a house where there's enough of it already.
But when things is duty, they can't be put by
just because they're unpleasant—"

"Has my son been taking money from Collingham
& Law's?"

The spectral voice gave force to the directness
of the question. Abandoning the hint of professional
bullying he had taken toward Jennie,
Flynn, with Pansy's teeth not six inches from his
calf, went a pace or two toward the figure in the
entry.

"Has he been takin' money, that boy of yours?
Well now, and have you any reason to think so,
ma'am?"

"None—apart from what I hoped."

"Momma!"

Jennie sprang to her mother, grasping her by
the arm. While Jackman stood like an iron
figure in the background, Flynn, always with
Pansy's teeth keeping some six inches from his
calf, advanced still another pace or two.

"Ah, now, that's a quare thing, ma'am, for
the mother of a lad to say—that she hoped he
was takin' money."

"Oh, don't mind her," Jennie pleaded. "She
hasn't been just—just *right*—ever since my
father died."

"I didn't think of it at first," Lizzie stated,
in a lifeless voice. "I believed what he told us,
that he was making money on the side. It was
only latterly that I began to suspect that he
wasn't; and now I hope he took it from the
bank."

"But, good God! ma'am, why? Don't you
know he'll be caught—and what he'll get for it?"

"Oh, he'd get that just the same, if you mean
suffering and punishment and a life of misery.
All I want is that he should be the first to
strike. Since he's got to go down before brute
power—"

"Brute power of law and order, ma'am, if
you'll allow me to remind you."

She uttered a little joyless laugh.

"Law and order! You'll excuse me for
laughing, won't you? I've heard so much of
them—"

"And you're likely to hear a lot more, if this
is the way o' things."

"Oh, I expect to. They'll do me to death, as
they'll do you, and as they do everyone else.
Law and order are the golden images set up for
us to bow down to and worship as gods; and we
get the reward that's always dealt out to those
who believe in falsehood."

Flynn appealed to both Jennie and Jackman.

"I never heard no one talk like that, whether
dotty or sane."

"If it was real law and order," Lizzie continued,
with the same passionless intonation,
"that would be another thing. But it isn't.
It's faked law and order. It's a plaster on a sore,
meant to hide the ugly thing and not to heal it.
It's to keep bad bad by pretending that it's
good—"

"Ah, but bad as it is, ma'am," Flynn began to
reason, "it's better than stealin'—now, isn't it?"

But Lizzie seemed ready for him here.

"I think I've read in your Bible that the commandment,
'Thou shalt not steal,' was given to
a people among whom it was a principle that
everyone should be provided for. If it happened
that anyone was not provided for, there was
another commandment given as to him, 'Thou
shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the
corn.' He was to be free to take what he needed."

Flynn shook his head.

"That may be in the Bible, ma'am; but it
wouldn't stand in a court o' law."

"Of course it wouldn't; only, the court of
law is nothing to me."

"It can make itself something to you, ma'am,
if you don't mind my sayin' so."

"Oh no, it can't! It can try me and sentence
me and lock me up; but that's no worse than
law and order are doing to me and mine every
hour of the day."

"Oh, momma," Jennie pleaded, clinging to her
mother's arm, "please stop—\ *please*!"

"I'm only warning him, darling. Law and
order will bring him to grief as it does everyone
else. How many did it kill in the war? Something
like twelve millions, wasn't it, and could
anyone ever reckon up the number of aching
hearts it's left alive?"

"Yes, momma; but that kind of talk doesn't
do Teddy any good."

"It does if we make it plain that he was only
acting within his rights. These people think
that by passing a law they impose a moral duty.
What nonsense! I want my son to be brave
enough to strike at such a theory as that. It's
true that they'll strike back at him, and that
they have the power to crush him—only, in the
long run he'll be the victor."

Flynn looked at Jennie in sympathetic apology.

"All right now, Miss Follett. I guess my
friend and me'll be goin' along—"

"You'll do just as you like about that," Lizzie
interposed, with dignity; "but if you see my
son before I do, tell him not to be sorry for
what he's done, and above all not to think that I
blame him. 'Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that
treadeth out the corn.' When you do, the eighth
commandment doesn't apply any longer."

Jennie followed her visitors to the doorstep.
After her mother's reckless talk, they seemed like
friends, as, indeed, at bottom of their kindly
hearts they could easily have been. They
brought no ill will to their job—only a conviction
that if Teddy Follett was a thief, they must
"get him."

"Does—does Mr. Collingham know that all
this is going on?"

She asked her question in trepidation, lest
these men, trained to ferret out whatever was
most hidden, should be able to read her secret.
It was Jackman who shouldered the duty of
answering. He seemed more laconic than his
colleague, and more literate.

"We don't trouble Mr. Collingham with
trifles. If it was a big thing—"

So Jennie was left with that consolation—that
it was not *a big thing*. How big it was she could
only guess at, but, whatever the magnitude, she
had no doubt at all but that it was "up to her."
She got some inspiration from the little word
"up." There was a lift in it that made her
courageous.

Nevertheless, when she returned to the living
room, finding her mother seated, erect and
stately, in an armchair, with Pansy gazing at
her with eyes of quenchless, infinite devotion,
Jennie knew a qualm of fear.

"Oh, momma, wouldn't it be awful if Teddy
had to go to jail?"

"It would be awful or not, just as you took
it. If you thought he went to jail as a thief, it
*would* be awful, but if you saw him only as the
martyr of a system, you'd be proud to know he
was there."

"Oh, but, momma, what's the good of saying
things like that?"

"What's the good of letting them throw you
down, a quivering bundle of flesh, before a Juggernaut,
and just being meekly thankful? That's
what your father and I have always done, and,
now that the wheels have passed over him, I see
the folly of keeping silent. I may not do any good
by speaking, but at least I speak. When they
muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, it isn't
much wonder if the famished beast goes mad.
Did you ever see a mad ox, Jennie? Well, it's
a terrible sight—the most patient and laborious
drudge among animals, goaded to a desperation
in which he's conscious of nothing but his
wrongs and his strength. They generally kill
him. It's all they can do with him—but, of
course, they can do that."

"So that it doesn't do the ox much good to go
mad, does it?"

"Oh yes; because he gets out of it. That's
the only relief for us, Jennie darling—to get out
of it. I begin to understand how mothers can
so often kill themselves and their children.
They don't want to leave anyone they love to
endure the sufferings this world inflicts."

From these ravings Jennie was summoned by
the tinkle of the telephone bell.

"Teddy!" cried the mother, starting to her
feet.

"No; it's Mr. Wray. I knew he'd ring me if
I didn't turn up."

The instrument was in the entry, and Jennie
felt curiously calm and competent as she went
toward it. All decisions being taken out of her
hands, she no longer had to doubt and calculate.
The renunciations, too, were made for her. She
was not required to look back, only to go on.

In answer to the question, "Is this Mrs.
Follett's house?" she replied, as if the occasion
were an ordinary one:

"Yes, Mr. Wray. I'm sorry I can't come to
the studio."

"Oh! so it's you! You can't come—what?
Then you needn't come any more."

"Yes; that's what I thought. I see now that—that
I can't."

"Well, of all—" He broke off in his expostulation
to say: "Jennie, for God's sake, what's
the matter with you? What are you afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid of anything, Mr. Wray; but
there's a good deal the matter which I can't
explain on the telephone."

"Do you want me to come over there?"

"No; you couldn't do any good."

"Is it money?"

"No." She remembered the accumulation of
untouched bills and checks in her glove-and-handkerchief
box upstairs. "I've got plenty of
money. There's nothing you could do, thank
you."

There was a pause before he said:

"Then it's all off? Is that what you mean?"

"Isn't it what you meant yourself only a
minute ago?"

"Oh, well, you needn't stake your life on
that."

She began to feel faint. It cost her more to
stand there talking than she had supposed it
would when she took up the receiver.

"I'm afraid I must—must stake my life on
that. I—I can't stay now. I can't come any
more to see you, either. I've—I've given up
posing. G—good-by."

She heard him beginning to protest from the
other end.

"No, Jennie! Wait! For God's sake!"

But her putting-up of the receiver cut them
off from each other.

"So that's all over," she said to herself, turning
again into the living room.

But she said it strongly, as Lizzie had many
a time said similar things on witnessing the
death of hopes, with desolation in the heart,
perhaps, but no wish to cry.

Meanwhile, Flynn and Jackman, trudging
toward the car station in the square, were discussing
this strange case.

"That was a funny line o' talk about the ox
treadin' out the corn. I never heard nothin' like
that in our church."

But Jackman, being a Methodist and a student
of the Bible before coming to New York and
giving himself to detective work, was able to
explain.

"That's in the Old Testament, to begin with;
but Paul takes it up and says that, though it
was meant, in the first place, to apply to the
animals, its real application is to man. 'That he
that ploweth may plow in hope, and that he
that thresheth in hope should be partaker of
his hope'—that's the way it runs. That everyone
should get a generous living wage and not
be cheated of it in the end is the way you might
put it into our kind of talk."

"Is it now? And it do seem fair—don't it?—for
all the old woman yonder is so daft. And
would that Paul be the same *Saint* Paul as we've
got in our church?"

"Oh, the very same."

"Would he now? And you a Protestant!
That's one thing I've often wondered—why
there had to be so many religions and everyone
wasn't a Catholic. It'd be just as easy, and cost
us less. Ah, well! It's a quare world, and that
poor woman's had a powerful dose o' trouble.
I don't wonder she's got wheels in her head.
Do you? Maybe you and me'd have them if
we'd gone through the same." Having thus
worked up to his appeal, he plunged into it. "I
know wan little woman 'd be glad if I was to
come home to-night and tell her we'd called the
thing off. That's my Tessie. It's amazin' how
she's set her heart on my not trackin' down this
boy."

"Not to track him down would be to compound
a felony," Jackman replied, severely.

"Ah, well! So it would, now. You sure have
got the right dope there, Jackman, and that I'll
tell Tessie. I'll say I'd be compounding a felony,
and them words 'll scare her good."

So Flynn, too, resigned himself, putting on
once more the mask of craft and implacability
that was part of his stock in trade, and which
Jackman rarely took off.

----

And all that day Teddy lay crouched in his
lair with his eye glued more or less faithfully to
the peephole. Except from hunger, he had
suffered but little, and the minutes had been
too exciting to seem long in going by. It was
negative excitement, springing from what didn't
happen; but because something might happen,
and happen at any instant, it was excitement.
From morning to midday, and from midday on
into the afternoon, cars, carts, and pedestrians
traveled in and out of Jersey City, each spelling
possible danger. Now and then a man or a
vehicle had paused in the road within calling
distance of the shanty. For two minutes, for
five, or for ten at a time, Teddy lay there wondering
as to their intentions and trying to make
up his mind as to his own course. Whether to
shoot himself or make a bolt for it, or if he shot
himself whether it should be through the temple
or the heart, were points as to which he was still
undecided. He would get inspiration, he told
himself, when the time came. He had often
heard that in crises of peril the brain worked
quicker than in moments of tranquillity; and
perhaps, after all, a crisis of peril might not lie
before him.

In a measure, he was growing used to his
situation as an outlaw; he was growing used to
the separation from the family. It was not that
he loved them less, but that he had moved on
and left them behind. He could think of them
now without the longing to cry he had felt
yesterday, while the desperation of his plight
centered his thought more and more upon himself.
If he didn't have to shoot himself, he
planned, in as far as plans were possible, to sneak
away into the unknown and become a tramp.
He couldn't do it yet, because the roads were
probably being watched for him; but by and
by, when the hunt had become less keen....

Seven doughnuts swallowed without a drop
of water being far from the nourishment to
which he was accustomed, he waited with painful
eagerness for nightfall. When the primrose-colored
lights up and down the road and along
the ragged fringe of the town were deepening to
orange, he crept forth cautiously. Even while
half hidden by the sedgy grasses, he felt horribly
exposed, and when he emerged into the open
highway, the eyes of all the police in New York
seemed to spy him through the twilight. Nevertheless,
he tramped back toward the dwellings
of men, doing his best to hide his face when
motor lights flashed over him too vividly.

Unable to think of anything better than to
return to the friendly woman who had given
him seven doughnuts for his six, he found her
behind her counter, in company with a wispy
little girl.

"Ah, good-evening. Zo you'f come ba-ack.
You fount my zandwiches naice."

Teddy replied that he had, ordering six, with
a dozen of her doughnuts. Her manner was so
affable that he failed to notice her piercing eyes
fixed upon him, nor did he realize how much a
young man's aspect can betray after twenty-four
hours without water to wash in, as well as
without hairbrush or razor. He thought of himself
as presenting the same neat appearance as
on the previous evening; but the woman saw
him otherwise.

"I wonder if I could have a glass of water?"
he asked, his throat almost too parched to let
the words come out.

"But sairtainly." She turned to the child,
whispering in a foreign language, but using more
words than the command to fetch a glass of water
would require.

When the child came back, Teddy swallowed
the water in one long gulp. The woman asked
him if he would like another glass, to which he
replied that he would. More instructions followed,
and while the woman tied up the sandwiches
the little girl came back with the second
glass. This Teddy drank more slowly, not noticing
as he did so that the little girl slipped
away.

Nor did he notice as he left the shop and turned
westward into the gloaming, that the child was
returning from what seemed like a hasty visit to
a neighbor's house across the street. Still less
did he perceive, when the comforting loneliness of
the marshes began once more to close round him,
that a big, husky figure was stalking him. It
had come out of one of the tenements over the
way from the pastry shop, apparently at a summons
from the wispy little girl. Like the men
whom Jennie had seen eying the house in the
afternoon, he suggested the guardianship of law,
even though he was, so to speak, in undress
uniform. His duties for the day being over, he
had plainly been taking his ease in slippers,
trousers, and shirt. Even now he was bareheaded,
pulling on his tunic as he went along.

He didn't go very far, only to a point at which
he could see the boy in front of him turn into the
unused path that led to the old shack. Whereupon
he nodded to himself and turned back to
his evening meal.




CHAPTER XIX
===========


Jennie's chief hesitation was as to cashing
the checks, not because the teller at the
Pemberton National Bank didn't know her,
but because he did. To present a demand
for money made out to Jane Scarborough
Follett, and signed, "R. B. Collingham, Jr.,"
was embarrassing.

But she had grown since the previous afternoon,
and embarrassment sat on her more
lightly. Like Teddy marooned on the marshes,
she seemed to have moved on, leaving her old
self behind. Now she had things to do rather
than things to think about. One fact was a
relief to her; she was no longer under the necessity
of betraying Bob.

So she cashed her checks, and counted her
money, finding that she had two hundred and
forty-five dollars. She didn't know how much
Teddy had taken from the bank; possibly more
than this, possibly not so much; but whatever
the sum, this would go at least part of the way
toward meeting it. If she could meet it altogether,
then, she argued, the law couldn't touch
him.

On arriving at the bank her first sensation
was one of confusion. There seemed to be no
one in particular to whom to state her errand.
Men were busy in variously labeled cages, and
more men beyond them sat at desks within pens.
Two or three girls moved about with documents
in their hands, and there was a distant click of
typewriters. People passed in and out of the
bank, occupied with their own affairs, and everyone,
clerk and client alike, had apparently a
definite end in view. It was like coming up
against a blank wall of business, leaving no
opening through which to slip in.

The weakest point seemed to be at a counter
beneath the illuminated sign, "Statements,"
where two ladies waited for custom, conversing
in the interim. Jennie stood unnoticed while
the speaker for the moment finished her narration,
bringing it to its conclusion plaintively.

"So when mother called in the doctor, it turned
out to be a very bad case of ty-*phoid*. Statement?"

The question at the end being directed toward
Jennie, the latter asked if she could see Mr.
Collingham. The reply was sharp; the tone
quite different from that of the domestic anecdote
of which she had just heard a portion.

"Next floor. Take the elevator. Ask for Miss
Ruddick." The voice resumed its plaintiveness.
"So we had him moved into the corner bedroom,
and sent for a trained nurse—"

On getting out of the lift, Jennie found herself
in a sort of lobby where applicants for interviews
sat with the hangdog look which such postulants
generally wear. A brisk little Jewess seated at
a desk murmured the name of each newcomer
into a telephone, after which there was nothing
to do but take a chair and wait upon events.
Now and then some one came out from his conference,
whereupon a messenger girl, generally
of Slavic or Hebraic type, would summon his
successor.

It was nearly an hour before Jennie was called
to the office of Miss Ruddick, who, with her practiced
method of dealing with the importunate,
prepared to put her rapidly through her paces
and land her again at the lift. This Miss Ruddick
did, not so much with the minimum of
courtesy as with the maximum of conscientiousness.
Her aim was to save Jennie's time as well
as her own, in the altruistic spirit of Mr. Bickley's
principles.

"How do you do? Are you the daughter of
the Mr. Follett who used to be with us here?
So sorry for your loss, though it may be a release
for him, poor man. We never know, do we?
Now what is it I can do for you?"

Jennie said again that she hoped to see Mr.
Collingham.

"I think you'd better tell your errand to me."

"I couldn't. I can only tell it to him."

In saying this she supposed Miss Ruddick
would understand the reference to be to Teddy,
whose story must by this time be ringing through
the bank. In spite of what Jackman had said
on the previous afternoon, they couldn't keep so
serious a crime secret for more than a matter of
hours. But Miss Ruddick only seemed displeased
by Jennie's insistence, answering coldly,

"If it's a job you're looking for, the best person
to see would be—"

And just then the communicating door opened
and Collingham himself came out. He was
about to give some order to Miss Ruddick and
pass on when Jennie rose in such a way that his
eye fell upon her. When a man's eye fell upon
Jennie his attention was generally arrested. In
this case, it was the more definitely arrested, for
the reason that Jennie, timidly and tremblingly,
gave signs of having a request to make.

"You wish to speak to me?"

At this condescension Miss Ruddick was
amazed, but, the responsibility being taken off
her hands, she was already capturing the minutes
by being "back on her job," according to her
favorite expression. Jennie could hardly speak
for awe. She recalled what Mrs. Collingham had
said—a hard, stern, ruthless man, who kept her,
her son, and her daughter as puppets on his
string. If he so treated his own flesh and blood,
how would he treat her?

Following him into the private office, she reminded
herself that she must keep her head.
She had come on a specific business, and to that
business she must confine herself. Her other
relations with this terrible man she must leave
to his son to deal with.

"Your name is—"

His tone was courteous. They were both
seated now—he at his desk, she in a small chair
at a respectful distance. The question surprised
her, for the reason that in her confusion she supposed
that her identity was known to him.

"I'm Jennie Follett." His visible start did
not make her situation easier. She remembered
that Mrs. Collingham had said that if he knew
of the tie between herself and Bob he would disinherit
him on the spot. Just what was implied
by that she didn't understand, but it suggested
all that was most dramatic in the movies. To
disarm his suspicions in this direction, she hurried
on to add, "I came about my brother."

He relaxed slightly, leaning on the desk and
examining her closely.

"Oh, your brother!"

"Yes, sir. I don't know how much money
he's been taking from the bank—"

Collingham's brows contracted.

"Wait a minute. Has your brother been
taking money from the bank?"

At the thought that she might be making a
false step, Jennie was appalled.

"Oh, don't you know that yet, sir?"

"Don't I know it yet? I don't know what
you're talking about at all."

So the whole thing had to be explained. Two
men had appeared on the previous afternoon in
Indiana Avenue, accusing Teddy of systematic
robbery. Teddy had so far corroborated the
charge that he had absented himself from home
and work. He had called up once, nominally
from Paterson, but the two detectives didn't
believe that it was. In any case, she had a little
money of her own—her very own—two hundred
and forty-five dollars it was—and as far as it
would go she had come to make restitution. If
it wasn't enough, they would sell the house as
soon as they could get it on the market and pay
up the balance, if he would only give the order
that Teddy shouldn't be sent to jail.

Emboldened by his concentration on her story
and herself, she took out the roll of bills from her
bag, enlarging on her plea.

"You see, sir, it was this way. After my
father had to leave the bank last fall, Teddy had
to be our chief support, just on his eighteen a
week. My two little sisters left school and went
to work; but that didn't bring in much. Then
there were the taxes, and the mortgages, and the
expenses of my father's funeral, besides six of
us having to eat—"

"You were working, too, weren't you?"

"Yes, sir; I was posing. But I only earned
six a week."

"Only?"

Based on a memory of his own of something
Junia had said—"a mousey little thing with a
veneer of modesty, but mercenary isn't the word
for her"—there was an implication in this
"Only?" which escaped Jennie's simplicity.

"Yes, sir; that was all. Somehow I couldn't
get the work. Nobody seemed to want me."

He pointed at her roll of bills.

"Then where did you get the money you're
holding in your hand?"

The question was unexpected and confounding.
She must either answer it truly or not answer it
at all. If she answered it truly, she not only
exposed Bob, but she exposed herself to the utmost
rigor of his wrath. She didn't care about
herself; she didn't care much about Bob; she
cared only about Teddy. The utmost rigor of
this man's wrath would send him to jail as easily
as she could brush a fly through an open window.
She could say nothing. She could only look at
him helplessly, with lips parted, eyes shimmering,
and the hot color flooding her face pitiably.

It was the kind of situation in which no man
with the heart of a man could be hard on any
little girl; besides which, Collingham looked on
this silent confession as providential. It would
enable him to reason with Bob, if it ever came to
that, and tell him what he, the father, knew at
first hand and from his own experience. Otherwise
he brought no moral judgment to bear on
poor Jennie, and condemned her not at all.

"Just wait a minute," he said, in a kindly tone,
getting up as he spoke. "I'll go and straighten
the thing out."

Left alone, Jennie had these concluding words
to strengthen her. He would straighten the thing
out. That meant probably that Teddy wouldn't
have to go to jail, and beyond this relief she
didn't look. It would be everything. Nothing
else would matter. He might be dismissed from
the bank; they might starve; but the great
thing would be accomplished.

It was a half hour or more before he returned,
and when he did he looked worried.
"Troubled" would perhaps be a better word,
since even Jennie could see that his thoughts
were farther away and deeper down than the
incidents on the surface. He spoke almost
absent-mindedly.

"I find there's been a leakage for some little
time past, and they've had difficulty in fixing
where the trouble was. Now I'm sorry to say
it looks as if it was your brother. There's hardly
any doubt about that—"

"You see, sir," she pleaded, "it was so hard
for him not to be able to do anything when my
father was so ill and my mother worried and the
bills piling up—they stopped our credit nearly
everywhere—and the tax people—they were the
worst of all."

"Yes, yes; I quite understand. And I've told
them not to press the matter further. Flynn and
Jackman, the two men you saw yesterday, are
out for the minute; but when they come in they
are to report to me. I don't suppose we can take
your brother back; but I'll see what I can do for
him elsewhere." He rose to end the interview,
so that Jennie rose, too. "You can keep that
money," he added, nodding toward her roll of
bills. "You were not responsible, and there's
no reason at all why you should pay."

When Jennie protested, he merely escorted
her to the door, which he held open.

"No, don't thank me," he insisted. "Please!
Just make your mind easy as to your brother.
The matter shall not go any farther. I don't
know what I can do for him as yet—the circumstances
make it difficult; but I shall find something."

So, blinded with tears, Jennie made her way
toward the lift, calling down on Bob's father as
well as on his mother all the blessings she was
able to invoke.

----

Late that afternoon, Teddy, on the floor of his
hut, woke with a start from a doze. He hadn't
meant to doze, but he had slept little on the preceding
night, and was lulled, moreover, by a sense
of his security. The day had not been as exciting
as the day before. Nothing having happened
during all those hours, he was growing
convinced that nothing would. In its way,
safety was becoming irksome. He began to
ask himself whether the spirit of adventure
didn't summon him to go forth as a tramp that
night.

So he dozed—and so he waked, with a start.
The start was possibly due to a consciousness
even in his sleep that there were people in the
road. He was frightened before he could put his
eye again to the peephole. Luckily the pistol
was at hand, and *the other thing* might now have
to be done.

As a matter of fact it seemed likely. Two burly
figures had already left the highway, Flynn
tramping along the flicker of path, and Jackman
picking his steps through the oozy mud a little
to Flynn's right and a little behind him. There
was no secrecy about their approach, and apparently
no fear.

"They don't suspect that I've got a gun,"
Teddy commented to himself. "Lobley can't
have told them."

They were talking to each other, and, though
Teddy could not make out their words, he heard
Flynn's gurgle of a laugh. To his fevered
imagination, it was a diabolic laugh, suggestive
of handcuffs and torture.

The thought of handcuffs frenzied him. Of
the sacrilegious touch on his person, the links
set the final mark. Rather than submit to them
he would shoot anyone, preferably himself. For
shooting himself the minute had come, and he
decided to do it through the temple. The aim
through the heart might miscarry; there was no
chance of miscarriage through the brain. All
that remained for him now was to know the
moment when.

"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their
eyes."

Some trick of memory brought the tag back
to him. He knew that it applied to the shooting
of an enemy, but in this case it suited himself.
He couldn't see the whites of their eyes as yet,
for through the grasses and over the slimy
ground they advanced but slowly. That gave him
the longer to live. He might live for three minutes,
possibly for five. Even a minute was
something.

But he was ready. He couldn't say that he
had no fear, because he was all fear; but for the
very reason that he was all fear, he was frozen,
numb. Only, the hand that held the pistol shook.
He couldn't control it. All the more, then, must
he do it through the brain, since he found by
experiment that he could steady the muzzle
against his temple. He didn't dare so to hold it
long, lest that impulse of acting before he thought
might deprive him of these last precious seconds
of life. So he let the thing rest on the peephole,
pointing outward, like a gun on board ship.
He found, too, that this steadied his eye. He
could squint along the barrel right at the two
big figures lumbering through the morass.

"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their
eyes."

Flynn looked up, a laugh on his lips at this
absurd adventure. The boy saw the whites of
his eyes, and, as far as he himself knew, his mind
went blank. He always declared that he heard
no sound. He only saw Flynn throw up his
arms with a kind of stifled shout—stagger—try
to regain his lost balance—and go tumbling, face
downward, into the long grass. Jackman fell,
too, though not so prone but that he could
partially raise himself, half supported by his
left arm, while, without being able to face toward
the road, he waved his right to the motors flashing
by.

For Teddy mind-action ceased. He was
nothing but mad instinct. He knew he must
have fired—must have fired twice—that the
hand that was to shoot into his temple had
betrayed him. He knew, too, that he couldn't
shoot into his temple—that great as was his
terror of the handcuffs, his terror of this thing
was worse. Flinging the pistol across the floor,
his one impulse was to save himself.

As he had foreseen, his mind, once it began to
work, worked quickly. He saw that the grass
growing up to the door of the shack was tall, and
hardly beaten down by his footsteps. Lying
flat like a lizard, he wriggled his way into it.
The very yielding of the swampy bottom beneath
his weight was in his favor. By a sense, such as
that which had waked him up, he knew that
motors were stopping in the road, that people
were leaping out, that Flynn and Jackman were
the objects of everyone's concern, and that, in
the mystery as to what had happened to them,
no one's attention was as yet directed to himself.
He made for the back of the shack, writhing his
way round the two corners, and heading out
toward the center of the marsh. It was needful
to do this, since the shanty and its neighborhood
would soon be explored, and he must, if possible,
be lost in the swampy tracklessness.

Though progress of necessity was slow, he
was amazed at the distance he was putting
between himself and danger. Oh, if it was only
night! If a thundercloud would only come up
and darken the sky! But it was the brilliant,
pitiless sunshine of an August afternoon, with
not a shred of atmosphere to help him. Still
he writhed and writhed and writhed his way
onward, making the pace of a snake when half
of its body is dead. He was no longer Teddy
Follett; he was no longer so much as an animal.
He was one big agony of mind, which becomes
an agony of body; and yet he was eager to live.

He began to think that he might live. He
seemed as far away from the peril behind him
as the woods thing that gives its hunter the slip
in the green depths of the covert. Dogs might
be able to track him, but not men alone; and
while they were bringing up the bloodhounds
he might....

And then he heard a shout that struck through
him like paralysis.

"There he is! I see him!"

"Where? Where?"

"That line behind the shack—don't you see?—a
little streak right through the grass."

"No; I don't see anything."

"Come along and I'll show you. Come
along, boys. We'll get him. He's only going on
his belly."

"Yes, and be croaked, like this poor guy!
Don't forget that the bird over there can give
you a dose of lead."

So Flynn was dead! That was the meaning
of that. Teddy had killed a man. Perhaps he
had killed two men. He hadn't taken time to
think of it before; but now that he did, he lay
stricken in every muscle of his frame, his face
in the mud, and his fingers dug into the queachy
roots of the sedges.




CHAPTER XX
==========


The guests went early. It was a relief to
have them go. Not that they differed
from other guests to whom Collingham Lodge
was accustomed to open its doors, or that the
dinner was less fastidiously good than Junia
was in the habit of giving. Dinner and guests
had both been up to form; and yet it was a
relief when the last car glided from beneath the
portico.

"Why do you suppose it is?"

Junia had asked this question so often of late
that Collingham had ceased to try to answer
it. Instead, he lit a cigar and strolled to the
open French window. He, too, found it a relief
to relax in the company of his family, though
less puzzled than Junia at the state of mind.

"Oh, come out!" Edith called from the terrace.
"It's heavenly."

It was a soft, warm, velvety night, starlit and
voluptuous. The air astir was just enough to
carry the scents of roses, honeysuckle, mignonette,
and new-mown hay. Except for the
dartings of small living things and the occasional
peep of a half-awake bird, there was no sound
but that of the plash of the fountains on the
terraces. Edith went in for a light wrap for her
mother; Collingham, his cigar in hand, dropped
into the teakwood chair.

"It isn't our dinners only," Junia complained,
when, with the wrap about her shoulders, she
had settled herself in the wicker armchair she
preferred; "it's all dinners. It's just as if people
didn't enjoy them any more."

"Well, they don't." Edith half loungingly
swung herself in a Gloucester hammock. "What
we've got to learn, mother dear, is that entertaining,
as we called it, was a pre-war habit
which we've outlived in spirit, though we haven't
quite come to the point in fact."

"There's something in that," Collingham
agreed.

"And yet there's got to be hospitality," Junia
reasoned. "You can't just live and die to
yourself."

Edith swung lazily.

"Hospitality, yes; but isn't there a difference
between that and entertaining?"

"If so, what is it?"

"I'm not sure that I can say. Isn't the one
a permanent necessity, and the other merely a
custom that can go out of date?"

"Between your custom that can go out of
date and your permanent necessity, I don't see
that there's much distinction."

"Well, there is, mother dear. It's like this:
Entertaining is giving people something they
don't particularly want and which you expect
them to repay; while hospitality is opening your
house to people in need, whether they can repay
you or not."

"Oh, if we're going to open our houses to people
in need—"

"Well, what?"

"I'm sure I don't know what; nor you, either."

"And that's just it. We're halting between
two states of mind. Ever since the war began,
mere entertaining bores us; and we're terrified
at the idea of genuine hospitality; so there we
are. We still give dinners and go to them; but
when we do we feel it's something fatuous, which
can't help making us dull."

Out of the silence that ensued Collingham
said, moodily:

"It's all very fine to talk of opening your
house to people in need; but it's not as easy as
it looks."

"Is anything ever as easy as it looks, dad?
Don't we shirk the social problems that are
upsetting the world by declaring them impossible
to solve, when a material difficulty only
puts us on our mettle?"

He turned this over. All that day he had been
calculating his own possible responsibility in
Teddy Follett's going wrong, and was thinking
of it now. In the end he said:

"All the same you've got to follow the regular
trend. If you were in business you'd know.
You can't do things differently from other people.
You may be as sorry as you like not to be able
to help; but if you can't, you can't—and there's
an end of it."

"Mr. Ayling in his new book, *Social Problems
and the Individual*, says there's a distinction to
be drawn between *can't* and *can't*—there's the
can't that comes from lack of ability, and the
can't that springs from the accepted standard.
He says—"

"I don't believe your father is at all interested
in that, Edith dear."

"Oh yes; let her go on. I'm not afraid of
what Ayling thinks."

But before Edith could resume the attention
of all three was called by the tinkle of the telephone
bell in the library, which could be approached
from the terrace through the drawing-room.
With a muttered, "Who's ringing up
at this time of night?" Collingham dragged
himself in to answer it. The women remained
silent, each listening to see if the call was for her.

"Yes?... This is Mr. Collingham.... Who?...
Oh, it's you, Mr. Brunt?... Yes?... What
did you say?... Killed? Who's killed?...
Not Flynn the detective, who comes in and out
of the bank?... Indeed! Dear me! Dear me!
Where was it?... Who did it?... Not that boy?...
Oh, my God!... What happened?... Tell
me quickly.... Over beyond Jersey City! Yes?
Yes?... And they've got him?... In the Brig?
That's the Ellenbrook jail, isn't it?... Jackman,
too, did you say?... Wounded, but not killed....
Badly?... Oh, the poor fellow!... In the
hospital?... That's right.... Has anyone communicated
with his family?... Good! Good!...
And Flynn's wife?... Oh, the poor woman!...
And the boy's family?... You don't know anything?
Then no one has informed his mother?...
Not that you know of.... I see.... He's to
be brought into court to-morrow morning....
Poor little devil!... Oh, I know he doesn't deserve
pity, but—but I can't help it, Brunt.
His father was with us so long and—and one
thing and another!... No; I'll appear in court
myself and see what I can do for him.... Good
night, then. I'll see you in the morning."

"What boy can that be?" Junia whispered,
as her husband hung the receiver in its place.

"I'm sure I don't know—unless—unless it's
the Follett boy."

"Oh, I hope not. It would make such awful
complications."

They waited for Collingham to come and tell
them his plainly thrilling news, but he remained
in the library.

"It *would* make complications," Edith ventured,
in a low voice, "if it proved to be young
Follett—with Bob in love with his sister."

Junia spoke not so much from impulse as
from inspiration.

"He's more than in love with her. He's
married to her."

"Mother!"

"Yes; he was married to her a few days
before he sailed. I've known it all along."

Edith was breathless.

"Did he tell you?"

"No; she did."

"She? The Follett girl? Why, mother!"

Junia rose. She knew that if her suspicions
were correct she would have things to do before
she slept.

"Go to bed now, dear; and I'll come to your
room and give you the whole story. In the meantime
I may have to tell your father."

"You mean to say that he doesn't know?"

"No; not yet. I've been rather hoping that
before I told him Bob would—would see his way
out of the mess."

"He'll never do that, never in this world—not
according to what he's said to me."

"Oh, well, he didn't know everything then
that he'll have to know now. But go and say
good night to your father; and I'll come up by
the time you're in bed."

"Mother, you're amazing!" Edith spoke
more in awe than in admiration; but she obeyed
orders by going to her father.

She found him still sitting in the chair by the
telephone, bowed forward, his elbows on his
knees, and his forehead in his hands. When
he lifted his haggard eyes toward her she stood
still.

"Daddy, what in the world has happened?
Who is it that has killed some one? We couldn't
help hearing that much."

He raised himself. "Come here."

Going forward, she knelt down beside him,
taking his hand and kissing it.

"You poor daddy! You're bothered, aren't
you?"

"It's—it's young Follett. He's been stealing
money from the bank, and now he's shot one of
the detectives who heard he was hiding in a
cabin out on the New Jersey marshes. They'd
sent out a description of him to the suburban
stations. And only to-day I told his sister that
I'd call the thing off and give him another
chance."

"She came to see you?"

"She came to see me."

"Then you did what you could, didn't you?"

"I did what I could—then." In spite of the
emphasis on the final word, he slapped his knee
with new conviction. "I've done what I could
all through. It's no use saying I haven't, because
I have. There's just so much you can do,
and you can't do any more. You can't make a
business a home for indigent old gentlemen—now,
can you?"

He sprang to his feet, leaving her kneeling by
the chair.

"No, I don't suppose you can," she assented,
rising slowly. "But I do wish you'd talk to Mr.
Ayling sometime, daddy. He seems to see all
these things from new points of view—"

He was pacing about the room very much like
Max in moments of agitation.

"Oh, new points of view! There's only one
point of view, I tell you, and that's the one on
what we've made the country prosperous."

She smiled wistfully.

"Prosperous for some."

"Well, that's better than prosperous for
nobody, isn't it?"

She said good night to him then, for the reason
that she herself was so stirred that she needed
seclusion in which to think these strange things
over. That Bob should have married Jennie
Follett was a shock in itself; but that through
his wife he should now be involved in this
frightful tragedy was something that her mind
found it hard to take in. It was the first time
that she had ever come so close to the more
terrible happenings in life.

Meanwhile, Junia, overhearing what was said,
reconstructed her plan of campaign. In common
with great generals, she possessed the faculty of
rapid revision, as events took place differently
from the way she had expected. By the time
she heard Edith go upstairs she had foreseen
the line of action which the new situation forced
on them.

Collingham was still lashing about the library
when she appeared on the threshold. Her calmness
arrested him. In a measure it soothed him.
It was the kind of juncture in which she always
knew what to do, and he had confidence in her
judgment. When she said, "Sit down, Bradley;
I've something to say," he obeyed her quietly,
relighting his cigar. As she, too, sat down, Max
or Dauphin would have noted in her the aura of
authority which a master wears when about to
lecture a schoolboy.

"I've something startling to tell you, Bradley;
but I want to say beforehand that you mustn't
get worked up, because I see a way out."

Taking his cigar from his lips, he looked at
her sidewise. His expression said, "What's it
going to be now?"

"What I've heard you telling Edith about
this young Follett killing a detective concerns
us more closely than you may think, because
Bob is married to his sister."

He laid his cigar on an ash tray, swung round
to the table between them, clasped his fingers,
and leaned on his outstretched elbows. His
tone was quiet, even casual.

"When did he do that?"

"Just before he sailed."

"Then I'm through with him."

"Oh no, you're not, Bradley! He's your son,
whether he's married anyone or not."

"I can't help his being my son; but I can help
having anything more to do with him."

"Listen, Bradley. This whole thing is going
to be in the papers in the course of two or three
days; and you must come through it with honors.
It's perfectly simple to do it, and win everyone's
respect and sympathy. In addition to that you
can get Bob's devoted affection; and you know
how much that means to us all."

To Collingham it meant so much that he
listened to her attentively, with eager eyes. In
Bob's marriage, with its attendant circumstances,
they had obviously received a shock.
All Marillo Park, as well as the public in general,
would know it to be a shock and would be
watching to see how they took it. In that case,
the best thing was the sporting thing. They
must stand right up to the facts and accept them.
Everyone knew that the younger generation was
peculiar. It was the war, Junia supposed, and
yet she didn't know. In any case, it was not the
Collinghams alone who were so afflicted, but
dotted all over Marillo were families whose young
ones were acting strangely. There were the
Rumseys, whose twin sons had refused an
uncle's legacy amounting to something like
three millions, because they held views opposed
to the owning of private property. There were
the Addingtons, whose son and heir had married
a girl twice imprisoned as a Red and was believed
to have gone Red in her company. There
were the Bendlingers, whose daughter had eloped
with a chauffeur, divorced him, and then gone
back and married him again. These were
Marillo incidents, and in no case had the parents
found any course more original than the antiquated
one of discarding and disinheritance.
And yet you couldn't wash your hands of your
flesh and blood like that. They were your flesh
and blood whatever they did; and it was idiotic
to act as if you could cut the tie between yourself
and them. He could see for himself that Rumseys, Addingtons, and Bendlingers had lost
rather than gained in general esteem by their
melodramatic poses.

Now, the thing for the Collinghams was to
accept the situation with a great big generous
heart. They were to open their arms to Bob,
and back him loyally in the combination of difficulties
he had to swing. But he himself must
swing them. Junia laid emphasis on that. By
direct action they couldn't intervene. They
could only make it possible for him to act directly
on his own responsibility. He had married
a wife whose family was in trouble. They, the
Collinghams, would not share that trouble, but
they would help him to share it, since he had
brought on himself the necessity for doing so.

To accomplish this, Junia suggested sending
to Bob a cablegram covering the following five
points. The Follett boy was in jail charged
with murdering a detective; Bob should publish
at once his marriage to this boy's sister; he
should return to New York by the first convenient
steamer; his father was placing ten
thousand dollars to his account, and when that
was used would place more; he was also ready, if
instructed by Bob, to engage the best counsel in
New Jersey to defend the boy.

"That will take care of everything till he gets
here," Junia concluded, "and in the meantime,
we can't do better, it seems to me, than go up,
as we always do at this time of year, to our camp
in the Adirondacks. This house can be kept
open for Bob when he arrives, and Gull can stay
with one of the motors to run him in and out of
town."

"And what are we to do about the girl?"

"Nothing. That isn't for us to take up. We
must leave it to Bob. If he ever brings her to
us as his wife—But, then, he never may."

"What makes you think so?"

Her superb eyes covered him with their fine,
audacious, womanly regard.

"I'd tell you, Bradley, if—if I didn't think
there are things that had better not go into
words, even between you and me. Whatever Bob
discovers will be his own affair. You and I had
best know as little as possible. We can back
Bob up, and that's all we can do. Everything
else he will have to work out for himself. By
the time he's done that he'll be a grown-up
man. It's possible he's needed something of the
sort to develop him."

So Collingham telephoned his cablegram to
Bob, and went to bed comforted. Next morning,
on arriving at the bank, he found Junia's counsels
supported by the best opinion among his
co-workers. That is, he changed his mind as to
going to the court in Ellenbrook for the first
hearing of the Follett boy, or otherwise expressing
himself toward the Follett family. He had
given Bob the means of doing whatever needed
to be done, and Bob had the cable at his disposition.
To go to the court, or to express sympathy
in any way, would, according to Bickley,
be dangerous to discipline. Feeling in the bank
was extremely hostile to young Follett, and it
was better that it should remain so. The bank
employee's cast of mind, so Bickley said, was,
not revolutionary or rebellious against acknowledged
rights. By sheer force of habit, it was
schooled to reverence for life and property. The
principle of ownership being holier to it than any
tenet of religion, the Follett boy could not be
looked upon otherwise than as an enemy of mankind;
and this was as it should be.

----

While Collingham thus weighed the counsels
offered him at the bank, Gussie Follett was
blindly making her way homeward from Corinne's
with a paper so folded in her hand as not
to display its headlines. She had gone to her
work with comparative cheerfulness, since, on
the previous day, Jennie had been assured by
no less authority than Mr. Collingham himself
that Teddy should not be sent to jail. So long
as he was not sent to jail, they would be free
from public comment, and, free from public comment,
they could "manage somehow." Managing
somehow being an art in which they had gained
authority, they were not afraid of that, even
though it involved parting with the one great
asset against calamity, the house.

Gussie's first intimation of bad news came
when, on entering the shop, she found the four
or five other girls huddled round Corinne. Her
appearance made them start as if she was a
ghost. Her own heart sank at that, though she
hailed this shudder with a laugh.

"Say, girls, is this the big reel in 'The Specter
Bride'?"

Corinne, whose real name was Mamie Callaghan,
emerged from a miniature forest of upright
metal rods crowned with hats at various roguish
angles. A dark, wavy-nosed woman of cajoling
Irish witchery, she could hardly keep the prank
from her voice even at such a time as this.

"So, Gussie, you don't know! Well, some
one's got to break it to you, and I guess it'll
have to be me."

But it was broken already, even before Corinne
had brought forward the paper she was hiding
behind her back.

"Teddy!" Gussie cried out. "There's something
about him in that thing. Let me see it!
Let me see it!"

Corinne let her see it, and the work was done.
Gussie couldn't read beyond the headlines with
their "Robbery" and "Murder" in Italic capitals,
but she grasped enough. The snapshot of
Teddy taken in the road, just as he had been
dragged, a mass of slime, out of the morass, made
her reel backward as if about to fall; but when
Eily O'Brien sprang to her support she waved
her away gently. She was not going to faint.
Her physical strength wouldn't leave her, whatever
else was gone.

"I'm—I'm going home," was all she said,
crushing the paper against her breast.

"Oh, Gus, lemme go with you!" Eily had
begged; but this kindness, too, Gussie put away
from her.

She could go alone, and alone she went, with
one consuming thought as she sped along.

"Oh, momma! Poor momma! This'll about
finish her."

And yet when she entered the living-room her
mother was sitting, calm and serene, while Mr.
Brunt told the tale of the New Jersey marshes.
Jennie, white, tearless, terrified, crept up to
Gussie, and the two clung together as their
mother said, in her steady voice.

"So I understand that only one of them is
dead—the Irish one."

Mr. Brunt assented.

"Yes, Flynn, the Irish one."

"I'm not surprised. I told him when he was
here the other day that what he called 'law and
order' would bring him to grief, as they bring
most of us, though I didn't expect it to be so
soon. And my son, you say, is in jail."

"At Ellenbrook."

"They'll try him, I suppose."

"I'm afraid so."

"And then they'll send him to the chair."
Mr. Brunt didn't answer. "Oh, you needn't be
afraid to speak of it. I know they will. I'm not
sorry. Teddy will be sorry, of course—till it's
over. But I'd rather he'd suffer a little now and
be done with it than go through the hell of years
his father and I have had. If there was going to
be any chance for him, it would be different;
but there's no chance, not the way the world is
organized now."

The girls crept forward together.

"Momma darling—"

But Lizzie resumed, calmly:

"Where there's nothing but government by
the strong for the strong, people like ourselves
must go under. You'll go under, too, Mr. Brunt.
You belong to the doomed class. The workingman
will soon be getting share and share alike
with the capitalist; and the white-collar
crowd will be kicked about by both. If we had
the pluck to fight as the workingman has fought,
we might save something even now; but we
haven't, and so there's no hope for us. Law and
order have us by the throat, and we must suffer
till they strangle us. Well, my boy will soon be
out of it—thank God!—and all I ask is to follow
him."

When Mr. Brunt got himself to the door,
Jennie went with him, as she had done with
Flynn and Jackman two days earlier. She did
this in the dazed condition of a woman who performs
some little act of courtesy during shipwreck,
while waiting for the vessel to go down.

"You must excuse my mother, Mr. Brunt.
Ever since my father died her mind's been
unsettled, and we don't know what to make of
her."

But Mr. Brunt's demeanor did not encourage
conversation. To do him justice, the mission on
which Collingham had sent him had been repugnant
for other reasons than the breaking of
bad news. His mind being of the cast Bickley
had analyzed that morning, Teddy's theft filled
him with more horror than his killing of a man.
To come so near to crime against the ownership
of bank notes inspired him with a physical
loathing which even Jennie's loveliness couldn't
mitigate. It was as if she herself was tainted by
some horrible infection, making it a relief to
him to get away from her.

But turning to re-enter the house, she felt
again that access of new strength which had
come to her repeatedly during the past few days.
It was as if resources of her being never taxed
before were now offering themselves for use.
What she had to do was in the forefront of her
thought rather than what some one else had
done. What some one else had done was already
in the past. That was made for her and couldn't
be helped; whereas her own duties imperatively
summoned her to look ahead.

"Teddy will need a suitcase of clean things,"
was the direct expression of these thoughts
before she had recrossed the threshold.

Having said this aloud to Gussie, Gussie's
mind could also tackle the minor concrete details
to the exclusion of the bigger considerations involved
in Teddy's plight. That the honest,
loving, skylarking boy whom they had grown up
with could be a thief and a murderer was something
the intelligence rejected as it rejected
dreams. They could, therefore, take the new
straw suitcase which had once been a family
present to Gussie, and which she had never used,
pack it with Teddy's other suit and the necessary
linen, as if he were really at Paterson or Philadelphia.

"How shall we get it to him?" Gussie asked,
when the work was done.

"I'll take it," Jennie answered, "if you'll
stay and look after momma."

"Momma won't need much looking after—the
way she is."

"Well, that's one comfort anyhow. With
this to go through with I'm glad her mind's not
what it used to be."

So, stunned and dry eyed, they caught on to
the new conditions by doing little perfunctory
things, consoling and helping each other.




CHAPTER XXI
===========


Teddy's first night in a cell was more tolerable
than it might have been for the reason
that his faculties seemed to have stopped working.
As nearly as possible he had become an
inanimate thing, to be struck, pulled, hustled,
and chucked wherever they chose. Not only
had he no volition, but little or no sensation. A
dead body or a sack of flour could hardly have
been more lost to a sense of rebellion or indignity.

It was not that he didn't suffer, but that
suffering had reached the extreme beyond which
it makes no further impression. Nothing registered
any more—no horror, no brutalities, no
curses or kicks. As far as he could take account
of himself, the Teddy Follett even of the shack
had been left behind in some vanished world,
while the thing that had hands and feet was a
clod unable to resent the oaths and blows and
flingings to and fro which were all it deserved.

Once he had heard that shout, "I see him!"
in the road, he had been like an insect paralyzed
by terror that doesn't dare to move. He had
lain there till they came and got him. It was
not fear alone that pinned him to the spot; his
bodily strength had given out. For forty-eight
hours he had eaten but little and drunk only
the two glasses of water in the pastry shop.
Though he had slept the first night, the second
had been passed in a fevered, intermittent doze.
Furthermore, the agony of approaching suicide
had drained his natural forces.

So he lay still while the hue and cry of the
man hunters quickened and waxed behind him.
Escape was out of the question, since, even if
he had the strength to drag himself a few yards
farther, they would run him down in the end.
Resistance, too, would be hopeless, with, as he
judged, some twenty or thirty in the posse.

He could feel their fury growing as they slipped
and slithered through the grasses. Oaths, obscenities,
and laughter accompanied every grotesque
accident, as one man fell with the weedy
tangle about his feet, or another went knee-deep
into the swamp. The very fear of "a dose of
lead" intensified their excitement till, as they
caught sight of him, a helpless thing with face
hidden in the mud, they gave vent to a yell of
satisfaction.

They didn't let him rise; they didn't so much
as pull him to his feet. They dragged him by
his collar, by his hair, by his arms, by his legs,
by anything they could seize, kicking, beating,
and cursing him. He made no outcry; he didn't
speak a word. For aught they knew, he might
be drunk or insane or dead. Only once, when a
man kicked him in the face, was he powerless to
suppress a groan. Otherwise, he was just a
sodden lump of flesh as, now head first, now feet
first, now with face upward, now with face downward
he was tugged and tumbled and hurtled
and rolled over the five hundred yards of slime
between the spot where they had caught him and
the road.

There he had a new experience. He learned
what it was not only to be outside the human
race, but to be held as its foe. Already, while
still far out on the marsh, he had heard the yells:
"Kill him! Kill him! Kick the damn skunk to
death!" But when actually surrounded by
these howling, screaming, outraged citizens,
with their teams and motor cars banked in the
roadway, he tasted the peculiar astonishment of
the man who has always been liked when assailed
by a storm of hatred. While the three or four
police who by this time had appeared did their
best to defend him, men fought with one another
to get at him. A well-dressed girl of not more
than eighteen reached over the shoulder of one
of the police and struck him on the head with
her sunshade. An elderly woman squeezed herself
near him and spat in his face.

"Ah, say, people," one of the police called
out, "give the young guy a chanst. Can't you
see he's only a kid?"

"'Kid' be damned!" came the response.
"Say, fellows, here's the telegraph pole! Let's
lynch him!"

"Lynch him! Lynch him! String him up!"

"No! Let's make a bonfire and burn him
alive!"

"Chuck the cops into the Hackensack, and
then we can do as we like."

"Lynch him! Lynch him! Lynch him!"

Teddy didn't care whether they lynched him
or not. In as far as he could form a wish he
wished they would; but then he was past forming
wishes. They could string him up to the telegraph
pole or burn him alive just as they felt
inclined; for he had traveled beyond fear.

Just then the crowd parted, the police van
drove up, and his protectors dragged him to its
shelter. Even then there was a new sensation
in store for him. The parting of the crowd
showed Flynn lying by the roadside, also waiting
for the van. He was on his back, his knees
drawn up, his mouth dropped open. Waistcoat
and shirt had been torn apart, and Teddy saw
a red spot.

He started back. Except for the groan when
he had been kicked in the face, it was the only
time he opened his lips.

"I didn't do that!" he cried, so loud that a
jeer broke from the crowd.

A policeman shook him by the arm.

"Say, sonny, you didn't do that?"

Appalled by the sight of the dead man,
Teddy could do no more than stupidly shake
his head.

"Then who in hell did? Tell us that."

But the boy collapsed, his head sagging, his
knees giving way under him. When he returned
to consciousness he was lying in the dark, jolting, jolting, jolting, on the floor of the police van.

At the station he was pulled out again. He
could stand now, and walk, though not very
well. Hands supported him as he stumbled up
the steps and into a room where a man in uniform
sat behind a desk, while three or four police
and half a dozen unexplained hangers-on stood
about idly.

"A live one," the policeman who led Teddy
called out, jocosely, as they approached the
desk.

"Looks like a dead one," the man behind the
desk replied, with the same sense of humor.
"Looks like he'd been dead and buried and dug
up again."

The allusion to Teddy's hatless, mud-caked
appearance raised a laugh.

The man behind the desk dipped his pen in
the ink bottle and drew up a big ledger.

"Name?"

Teddy could just articulate. "Edward Scarborough Follett."

"Gee, whiz! Guess you'll have to spell it
out."

Teddy spelled slowly, as if the letters were
new to him. Having done this, he was asked no
more questions. Explanations came from the
officer who had "run him in" and who produced
the automatic pistol picked up on the floor of
the shack. When it was stated in addition that
Teddy was charged with shooting and killing
Peter Flynn, whom all of them knew and to
whom they were bound by ties of professional
solidarity, the boy felt the half-friendly indifference
with which the spectators had seen
him come in change to sullen hostility.

The formulas fulfilled, he was seized more
roughly than before, to be half led, half pushed,
along a dim hall and down a dimmer flight of
steps to a worn, stone-flagged basement pervaded
by dankness and a smell of disinfectants. The
corridor into which they turned was long and
straight and narrow like a knife-cut through a
cheese. On the left a blank stone wall was the
blanker for its whitewash; on the right, a row
of little doors diminished down the vista to the
size of pigeonholes. Pressed close to the square
foot of grating inset in each door was a human
face eager to see who was coming next, while the
officer was greeted with howls of rage or whining
petitions or strings of ugly words.

They stopped at the first open door, and after
one glance within Teddy started back.

"Don't put me in there, for Jesus' sake!"

The cry was involuntary, since he knew he
would be put in there in any case.

"Ah, go in wid you!"

A shove sent him over the threshold with such
force that he fell on the wooden bunk which was
all the dog hole contained, while the door
clanged behind him.

All that night he lay in a stupor induced by
misery. No one came near him; no food or
drink was offered him. Thirst made him slightly
delirious, which was a relief. Now and then,
when his real consciousness partially returned
he muttered, half aloud:

"I didn't do it. My hand might have done it—but
that wasn't me."

The crepuscular light of morning was not very
different from the darkness of night, but it
brought his senses back to him sluggishly.
Bruised as he was in body, he was still more
bruised in mind, and could render to himself no
more than a vague account of what had happened
yesterday. When a tin of water and a
hunk of bread were mysteriously pushed into the
cell, he consumed them like an animal, lying
down again on the bunk. Without water for a
wash, his face and hair were still caked with the
mud which also stiffened his clothing.

"My God! what's that?"

Not having seen him before, the guard who
summoned him to court was startled by the apparition
that crawled to the threshold of the cell
when the door was unlocked. The semblance to
a boy was little more exact than that of a snow
man to a man.

"Ah! my God! my God! Sure you can't go
into court like that. They wouldn't know you
was a human bein', let alone a prisoner. Wait a
bit, and I'll get you somethin' to wash up in."

There followed a little rough kindliness,
scouring and brushing and combing the lad into
something less like a monstrosity. Teddy submitted as a child does and with a child's indifference
to cleanliness.

So, too, he submitted in court, hardly knowing
where he was or the significance of these formalities.
Apart from the relief he got from his own
reiterations, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it," the
proceedings were a blur to him. When he was
led out again down more steps, along more corridors,
and cast into another stale and disinfected
cell, he took it with the same brutish insensibility.
He didn't know that the new cell was in
that part of the House of Detention known as
Murderers' Row, nor did he heed the hoarse
questions whispered through the next-door grating,
and which he could barely catch as they
stole along the wall.

"Say, who'd ye do in? Did he croak right off?
My guy didn't croak till three weeks after I
give him the lead, and now they can't send me
to the chair nohow. In luck, ain't I?"

To Teddy, this uncanny recitation was no
more than the other sounds which smote the
auditory nerve but hardly penetrated to the
brain. They were all abnormal sounds, sprung
of abnormal conditions, breaking in on a silence
which was otherwise that of the sepulcher.
Footsteps clanked—and then all was still; a
door banged—and then all was still; a raucous
voice shouted out a curse—and then all was still.
The stillness was as ghostly as the sound, only
that, as far as Teddy was concerned, so little
reached his massacred perceptions.

The rattle of keys and the clanging of the
door! He looked up from the bunk on the edge
of which he was sitting listlessly.

"Lady to see you!"

This guard was young, smart, debonair, with
a twinkle in his eye, and the first who didn't
treat a comrade's murderer with instinctive animosity.
Teddy got up and followed him in the
stupefied bewilderment with which he had done
everything else that day. Lady to see him!
The words seemed to refer to something so far
back in his history that he could hardly recall
what it was. Once upon a time there had been
a mother, a Jennie, a Gussie, and a Gladys;
but they were now remote and shadowy.

Along corridors, up steps, and then along more
corridors he tramped, till they stopped at an
open door—and there he saw Jennie. In a room
unspeakably bare and forbidding in spite of a
table and half a dozen chairs she waited for him
with a smile. He, too, did his best to smile, but
his lower lip, swollen with the kick that had
caught him in the mouth, made the effort nothing
but a rictus.

For this, Jennie had been prepared by the snapshot
in the paper. All the while she had been on
the way to him she had been saying to herself
that she must show no sign of horror or surprise.
Even though she would follow the cue of her poor
demented mother and pretend that he was in
prison as a martyr, she would take no pitying or
tragic note. She went forward, therefore, and
threw her arms about him with the same offhand,
unsentimental pleasure which she would have
shown in meeting him after a brief absence
at any time.

"You darling Ted! We're so glad to have
found you. I thought I'd just run down and
bring you some clean clothes."

It was better done than she thought she had
the strength for, perhaps because his need was
greater than she had supposed possible. Could
she have dreamt beforehand that Teddy would
ever look like this, she would have screamed
from fright. But now that he did, she rose to
the fact, seemingly taking it for granted, actually
taking it for granted, through some hitherto
unsuspected histrionic force. Within a minute
of his arrival they were seated near each other,
in a curious make-believe that the conditions
were not terrible.

With this familiar presence beside him, Teddy's
mind resumed functioning, possibly to his
regret. Home was close to him again, while the
loved faces came back to life.

"How's ma?"

The question was indistinct because, now that
it came to making conversation, he found that
his tongue was thickened in addition to his
swollen lip. Jennie replied that their mother's
health was never better.

"I suppose"—he balked a little but forced
himself onward—"I suppose she feels pretty
bad—over me."

"No, she doesn't. She told me to tell you so."
She was determined to speak truthfully in this
respect, so that if their mother's dementia could
do him any good, he shouldn't fail of it. "She
told me to say that you were not to be sorry for
anything you'd done, no matter how they
punished you."

"Does she—does she know what I've done?"

She threw it off, as if casually.

"She knows all that's been in the papers; and
I don't believe they've left anything out, not
judging by the things they've said."

"How's Gussie? How's Gladys?"

Having answered these questions to the best
of her ability, Jennie raised the subject of what
she could bring him to eat. The guard who had
remained in the room informed her that she
could bring him anything, at which she promised
to return next day. For the minute she was at
the end of her forces. If she went on much
longer they would snap.

"I'll run away now, Ted," she said, rising.
"It's splendid to see you so bucked up. I'll be
here again about this time to-morrow, and bring
you something nice. Momma's busy already
making you a fruit cake." She added, as she
held him by the hand, "I suppose you'll have to
have a lawyer."

A memory came to him like that of something
heard while under an anæsthetic.

"I think the judge said this morning that he'd
appoint some one to—to defend me."

"Oh, we'll do better than that," she smiled,
cheerily. "I've got some money. We'll have a
lawyer of our own."

The journey home was the hardest thing
Jennie had ever had to face. Teddy! Teddy!
Teddy brought to this! It was all she could
say to herself. The bare fact dwarfed all its
causes, immediate or remote.

Eager for privacy in which to sob, she was
speeding along Indiana Avenue when, happening
to glance in the direction of her home, she saw
Gladys standing on the sidewalk. Gladys, having
at the same minute perceived her, started
with a violent bound in her direction. She, too,
had a newspaper in her hand, leading Jennie to
expect a repetition of Gussie's episode that
morning.

It was such a repetition, and it was not. It
was, to the extent that Gladys had been informed
of Teddy's drama much as her elder sister at
Corinne's, though later in the day. At a minute
when trade was slack and Gladys ruminantly
chewing gum, Miss Hattie Belweather, a cash
girl in the gloves, slipped up to her to say:

"Oh, Gladys Follett, if you knew what Sunshine
Bright's been saying about you, *you'd*
never speak to her again!" Hattie Belweather,
who had the blank, innocent expression of a
sheep, having paused for the natural inquiry,
went on breathlessly. "She says your brother
Teddy robbed a bank and killed a man and is in
jail over at Ellenbrook and—"

Such foolish calumny Gladys could so far
contemn as to say with quiet force:

"You tell Sunshine Bright that the next time
I go by the notions I'll stop and break her neck.
See?"

Hattie Belweather, having sped away to carry
this challenge, Gladys found herself confronted
by Miss Flossie Grimm, a saleslady in the stockings,
to which department Gladys herself in a
minor capacity was also attached. Feeling that
the Follett child was ignorant of facts of which
she should be in possession, Miss Grimm said,
reprovingly:

"You've got a chunk of gall! Look at that!"

*That* was one of the papers giving the story of
Teddy's downfall, so that Gladys, too, was
soon making her way homeward. But she was
not a cash girl for nothing, while the instincts of
the city *gamine* endowed her with alertness of
mind beyond either of her sisters. She remembered
that the paper she had seen was a morning
one, and that by this hour those of the afternoon
would be on the news stands. They would not
only give further details, but might possibly
tell her that the whole story was untrue. Somewhere
she had heard that among the New York
evening papers one was renowned for solemnity
and exactitude. Veracity costing a cent more
than she usually spent for the evening news,
when she spent anything, which was rare, she
felt the occasion worth the extravagance.

In these pages, Teddy's case was condensed
into so small a paragraph that she had difficulty
in finding it; but during the search she lighted
on something else. It was something so extraordinary,
so unbelievable, so impossible to assimilate,
as to thrust even Teddy's situation well
into the second place.

After that, all the known methods of locomotion
were slow to Gladys in her efforts to reach
home; but before she could enter the house she
had seen Jennie advancing up the avenue, and
so ran back to meet her.

"Oh, Jen! Look!"

It was all she had breath to say, so that Jennie
naturally did as she was bidden. But she, too,
found the paragraph thrust beneath her eyes
extraordinary, unbelievable, and impossible to
assimilate, though for other reasons than those
that swayed her sister.

    :small-caps:`Collingham-Follett.` On May 11th, at St. Titus's
    Rectory, Madison Avenue, by the Rev. Larned Goodbody,
    Robert Bradley Collingham, Jr., of Marillo Park, N. Y.,
    to Jane Scarborough Follett, of Pemberton Heights, N. J.

Of the many things Jennie didn't comprehend,
she comprehended this paragraph least of all.
Who had put it in the paper, and what did it
mean? She walked on dreamily, Gladys trotting
beside her, a living interrogation point.

"Oh, Jen, what's it all about? Are you
married to him really?"

Jennie answered as best she knew how.

"Not—not exactly."

But here Gladys was too quick for her.

"If you're married to him at all, it's got to be
exactly, hasn't it?"

"I—I did go through—through the ceremony."

"Well then, you've got the law on him,"
Gladys declared, earnestly. "He'll have to pay
you alimony anyhow."

"I—I don't want him to pay me anything."

"Not pay you anything, and him with a wad
as big as a haystack? Oh, Jen, you're not going
dippy like poor momma, are you?"

Jennie wondered if she was. It seemed to her
as if she could stand little more in the line of
revolution without her mind giving way.

And yet within a few minutes she received
another shock. It came through Gussie, who
ran to meet them at the door.

"For mercy's sake, Jen, what's all this about?"

She fluttered a yellow envelope, on which the
address was typewritten.

   | :small-caps:`Mrs. Bradley Collingham, Jr.`
   |   Care :small-caps:`Mrs. Follett`
   |     :small-caps:`11 Indiana Avenue`
   |       :small-caps:`Pemberton Heights, N. J.`

"I told the boy it didn't belong here—" Gussie
was beginning to explain when Gladys interrupted.

"Yes, it does. Read that."

Gussie read and read again.

"Well, of all—" She stopped only because
she lacked the words with which to continue.

In the meanwhile Jennie had opened her telegram
and read:

    Have asked father to engage best counsel in New York
    to defend boy. Sailing to-morrow on *Venezuela*, and will
    take all responsibilities off your hands. Placed two thousand
    dollars to your account at Pemberton National Bank.
    See manager. Devoted love. Your husband, :small-caps:`Bob`.

Jennie let the yellow slip flutter to the entry
floor while she stood gazing into the air. Gussie
having picked it up, the two younger sisters
read it together.

"Some class!" Gladys commented, dryly.

But Gussie could only stare at Jennie awesomely,
as if a miracle had transformed her.




CHAPTER XXII
============


On landing from the *Venezuela*, Bob drove
out to Collingham Lodge. He knew that
by this time the family were in the Adirondacks,
and that with Gull and his wife to look after him
he should have the place to himself. Now that
he was known to be married he had first thought
it possible to bring Jennie there, but had decided
that the big empty house might frighten her with
its loneliness. A hotel in New York was what
she would probably prefer; and with all he had
to do for Teddy, it would doubtless be most convenient
for himself. He went to his old home,
therefore, only as to a base from which to make
further arrangements. Having unpacked a few
things and eaten a snack of lunch, he would go
to see his wife at once.

Though he had not expected to hear from her
on landing, and still less to see her at the dock,
he was faintly disappointed to receive neither of
these forms of greeting. He reminded himself
that not her coldness, but her inexperience, would
account for this, and so made the more of his
anticipations for the afternoon. She had written
to him while he was away, short, noncommittal
letters, betraying a mind unused to correspondence
rather than a heart opposed to it.
Lack of habit, he told himself, would for a long
time to come make her seem unresponsive when
she would only be hesitating and observant.

It was the hot season at Marillo, and those
houses which were not closed were somnolent.
At Collingham Lodge, Max, with his madly joyful
demonstrations, was the only expression of
life. Within the house, the shades were down,
the furniture befrocked. Nevertheless, it was
home, and all the more home after the alien
pageantry of the tropics and the south. Having
bathed and changed his clothes, he found
pleasure in roaming from one dim airless room
to another, as if he had been absent for a year.

It was a greater pleasure for the reason that,
ever since receiving his father's amazing cablegram,
the vague antagonism he had felt for two
or three years toward his parents had given place
to affection and gratitude. They had seemingly
come round after all to acknowledging his right
to be himself. The concession gave him a sense
of loving them, of loving the things that belonged
to them. He strolled into their rooms, looking
about on the objects they used, as though in
this way he got some contact with their personalities.

As yet, Jennie's family hardly entered the
sphere of his conceptions. He knew she had
a mother and sisters; he had seen and spoken to
Teddy at the bank. But even the knowledge that
the boy was in jail for killing a man didn't bring
him or them near to him as realities. While
there were things he should do for the boy, they
would not be done for him, but for Jennie.
What concerned her naturally concerned her
husband; but otherwise his father and mother
came first. For this new generosity on their
part, for this opening of the arms, his heart
glowed toward them, making them sensibly his
own.

He was thinking of this as he stood in his
mother's room, gazing round on the chintzy comfort
he had all his life regarded with some awe.
Not since he had been a little boy had he felt so
warmly toward her as now. A note from her at
Quarantine had assured him, as she had assured
him before he went to South America, that she
was his mother and that in all trials he could
count on her. Counting on her, he could count
on everything, for however difficult his father
might prove, she could manage him in the end.
It made everything easier for him and for Jennie,
turning an anxious outlook on life into a splendid
hopefulness.

He was leaving the room to go and see if Mrs.
Gull had cooked a chop for him when he noticed,
propped against the wall and near the door by
which he had come in, what looked like a picture
carelessly covered with a crimson cloth. His
mother had long talked of having her portrait
done; he wondered if it could be that. He put
his hand on it, and felt the frame. It was a
picture, and, if a picture, undoubtedly the
portrait.

"Let's see what the old lady looks like," were
the words that passed through his mind.

With a twitch the cloth was off, and he sprang
back. The start was one of surprise. Looking
for no more than the exquisite conventionality
he knew so well, this vital nudity caught his
breath and made his heart leap. It was as if he
had actually come on some living pagan loveliness
seated in one of the empty rooms. Tannhäuser
first beholding the goddess in the secrecy
of the Venusberg must have felt something like
this amazed tumult of the senses.

Turning from the great bay window in which
he had hastily pulled up the shades, his excitement
had consciously in it a presentiment of evil.
She was so alive, and so much there on purpose!

Then a horror stole over him, like a chill that
struck his bones. He crept forward, with a
stricken, fascinated stare. *It couldn't be*, he was
saying to himself; and yet—and yet—\ *it was*.

The bearings of this conviction didn't come to
him all at once. The fact was as much as he
could deal with. She had sat and been painted
like this! His impressions were as poignant and
confused as if he had seen her struck dead. He
couldn't account for it. He couldn't explain the
presence of the thing here in his mother's room.

On the lower bar of the frame he saw an inscription
plate, getting down on all fours to read
it—"Life and Death: by Hubert Wray."

So Hubert had done it; Hubert had seen her in
this flinging-off of mystery. Of course!

His thought flashed back to the day when he
had first made her acquaintance. Leaning a
little forward, she was sitting in this very Byzantine
chair, on this very dais, wearing a flowered
dress, a flower-wreathed Leghorn hat in her lap.
Wray, in a painting smock, was standing with
the palette and brushes in his hand, making a
sketch of her more or less on the lines of a Reynolds
or a Gainsborough. He had dropped him
a line telling him he had taken a studio and
inviting him to look him up. He hadn't looked
him up till a week or two had gone by; but, having
once seen this girl, he did so soon again.

Of him she had taken little or no notice.
When, later, he forced himself on her attention,
she made his approaches difficult. When he
asked her to marry him she had at first laughed
him off, and then refused him in so many words.
But as she generally based her refusal, unconsciously,
perhaps, on the social differences between
them, he wouldn't take her "No" for an
answer. If he could ignore the social differences,
it seemed to him that she could, while the advantages
to her in marrying a Collingham were
evident.

"And all the while this is what the trouble
was."

What he meant by *this* was more than the
picture, "Life and Death," though how much
more he made no attempt to measure. The
truth that now emerged for him out of his memory
of the winter months was that Wray loved
Jennie, that Jennie loved Wray, and that he had
been a blind fool never to have seen it. He
threw himself on his mother's couch, burying
his face in the cushions.

As much as from anything else he suffered
from the breakdown of his convictions. He had
been so glib on the subject of his instinct. Love
could make mistakes, he had said to Edith, but
instinct couldn't. He had been the other half
of Jennie; Jennie had been the other half of him.
She couldn't be unfaithful to him, because he
knew she couldn't. His love was protecting her
like a magic cloak, while she was.... The awful
shame of a man whose foolish stammerings of
passion are held up to public ridicule seemed to
kill the heart in his body.

And yet, when he staggered to his feet and
strode toward the obsessing thing to pull the
cloth over it again, he started back once more.
The woman with the skull had changed. She
was a coarse creature now, common and sensual.
Amazement pinned him to the spot, his hands
raised as if at sight of an apparition. Then
slowly, insensibly, weirdly, Jennie came back
again, though not quite the Jennie he had seen
at first. This Jennie retained the traits of the
second woman—a Jennie coarsened, common,
and sensual, in spite of being exquisite, too.

He walked in and out of the other rooms on
the floor, so as to clear his mind of the suggestion.
When he came back, he saw the second woman,
and the second woman only; but having moved
into a new light, he found Jennie there as before.
It was like sorcery. Whether the thing had a
baleful life, or whether his perceptions were
growing crazed, he couldn't tell.

Neither could he tell what he was to do with
regard to the plans he had been making. A
hotel in New York *now*....

But the immediate duties were evident.
Nominally he had come back to befriend the
boy, and the boy must be befriended. To do
that he must have a knowledge of the facts.
Farther than this he had been unable to progress
even by the hour, in the early afternoon, when
he was limping along Indiana Avenue.

He had telephoned his coming, and Jennie
had answered in a dead voice which could hardly
be interpreted as a welcome. It was like a guilty
voice, he said to himself, though he corrected
the thought instantly, to argue in favor of
emotion.

He had spent the intervening two or three
hours arguing. Jennie was a model, and he
must not be surprised if a model's work, however
startling to one who was not a model, should
seem a matter of course to her. All professions
had peculiarities strange to those who didn't
belong to them, and the model's perhaps most of
all. He couldn't judge; he couldn't condemn.
He must try to understand her from her own
point of view. Probably her posing in this way
seemed the most natural thing in the world to
her; and, if so, he must make it seem the same
to himself. He couldn't expect her to have the
hesitations and circumspections of a girl from
Marillo Park. If she was true to her own
standards, it was all he had a right to look for.

And yet there was Wray. He had long seen
in Hubert a fellow whom no girl could love "and
get away with it." These were the words he
had used of his friend, and he had considered the
detail none of his business. Most men were that
way, more or less, and if he himself wasn't, it
was not a moral excellence, but a trick of temperament.
But that Jennie was in danger from Wray
was a thought that never occurred to him. Her
innocence and defenselessness, combined with
what he had taken to be a kind of studio code
of honor, would have been enough to protect
her, even had his suspicions been roused, which
they never were. He tried to smother those
suspicions even now, saying to himself that he
had nothing against her except that she had
been a model—in all for which a model was ever
called upon.

He had that—and the timbre of her voice on
the telephone. There was dismay in that voice,
and terror. If it wasn't a guilty voice....

But, as a matter of fact, it was a guilty voice.
In an overwhelming consciousness of guilt, Jennie
had spent the whole of the ten days since the
coming of his cablegram. The man who at a
distance of four or five thousand miles could
know that Teddy was in jail and act so promptly
for the good of all might be aware of anything.
Having always seemed immense and overshadowing,
he became godlike now from his
sheer display of power. It was power so great
that she could put forth no claim; she could only
wait humbly on his will.

As, hidden behind a curtain, she watched for
his coming along the avenue, all her thoughts
were focused into speculation as to how he
would approach her. Would he be sorry for
having married her? She could only fear that
he would be. She had never mistrusted his
mother's reading of his character—that he made
love to girls one day and forgot them the next—in
addition to which she had involved him in this
terrible disgrace. Whatever excuse those who
loved Teddy might make for him, the fact remained
that to the world he was a bank robber
and a murderer. All his kin must share in the
condemnation meted out to him, and Bob's first
task as a married man must be that of defending
her and hers against public disdain. He might
be as brave as a lion in doing that, but, she
reasoned, he couldn't like the necessity. He
might say he did, and yet she wouldn't be able
to believe him. Even if he still cared for her as
he had cared when he went away, his marriage
to her couldn't possibly be viewed otherwise
than as a misfortune; and he might not still
care for her.

She saw him as he limped round the corner at
the very end of the street. He wore a Panama
hat and a white-linen suit. Luckily, Gussie and
Gladys had gone back to work and her mother
was lying down. She couldn't have borne the
suspense had she not been all alone. Even
Pansy's searching eyes, as she stood with her
little squat legs planted wide apart, trying to
understand this new element in the situation,
were almost more than Jennie could endure.

Bob advanced slowly, examining the numbers
of the houses, many of which were lacking.
Seventeen, Fifteen, and Thirteen were, however,
over their doors, so that he was duly prepared
for Eleven.

"I'll know by the first look in his eyes," she
kept saying to herself, "whether he's sorry he
married me or not."

As he passed number Thirteen she got up from
the arm of the big chair on which she had been
perched, and found she could hardly stand. It
was all she could do to creep into the entry and
open the front door. When he turned into the
little cement strip leading up to it, she shrank
back into the shadow. He was abreast of the
two hydrangea trees before he saw her. When
he did so he stood still. It seemed to her that an
unreckonable time went by before a smile stole
to his lips, and when it did it was wavering,
flickering, more poignant than no smile at all.

Her inner comment was: "Yes; he's sorry.
Now I know." Pride, another new force in her
character, made of her a woman with a will,
as she added, "I must help him to get out of it—somehow."

But Pansy, sensing a nimbus of good will as
imperceptible to Jennie as the pervasive scent
of the summer, lilted down the steps, raised her
forepaws against his shin, and gazed up into his
face adoringly.




CHAPTER XXIII
=============


It was a help to Bob Collingham that his
first glance at Jennie decided his attitude for
the near future. Whatever his doubts and
questionings, he could add nothing to the trials
she had to face. Whatever she had done, whatever
the net of circumstances in which she had
been caught, he must act as if, as far as he himself
was concerned, he was satisfied. Whether
she loved him or whether she didn't, or whether
her duties as a model had or had not made her
indifferent to considerations to which most
people were sensitive, were questions that must
be postponed.

This conviction, which flashed on him as he
saw her shrinking in the entry, was confirmed
when he felt her crumpled in his arms, relieved
by his presence and yet frightened by the new
conditions which it wrought. It was the same
dependent but rebellious little Jennie, clinging
to him and yet trying to slip away from him.
It was as if she begged for a love which the perversity
of her tortured little heart wouldn't
allow her to accept. Very well then; he must
measure it out to her a little at a time, as you
fed a sick person or a starving man, till she got
used to it. When she was stronger and he more
at peace with himself, they could tackle the
personal problems between them.

So, when she struggled from his arms, he let
her go, following her into the living-room.

"Gussie and Gladys are back at work," she
said at once, to explain the fact that none of
his new connections were there to greet him,
"and momma's lying down. She always lies
down at this time of day, ever since daddy died."
She dropped into one big shabby armchair,
motioning him to another. "And there's something
else I must tell you. Ever since—this
thing happened to Teddy—she hasn't been—well,
not right in her mind."

The stand he had taken became more imperative.
A father's death, a mother's collapse, a
brother's crime had put her at the head of her
little troop of three, to bear everything alone.
He had left behind him an inexperienced girl;
he had come back to find a woman already
accustomed to rising to emergencies. The
change was perceptible in the clearer, slightly
older cutting of her features, as well as in the
greater authority with which she spoke. Where
the contours of her profile had been soft and
vague, there was now a delicate chiseling; where
there had been hesitation in words, there was
now the firmness of one obliged to know her mind.

As she sketched her mother's mental state,
he sat on the extreme edge of his big chair,
straining forward so as to be near her without
touching her, his fingers clasped between his
knees. She continued to speak nervously, with
agitation, and yet lucidly.

"She isn't very bad. She's only what you'd
call unsettled. It's not that she does anything,
but rather that, after all the years when she's
worked so hard, she just sits and does nothing.
It's as if she was lost in thinking; and when she
comes back she says such terribly strange
things."

"What sort of things?"

"For one, that it's no use living any longer—that
the world's so bad that the best thing left
is to get out of it. She says you can't help the
world, or hope to see it improve, because human
beings will always reject the principles that
would make it any better."

He smiled gently.

"I've heard people talk like that who weren't
considered unsettled in their minds."

"Oh, but she doesn't stop there. She tells
Teddy he was quite within his rights in taking
money from the bank, and when she goes to see
him she begs him to be brave and not be sorry
for anything he's done."

"And is he sorry?"

"I don't know that you could call it sorry.
He's dazed and bewildered. He knows he took
the money and that he killed a man; but he
thinks he was placed in a position where he
couldn't help it."

"And does he say who could have helped it?"

As she looked down at that twisting and untwisting of her fingers which was the chief sign
of her effort at self-control, her color rose.

"He says your father could have helped it;
but I don't believe he's right."

"No, he isn't right—not as dad himself sees it.
I know he's been worried ever since your
father left the bank; but he thinks he couldn't
help dismissing him. Life isn't very simple for
anyone—not for my dad any more than it was
for yours. If I could see Teddy—"

"Would you go to see him?"

"Go to see him? Why, that's what I came
back for! I'd like to do it this very afternoon,
if you'd tell me first how it all came about.
You see, I don't know anything, except the two
or three bald facts dad mentioned in his cablegram."

It was not easy to tell this story, even to a
man whom she knew to be so kind. The fact
that he was her husband didn't help her, for the
reason that it was because he was her husband
that her pride was in revolt. Had he not been
her husband, he would have been free to withdraw
from this series of catastrophes. Now he
could not withdraw. He was tied.

Moreover, the sordid tale of domestic want
became the more sordid when given fact by fact.
It was the intimate story of her life in contrast
to the intimate story of his. The homely family
dodges for making both ends meet which had
been the mere jest of penury between Gussie,
Gladys, and herself became ghastly when exposed to a man who had never known the lack
of service and luxury, to say nothing of food
and drink, since the minute he was born. She
felt as if it emptied her of any little dignity she
had ever possessed, as if it denuded her of self-respect.
She could more easily have confessed
sins to him than the shifts to which they had
been put to live.

Nevertheless, she went through with it,
brokenly, with great effort, and yet with a kind
of dogged will to drain all the dregs of the cup.

"He'll see me as I am," was part of her
underlying thought. "He'll know then that
I can't go on with this comedy of having married
him. Even if I have, we've got to end it somehow."

But on his side the reaction was different.
He had never heard this sort of tale before. He
had never before been in contact with this phase
of poverty. He had known poor men in college,
and plenty of chaps who were down on their
luck; but the daily pinching and paring of whole
families just to have enough to eat and to wear
was so new as to astonish him. For the minute
it made Jennie less an individual than a type.

"My God!" he was saying inwardly, "do human
beings have to live so close to the edge as
all that?"

When she had told him of the incident of the
cutting off of the gas because they couldn't pay
fifteen dollars on account, the turning point of
Teddy's tragedy, his exclamation was embarrassing to them both: "Why, I pay twice that
for a pair of shoes!" Though she knew he meant
it as a protest against the straits to which they
had been put, it seemed both to him and to her
to make the gulf between them wider.

"And you were going through all that," he
said, when she had finished her recital, "during
the months when I was seeing you two and three
times a week at the studio. My God! how I
wish you could have told me!"

It was the first time that a little smile came
quivering to her lips.

"You don't tell things like that—not to anyone
outside your family. Besides, it isn't worth
while. You get used to them."

"You weren't used to it—when your mother
cried—and Teddy forked out the money."

"Not to that very thing—but to things like
it. If Teddy hadn't forked out the money, we
should have worried through somehow. That's
the awful thing about it—that if he hadn't done
it we shouldn't have been much worse off than
we'd been at other times. A little worse—yes—even
a good deal, perhaps; and yet we could have
lived through it. I couldn't have told you, because
people of our kind don't talk about such
things, not even with their neighbors. We just
take them for granted."

It was this taking it for granted that impressed
him with such a sense of the terrible. It left so
little room for living, so limited a swing to do
anything but scrape. Scraping was the whole of
Jennie's history. He could see it as she talked.
She had never in her life had fifty dollars to do
with as she chose. Perhaps she had never had
five. It was not the lack of the money that
overwhelmed him, but of any freedom to move,
of any scope in which to grow.

Forgetting his reserves of the morning, he
caught her by both hands, holding them imprisoned
in her lap.

"But that's all over now, Jennie. You're my
wife. You're coming to me—right off—to-day—this
very afternoon."

"Oh, Bob, I couldn't!" If he was to be "got
out of it," she felt it essential to gain time. "I
couldn't leave them. Don't you see? There's
no one but me to keep house or—or to decide
anything. Momma's given up entirely, and
Gussie and Gladys are both so young that I
couldn't possibly leave them alone."

"Then we'll have to manage it some other
way."

"No; not yet. Let's wait. Let's see."

"Waiting and seeing won't change the fact
that we're man and wife and that everyone
knows it. It's been in the papers—"

"Yes, but why did you put it in?" It was her
turn to seek information. "To me it was like a
thunderbolt."

He gave her the contents of his father's
cablegram.

"I took it for granted that you must have told
him."

"I shouldn't have done that. I did—I did tell
your mother, Bob—but then I couldn't help it."

He started back, releasing her hands which he
had continued holding.

"What? You've seen the old lady?"

She nodded. "Yes; she sent for me to go out
to Marillo Park."

"For Heaven's sake! What made her do
that?"

She was aware of her opportunity. If she
wanted to "get him out of it," now was her
chance. She could tell him part of the truth and
keep him dangling—or the whole of it and let
him go. "Fairer to him—and easier for me"
was the thought on which she based her decision.

"She—she wanted to thank me for—for not
having taken you at your word and married
you."

"Oh! So you had to tell her that you had.
And what did she say to that?"

"She was lovely."

He beamed with pleasure.

"She can be when she takes the notion, just
as she can be the other way. She must have
liked you."

"I—I think she did."

"You bet she did! She'd let you see it if she
didn't. So *that's* what smoothed the way for us!
I couldn't make it out. You certainly are a
little witch, Jennie!"

"It isn't as smooth as all that." Springing to
her feet, she turned her back on him, moving
away toward the window. "Oh, Bob, I wish
I didn't have to tell you. You're so good and
kind, and I've been so"—it came out with a
burst of confession, her arms outstretched, her
hands spread palms upward—"I've been so
awful! When you know—"

"Wait!" He seized her by the shoulders with
the force which calms emotion from sheer
fright. "Wait, Jennie! I know what you're
going to tell me."

"Oh, but you can't."

"It's—it's something about Wray, isn't it?"

She nodded dumbly.

"Then we'll put it off. Do you see? That
isn't what I came back for. I came back about
Teddy, and we must see that through before
we think of ourselves. All that'll keep—"

"It won't keep if we go and live together."

"Then we won't go and live together—not
till we see how it's to be done. That's just a
detail. In comparison with Teddy, it doesn't
matter one way or another. We'll come to it
by and by. All we've got to think of now is
that there's a boy whose life is hanging by a
thread—"

"Yes; but I don't want you to be mixed up
in it. I want to—to save you from—from the
sacrifice—and—and the disgrace."

He stood back from her with a hard little laugh.

"Good God! Jennie, I wonder if you have the
faintest idea of what love is! You can't have.
Do you suppose it matters to me what I'm mixed
up in so long as it's something that touches you?
Listen! Let me explain to you what love is like
when it's the kind I feel for you. I"—he braced
himself in order to bring out the words forcibly—"I
don't care what Wray is to you or what you
are to Wray—not yet. I put that away from me
till I've gone with you through the things you've
got to meet. They'll not be easy for you, but I
want to make them as easy as I can. No one
can do it but me, because no one cares for you as
I do."

"Oh, I know that."

"Then, if you know it, Jennie, don't force
anything else on me when I'm doing my best not
to think of it. Let me just love you as well as I
know how till we do the things that are right in
front of us. After that, if there's a reason why
I should hand you over to Wray, or to anybody
else, you can tell me, and I'll—"

Pansy's scrambling to attention and a sound
on the stairs arrested his words as well as Jennie's
rising tears.

"Momma's coming down," the girl whispered,
hurriedly. "She wants to see you. Don't forget
that you're not to mind anything she says."

To Bob, the moment was one of awed surprise,
for the commanding, black-robed figure differed
from all his preconceptions, as far as he had any,
of Jennie's mother. Advancing rapidly into the
room, she took his right hand in hers, laying her
left on his head as if in benediction.

"So you're my Jennie's husband. I hope
you're a good man, for you've found a good
woman. Be loving to each other. The time is
coming when love is all that will survive. Let me
look at you."

He stood off, smiling, while she made her
inspection.

"Love is all there is, anyhow, don't you think,
Mrs. Follett?"

"Yes; but it gets no chance in this world."

"Or it is the only thing that does get a
chance?"

"It may be the only thing that does get a
chance, but that chance is small. There's no
hope for the world. Don't think there is, because
you'll be disappointed. Each time your disappointment
is worse than the last, till you end in
despair."

It was the strain Jennie felt obliged to interrupt.

"Momma, Mr. Collingham is going to see
Teddy. Don't you want him to take a message?"

"Only the message I've given him myself—that
it's only a little way over, and that one of
two things must happen then. It will either be
sleep, in which nothing will matter, or it will be
life, in which he'll be free—understood—supported—instead
of being beaten and crushed and
mangled, as everyone is here. Tell him that."

He felt it his duty to be cheerier.

"On the other hand, we may get him off; or
if we can't get him off altogether—"

"What good would that do—your getting him
off? You'd be throwing him back again on a
world that doesn't want him."

"Oh, but surely the world *does*—"

"Yes; the world does—I'm wrong—it does to
the same extent that it wanted his father—to
give it every ounce of his strength with a pittance
for his pay—to spend and be spent till
he's good for nothing more—and then to be
thrown aside to starve. It's possible that even
now Teddy would be willing to do this if they'd
only let him live; but tell him it's not good
enough. I've told him, and I don't think he
believes me; but you're a man, and perhaps you
can make him see it."

"Yes, momma dear, he'll do the best he
can—"

"It won't be the best he can if he tries to keep
him here. We've passed on, my boy and I. Only
our bodies are still on the earth, and that for just
a little while. A year from now and we'll both
be safe—so safe!—and yet you'd try to keep us
in a world where men make a curse of everything."

----

But Teddy himself was less reconciled than
his mother to bidding the world good-by. In
proportion as his physical strength returned,
the fate that had overtaken him became more
and more preposterous. To suppose that he
had of his own criminal intention stolen money
and killed a man was little short of insane. A
man had been killed by a pistol he held in his
hand; he had taken money because the need
was such that he couldn't help himself; but he,
Teddy Follett, was neither a thief nor a murderer
in any sense involving the exercise of will.
He was sure of that. He declared it to himself
again and again and again. It was all that
gave him fighting force, compelling him to insist,
to assert himself, and to protest in season and
out of season against being shut up in a cell.

The cell was seven feet long and four feet wide.
Round the foot of the bunk and along the sides
there was a space of some twelve inches. At the
foot there was the iron-ribbed door with a
grating, and along the sides a slimy and viscous
stone wall. Besides the bunk, a bucket, and a
shelf there was nothing whatever in the way
of furnishings. Under the bed he was privileged
to keep the suitcase with his wardrobe, and on
the shelf whatever his mother and sisters brought
him in the way of food. By day, the only light
was through the grating to the corridor; by
night, a feeble electric bulb was extinguished at
half past nine. The Brig being an ancient
prison, and Teddy but one of a long, long line of
murderers who had lain on this hard bed, vermin
infested everything.

While Bob Collingham was on his way to him
Teddy was in conversation with the chaplain.
For this purpose, the door had been unlocked.
The visitor leaned against the door post while
the prisoner stood in the narrow space between
his bunk and the wall.

It was the Protestant chaplain, a tall, spare,
sandy-haired man of some fifty-odd, whose
yearning, spiritual face had, through long association
with his flock, grown tired and disillusioned.
Having sought this post from a genuine
sympathy with outcast men, he suffered from
their rejection. He was so sure of what would
help them, and only one in a hundred ever
wanted it. Even that one generally laughed at
it when he got out of jail. After eighteen years
of self-denying work, the worthy man was sadly
pessimistic now as to prospects of reform.

For the minute he was trying to convince
Teddy of the righteousness of punishment. He
had been drawn to the boy partly because of
his youth and good looks, but mainly on account
of his callousness to his crime. He seemed to
have no conscience, no notion of the difference
between right and wrong. "A moral moron"
was what he labeled him. The lack of ethical
consciousness was the more astonishing because
his antecedents had apparently been good.

"You see," he was pointing out, "you can't
break the laws by which society protects itself
and yet escape the moral and physical results."

But in his long, solitary hours Teddy had
been thinking this out.

"Doesn't that depend upon the laws? If the
law's wrong—"

"But who's to judge of that?"

"Isn't the citizen to judge of that?"

The parson smiled—his weary, spiritual smile.

"If the citizen was allowed to judge of
that—"

"If he wasn't," Teddy broke in, with the
impetuosity born of his beginning to think for
himself, "if he wasn't, there'd be no such country
as the United States. Most of the fireworks in
American history are over the fine thing it is to
beat the law to it when the law isn't just."

"Ah, but there's a distinction between individual
action and great popular movements."

"Great popular movements must be made up
of individual actions, mustn't they? If individuals
didn't break the laws, each guy on his
own account, you wouldn't get any popular
movements at all."

The chaplain shifted his ground.

"All the same, there are certain laws that
among all peoples and at all times have been
considered fundamental. Human society can't
permit a man to steal—"

"Then human society shouldn't put a man
in a position where he either has to steal or
starve to death."

There was a repetition of the thin, ghostly
smile.

"Oh, well, no one who's ordinarily honest and
industrious ever—"

"Ever starves to death? That's a lie. Excuse
me," he added, apologetically, "but that kind of
talk just gets my goat. My father practically
starved to death—he died from lack of proper nourishment,
the doctor said—and there never was a
more industrious or an honester man born. He
gave everything he had to human society, and
when he had no more to give, human society
kicked him out. It has the law on its side, too,
and because"—he gulped—"I came to his help
in the only way I knew how they've chucked
me into this black hole."

The chaplain found another kind of opening.

"So, you see, my boy, there's that. If you
don't keep the law—"

"They can make you suffer for it," Teddy declared,
excitedly. "Of course they can. They've
made me suffer—God! how they've made me
suffer—more, I believe, than anyone since Jesus
Christ! But that's not what we were talking
about. You started in to tell me that it's *right*
for me to suffer the way they're making me.
That's what I kick against, and I'll keep on
kicking till they send me to the chair."

"If you could do yourself any good by that—"

But just here the dialogue was interrupted by
the appearance of Boole, the dapper, debonair
young guard who generally announced Teddy's
afternoon visitors.

"Hello, old cuss! Gent to see you."

The chaplain prepared to move on to the neighboring
cell. His leave-taking was kindly and
with a great pity in it.

"We'll go on with this talk again, my boy.
When you're able to get the right point of
view—"

What would happen then was drowned in the
clanging of the door behind him, as Teddy
stepped out into the corridor.

"Who is it? Stenhouse?" he asked, as he
walked along with the guard.

He had already dropped into the prisoner's
habitual tone of hostile friendliness toward the
officials with whom he came most in contact,
recognizing the fact that had he met any of
these men "on the outside" they would have
hobnobbed together with the freemasonry of
American young men everywhere. On their
sides the keepers, apart from the fact that they
considered Teddy "a tough lot," had ceased to
show him animosity.

"It's not the lawyer," Boole answered now.
"It's a swell guy with a limp. Looks to me as if
he might be the gay young banker sport that the
papers say is married to your sister."

Teddy felt his heart contracting in a spasm of
dread. The one fact he knew of his brother-in-law
was that he had sent him Stenhouse, one of
the three or four lawyers most famous at the
New Jersey bar for saving lives. This detail,
too, the boy had learned from Boole.

"You'll not get the cur'nt, with him to defend
you, believe *me*. Some bird! If he can't prove
you innocent, he'll find a flaw in the law or the
indictment or somethin'. Why, they say he
once got a guy off, a Pole, the fella was, just on
the spellin' of his name."

Having been warned by Stenhouse not to
discuss his case with anyone, Teddy was discreetly silent. As a matter of fact, he had too
much to think of to be inclined to talk. The circumstance
that "young Coll" had become a
relative was one of which he was just beginning
to seize the importance. His bruised mind had
been unable at first to apprehend it. Slowly he
was coming to the realized knowledge that he
was allied to that Olympian race which the
Collinghams represented to the Folletts, and that,
at least, some of their power was engaged on his
behalf.

It was confusing. Since the might that had
struck him down was also coming to his aid, the
issue was no longer clear-cut. To have all the
right on one side and all the wrong on the other
had simplified life. Now, a right that was
partly wrong and a wrong that was partly right
had been personified, as it were, in this union
through which a Collingham had become a Follett,
and a Follett a Collingham.

Young Coll was standing where Jennie had
stood on the first occasion of Teddy's coming to
the visitors' room. He too waited with a smile.
The minute he saw the lad appear timidly on the
threshold he limped forward with outstretched
hand.

"Hello, Teddy!" His embarrassment, being
a kindly embarrassment, was without awkwardness.
"You didn't know I was going to be
your brother the last time you saw me, did you?"

Teddy said nothing. He was not sullen, but
neither was he friendly. A Collingham, even
though married to his sister, was probably a
person to be feared. Teddy's counsel to himself
was to be on his guard against "the nigger in
the woodpile."

"Perhaps it was my fault that you didn't,"
Bob went on, with some constraint. "That's
the reason why I'm here. I dare say there isn't
much I can do for you, old boy, but what little
there is I want to do."

Teddy eyed him steadily, still without making
a reply. Somehow they found chairs. Boole,
having once more summed up the visitor, had
retreated toward the guard who sat officially at
the far end of the room.

"Looks like a good cuss," was Boole's whispered
confidence. "Kind o' soft—like most o'
them swell sports that marries working goyls."

Bob was finding himself less and less at his
ease. The boy not only came none of the way
to meet him, but seemed to hold him as an
enemy. By his silence and by the severity of his
regard he conveyed the impression that young
Coll, and not himself, had done the wrong.

It was an attitude for which Bob was not prepared.
Neither was he prepared for the defacement
of all that had been glowing in the lad's
countenance. Jennie had warned him against
expecting the ruddy bright-eyed Teddy of the
bank, but he hadn't looked for this air of youth
blasted out of youthfulness. It was still youth,
but youth marred, terrified, haunted, with a fear
beyond that of gibbering old age.

With his lovingness and quickness of pity,
Bob sought for a line by which he could catch
on to the lad's interest.

"I asked my father to send you the best
counsel in New Jersey, and I believe he's picked
out Stenhouse."

Teddy regarded him grimly.

"Yes, he did." It seemed as if he meant to
say no more, when, with a sardonic grunt, he went
on, "Something like a guy who smashes a machine
and then gets the best mechanician in the
world to come and patch it up."

"Yes—possibly—it may be. Only, there's
this to consider—that no one smashes a machine
on purpose."

"No, I don't suppose he does. Only, it's all
the same to the machine whether it's been
smashed on purpose or by accident—so long as
it'll never run again."

Bob considered this.

"You might say that of a machine—a dead
thing from the start. You can't say it of a human
being, who's alive from the beginning. See?"

"No, I don't see."

"And I don't know that I can explain. I'm
only sure that a machine can be done for, and
that a human being can't be. You can come to
a time when it's no use doing anything more for
the one; but you can never reach such a time
with the other. With *him*, you may make mistakes
or you may do him a great wrong, but you
can't stop trying to put things right again."

"And you think you can put things right again
for me?"

"I don't know what I can do. I haven't an
idea. Very likely I can't do anything at all. I
merely came back from South America to do
what I could."

"Did you feel that you had to—because you'd
married Jennie?"

"That was a reason. It wasn't the only one."

"What else was there?"

"I'm not sure that I can tell you. A lot of the
things we do we do not from reason, but from
instinct. But if you don't want me to try to
take a hand—"

Under the dark streaks that blotted out what
had once been Teddy's healthy coloring, a slow
flush began to mantle.

"I don't want to be—to be bamboozled."

"Of course you don't. But how could I bamboozle
you?"

There was no explanation. Unable to base
his distrust on any other ground than that Bob
was the son of the man who had dismissed Josiah
Follett from the bank, Teddy fell silent again.
He could not afford to reject the least good will
that came his way, and yet his spirit was too sore
to accept it graciously.

Some of this young Collingham divined. He
began to see that as the boy was suffering and
he wasn't, it was not for him to take offense.
On the contrary, he must use all his ingenuity
to find the way to make his appeal effectively.

"All I could do from down there," he said,
when Teddy seemed indisposed to speak again,
"was to get Stenhouse or some one to take up
your case. I mean to see him in the morning
and find out how far he's got along with it. But
now that I'm here, can't you think of something
of your own that you'd like me to do?"

Teddy raised his eyes quickly. His look was
the dull look of anguish, and yet with sharpness
in the glance.

"What kind of thing?"

"Any kind. Think of the thing that's most on
your mind—the thing that worries you more
than anything else—and—put it up to me."
The somberness deepened in the lad's face, not
from resentment, but from heaviness of thought.
"Go ahead," Bob urged. "Cough it up. If
it's something I can't tackle, I'll tell you so."

"What's most on my mind," Teddy began,
slowly, gritting his teeth with the effort to get
the words out, "what worries me like hell—is
ma—and the girls. They—they must be lonesome—something
fierce—without me."

In his agony of controlling himself he was
rubbing his palms between his knees, but Bob
put out his great hand and seized him by the
wrist.

"Look here, old chap! I can't comfort them
for your not being there. You know that, of
course. But it always helps women to have a
man coming and going in the house—to take a
lot of things off their hands—and keep them
company—and I'll do that. If I can't be everything
that you'd be—"

"You can be more than I could ever be."

"Yes—from the point of view of having a
little more money—and freedom—and a car to
take them out in—and all that; but if you think
I could ever make up to them for you, old sport—but
that isn't what you want me to do, is it?
You don't want me to be you, but to be something
different—only, something that'll make
your mother and Jennie and your little sisters
buck up again—"

Stumbling to his feet, Teddy drew the back
of his hand across his eyes.

"I—I guess I'd better beat it," he muttered,
unsteadily. "They—they don't like you to stay
out too long."

But Bob forced him gently back into his chair
again.

"Oh, cheese that, Teddy! Sit down and let's
get better acquainted. I want to tell you how
Jennie and I made up our minds to get married."




CHAPTER XXIV
============


"And yet it's one of the commonest types
of the criminal mind," Stenhouse was
explaining to Bob during the following forenoon.
"Fellows perfectly normal in every respect but
that of their own special brand of crime. See
no harm in that whatever. Won't have a
cigar?"

Having declined the cigar for the third time,
Bob found a subconscious fascination in watching
the lawyer's Havana travel from one corner to
the other of his long, mobile, thin-lipped mouth.
It was interesting, too, to get a view of Teddy's
case different from Jennie's.

There was nothing about Stenhouse, unless
it was his repressed histrionic intensity, to suggest
the saver of lives. Outwardly, he was a
lank, clean-shaven Yankee, of ill-assorted features
and piercing gimlet eyes. But something about
him suggested power and an immense persuasiveness.
He had only to wake from the quiescent
mood in which he was talking to Bob to become
an actor or a demagogue. With laughter, tears,
pathos, vituperation, satire, and repartee all
at his command, together with an amazing
knowledge of criminal law, he was born to commend
himself to the average juryman. Little
of this was apparent, however, except when he
was in action. Just now, as he lounged in his
revolving chair, his limber legs crossed, his
thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his
perfecto moving as if by its own volition along
the elastic lines of his mouth, he was detached,
impartial, judicial, with that manner of speaking
which the French describe as "from high to low"—"*de
haut en bas*"—the "good mixer," with a
sense of his own superiority.

The lack of the human element was to Bob the
most disconcerting trait in the lawyer's frame of
mind. To him the case was a case, and neither
more nor less. The boy's life, so precious to
himself, was of no more account to Stenhouse
than that of a private soldier to his commanding
officer on the day when a position must be rushed.
Stenhouse was interested in the professional
advantage he himself might gain from the outcome
of the trial. In a less degree, he was
interested in Teddy's psychology as a new slant
on criminal mentality in general. But the results
as they affected his client's fate concerned
him not at all.

"I'm talking to you frankly," he went on,
"because it's the only way we can handle the
business. You're making yourself responsible
in the case, and so I must tell you what I
think."

"Oh, of course!"

"I quite understand your connection with this
young fellow, and why you're taking the matter
up, but I must treat you as if you were as aloof
from it in sentiment as I am myself."

"That's exactly what I want."

"Well, then, the boy's in a bad fix. It's a
worse fix because he belongs to the dangerous
criminal type for whom you can never get a
jury's sympathy. Roughly speaking, there are
two classes of criminals—the criminals by accident
and the criminals born. This boy is a
criminal born."

"Oh, do you think so?"

"I know so. Yes, sir! You can't have as
much to do with both lots as I've had without
learning to read them at sight; and when it
comes to drawing them out—why, he hadn't told
me a half of his story before I could see he'd had
murder on the brain for the best part of his life."

"I shouldn't have thought that."

"No, you wouldn't. Lot of it subconscious—suppressed
desire, Freud, and all that. But
start him talking, and it's 'God! I'd have shot
that fellow if I'd had a gun!' or it's, 'If I'd had
a dose of poison, they'd never have got me
alive.' Mind ran on it. Yes, sir! Always thinking
of doing somebody in—if not another fellow,
then himself."

"I don't think he knew it."

"Of course he didn't know it. Seemed
natural to him. Our own vices always do seem
natural to us. If you put it up to him now, he'd
say he'd never had a thought of shooting up
anyone, and he wouldn't be lying out of it,
either. Way it seems to him. Way it seems to
every criminal of the class. But to judges and
juries it's just so much 'bull,' and tells against
the accused in the end. Sure you won't have a
cigar?"

Having again declined the cigar, Bob argued
in favor of Teddy, but Stenhouse was fixed in
his convictions.

"I'll do what I can for him, of course; only,
I'm blocked by his refusal to plead guilty.
Pleading guilty might—I don't say it would,
but it might—incline the judge to mercy. It
would get him off, too, with the second degree,
only that, when his own story shows him as
guilty as hell, he keeps pulling the innocent stuff
to beat a jazz band. The rascal who plumps
with his confession will always get the clemency,
while the fellow with a mouthful of innocence
will be sent to the chair."

"But if he does feel that he's innocent—"

"Sure he feels that he's innocent! That's it!
That's what I'm talking about—the ingrained
criminal's lack of consciousness that his kind of
crime is crime. The other fellow's—yes; but his—why,
the law is a fool to be made that way and
trip a good fellow up! To hear this young shaver
talk, you'd think the courts should be manned
by pickpockets."

"All the same, he was in a tight place—"

"What's that got to do with it? If we didn't
get into tight places, there'd be no need for laws
of any kind."

"I was only thinking of his motive—"

"His motive may have been all right. I'll not
dispute you there, because you'll find that
legally there's a difference between motive and
intent. His motive may have been to provide
for his mother, just as he says. Good! No
harm in that whatever. But his intent was to
rob a bank and shoot the guy that came out
after him. The court won't go into his motives.
It'll deal only with his intent, and with what
came of it."

There was more along these lines which sent
Bob away with some questioning as to himself.
Being of a law-respecting nature, he was anxious
not to uphold the transgressor to anything like
a danger point. And he ran that risk. Having
undertaken to help Teddy on Jennie's account,
his heart had gone out beyond what he expected
to the boy himself. It was the first time he had
ever been in contact with a prisoner, the first time
he had ever come face to face with a lone individual
against whom all the organized forces
of the world were focused in condemnation.
His impulse being to range himself on the
weaker side, he had, in a measure, so ranged
himself. He had told Teddy that he stood by
him, and would continue to stand by him through
thick and thin. But was he right? Had he
shown the proper severity? Hadn't he been
sloppy and sentimental, without sufficiently remembering
that a man who had killed another
man was not to be handled as a pet?

It was not common sense to treat the breaker
of laws as if he hadn't broken them or as if his
punishment had made him a sympathetic figure.
Too facile a pity might easily become a sin
against the community's best standards, and by
putting himself on the weaker side a man might
find himself on the worse one. Even the fact
that the wrongdoer was a relative ought not to
blind the eyes to his being a wrongdoer. It was
his duty as a citizen, Bob argued, to support the
charter of the Rights of Man as set forth in the
Old Testament—thou shalt not kill—thou shalt
not steal—the ideal of the New Testament,
"Neither was there among them any that lacked,
for they had all things common," never having
been called to his attention.

As to Teddy's being a criminal born, he was
not sure. Perhaps he was. Such "sports" appeared
even from the most respectable stock.
There was a dark tradition, never mentioned
now except between Edith and himself, of a
Collingham—they were not sure of the relationship—who
had died in jail somewhere in the
West. Of the Follett stock Bob knew nothing.
Jennie was the other half of himself; but such
affinities, he was sheepishly inclined to feel,
dated from other worlds and other planes of
existence, though finding a manifestation in
this one.

But it was Jennie who gave him the lead he
was in search of.

"I should think there were plenty of them to
attend to that," she said, when he had expressed,
as delicately as he could, his misgivings as to his
own lack of rigor. "Whatever he did, and however
bad it was, they've got all the power in the
world to punish him, and they're going to do it.
When there's just one person on earth to show
him a little pity, I shouldn't think it could be
too much." She added, after a second or two of
silence: "He was sorry you didn't go in to see
him. He missed you. I—I think he's going to
cling to you just like a drowning man, you know,
to a hand that's stretched out to him from a
boat. Very likely he'll have to drown; but so
long as the hand is there, it's—it's something."

In this speech, which was long for Jennie and
betokened her growing authority, there were
two or three points on which Bob pondered as
he drove them homeward from the Brig. Jennie
sat beside him, Lizzie in the back seat. He
took the longest and prettiest ways so as to give
them something like an outing.

It was the afternoon of the day on which he
had seen Stenhouse, and in the interval he had
been thinking out a program. Whatever the restrictions
he must put upon himself with regard
to the boy, his duty to protect and distract
Jennie and her family was clear. Teddy had
also given him to understand that, more than
anything done for himself, this would contribute
to his peace of mind. Done for his mother and
sisters, it would be done for him, and the doer
could be sure that he wasn't loosening the foundations of society. Even where there was a born
criminal to be judged, and perhaps put out of
the way, something was gained when the innocent
could be saved to any possible degree from
suffering with the guilty.

In this, too, he was not without an eye to
Indiana Avenue. Though he had no experience
of suburban life, he was intuitive enough to feel
sure that, to the neighbors, Jennie's marriage
had a "queer look," and the more so since she
was not living with her husband, now that he was
back from South America. To counteract this,
he meant to show himself in the street as much
as possible, parading his car before the door.
There must be no cheap gossip as to Jennie
based on lack of his devotion, even though all
arrangements between her and himself were no
more than provisional.

To that point, then, his course was clear.
He could not console the mother, whose reason
was stricken at its base, nor the three young
girls whose lives were overshadowed by tragedy;
but he could divert their minds from dwelling
too much on calamity by bringing in a new
interest. He could make it a big interest. He
could enlarge the interest in proportion to their
need; and, as Jennie spoke, it dawned on him
that they themselves began to foresee that their
need might be great indeed. "They've got all
the power in the world to punish him; and
they're going to do it." "He's going to cling to
you like a drowning man. Very likely he'll have
to drown." Jennie had had one or two interviews
with Stenhouse, and perhaps had inferred
from that great man's talk the difficulties of his
task.

But the help she gave Bob was in her response
to his misgivings. "When there's just one person
on earth to show him a little pity, I shouldn't
think it could be too much." It couldn't be too
much—not possibly. The worst enemy of mankind
had a right to "a little pity," and even
Judas Iscariot had received it. If Teddy didn't
get it from him, Bob, he wouldn't get it from
anyone—his mother and sisters apart. All
civilized men were lined up against him, and
doubtless could not be lined in any other way.
In that case, punishment was assured, and, as
Jennie said, there were plenty of people to take
care of its infliction. He, Bob Collingham, since
he stood alone, might well forget the heavy
score against the boy in "bucking him up" to
meet what lay ahead of him.

He worked this out before driving Jennie and
her mother to their door, after which he waited
for Gussie and Gladys to come home from work
to take them, too, for an airing. Jennie sat
beside him, as on the earlier drive, the two
younger girls in the seat behind.

To both, the expedition was as the first stage
of a glorification which might carry them up to
any heights. Taken in connection with what
they suffered on account of Teddy, it was like
drinking an unmingled draught of the very bitter
and the very sweet. Hardly able to lift up their
heads from shame, they nevertheless felt the distinction
of going out in an expensive high-powered
car with a gentleman of wealth and position,
who thus publicly proclaimed himself their
relative.

"This'll settle Addie Inglis and Samuella
Weatherby," Gladys whispered, in reference to
some taunt or aspersion which Gussie understood.
"Say, Gus, he's some sport, isn't he?
Jen sure did cop a twenty-cylinder."

But Gussie had already turned over her new
leaf. From the corner where she reclined with
the grace of one accustomed from birth to this
style of conveyance, she arched her lovely neck
and turned her lovely head just enough to convey
a hint of reprimand.

"Gladys dear, momma wouldn't like you to
use that kind of language. Remember that now
we must carry out her wishes all the more because
she isn't able to enforce them. Your
companions may not always be Hattie Belweather
and Sunshine Bright, and so—"

"Say, Gus, what's struck you? Has goin' out
in a swell rig like this gone to your head?"

"Yes, dear; perhaps it has. And if you'll
take my advice you'll let it go to yours."

The only immediate response from Gladys
was a cocking of the eye and a "clk" of the
tongue against the cheek, something like a Zulu
vowel; but Gussie noticed that in Palisade
Park, where they descended from the car to
make Bob's acquaintance, Gladys reverted to
the intonation and idiom in which she had first
picked up her English.

The jaunt tended to deepen the sensation
which had been creeping over the girls within the
past few days, that they were heroines of a
dramatic romance. They had figured in the
papers, their beauty, personalities, and histories
becoming points of vital national concern. One
legend made them the scions of an ancient English
family fallen on evil days, but now to be
revived through alliance with the Collinghams,
while another came near enough to the truth to
embody the Scarborough tradition and connect
them with the historic house in Cambridge. In
no case was there any waste of the picturesque,
the detail that Jennie had been an artist's model
and "the most beautiful woman in America"
being especially underscored.

It was only little by little that Gussie and
Gladys came to a sense of this importance, thus
finding themselves enabled to react to some
small degree against their sense of disgrace.
In the shop, Gussie had heard Corinne whisper
to a customer:

"That pretty girl over there is the sister of
Follett, who murdered Flynn, and whose sister
made that romantic marriage with the banker."

Though she glanced up from the feather she
was twisting only through the tail of her eye,
Gussie could reckon the excitement caused by
this announcement. When it had been made a
second time, and a third, as new customers
came in, she saw herself an asset to the shop.
Stared at, wondered at, discussed, and appraised,
she began to feel as princesses and
actresses when recognized in streets.

Similarly, Hattie Belweather had run to
Gladys to report what Miss Flossie Grimm had
said over the counter, in the intervals of displaying
stockings.

"See that little red-headed, snub-nosed thing
over there? That's the Follett child, sister to
the guy that shot the detective and the girl
that married the banker sport. Some hummer he
must be. Jennie, the married one's name is.
They say she's had an offer of a hundred plunks
a week to go into vawdeville. Fast color? Oh,
my, yes! We don't carry any other kind."

Thus Gladys began to find it difficult to discern
between notoriety and eminence, moving among
the other cash girls as a queen incognita among
ordinary mortals.

Most of this publicity was over by the time
Bob reached New York, though the echoes still
rumbled through the press. His own arrival
reawakened some of it, offering opportunities
that were never ignored of drawing dramatic contrasts.
He was represented as having been
"born in the purple," and stooping to a "maiden
of low degree." Low degree was poetically fused
with the occupation of a model, and by one
publication the statement was thrown in, without
comment, and as it were accidentally, that
the present Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham,
Junior, of Marillo Park, had been greatly admired
by appreciative connoisseurs as the figure
in Hubert Wray's already famous picture, "Life
and Death." Hubert Wray was even credited
with "discovering" this beauty when she was
starving in the slums.

Except for the detail of Wray's picture, the
publicity was something of a relief to Bob, since
it left him nothing to explain. The truth in
these many reports being tolerably easy to disengage,
his friends and acquaintances knew of
his position, and, in view of its circumstances,
they respected it. He went to the bank; he
went to his club; he passed the time of day with
such neighbors as remained at Marillo Park,
finding it the easier to come and go because
everyone knew what had happened.

From almost the first day he fell into a routine—the
bank, Stenhouse, Teddy, Indiana
Avenue. Though he was not yet working at the
bank, he felt it wise to show himself daily on the
premises, in order to establish the fact that his
relations with his family were unchanged.
Stenhouse he didn't visit every day, but only
when there were matters connected with the
case to talk over. He saw Teddy as often as the
Brig regulations would allow, growing more and
more touched by the eagerness with which the
boy welcomed him. In Indiana Avenue he was
assiduous. Whatever the hints flung out by
Addie Inglis and Samuella Weatherby, they
received contradiction as far as that was possible
from obvious devotion.

As for his personal relations with Jennie, they
changed little from the *modus vivendi* agreed
upon. That she was growing more and more
grateful was evident, but gratitude wasn't what
he wanted. What he wanted he himself didn't
know, and, in a measure, he didn't care. Till she
got what she wanted, he could never be wholly
satisfied; and if she wanted Wray....

But at this point his reasoning faculties failed
him. If she wanted Wray and if Wray wanted
her, there would, of course, be but one thing for
him to do. It was that one thing itself which
remained elusive or obscure, dodging, disturbing,
and defying him. He could find a means to give
Jennie her freedom, or he could take her by brute
force, or, in certain circumstances, he could
dismiss her as not worthy of his love. The
trouble was that he couldn't see himself doing
any of the three; and yet if what seemed to be
true was true, he couldn't see himself as doing
the other thing.

The *modus vivendi*, like all other arrangements
of its kind, was therefore safe and convenient.
It settled nothing; but it was what the term implied,
a way of living. It was not an ideal way
of living, or a way that shielded anyone from
comment; but it was a way.

As for comment, it reached Bob only indirectly,
and not oftener than every now and then.
Perhaps it came in as pointed a form as it ever
assumed for him in a seemingly chance remark
from the chauffeur's wife, Mrs. Gull. It was
not a chance remark, for the neat, pretty, thin-lipped,
pinched-face Englishwoman who had
passed all her life "in service" didn't make ill-considered
observations.

"I suppose we shall see the young lady down,
sir, some day soon?"

"Yes, some day soon," Bob replied, cautiously,
getting ready in the hall to go to town.

"To remain?"

It was all summed up in those three syllables—all
the gossip on the Collingham estate, and
on all the estates at Marillo, not to go farther
afield.

"Not to remain just yet," Bob answered,
judiciously. "Mrs. Follett isn't well, and Mrs.
Collingham has two younger sisters whom she
has to take care of."

That this explanation was not adequate he
knew; and yet it was an explanation. "It
certainly do seem queer," Mrs. Gull observed to
the gardener and the gardener's wife, in a company
that included Gull; and Gull, who was
from Somersetshire, replied, "It most zure and
zertainly do."

But on the Sunday afternoon two weeks after
Bob's return "the young lady" paid her visit to
Collingham Lodge, accompanied by her mother
and two sisters.

The journey was made in what Gladys characterized
as "style," the style being mainly supplied
by Gull in his sedate chauffeur's uniform. But
the fact that he drove the car left Bob free to sit
with his guests in the tonneau. He put Jennie,
as hostess and mistress of the car, in the right-hand
corner, Mrs. Follett in the left one, and
Gussie in the middle. He and Gladys occupied
the adjustable seats behind the chauffeur. At
sight of the light linen rug with the Collingham
initials in crimson appliqué, Gussie and Gladys
exchanged appreciative glances, and they both
searched the neighboring piazzas for a glimpse of
Addie Inglis or Samuella Weatherby.

Acquainted now with the fact that Jennie had
viewed the celestial country whither they were
traveling, and with her descriptions of the
wonders she had seen almost learned by rote,
the girls came near to forgetting that Teddy was
in a cell. But his mother didn't forget it. Silent,
austere, incapable of pleasure, and waiting only
the moment of the boy's release and her own,
her eyes roamed the parched September landscape
and saw none of it. She did not appear unhappy—only
removed into a world of her own, a world
of long, long thoughts.

No one said much. There was not much to
say and a great deal to think about. Even the
house, the terraces, the gardens called forth no
more than "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" of approval.
Gladys declared that she felt herself wandering
through the castle scenes in "The Silver Queen,"
the latest screen masterpiece, but no one else
descended to such comparisons.

"It's like heaven," Gussie murmured timidly,
to Bob, as they strolled between hedges of
dahlias.

"Oh no, it isn't!" he laughed. "Three or
four places at Marillo are much finer than this."

Subdued by sheer ecstasy, they assembled on
the flagged terrace, where Mrs. Gull brought out
tea. Bob was pleased at Jennie's bearing toward
the chauffeur's wife—friendly with just the right
touch of dignity.

"Mr. Collingham tells me you're English.
We're almost English ourselves, since we were
born in Canada. I've never been in England, but
I should so love to go, though they say it's quite
different since the war."

There was no more to it than that, but Mrs.
Gull reported to her husband: "As much a
lady as any I've ever served under—and I do
know a lady when I see her. Miss Edith's a
lady, too, but not a patch on this one. She may
have been just as bad as they say she was, but
you'd never believe it to look at her, and the
sisters be'ave as pretty as pretty. Oh dear!
And they with a murderer for a brother! It do
seem queer, now don't it?"

To which Gull replied in his usual antiphon,
"It most zure and zertainly do."

The jarring chord in this harmony came from
Lizzie, while Bob was in search of Gull to bid
him bring round the car. Lizzie stood looking
down the two flowered terraces, where in honor
of the visitors the fountains had been turned on.

"I understand now why they couldn't afford
to pay your father his forty-five a week. It must
cost a great deal of money to keep this establishment
going."

"Oh, momma," Gussie pleaded, "don't begin
to hang crape just when we're able to enjoy ourselves
a little."

Lizzie turned on her daughter her rare and
almost forgotten smile.

"Very well, dear; enjoy yourself. Only a
world in which enjoyment must be bought at
such a price is not a fit world for human beings
to live in."

Gladys crept up, snuggling against her mother's
shoulder.

"Yes, momma darling; but you won't say
that any more till we get home, now will you?
It might hurt poor Bob's feelings if you did, and
you *can't* say that he's ever done us any harm."




CHAPTER XXV
===========


On the day after the visit to Collingham
Lodge, Bob left for the camp in the
Adirondacks. As yet he had no knowledge of
the family's attitude toward him more exact
than he could infer. He had written to them all
since his return, but their replies, even Edith's,
had been noncommittal. He guessed that they
had decided together not to express themselves
fully till they came face to face with him.

Even then, the approach to his own affairs was
indirect. An affectionate family reunion, based
seemingly on the ground that nothing had happened
when so much *had*, blocked the openings
for bringing up the subjects he had most at
heart. During the early part of that first evening
at Sugar Maple Point he couldn't get anyone
alone. Not till nearly bedtime did he himself
offer a lead by strolling out into the moonlight
in the hope that one of the three would follow
him.

It was full moonlight, turning Sugar Maple
Lake into a sheet of silver and gold laid at the
base of a velvety silhouette of mountains. The
magic of stillness, the tang of the forest, the repose
of the spirit from the girding and striving
of the world—these lovelinesses came to Bob
Collingham with a peace such as they always
brought, but which to-night couldn't find a
resting place. It couldn't find a resting place
because in this tranquil woodland more than
anywhere else he found himself wishing that
Teddy Follett wasn't in a cell.

Sugar Maple Lake is small for the Adirondacks,
being no more than three miles long and a mile
and a half in width. All its shores are owned by
rich men, mostly from New York, who can keep
themselves secluded. In seclusion they are
able to combine rusticity with the amenities of
life, in a wealthy, modern, American version of
Marie Antoinette's humble village at Versailles.
At a stranger's first glance, the "camps" are
but lumbermen's log cabins on a larger scale;
but when you come to the conveniences and
luxuries of living, they differ little from Marillo
Park.

Reaching the thin line of maples and pines
fringing the edge of the lake, Bob turned to see
if he was followed. At first there was no one.
The light from the windows and doors made a
golden splotch on the greenish silvery black of
the sloping lawn, but no figure appeared in the
glow. Coming to the conclusion that this, too,
was "a put-up job," he was strolling back again
when his mother, cloaked against the night air,
stole out and called his name softly.

On reaching him she took his arm, and together
they picked their way along a graveled
path leading toward the Point.

"I'm so glad you've come," she said, instantly.
"I've been having such a terrible time with your
father. You know how he is—so stern—so
relentless—"

"He's been corking to me."

"You mean the cablegram he sent you to Rio?
Oh, well, I made him do that. It's all over now,
dear, and you mustn't worry; but at first—that
night when we heard that the Follett boy had
got into trouble and I had to tell your father of
your marriage—well, I don't want to make things
out worse than they are, so I sha'n't tell you what
he said; but I did manage him. I soothed him
and told him how he ought to take it and what
he ought to do—with the result that you got that
message. You mustn't think it was easy, dear—"

"You've been a brick, old lady!"

"I'm your mother, Bob. It's all summed up
in that. Whatever makes for my children's
happiness makes for mine. Your father is not a
woman, and that's the difference between us.
And now I've had all this trouble with him over
Edith's engagement; but he's given in at last."

Bob sprang away from her.

"Edith engaged? Who to? Not to Ayling?"

She took his arm again, continuing toward the
Point.

"Yes, to Ernest. He was so opposed to it.
But I've battled for my child's heart, Bob, and
I've won out. Your father is giving her ten
thousand a year. It isn't much, but they ought
to be able to manage. We didn't write you,
partly because it was only settled last week, and
it was easier to wait and tell you."

"But I thought you didn't like the match
yourself, old girl."

"Oh, me! I have to turn myself every way at
once. I've no wishes of my own. To reconcile
my children to their father and their father to
my children is all I live and work for."

Coming to the little rustic gazebo perched on
the tip of the Point, they entered and sat down.
There being nothing to obtrude itself here on
lake and moon and mountain, it was as if they
had left human crudities behind. In the windless
air, the fragrance of Bob's cigarette mingled
with the aromatic pungency of millions and
millions of growing things.

"There was simply nothing else to be done,"
Junia resumed. "There was Edith eating her
heart out and stubborn as a mule—and with the
mess you've made of things—not that you could
*foresee*—or know the sort of people you were
getting in among—"

It was the opening he had been looking for,
and he knew that, whatever the outcome, he must
use it.

"Exactly what do you mean by that, mother?"

She seemed confused.

"I don't suppose I mean anything—except
what's obvious."

Not to press the point at once, he said, "You
saw Jennie."

"Yes; I sent for her."

"What did you think of her?"

"Oh, what anyone would think. She's charming—to
look at."

"Only to look at?"

"Her manner is charming, too. Of course!
I—I don't quite know what you want me to
say."

"How much did she tell you that afternoon?"

She looked at him through the moonlight.

"Hasn't she told *you*?"

"She's told me nothing—except that you
were lovely."

"Then, Bob dear, I'm afraid I can't add anything.
You see, they were *her* secrets—"

"Oh! Then she told you secrets!"

"Why, of course! What did you think?"

"Any other secret besides that she and I had
been married?"

"Bob darling, I don't think it's fair to put me
on the witness stand. She's your wife—and because
she's your wife I accept her. What I
know is buried here"—she smote her chest—"and
if for your sake and hers I try to forget it
I think you might let me."

For a few minutes he smoked in a silence
broken only by the maniac cry of a loon in the
distance.

"Did it occur to you," he asked at last, "that
she was a very simple girl who could easily become
entangled in her talk when she tried to
explain things to a woman of the world?"

"No; because the things said were very simple—just statements of fact as to which there could
be no misunderstanding."

"Had the statements of fact anything"—he
moistened his dry lips—"anything to do with—with
Hubert?"

"Some of them. But there!" She caught
herself up. "You're not going to make me tell
you things. I'm your mother, and if I intervene
at all, it must be in the way of helping you to
come together and not of putting you apart."
She rose, drawing her cloak about her. "I think
I must go in, dear. I'm beginning to feel the
damp."

He, too, rose, sitting down again sidewise on
the rustic rail of the summerhouse.

"Wait a minute, mother. I want to ask you
something. When I was at Marillo I wandered
into your room one day and saw a picture."

"A picture?"

"Yes; a picture; and I—I wondered how it—it
happened to come there."

She bent a little toward him, drawing her
cloak more closely about her. If it was acting it
was well done.

"It—it couldn't have been—"

He chucked the butt of his cigarette into the
lake.

"Yes, I guess it was. It had an inscription on
it—'Life and Death, by Hubert Wray.'"

"Oh, my God! Where did you say you saw it,
Bob?"

"In your bedroom, against the wall. I
thought it might be a portrait you'd had done,
and so lifted—"

"And I told them to put it out of sight. You
see, Hubert didn't send it till after we'd left the
house—just before he went to California. I'd
given orders that it was to be locked up in an
empty closet in my wardrobe room. Oh, Bob
darling, I don't know what you're going to think
of me."

"Oh, you're all right, mother. It wasn't you.
I—I only wondered how you'd come by the
thing at all."

She made an obvious effort at controlling
emotion.

"Why, Bob, it was this way. After—after
what Jennie told me that day I—I naturally
thought a good deal about Hubert—and—and
their relations to each other—"

"She talked about them, did she?"

"Well, you see, in a way she had to. She was
let in for it, poor thing. I can't tell you everything
without giving you the whole story—and
it's *her* story, as I've said before. I've no right
to betray her, and least of all to you."

"All right. Go on."

"So when I'd heard that Hubert had a new
picture at the Kahler Gallery—and everyone was
talking about it—and I knew from the things they
said what—what sort of a picture it was—"

"Yes, yes; I understand."

"Well, then, I—I went and saw it; and to—to
get it out of sight I bought it on the spot.
I didn't want it to be still on exhibition when you
came back; and I hoped that people would forget
it. I should have burned it at once, only
that Hubert delayed sending it, and—well, you
see how it happened. But even so, Bob dear,
you knew you were marrying a model—"

"Oh yes; it isn't that—not altogether."

She laid her hand on his shoulder.

"What is it, Bob darling? Can't you tell *me*?
I'm your mother, dear—"

But he moved away from her touch, as if
unable to bear sympathy.

"I can't tell you yet, old lady. I must see my
own way first. I've got to get through this
business about the boy before I take any step
whatever. She knows pretty well that I know
that—that she and Hubert are in love with—with
each other—"

"Oh, but Hubert is not in love with her. He
told me so."

"Not in love with her?" he cried, sharply.
"Why isn't he?"

"He said—oh, Bob, I can't talk about it.
You'll—"

"You've got to talk about it, mother. I can't
*half* know. I must *know*! If he wasn't in love
with her, what did he mean by making her
think—"

"I don't believe he did make her think. He
hinted that—that there'd been something between
them, but that—that with girls of that
sort you—you couldn't call it love."

"Why couldn't you?"

"Because—no, I won't, Bob! I'm your
mother. I must make things easier for you, and
not harder, and so—"

"It will make things easiest for me to know
the truth. So go on! Out with it! Tell me just
what he said."

She wrung her hands beneath the cloak.

"He said it—it couldn't be love—with a girl
whom—whom anyone could—"

He sprang from the rail, holding up his hand.

"Wait a minute, mother! Jennie's my wife.
I'm her husband. I believe in her."

With her speed in trimming her sails to the
wind, Junia caught the direction.

"I don't want you *not* to believe in her, Bob. I
didn't want to say any of the things that—that
you've been dragging out of me. You know
that."

"Yes, I know that, old lady, and I'm grateful.
I had to drag them out and know the worst
that could be said, so as to contradict it in—in
my heart."

"Oh, in your heart!"

"Yes, in my heart. It's where I'm strongest—just
as it's where dad is strongest, too, if he'd
only been true to himself. But that's a side
issue. What I want to say now—and what I'd
like you to understand—is that I *know* that
Jennie is good and pure and true and one of the
sweetest and loveliest spirits God ever made. I
know it!"

Junia couldn't be as feminine as she was
without gazing in awe and admiration at the
tall, upright figure, which seemed taller and more
upright for the moonlight.

"Would you know it—mind you, I'm only
*putting* it this way—would you know it—with
her own evidence to the contrary?"

"Yes, mother; I should know it—with her own
evidence to the contrary."

She shivered and turned away from him.

"I must really go in now, dear. I'm so afraid
of catching cold. But—but good night!"

Having kissed him, she went down the steps,
turning once more to look back at him. Silhouetted
against the oblong of light between two
rough pilasters, he was mechanically taking out
his case and selecting a cigarette.

"You're splendid, Bob," she said, with a ring
of sincerity that startled him. "That's the way
to love a woman. If there were only more men
like you! And—I *will* say it, in spite of the things
you've just made me confess—there must be
something very, very good in a girl to—to call
forth that kind of love."

But Jennie herself made that kind of love more
difficult. On returning to town Bob found her
changed. During all the weeks of the *modus
vivendi* she had been gentle, submissive, grateful,
accepting his terms in the provisional spirit in
which she understood them, and carrying them
out. When Teddy's affairs were settled—and
they never defined what they meant by that—she knew they were to have a reckoning; but
the reckoning was to be postponed till then.

And now, all at once, she seemed disposed to
force it on. His visit to his family had frightened
her. It frightened her the more in that he said
so little about it. He, too, was changed. He
was silent, pensive. He watched her more and
talked to her less; but when he watched her his
eyes, so she said to herself, had a queer kind of
sorrow in them. She didn't wonder at that.
Anyone's eyes would have had sorrow in them—anyone
who was seeing Teddy nearly every day
and filling him up with fortitude. If it had not
been for Teddy's sake she would have done her
best to get Bob "out of it" long ago.

Her fear now was of not being able to make
this attempt of her own accord. In other words,
she shrank from being found out before confessing
of her own free will. Twenty words from Mrs.
Collingham to her son would rob her, Jennie, of
such poor shreds of good intention as she still
possessed.

The trouble was, first, the lack of opportunity,
and then, the waiting for the right emotional moment.
It was not a thing you could spring at
any chance hour of the day. Something must
lead up to it and make it natural.

But a week after his return from Sugar Maple
Point, the occasion seemed to present itself. It
was one of those evenings in late September when
indoors was too stifling. In pursuance of his
plans for distracting the family, which meant so
much to Teddy, Bob had motored the mother
and daughters to a small country restaurant,
where they had had supper, and had brought
them home again. Lizzie and the two girls having
said good night, Jennie was about to do the
same, but he held her by the hand.

"Don't go in. Let's walk a bit."

"So it's come," Jennie thought. "I must do
it before we get home."

Even so she put it off. He, too, put off whatever
in himself was burning to find words. They
said as little as they could without being altogether
silent, and that little was mere commonplace.

"Wonderful night, isn't it?"

"Yes; and I think we're going to have a
breeze. It isn't so hot as an hour ago."

"Anyhow, the hot weather must be nearly
over. It will be October in a day or two."

"But we often have very hot days in October.
I remember that last year—"

So they came to Palisade Walk and turned
into it. Though the moon was not yet up, the
effulgence of its approach made a halo above the
city. Manhattan was a line of constellations
the riverway a gulf of darkness in which were
scattered stars. Along the parapet, shadowy
couples, mostly lovers, formed little ghostly
groups, while here and there was the point of
light of a cigarette or cigar.

They came to a halt, Jennie leaning against
one of the dragon's teeth, looking over at the
city, Bob standing a little back from her.

"I've never been here at night before," he
said. "I'd no idea it was so beautiful."

"We don't come very often ourselves. We live
so near that I suppose we're used to it."

"We had some wonderful evenings at Sugar
Maple Point; but that was another kind of thing."

She assembled her forces without turning to
look at him or making any change in her tone.

"I suppose you talked to your mother while
you were up there?"

"Oh, of course!"

"About me?"

Divining what was coming, he was on his
guard. "You were mentioned—naturally."

"And she told you things?"

"Some things."

"Some things about me that—that were new
to you?"

"Yes; some things about you that were new
to me."

"Did she tell you—everything?"

"I'm not in a position to say that it was everything;
but—but I rather think it was. What
of it?"

"Oh—only, that—that I'm as bad as she said
I was. I—I wanted you to know that it was
true."

The long stillness was broken only by a moan
like that of a wounded monster from a ferryboat
far away.

"Why do you want me to know that?" he
asked, at length.

"So that you'll see now that when—when
everything is over about Teddy—you'll be—you'll
be free."

"But suppose I don't want to be free?"

"But I want it for you."

"Why?"

"Oh, it's very simple." She turned, leaning
with her back to the rock. "It's just this, Bob—I'm
not fit to be your wife. I never was fit. I
never shall be fit. There it is in a nutshell. It
isn't education and social things that I'm talking
about. I'm—I'm too—I don't know how to put
it—but you're so big—"

"We'll drop all that, Jennie, if you don't
mind, because it isn't a case of fitness on either
your part or mine; it's one of love."

She hung her head.

"Oh, love! I—I don't think I—I know what
it is."

"I'm sure you don't. It's what I've told you.
I want to show you what it's like. Do you know
what I said to the old lady when she got off
those things? She didn't want to do it, mind
you," he hastened to explain. "She wanted to
keep your secrets and be true to you—but I
dragged them out of her. And do you know
what I said to her? Well, I'm going to repeat
it to you now. I said I wouldn't believe
anything against you—not even on your own
evidence."

"Is that love, Bob—or is it just being stubborn?"

"I shall let you find that out for yourself—as
we go on."

"Oh! as we go on?"

"Yes, as we go on, Jennie. We're going on.
Don't make any mistake about that. I know
how you feel. Everything looks so dark to you
now that you can't believe it will ever be light
again; but it will be, Jennie. All families and
all individuals go through these experiences—not
as terrible as yours, perhaps—but terrible
all the same. Not one of us is spared. Sometimes
it seems to you as if you just couldn't go
through with it; but you can. You must hang
on—and bear it—and it will pass. That's what
I'm here for—to help you to hang on—and,
Jennie, clinging together, as we're doing, we'll
come out to the light—even Teddy—and your
mother. Oh, look! There the light is now—the
light everlasting—that always comes back, if
we only wait for it!"

At the pointing of his finger and his sudden
cry she turned to face the eternal wonder of the
moonrise.




CHAPTER XXVI
============


During the next few months, the necessity
for bracing Teddy and his sisters to meet
fate threw Bob Collingham's personal preoccupations
more and more into the background.
All that was implied by the fact that Jennie was
his wife and he was her husband went into this
single supreme task.

Habit came to his aid by fitting them all to the
situation as though they had never been in any
other. They grew used to the fact that Teddy
was in jail and might come out of it only by one
exit. Teddy grew used to it himself. The
family, once more at Marillo, grew used to the
odd arrangement by which Bob and Jennie
worked together and lived apart. The Collinghams
grew used to the thought of the Folletts,
and the Folletts to that of the Collinghams.

"You get used to anything," Junia commented
to her husband, as one who has made a new discovery.
"It seems to me as if Edith's living in
that flat on Cathedral Heights and keeping only
one maid is all I'd ever dreamed for her."

To Bob, this wonting of the mind was the
easier because Wray stayed in California, his
absence making it possible to leave in abeyance
the subjects that couldn't yet be touched upon.

The first chance of fortifying the three girls
seemed to present itself on a night in that
autumn when it was still warm enough to sit on
the screened piazza. His car was, as usual, before
the door, and in an hour or so he would be making
his way to Marillo. As he had returned to his
work at the bank, his spare time was now in the
evenings.

"If you want to do something for me, Gladys,
there's a way."

He said this in reply to an aspiration of all
three, in which the youngest sister had been
spokesman.

Gladys's voice was eager and affectionate.

"What way, Bob? Tell us. We'll do anything."

Smoothing Pansy's back as she lay on his
crossed knees, he considered how best to make it
clear. Gladys sat close to him, as the one who
most easily took him fraternally. Gussie, in
whom he stirred an unusual self-consciousness,
kept herself more aloof. Altogether in the
shadow, Jennie was seemingly withdrawn, and
yet more intensely aware of him than anyone.

"It's this way," he tried to explain: "Living
is like climbing a mountainside. You drag yourself
up to a ledge where you can stand and take
breath, and feel that you've reached somewhere.
Then, just as you think that you can camp there
and be comfortable for the rest of your life, you
find yourself summoned to move to the next
ledge higher up. At that some of us get discouraged; some fall off and go down; but most
of us brace ourselves for another great big test.
Do you see?"

Gladys answered, doubtfully, "I see—a little."

"Well then, the thing we need for the test is
pluck, isn't it?"

Gussie spoke dreamily.

"We need pluck for everything."

"So we do; and I often think that we don't
make enough of it. Pluck is different from courage,
because it's—how shall I say?—it's a little
more cheery and intimate. Courage is like a
Sunday suit that you wear for big occasions;
but pluck is your everyday clothes, which you
need all the time and feel easy in. Courage is
noble and heroic—something we'd be shy about
claiming. Pluck is the courage of the common
man, which anyone can feel he has a right to."

"I can't," Gussie confessed. "I'm the awfulest
coward."

With this Gladys agreed.

"Yes, Gus is a regular scarecat. I'm not
afraid of hardly anything."

"We're all cowards in our way; but we could
all be plucky when we mightn't like to call ourselves
brave. Do you get what I mean?"
Gladys made a sound of assent which seemed to
answer for all three. "Well, what I'm trying to
say is this: That the time has come when we're
all being summoned—you three—and me—and
Teddy—and all of us—to pull up to another
ledge. It's going to be tough, but we can make
up our minds that we can go through with it. I
don't mean just knowing that we *must* go
through with it, but knowing that we *can*."

There was silence for the two or three minutes
during which the girls thought this over.

"You said," Gladys reasoned, "that it was
something we could do for you. I don't see—"

"You'd do it for me, because it's easier to
pull with strong people rather than with weak
ones. You see, this is something which no one
of us can meet alone; we must all meet it together,
and the stronger each of us is the stronger
we all are. Being strong is a matter of knowing
that you're strong, just as being weak is the
same. If I was sure that none of you was
going to break down, I could be stronger myself,
and we could all buck up Teddy."

After another brief silence, Gladys sighed.

"All the same, it would be terrible—if they
did anything to him."

"Not more terrible than what millions of
sisters faced in the last few years, with their
brothers blown to bits. They were able to bear
it by getting the idea that they could."

Jennie spoke for the first time.

"Ah, but that was glory, and this is disgrace."

"Then it calls for more pluck—that's all.
The test comes to one in one way and to another
in another. Real glory is in meeting it."

It was still Jennie who urged the difficulties.

"But when it's the hardest test that ever
comes to anyone in the world!"

"Why, then, it's pluck again, and still more
pluck. It *is* the hardest test that ever comes to
anyone in the world. It's harder than when
women hear their boys are missing, and never
know what becomes of them; and that's pretty
hard. But, Jennie, hard things are the making
of us, and if we come through the hardest test
in the world and still keep our kindlier feelings
and our common sense, why, then, we come out
pretty strong, don't we?"

Jennie said no more. She liked to have him
talk to them in this way. It took for granted
that they were worth talking to, and to become
worth talking to had been a secret aim since the
day when she first learned the value of pictures
and books. A good many times she had stolen
in to confer with the genial custodian at the
Metropolitan; a good many volumes she had
hidden in her room to study after she went to
bed. She had proved to herself that she had a
mind; and now Bob was hinting at unknown
resources of strength. It nerved her; it put new
heart in her. Having always been taught to consider
herself weak, the suggestion that she could
come through her test victoriously—that she
could help him and Gussie and Gladys and Teddy
and her mother to do the same—thrilled her like
a sudden revelation.

To Bob himself the theme was not a new one,
though it was the first time he had ever got any
of it into words. He had been mulling over it
and round it ever since the war first called him
from a state of mental lethargy. Needing then
a clew to life, he had cast about him without
finding one. Neither Groton nor Harvard had
ever given him anything he could seize. His
parents hadn't given him anything, nor had
their religion. Mentally, he had gone to France
much as a jellyfish puts to sea, to be tossed about
without volition of its own, and get its support
from the food that drifts its way. Nothing much
had drifted his way till he found himself in the
hospital.

There, in the long, empty days and sleepless
nights, the "why" of things played in and out of
his brain like a devil's tattoo. He hated to
think that all he had witnessed was futility and
waste, and yet no explanation that anyone gave
him made it seem otherwise. The question of
suffering was the one that most perplexed him.
What was the good of it? Why had it to be?
Even the agony of his slashed head and crushed
foot was almost beyond bearing; and what was
that in comparison with all the pain, physical and
emotional, at that minute in the world? What
was the idea? How did it get you anywhere?

In as far as he received an answer, it came one
night when he waked from a light doze. He
waked repeating certain words which he recognized
as vaguely familiar:

"*Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier
of Jesus Christ.*"

He said them over two or three times before
getting their significance.

"That's it," he thought then. "That's why
we have to go through all this rumpus. 'Thou
therefore endure *hardness*!' *Endure* it! Accept
it! Rub it in! That's it, by gum!" The expletive
was the strongest in which his feeble
state allowed him to indulge; but he continued:
"That's what's the matter with me. I'm not
hard. I'm soft. I'm soft inside. In my mind,
in my heart, I'm like putty, like dough. It
isn't that I'm tender; I'm just *soft*. If I've
ever had to bear anything hard, I've kicked
like the dickens; and that's why I'm such an
ass now. 'Thou therefore endure *hardness*!'
I'll be hanged if I won't try."

So the trying came to be a kind of religion—not
a very vital religion, or one as to which he
was very keen, and yet a religion. During the
winter he was seeing Jennie, and the spring he
married her, and the summer he spent in South
America, he had fumbled with it without getting
hold of it. Not till he began his strivings with
Teddy, and his efforts to divert the minds of
Teddy's family, did it grow sharply defined to
his vision as a way of life.

Perhaps it was Teddy who taught him. Perhaps
they mutually taught each other. He
couldn't tell. He only became aware that something
was working in the boy like the might of
spirit in the inner man. Possibly Teddy was
learning more quickly than himself because his
lessons were more intensive.

He noticed this first on the day when he went,
at the lawyer's suggestion, to back up the argument
that to plead guilty was the only hope.

"I've done all I can with him," Stenhouse
declared. "Now it's up to you. He thinks
you're God; and so you may have some influence."

"But I never will," Teddy answered, coolly.
"I'd never have done society—as the chaplain
calls it—any harm if society hadn't done me
harm to begin with. I may be guilty in the
second place, but society is guilty in the first,
and no one will make me say anything different
from that."

"That's all very well, Teddy; but society
won't accept the plea."

"Then it can do the other thing."

Bob's tone became significant.

"And you realize what—what the other thing
might be?"

"You bet I do! You can't live in Murderers'
Row without having *that* rubbed into you."

They talked softly, in a corner of the visitors'
room, because other little groups were scattered
about, each centering round some sullen, swarthy
man, wreathed in mystery and darkness.

"That's all right, old chap," Bob agreed;
"but you see, don't you, that it's only a stand
for an idea?"

"It's a stand for telling the truth, isn't it?"

"The truth—as you see it?"

"The truth as it is—as I'm willing to bank
on it."

"Banking on it in a way that—that may call
for a great deal of pluck."

"Well, I've got a great deal of pluck."

"Yes—if you've got enough. It's one thing
to say so now, and another to prove it when the
time comes."

In his suppressed vehemence Teddy grasped
Bob's wrist, as the hands of both lay on the
small table above which their heads came
together.

"I've got the pluck for anything but to go
before their court and say what you want me
to say. I took the money because my father
and mother, after slaving for society all their
lives, had a right to it; I shot a man because
they'd got me so jumpy with all the wrongs
they'd done me that I didn't know what my
hand was up to. If they won't let me have
my kind of justice, they'll just have to dope me
out their own, and I'll swallow it."

Another conversation, in the same spot, and
with heads together in the same way, was
gentler.

"I know pretty well what they're going to
hand me out—and it'll be all right. What
kind of life would I have now, even if they
acquitted me? What could I have had even if
I'd never got into this scrape at all? I'm not
cut out for big things. I'm just the same size
as poor old dad, and I'd have gone the same
way. Ma's got it straight—it's not good enough.
Think of rotting in an office all your life just to
reach the gorgeous sum of forty-five a week,
and when you've got it to be chucked into the
hell of the unemployed! Say, Bob, why can't
everyone have enough in a world where there's
plenty to go round?"

"I guess it's because we haven't the right
kind of world."

"But why haven't we? We've been at it
long enough."

"Perhaps not. That may be where the
trouble lies. When life came on this planet, to
begin with, it took millions of years to get it
anywhere. Nobody knows how long it was before
the thing that lived in the water could creep
on the land; but it was time to be reckoned by
ages. When you come to ages, the human race
is young. It's made a life for itself which it
doesn't know how to swing. In a few more
ages it may learn; but it hasn't learned as yet."

Teddy reflected.

"So you've just got to take it as it is."

"That seems to be the number. We may kick
because it isn't perfect, but we don't know how
to make it perfect, and that's all there is to
say."

"It's easier for your kind to say than for ours."

"It's not as easy as it seems for any kind.
I don't see anyone, rich or poor, who hasn't
to spend most of his energy in bucking up.
The poor think it's easier for the rich, because
they have the money; and the rich think it's
easier for the poor, because they haven't the
responsibilities. So there you are. I begin to
think that making yourself strong—\ *hard*—tough
in your inner fiber—is about the biggest asset
you can bring to life."

"Or death," Teddy said, softly.

"Or death," Bob agreed.

On another occasion, Teddy was in another
mood.

"If I didn't get it now, I guess it would have
come along later; so that it's just as well to
have it over."

Bob's mind went back to Stenhouse's view
of Teddy's character.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, just what I say. You can't see red like
me without being a more dangerous cuss than
you mean to be. I'd have got into trouble
sometime, even if I hadn't done this." Before
Bob could find a response Teddy went on: "I
suppose you think that because I don't say
anything about Flynn I haven't got him on my
mind. Well, you're wrong."

"Oh, I didn't think that."

"But what *can* I say? I think and think and
think, and then begin thinking again. So that,"
he jerked out, "that's a reason, too."

"A reason for what, Teddy?"

He answered obliquely.

"I can't keep up that kind of thinking. I'll
go crazy if I do. I'd rather be sent to where I
can get another point of view. I don't care
what kind of point of view it is, so long as it
isn't this one. If I could come face to face with
Flynn, I believe I could make him understand.
Do you suppose there's any chance of that?"

It was inevitable that, in the long run, speculative
questions should lead them farther still.

"What do you suppose God is?" Teddy said,
unexpectedly, one day.

Bob smiled.

"Ask me something easier."

"But you must have some idea."

"I'm not sure that I have."

"Don't you believe in God? I should have
thought that you'd be the kind of cuss who
would."

"I don't know that you can call it believing.
It's more like—like having a kind of instinct—helped
out by a little thinking."

"Have I got the instinct?"

"Can't you tell that yourself?"

"If I told you you'd howl."

"No, I shouldn't. Go to it."

Teddy laughed sheepishly, as if he had ventured
to peer into secrets which were none of his
business.

"I'll tell you the way God seems to me—it's
all come to me while I've been in there."
He nodded toward the cells. "I don't seem to
get him as a great big man, the way the chaplain
says he is. He's all right, the chaplain, only he
don't seem to know anything about God. He
can gas away to beat the band about law, and
society, and the good of the community, and
hell to pay when you don't respect them; but
when it comes to God—it's nix."

"Well, what do you make out for yourself?"

"I haven't made it out exactly. It's as if
some great big hand had pulled aside a curtain—but
it's a curtain that I didn't know was there.
See?"

"Yes, I see. And what does it show you?"

"That's the funny part of it. I can't tell
you what it shows me. I don't exactly see it;
I only know—mind you, I'm just telling you
how it seems to me—I only know that it's
God."

"But I suppose, if you know that it's God, you
have an idea of what it's like?"

"Ye-es; it's like—like a country into which
I'm traveling—not with my body—see?—but
with my *self*. No," he corrected, "that's not it.
It isn't a country; it's more like a life. Oh,
shucks! I haven't got it straight yet. Now
look! This is the way it is. Suppose that
everything we see was alive—that these chairs
were alive, and the walls, and the table—that
every blamed thing we ever touch or use was
alive, and had a voice. See?" Bob nodded
that he saw. "Now, suppose every voice was
trying to make you understand things. The
table would say, 'This is the way God wants
you to work'; and the chair, 'This is the way
God wants you to rest'; and the walls, 'This
is the way God stands round you and backs you
up.' Everything would be helping you then,
instead of putting itself dead against you the
way we have it here."

"I get the idea; but would that be God?"

Over this question the boy's face brooded
thoughtfully.

"It mightn't be God in the way that you're
you and I'm me. It would be more like a way
of *knowing* God. It's like my case in the courts.
It's set down as 'The People against Edward
S. Follett.' But I don't see the People; I only
feel what they do to me. It's something like
that. I don't see God; but I kind of feel—" He
broke with another apologetic laugh. "Oh, I
guess it's all wrong. Gussie'd call me a gump.
It just kind of gets you; that's all. It makes me
feel as if I was moving on into something—but
I guess I'm not."

The pensive silence that followed was broken
by Bob's saying:

"That's what I mean by instinct."

Teddy resumed as if he hadn't heard. "When
I wake up in the night—and waking up in the
night in that place, with snores and groans and
guys talking in their sleep and having nightmares,
is some stunt, believe *me*—but when I
do, it's just as if I had great big arms round me,
and some one was saying: 'All right, Teddy, I'm
holding you. Keep a stiff upper lip. I'll make
it as easy as I can for you and everyone else.
I'm just drawing you—drawing you—drawing
you—a wee little bit at a time—over here,
where you'll get your big chance.' What's more,
Bob," he went on, as if he touched on the heart
of his interest, "it says it'll take care of
Flynn and his wife and his poor little kiddies,
and do the things—" Once more he broke off
with his uneasy laugh. "Ah, what's the
use? You think I'm a quitter, don't you?"

"Why should I think that?"

"Oh, I don't know. I talk like a quitter.
But it isn't that. If I could still do anything
for ma and the girls—"

"I'm looking after them, old boy."

"So there you are. What'd be the good of
my staying?" He added, between clenched
teeth, "God, how I'd hate to go back!"

"Back into the world?"

He spoke as if to himself: "You see—that
day—the day the thing happened—and they
came and caught me—and did all those things
to me—and I saw Flynn lying by the road—it
was—it was a kind of sickener. If putting
me out of the way is the thing in the wind, it
was done right there and then. Right there and
then I seem to have begun—moving on." He
drew a long breath. "And I'd rather keep
moving, Bob—no matter to where—no matter
to what—than turn back again to face a bunch
of men."




CHAPTER XXVII
=============


Teddy was not called on to face a bunch of
men till going to the courtroom for his
trial. Dressed long before the hour in a new
dark-blue suit, fresh linen, and a dark-blue tie,
his prison pallor, a little like that of death, put
him out of the list of the active and free. As
he sat on the edge of his bunk, somber with
dread, he was nevertheless obliged to find
suitable jocosities with which to answer the
good-luck wishes that came slithering along the
walls from the neighboring cells. It was half past
nine before two guards whom he had never
seen before, stalwart fellows well over six feet,
came to the door and unlocked it.

"Ready, Follett? Time's come."

Springing to his feet, he found handcuffs
slipped round his wrists before he was aware of
what was being done. It was an unexpected
indignity. He had never been handcuffed
before.

"Say, fellows," he protested, "I'll go all
right. I don't want these on me."

"Come along wid ye."

The words were friendly rather than rough,
as was also the hand of a guard on each shoulder
as they steered him along the corridor. The
Brig is a rambling building, or succession of
buildings, with courthouse and house of detention
under the same series of roofs. The pilgrimage
was long—upstairs, downstairs, through
passages, past offices, past courtrooms, with
guards, police, clerks, lawyers, litigants, loungers,
standing about everywhere. The sight of a man
in handcuffs arrested all eyes for the moment,
and stilled all tongues. With his glances flying
from right to left and from left to right, Teddy
again began to feel the sense of separation from
the human race which had struck to his soul
that day on the marshes.

Of his other impressions, the chief was that of
squalor. It seemed as if all the elements had
been brought together that would make poor
Justice vulgar and unimpressive. Out of a
squalid cell he had been pushed along squalid
hallways, through groups of squalid faces, into
a squalid courtroom, where he was ushered into
a squalid cage, long and narrow, with a seat
hardly wider than a knife blade. Once within
the cage the handcuffs were taken off, the door
was locked, and each of the stalwart guards
took his stand at one end. The cage being
raised some six or eight inches above the level of
the floor, the boy was well in sight of everyone.
It was like being on a throne—or a Calvary.

On taking his seat, he was vaguely conscious
of a bank of faces, tier above tier, at the
back of the courtroom. Before him some
fifteen or twenty officials, reporters, and lawyers
lolled at their tables, walked about, yawned,
picked their teeth, or told anecdotes that raised
a smothered laugh. Most of them struck him
as untidily dressed; few looked intelligent.
Among them a portly man, whom he afterward
saw as the district attorney, in a cutaway coat,
with a line of piqué at the opening of his waistcoat,
seemed like a person in fancy costume.
Everyone paused as he entered the cage, but, a
glance having satisfied their curiosity, they paid
him no further attention.

The trial lasted three days, passing before
his eyes like a motion-picture film of which he
was only a spectator. Try as he would, he found
it hard to believe that the proceedings had anything
to do with him. "All this fuss," he would
comment to himself, grimly, "to get the right
to kill a man." The strain of being under so
many cruel or indifferent eyes sent him back
with relief to his cell, where during the nights
he slept soundly.

His one bit of surprise came from Stenhouse's
final argument in his defense. Up to
that point, both defense and prosecution had
struck him as more or less silly. The state had
tried to prove him a desperado whom it was
dangerous to let live; the defense had done its
best to show him a youth of arrested intelligence,
not responsible for his acts. He grinned
inwardly when Jennie, Gussie, and half a dozen
of his old chums testified to foolish pranks,
forgotten or half forgotten by himself, in the
hope of convincing the court that he had never
had the normal sense.

But Stenhouse in his concluding speech
transcended all that, taking Teddy's own stand
as the only one which offered the ghost of a
chance of acquittal. He began his final appeal
quietly, in a tone little more than colloquial.

"There's an old saying, a variant on something
said by Benjamin Franklin, which we
might remember oftener than we do. It's
terse, pithy, humorous, wise. Some one has
called it the finest bit of free verse composed in
the eighteenth century. Listen to it. '*It is
hard to make an empty sack stand upright.*' So
it is. The empty sack collapses of its own
accord. It can't do anything but collapse. It
was not meant to stand upright. To demand
that it shall stand upright is to insist on the
impossible. A full sack will stand as solid as
a tree. A group of full sacks will support one
another. Put the empty sack among them
and from the very law of gravitation it will
go down helplessly. Now, gentlemen of the
jury, you're being asked to bring in a verdict
against the empty sack—the sack that's been
carefully kept empty—because it hasn't the
strength and stability of that which all the
coffers of the country have combined to fill."

With this as a text, Stenhouse drew a picture
of the industrious man who is limited by the
very nature of his industry. He is not limited
by his own desire, but by the use society wishes
to make of him. Serving a turn, he is schooled
to serve that turn, and to serve no other turn.
This schooling takes him unawares. He doesn't
know it has begun before waking to find himself
drilled to a system from which only a giant can
escape. Few men being giants, the average man
plods on because he doesn't know what else to
do. There is rarely anything else *for* him to do.
Having taken the first ill-paid job that comes his
way, he hasn't meant to give himself to it all
his life. He dreams of something bigger, more
brilliant, more productive. The boy who runs
errands sees himself a merchant; the lad who
becomes a clerk looks forward to being a
partner; the young man who enters a bank is
sure that some day he will be bank president.

"Sometimes, gentlemen, these early visions
work out to a reality. But in the vast majority
of cases, the youth, before he ceases to be a
youth, finds himself where the horse is when he
has once submitted to the bridle. He can go
only as he is driven. Life is organized not to
let him go in any other way. Needing him for a
certain purpose, it keeps him to that purpose.
Work, taken as a great corporate thing, is
made up of hundreds of millions of tiny tasks
each of which calls for a man. The man being
found, he must be trimmed to the size of his
task."

Stenhouse had no quarrel with methods universally
followed by civilized man. To criticize
them was not his intention, as it was not
his intention to complain because man had not
yet brought in the Golden Age.

"But I do claim that the smaller the task to
which a man is nailed down, and the smaller
the pay he is able to earn, the greater the responsibility
of collective society toward that individual."

There was a time, he declared, when much
had been said to the discredit of slavery; but
one thing could be urged in its favor. The man
who had been kept throughout his life to one
small job was not thrown out in his old age to
provide for himself as he could. Having worked
for society, as society was constituted then, society
recognized at least the duty of taking care
of him. Stenhouse disclaimed any comparison
between free American labor and a servile condition;
he was striving only for a principle.
Men couldn't be screwed down during all their
working lives to the lowest wage on which body
and soul could be kept together, and then be
judged by the same standards as those who had
had opportunity to make provision for themselves
and their families. The same interpretation
of the law couldn't be made to cover the
cases of the full sack and the empty one.

"And yet," he went on, changing his tone
with his theme, "the empty sack is of value
because it can be filled. Coarse, cheap, negligible
as it seems, it is much too good to throw away.
It is an asset to production, to the country's
trade, to the whole world's wealth. And, gentlemen, what shall we say when we call that empty
sack—a man?"

The value of the human asset was the next
point to which he led his listeners.

"It is only a truism to say that among all
the precious things with which the Almighty
has blessed his creation the most precious is a
human life; and yet we live in a world which
seems to believe this so little that we must
sometimes remind ourselves that it is so. Within
a few years we have seen millions of men reckoned
merely as *stuff*. As productive assets to the
race, they haven't counted. We could read of
a day's loss on the battlefield running up
into the thousands and never turn a hair. We
came to regard a young man's life as primarily a
thing to throw away. It is for this reason,
gentlemen of the jury, that I venture to remind
you that a young man's life is primarily a thing
to save. It may be a truism to say that a
human life is the most precious of all created
things; but it is a truism of which we are only
now, to our bitter and incalculable cost, beginning
to realize the truth."

He went on to draw a picture of the contributions
to the general good made by the Folletts,
father and son. Their work had been
humble, but it had been essential. Essential
work faithfully performed should guarantee an
old age protected against penury. He reminded
his hearers that he was not opposed to the law
of supply and demand, which was the only
known method by which the business of the
world could be carried on. He only pleaded for
the same humanity to a man as was shown to
a broken-down old horse. From his one interview
with Lizzie, Stenhouse had got what he
called "the good line," "*Thou shalt not muzzle
the ox that treadeth out the corn.*" Of this
he now made use, following it up with St.
Paul's explanation: "Doth God take care for
oxen? Or saith he it altogether for our sakes?
For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that
he that ploweth may plow in hope; and that he
that thresheth in hope should be partaker of
his hope."

"Gentlemen, so long as we live in a society in
which the vast majority of us can never be partakers
of the hope with which we started out, so
long must justice take account of the suffering
of the poor muzzled brute that treadeth
out the corn. If he goes frenzied and runs
amuck, he cannot be judged by the standards
which apply to him who has been left unmuzzled
and free to satisfy his wants. It is not fair;
it is not human. It is true that to protect your
own interests you have the power to shoot him
down; but when he lies dead at your feet, no
more muzzled in death than he was in life, there
is surely somewhere in the universe an avenging
force that is on his side, and which will make
you—you as representatives of the society
which has placed its action in your hands—and
you as twelve private individuals with duties
and consciences—there is somewhere in the
universe this avenging force which will require
his blood at your hands and make you pay the
penalty. Surely you can find a better use for
that valuable asset, a young man's life, than just
to take it away. For the sake of the public
whose honor is in your keeping, you must play
the game squarely. For the sake of your own
future peace of mind, you must not add your
own crime to this poor boy's misfortune. Your
duty at this minute is not merely to interpret the
dead letter of a law; it is to be the voice of the
People whom you represent. Remember that
by the verdict you bring in that People will be
committed to the most destructive of all destructive
acts, or it will get expression for that
deep, human common sense which transcends
written phrases to act in the spirit of the greatest
of us all, judging not according to the appearance—not
according to the appearance, gentlemen,
and you remember who counseled that—but
judging righteous judgment."

He fell back into his seat, exhausted. He was so
impressive and impassioned as to convince many
of his hearers that he believed his own plea,
while to some who had considered the verdict a
certainty it was now in doubt.

Among Teddy's friends a hope arose that, in
spite of all expectation to the contrary, he might
be saved. Bob looked over and smiled. Teddy
smiled back, but mainly because he rejoiced in
what he felt to be his justification. He couldn't
see how they could convict him after such a
setting forth as that, though for the consequences
of acquittal he had so little heart.

In the excitement of the courtroom, the
judge's voice, when he began to give the jury
their instructions, fell like cool, quiet rain on
thunderous sultriness. He was a small man,
with a leathery, unemotional face, framed by an
iron-gray wig of faultless side-parting and long,
straight, unnaturally smooth hair. He had the
faculty of seeming attentive without being influenced.
Listening, reasoning, asking a question,
or settling a disputed point, he gave the impression
of having reduced intelligence to the soulless
accuracy of a cash register.

He reminded the jury that the law was not on
trial; society was not on trial; the industrial experience
of one Josiah Follett was not a feature
in the case. They must not allow the issue to be
confused by the social arguments which befogged
so many of the questions of the day. It was quite
possible that the world was not as perfect as it
might be; it was even possible that the law
was not the most perfect law that could be passed.
But these were considerations into which they
could not enter. In merely approaching them,
they would lose their way. The law as it stands
is the voice of the People as it is; and the only
questions before them were, first, whether or not
the accused had broken that law, and second, if
he had broken it, to what degree. In answering
these questions, they must limit themselves to
the bare facts of the charge. With the prisoner's
temptations they had nothing to do, except in so
far as they tended to create intent. The consequences
to his person, whether in the way of
liberty or of the last penalty, were no concern of
others. Justice in itself, viewed as justice in the
abstract, was no concern of theirs. They were
not, however, to burden their consciences with
the fear that the accused was thus deprived of
protection. The duty of a jury was not protection,
but discernment. The administration of the
law was far too big and complex a thing for any
one body of men to deal with. Justice having
many aspects, the law had as many departments.
Protection was in other hands than theirs. The
application of justice pure and simple, involving
punishment for guilt without excluding pity for
the provocation, was duly guaranteed by the
methods of the state. They would find their
task simplified by dismissing all such hesitations
from their minds and confining themselves to the
definite question which he repeated. Had the
prisoner at the bar broken the existing law, and
if he had so broken it, to what degree?

Having explained the difference between manslaughter
and murder, as well as between first-degree
murder and second, he admitted that, in
case the accused was found guilty, there was
much to indicate the second degree rather than
the first. There was, however, one damning
fact. The hand that had shot Peter Flynn went
on at once to shoot William Jackman. The
killing of one man might have been an accident.
If not an accident, it might still have mitigating
features. But for the murderer of a first man to
proceed at once to become the murderer of a
second indicated a planned and deliberate
intent....

When the court had adjourned and the jury had
retired to consider their verdict, one of the guards
unlocked the cage and Teddy was taken down
by a corkscrew staircase to a room immediately
below. It was a small room, lighted by one
feeble bulb, and aired from an air shaft. A
table and two chairs stood in the middle of the
room; a shiny, well-worn bench was fixed to one
of the walls. The guards took the chairs; Teddy
sat down on the bench. One of the guards cut
off a piece of tobacco and put it in his mouth; the
other lighted a cheap cigar. Taking another
from an upper waistcoat pocket, he held it out
toward Teddy.

"Have a smoke, young fella?"

Teddy shook his head. He was hardly aware
of being addressed. Nothing else was said to
him, and the guards, almost silently, began a
game of cards. This waiting with prisoners for
verdicts was always a tedious affair, and one to
be got through patiently.

To Teddy, it was not so much tedious as it was
unreal. He sat with arms folded, his head sunk,
and the foot of the leg which was thrown across
the other leg kicking outward mechanically.
Except for a rare grunted remark between the
players, there was no sound but the slap of the
cards on the table and the scooping in of the
tricks.

After nearly half an hour the door opened and
Bob Collingham came in with a basket containing
sandwiches and a thermos bottle of hot coffee.
With a word of explanation to the guards, he
was allowed to take his seat beside the prisoner.

"Hello, old sport! Must be relieved that it's
so soon going to be over. Brought you something
to eat."

With this introduction, they took up commonplace
ground as if it was a commonplace occasion.
Teddy asked after his mother and sisters;
Bob gave him the family news. Of the
trial they said nothing. Of what they were
waiting for no more was said than that Bob had
persuaded Jennie and Gussie to go home, promising
to come and tell them the decision. Lizzie
and Gladys had not appeared in the courtroom
at all. Of all this Teddy approved as he munched
his sandwiches stolidly.

The supply of food and coffee being large, they
invited the guards to share with them. The invitation
was accepted, the officers suspending
their game. The talk became friendly, commenting
on the judge's wig and the glass eye of
the foreman of the jury, but not touching directly
on the trial. These subjects, as well as the supply
of sandwiches, exhausted, the guards returned
to their game, the two young men being left to
themselves.

For the most part they sat in silence—a
silence as nearly cheerful as the circumstances
permitted.

"Don't worry about me, Bob," Teddy murmured
once. "I'm not going to care much whichever
way it is. Honest to God! I don't say I
wouldn't like it if they sent me back home; but
if they don't—"

Allowing his companion to finish the sentence
for himself, he lapsed into silence again.

Another time, speaking as if subterranean
thought came for a moment to the surface, he
said:

"I liked what you said about hardness—and
pluck. I've been practicing away on them both—making
myself tough inside. Funny how you
can, isn't it? You think at first that, because
you're soft, you've got to be soft; but you find
out that you're just what you like to make yourself.
That's a great line, Bob, '*Thou therefore
endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.*'
You watch," he added, with a tremulous smile,
"and you'll see me doing it."

"All right, old boy, I'll watch, but we'll all be
doing it with you. We're practicing, too. Jennie
and the girls are regular bricks, and, of course,
your mother—"

He smiled again.

"Good old ma! She sure is the best ever. I'd
be sorrier for her than I am if I didn't feel certain
that if—that if I go she won't wait long after
me." He swung away from this aspect of his
thought to a new one. "Say, Bob, do you suppose
it's a sign that God really is with me—gump
as I am!—that he's sent you to take ma and the
girls off my hands—\ *you* know—and make my
mind easy?"

They discussed those happenings which might
reasonably be held to be signs of Divine good
intention, after which silence fell again. The
guards grunted or yawned; the cards were
slapped on the table; the tricks were pulled in
with the scratching of paper against wood. An
hour went by; another hour, and then another.
In spite of his efforts to make himself hard,
Teddy felt the tension. Having accidentally
touched Bob's hand, he grasped it with a clutch
like a vise. He was still clutching it when a
messenger came to the door to say that the jury
was about to render their verdict and the prisoner
must come back into court.

Bob climbed the corkscrew first. A guard
followed him, then Teddy, then the other guard.
It was after seven in the evening. The courtroom,
relatively empty, had a sickly look, under
crude electric lighting. But half of the spectators
had come back, and only those officials and
lawyers who were obliged to be in their places.
All the reporters were there, watching for every
shade in Teddy's face and seeing more than he
expressed.

Bob managed to pass in front of the cage.

"Remember, Teddy—hardness is the big
word."

"Sure thing!" Teddy whispered back.

The jury filed in. The judge took his place.
Teddy was ordered to stand up. He stood
very straight, his hands in the pockets of his
jacket. In all that met the eye he was a sturdy,
stocky young man, pleasing to look at, and with
no suggestion of the criminal. His face was
grave with a gravity beyond that of death, but
he showed no sign of nervousness.

If anyone showed nervousness it was the foreman
of the jury, a good-natured fish dealer, with
a drooping reddish mustache, who had never
expected to be in this situation. When asked if
the jury had arrived at a verdict his voice
trembled as he answered:

"We have."

"What is your verdict?"

"We find the accused guilty of murder."

"Of murder in the first or the second degree?"

"In the first."

That was all. Bob wheeled round toward
Teddy, who smiled courageously.

"It's all right, Bob," he whispered, as their
hands met over the rail of the cage. "I've got
the right line on it. It's my medicine, and I
know how to take it. Keep ma and the girls
from worrying, and I can go straight through
with it."

.. figure:: images/illus3.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: ALL RIGHT, MA! I'M READY!

   "ALL RIGHT, MA! I'M READY!"

It was all there was time for. They had not
noticed that Stenhouse had said something
about appeal, and the judge something about
sentence. Everyone was leaving. Stenhouse
came to shake hands with his client and tell him
that the game wasn't up yet. The boy thanked
him. The cage was unlocked, and once more
Teddy, with a guard in front and a guard following
after him, went down the corkscrew stair.




CHAPTER XXVIII
==============


"What I don't understand, Bob," Collingham
said, with faint indignation in his
tone, "is whether you're a married man or not."

"I'm a married man, father, all right."

"Then why don't you live like a married
man? I suppose you know that people are
saying all sorts of things."

Bob considered the simplest way in which to
put his case. It was the afternoon of the day
following the end of Teddy's trial, and his father
was giving him a lift homeward from the bank.
It being winter, dark was already closing in, and
though they were out of the city, great arc-lights
were still strung along the roadways, which were
otherwise lighted by flashes from hundreds of
motor cars.

"I've never said anything about this before,"
the father resumed, before Bob had found the
right words, "because we'd all agreed—your
mother, Edith, and myself—that we wouldn't
hamper you with questions about it while you
were busy with something else. But now that
that's over—"

"Part of it is over, but only part of it. We've
a long road to travel yet."

"If the appeal is denied, as I expect it will be,
you'll have to let me in on the application to the
Governor for clemency. I think I'd have some
influence there."

"Thanks, dad. That'll be a help." He
asked, after further thinking, "Should you like
me to live as a married man—considering who
it is I've married?"

Knowing that the question was a searching
one, Bob found the reply much what he expected.

"I want to see the best thing come out of a
mixed-up situation. I don't deny that all these
problems bother me; but we have them on our
hands, and so there's no more to be said. We've
got to find the wise thing to do, and do it. That's
all I'm after."

"That's all I'm after, myself, dad."

"I don't admit any responsibility for all this
muss," Collingham declared, as if his son had
accused him. "I don't care what anyone thinks;
my conscience is clear."

"Of course, dad; of course!"

"But since things have happened as they
have, I'd like to make them as easy as I can for
everyone; and whatever money can do—"

"Or recognition?"

They came back to the original question.

"Yes; recognition, too—as soon as we've
anyone to recognize. What I don't understand
is all this backing and filling—"

"Have you asked mother?"

"In a way; and she's just as mysterious as
you."

Bob tried another avenue.

"You saw Jennie yourself, didn't you?"

"Once; yes."

"What did you think of her?"

"What any man would think of her. She was
very charming and—and appealing."

"Did you think anything else?"

The father turned sharply.

"What makes you ask?"

"Because it's possible you did."

"Well, I did. What of it?"

"Only this—that that's the thing I want to
nail before I bring her to you as my wife."

"Then why don't you go to work and nail it?"

He found the words he was in search of.

"Partly because I've other things to do;
partly because I feel that, by giving it its time,
it will nail itself; and, most of all, for the reason
that neither she nor I want to take the—the
great happiness which we feel is coming to us in
the end while—while all this other thing is in
the air. I wonder if you understand me."

"More or less."

"It's as if we'd accidentally put the cart of
marriage before the horse of engagement. Do
you see? Nominally we're married; but really
we're only engaged. We can't be married—we
don't want to be married—till other things are
off our minds."

With this bit of explanation, the Collinghams
began to live once more as if nothing had occurred.
It was not easy; but by dint of skimming on the surface they were able to manage it.
That is to say, Bob came and went, and they
asked him no more questions, while on his part
he continued to nerve Teddy and his sisters for
another test.

If there was anyone noticeably different, it
was Junia. Always quick to tack according to
the wind, she seemed almost to have changed her
course. In putting the best face on Edith's
marriage and Bob's complications she had
adopted the new ideals that kept her in the
movement.

"It's the war," she explained to her intimates.
"We're all different. Life as we used to live it
begins to seem so empty. We weren't real; we
people who spent our time entertaining and being
entertained. It's all very well to say that we're
much the same since the war as we were before,
but it isn't so. I know I'm not. I'm quite a
revolutionist. I may not have made much
progress, but I'm certainly more in touch with
reality."

With this transition, it became natural to
speak of her son-in-law.

"Such a wonderful fellow—all mind, you
know, but the type that helps so many of us to
find our way through the mists of materialism
and selfishness out to the great big ends. To
me, it's like a new life just to hear him talk, and
I can't help feeling it providential that he's
found a wife like Edith. She's an extraordinary
girl to be my child—intellectual and practical
at once. She can keep her husband company in
all his researches and yet cook him a good
dinner if their little maid is out. Is there anything
so astonishing in life as our own children
and what they turn out to be?"

This was a transition, too, leading her to speak
of Bob's affairs in the tone of one who, though
puzzled, takes them sympathetically.

"And yet I think it's enlarging. Though
we've kept only on the outer edge of the drama
through which Bob has been going with the girl
he's married, the whole thing has deepened his
life so much that it couldn't help deepening ours.
It's broadened us, too, I think, giving us an insight
into lives so different from our own. That's
what we need so much, it seems to me, that kind
of broadening. It's going to solve a lot of our
national problems which at present seem to be
insoluble. Yes; Bob is still at home with us,
and I tell you frankly that I don't know what is
coming out of it. It's all so queer and independent
and modern. I'm old-fashioned, and I
don't pretend to see through these young people's
ways. But I'm Bob's mother, and through all
his developments—and he *is* developing—I'm
going with him."

So Junia talked, and talked so much that she
was in danger of talking herself round. The
instinct to be in the front line of fashion had
something to do with it, but self-persuasion had
more. The thing of the hour being the throwing
over of the old social code, Junia wouldn't have
been Junia if she hadn't done it; but, even so,
the creeping-in of compunction toward Bob took
her by surprise. She had told herself hitherto
that she loved him so much that she would
work for his permanent happiness even at the
cost of his temporary pain; but now she began
to fear that what had seemed to her his temporary
pain might prove the very life of his life.

She came to this perception through reading
in the newspapers the accounts of the Follett
boy's trial. By the tacit convention which the
Collinghams had established, that they had
nothing to do with it, she never spoke of it to
Bradley or Edith, nor did they speak of it to
her; but she kept herself informed, and knew the
devotion with which Bob gave himself to Jennie
and her family. The boy's condemnation hit
her hard. When Bradley came home that night,
she saw that it had also hit him.

"I'm worth about five million dollars at a
guess," he confided to her, "and I'd cheerfully
have given four of them if this thing hadn't
happened."

"But, Bradley dear, you had nothing to do
with it."

"I know I hadn't," he declared, savagely;
"and yet I'd—I'd do as I say."

But it wasn't Bradley she was most sorry
for; nor was it for the Follett boy. She was
sorry that, because of conditions which she herself
had fostered, Bob would never reap the fruit
of a love in which he had been so chivalrous. She
didn't see how he could. Just as there was a
natural Bradley and a standardized one, so there
was a natural and a standardized Junia. The
natural Junia had long seemed dead; but the
bigness of the love which she saw daily and hourly
exemplified moved her to the painful stirrings of
new life.

Meanwhile Bob went with Teddy up the remaining
steps by which he mounted his Calvary.

He stood near the cage on the morning when
the boy was brought up for sentence, witnessing
his coolness. On being asked if he had anything
to say before sentence was pronounced he
replied:

"Nothing, sir, except to thank you for giving
me such a fair trial."

The words were spoken in a firmer voice than
those which followed:

"The court, in consideration of your crime of
murder in the first degree, sentences you to the
punishment of death by the passage of a current
of electricity through your body, within the
week beginning...."

----

When the appeal for a new trial was denied,
it was Bob who informed Teddy. When all
efforts to obtain Executive clemency had failed,
it was Bob again who broke the news. When
the boy requested that his mother and sisters
should omit their next visit to Bitterwell—should
wait till he sent them word before coming
again—it was Bob who conveyed the request.
Bitterwell, the great penitentiary, was twenty
miles from Pemberton Heights, and through the
winter they had gone to see him some thirty-odd
times. They went in couples. Gladys and her
mother, Jennie and Gussie, keeping each other
company. The visits were less difficult than
might have been expected because of Teddy's
cheerfulness.

Of the request to wait before coming again,
they didn't at first seize the significance. While
frank with them about everything else, Bob had
never given them the date of the week the judge
had named, nor had they asked for it. If they
did so ask, he meant to tell them; but they
seemed to divine his intention.

Perhaps they divined the intention in this
intimation from Teddy. At any rate, they didn't
question it, or rebel against it. It followed on
visits first of one pair and then of the other, both
of which had been so normal as almost to pass as
gay. That is, Teddy's spirits had infected theirs,
and they had parted from him smiling. That of
Jennie and Gussie had been the first of the two,
and he had sent them off with a joke.

"My boy, I'm proud of you," had been
Lizzie's farewell words to him. "Walk firmly,
with your head erect, and never, never be sorry
for anything you've done."

"Good old ma! The best ever! I sure am
proud of *you*! What'll you bet that we don't
have some good times together yet?"

A psychologist would have said that by suggestion and autosuggestion they strengthened
each other and themselves; but whatever the
process, the result was evident. Bob had given
them the verb "to carry on," so that "carrying
on" became at once an objective and a driving
force. Gussie and Gladys went regularly to
work; Jennie took care of the house and her
mother. The latter task had become the more
imperative, for the reason that, after Teddy's
request that they should suspend their visits,
she began to fail. It was not that she was hurt
by it, but rather that she took it as a signal.

In the efforts to be strong, they were helped
by the fact that, not long after Teddy's removal
to Bitterwell, Edith Ayling had come to see them,
all of her own initiative. She had repeated the
visit many times, and had Gussie and Gladys
go to see her at Cathedral Heights. Jennie had
never been able to leave home.

"I didn't say anything about it to you," Edith
explained to Bob, after the occasion of her
breaking the ice, "because I wanted to do it on
my own. Quite apart from you and Jennie, I
feel that our lots have become involved and
that we Collinghams have some responsibility.
I don't say responsibility for what, because I
don't know; and yet I feel—" Unable to say
what she felt, she elided to the personal. "Jennie
I don't get at. She's so silent—so shut away.
The mother has never been well enough to see
me. But the two younger girls I'm really getting
to know very well and to be very fond of.
They're intelligent down to the finger-tips, and
with a little guidance I'm sure they could do big
things."

"What kind of things?"

"I should train Gladys along intellectual
lines, and Gussie was born for the stage. I know
that Ernest and I could help them, if you thought
it all right, and we should love doing it. You
must read what he says in his new book, *Salvage*,
as to getting people into the tasks for which they
are fitted and in which they can be happy. He
thinks that a lot of our nonproductiveness
comes from the people who'd love doing one
thing being compelled to do another, and that if
we could only help the individuals we come
across to find their natural jobs...."

It was Edith also who unconsciously helped
her mother out of the trap in which she had
found herself caught.

"Oh, by the way, whom do you think I met in
the street the other day? No less a person than
Hubert Wray, just back from California. And
that reminds me. He told me you had bought
his big picture that everyone was talking about
last year. Where is it? Why did you never
say anything about it?"

Edith was spending a day in May at Collingham
Lodge, and was walking with her mother
between rows of irises.

"Come in," Junia said. "I'll show you.
Then you'll understand."

But not till "Life and Death" had been drawn
from its hiding place and propped against the
wall was Edith allowed to enter her mother's
room. She advanced slowly, her eyes on the
canvas. Junia waited for the shock.

"So that's it," Edith said, at last. "It isn't a
thing I should want to live and die with—I never
can understand that fancy people have for nudes—but
I see it's very fine."

"And is that all you see?"

"All I see? I see it has a meaning, of course,
but—"

Junia's throat felt dry.

"Don't you—don't you recognize anybody?"

"Who? The Brasshead woman? I shouldn't
know her from Eve."

Junia crept nearer.

"'The Brasshead woman'? Who's she? What
are you talking about?"

"Why, the model who sat for it. Hubert told
me all about her. He said she wasn't his ideal
for the part—rather a poor lot as a woman—but
he couldn't get anyone better." She added, on
examining the features, "I don't think she's
bad, considering what he wanted."

"Doesn't she—doesn't she remind you of—of
Bob's wife?"

"About as much as she does of you. Surely
that's not the reason why you hid the thing away!"

"I—I did think—I was afraid—that people
might see a resemblance—"

Edith made an inarticulate sound intended for
derision.

"As a matter of fact, Hubert said it was
probably a good thing for him to be obliged to
paint some one else than Jennie. He'd been
painting her so much that he was in danger of
painting her into everything, like Andrea del
Sarto with his wife."

"Then you—you don't think that he's painted
her in here?"

Edith looked again.

"Well, if you put it that way—and you were
crazy to find a likeness—perhaps about the
brows—and down here at the curve of the cheek
and neck—but no! Not really! This is a
carnal woman, and Jennie's a thing of the
spirit." She dismissed the subject as of no
further importance. "Do tell me. Is there
anyone in New York who reglazes these English
chintzes?"

So Junia made new plans, waiting for Bob to
come home to dinner in order to meet him on the
threshold, throw her arms about his neck, and
give him the glad facts.

But Bob sent a telephone message that he
would not be home to dinner, that he would not
be home that night. No one was to worry, and
he would turn up at breakfast in the morning.

It was all the information he gave because,
by special permission from the warden, and under
a solemn promise not to convey anything to the
prisoner that would enable him to cheat the
law, he was spending the night at Bitterwell.

He was spending it in a low one-storied building some sixty feet long and not more than
twenty in width. Its arrangements were simple.
On entering, you came into a corridor some six
feet wide, running the length of seven little
rooms. The seven little rooms were each furnished
with a cot, a fixed wash-basin, a table,
and a chair. Each had, however, this peculiarity—that
the end toward the corridor had no
wall. Instead of a wall it had long, strong perpendicular
white bars, some two or three inches
apart, and running from ceiling to floor. The
inmate was thus visible at all times, like an
animal in a cage. In the corridor were half a
dozen chairs of the kitchen variety, and at the
end a little yellow door.

The little yellow door led into a room of which
the chief piece of furniture was a chair vaguely
suggestive of an armchair in a smoking room,
though with some singular attachments. Around
it in a semicircle were some eight or ten other
chairs similar to those in the corridor. In one
corner was a walled-off space that might have
housed a dynamo; in the other a stack of brooms
and mops. As a passageway gave access to this
room, and the yellow door was carefully kept
closed, Bob was not required to see within.

Of the seven little rooms four were empty,
and three had occupants. At one end was a
negro; at the other an Italian; Teddy was in the
center. Outside, there was a guard for the
Italian, another for the negro, while for Teddy
there were two. They were big, husky fellows,
three Irishmen and a Swede, genial, good-natured
souls to whom their duties had become a matter
of course.

There was something of the matter of course
in the whole situation, even to Teddy and
Bob. The human mind being ready to accept
anything to which it is led by steps sufficiently
graded, both young men were attuned to finding
themselves as they were. As they were meant
that Teddy clung to one of the bars from within,
and Bob to the same bar from without. They
talked through the open spaces, being able to do
it quietly because they were so close.

"You don't think I'm afraid, do you, Bob?
I should have been afraid if it hadn't been for
you. You've bucked me up something—well,
there are no words for it."

"Let it go without words, Teddy. Don't try
to say it."

"I like to say it," he grinned. "Or, rather,
I'd like to say it if I could. I like trying to say
it, even when I can't."

That was all for the time; but after some
minutes, Teddy's hand stole over Bob's big paw
as it held to the bar, so that they held to it
together.

It was Bob who broke the silence next.

"I didn't tell you, Teddy—I've only just found
it out—that dad's been taking care of Mrs. Flynn
and her kiddies and means to go on doing it."

"That's good," the boy sighed. "It takes
about the last thing off my mind."

So they talked spasmodically, never saying
much, and yet saying all the things for which
language has no words. At intervals the Italian
showed his sympathy by groaning heavily, which
was generally a signal for the negro to begin
singing, in a cottony voice, the first verse of
"Safe in the Arms of Jesus." Teddy apologized
for them as a host for unseemly members of his
household.

"They're good guys, all right. That's just
their way of letting me know they feel for me.
It's funny how kind hearted some mutt will be
who's committed a cold-blooded murder."

He had probably been following this train of
thought for some minutes when he said, in a
reasoning tone:

"What can the law do with fellows of our sort?
Look at the thing straight now. We've got good
in us, of course; but you can't trust us to hold
our horses. I don't blame them for what they're
giving me—hardly any. Only, I'll be darned if
it doesn't make me surer that all this is only an
experiment—a way of finding out how not to do
it—so that we can make the next go a better
one."

They discussed this topic in a desultory way,
not so much letting it drop as pursuing it each in
his own thought. Teddy picked up the line again
after an interval of time, and some distance
farther on.

"I suppose you can't believe that you come to
a place where you know you're through and are
in a hurry to get on. Well, you do. I guess old
people like ma reach there, anyhow; and young
people, too, when they're—when they're like me.
I've had my shot—and I've miffed it. Now I'm
all on edge to have another try. I'm so crazy
about that that the thing that's to happen first
doesn't seem anything—very much."

The hours wore on, but it seemed to Bob a
night to which there was no time. Though the
support he brought to Teddy was merely that of
companionship, he felt that the boy was outstripping
him. In Teddy's own phrase, he was
"moving on," but moving on very fast. Bob
couldn't tell how he knew this; he only felt himself
being left behind. Teddy was quite right;
his old experiment *was* over, and some of the
exaltation of the new one was already breaking
through. That was the meaning of his silences,
his abstractions. That was why he came out of
each such spell with a smile that grew more
luminous.

The Italian and the negro fell asleep. The
four guards talked less to one another. Clutching
the bar grew tiring. Brannigan, one of Teddy's
guards, brought up a chair, offering it to Bob.

"Why don't you sit down? It'll be quite a
while yet."

Bob took the chair, Teddy the one inside the
cell. Bringing it as close to the bars as possible,
he thrust his fingers through the opening to
touch Bob's hand. Bob closed the fingers within
his palm, and so held them.

"I'm not going to send any message to ma and
the girls. They know I love them. You can't
add anything to that." A sidelong smile stole
through the bars. "I love you too, Bob. I guess
it's a bum thing to say, but to-night—well, it's
different—and I'm going to say it. I can't do
anything to thank you; but it may mean something
to you to have me loving you like the devil
all the way from—from over there."

"It means something to me now."

"Then that's all right."

The Italian breathed heavily. The negro
snored. The guards were bored and somnolent.
Teddy might have been asleep except for the look
and the smile that every now and then crept
through the bars toward his companion.

Suddenly he pulled his fingers from Bob's
clasp, jumped to his feet, and held out his arms.

"All right, ma! I'm ready!"

The cry was so loud and joyous that Bob
sprang up. Brannigan lumbered forward.

"Been dreamin'," he explained. "Just as well
if he has."

Teddy looked about him in bewilderment.

"No, I haven't been. I wasn't asleep. I
was wide awake. I guess you'll think I'm dippy,
Bob; but I did see ma. 'Pon my soul I did!
She was right there." He pointed to the spot.
"She looked lovely, too—young, like—and yet it
was ma all right. She wanted me to come.
That's why I jumped. Oh, well! Perhaps I *am*
dippy. But it's funny, isn't it?"

He was so preoccupied with this happening as
not to notice sounds in the outer passage and
beyond the yellow door. Even when he did, it
was with no more than a partial cognizance.

"Listen!" he said once. "There they are.
It'll be only a few minutes now. I'm not going
to let you go in there, Bob. Funny about ma,
isn't it?"

The sounds grew louder. The guards were
moving about. Behind the yellow door people
seemed to enter. There was the scraping of
chairs as they sat down. The Italian woke and
howled dismally. The negro shouted his hymn.
Teddy was far away on the wings of speculation;
but he came back to say:

"If ma had gone ahead of me, I know she'd
like nothing better than to come and give me a
lift over. But she hasn't gone ahead of me.
She's over there in Indiana Avenue. That's the
funny part of it. What do you suppose it means?"

Bob didn't know. Neither had he time to
offer an opinion, because the main door opened
and the warden appeared, accompanied by the
chaplain, the doctor, the principal keeper, and
three other men whom Teddy didn't know.

"Here they are!" Teddy whispered, as if their
coming was a relief.

The warden advanced to the central cell.
The door was unlocked. Teddy stood on the
threshold.

"Thank you, warden. I suppose I can say
good-by to my friend?"

Permission was given. Teddy stepped out
into the corridor.

"You'd better go now, Bob. No use in your
staying any longer." He nodded toward the
men standing round him. "They'll handle me
gently. I'm not afraid."

Their hands clasped; but the boy was only a
boy, loving and in need of love. Before Bob
knew what was happening, Teddy's arms were
about his neck, in a long, desperate embrace.

A gulp that was almost a sob from each—and
it was over.

"All right, boys. I'm ready. Go to it."

The words were spoken steadily. Bob limped
toward the door. A guard unlocked it.

"Say, Bob!" It was Teddy's voice again.
Bob turned. The lad had taken off his collar,
no more conscious of the act than if he was
going to bed. One of the strange men was
kneeling on one knee, making a significant slit
in a leg of Teddy's trousers. "Say, Bob! I
wonder—if it doesn't take you too far out of your
way-if you'd mind driving round by the house?
You see, if anything has happened to ma, why,
the girls'll be all up in the air, poor things!"

Bob nodded because he couldn't trust himself
to words—and so it was the end.

----

Out in the air it seemed to him as if he had
dreamed and waked up. The May night was so
exquisite, so hallowing, that the walls of Bitterwell
were mellow and enchanted against the dome
of stars. Even in these grim courts the scent of
growing things was sweet.

Driving in the deadest hours of night over the
long flat road, he was too tired to think. His
imagination didn't try to follow Teddy, because
it had become an instinct to spring to the need
to "carry on." Teddy was behind him. There
were other things in front; and his mind was
already with them.

And yet not actively. After he had slept he
would be able to take them up; but just now his
main desire was to get home to bed. Nothing
but that would dispel this overweight of emotion.

Along the familiar road he drove mechanically.
Even Teddy's last request, though it formed an
intention, was hardly in his mind. At Bond's
Corner, where the roads forked, to the right to
Pemberton Heights, to the left to the bridge that
would take him over toward Marillo, he was so
nearly asleep that he might have gone straight
on homeward had he not been startled by seeing
a man and a woman standing in the middle of
the road.

He jammed down the service and emergency
brakes, swinging to the right. The fact that they
stood facing him without getting out of his way
both amazed him and rendered him indignant.
Turning to look at so strange a pair of pedestrians,
he saw—Teddy and his mother.

They were not quite on the road, but a little
above it. Neither were they in the dark like
other things around, but shining with a light of
their own. Neither were they shadowy apparitions,
but definite, vital, forcible. They were
dressed as he had generally seen them, and yet
they wore a kind of radiance. The mother's arm
was over her boy's shoulder, but Teddy was
waving his hand. Smiles were on both faces,
on the lips, in the eyes, and somehow in the
personality.

Bob was not frightened, but he was thrilled.
It seemed to him that they stayed long enough
to overcome all the doubts of his senses. Though
he pressed on the brakes, the car went a number
of yards before he could bring it to a standstill;
and yet they never left his side. They didn't
exactly move; they were only there—living,
lovely, sending out love as if it had been light,
wrapping him round and round. It was so vivid,
so much a fact, that when the car stopped and he
saw no one there, he was amazed once more to
find himself alone.

He couldn't drive on at once. He lingered—staring
at the spot where they had stood, looking
over the wide, dim country, gazing up at the
stars in their yearning infinitude. He tried to
persuade himself that his own mind had projected
something unreal in itself; but he couldn't
throw off the extraordinary happiness the vision
left behind it.

Before reaching Indiana Avenue he had decided
on a course. If there were no lights in
the house, he would drive on homeward. If
there were he would stop. At this hour in the
very early morning, unless something unusual
had happened, there would of course be none.

But there were lights. At sound of his approach,
Pansy gave a little silvery yelp. Jennie
opened the door before he had time to ring.

"Come in, Bob. I saw your car from the
window."

In the living-room Gussie and Gladys, wearing
their dressing-gowns, cried out their relief at
seeing him. It was the situation Teddy had foreseen,
in which they were all "up in the air." As
usual, Gladys was the spokesman.

"Oh, Bob, we're so glad to have you. We
didn't know what to do. Momma—"

A sob stopped her, but Jennie was more calm.

"Momma's gone, Bob. Gussie went into her
room about half past ten to take her the glass
of milk we always put by her bed, and she was
asleep."

They gathered round him as if he formed their
rallying point. He took Jennie and Gussie each
by the hand. Gladys held his coat by the lapel.

"You're not sorry, any of you, are you? She
wanted to go; and she's gone in the sweetest of
all ways."

"She won't have to hear about Teddy," Gussie
wept. "That's a comfort, anyhow."

Gladys laid her head against Bob's breast.

"No; but Teddy'll have to hear about her."

Bob saw the opportunity. "No, Gladys;
Teddy will not have to hear about her." He
let this sink in. "Teddy—\ *knows*."

It was some seconds before Jennie and Gussie
released his hands and Gladys let go his lapel.
When they did they moved away silently.
Gussie dropped on her knees at the arm of a big
chair, bowing her head, and crying quietly.
Jennie, a slim figure with hands behind her back,
walked down the length of the room, staring at
the curtained window toward Indiana Avenue.
Gladys stood off, looking at Bob, nodding her
head sagely, as she said:

"I thought that's what it meant when he
didn't want us to come. He liked it better without
saying good-by. So we all do." She gave a
big, sudden sob, controlling herself as suddenly.
"We're going to carry on, Bob. We're not going
to show the white feather"—there was another
big sob, with another successful effort to keep
it back—"we're not going to show the white
feather—any of us—just to please you."

"Thank you, Gladys. It will please me.
But there's something that pleases me more.
I'd like to tell all three of you about it."

Jennie turned round from the window, coming
back down the room. She was pale, but she
didn't cry. Gussie dried her eyes and was struggling
to her feet when Bob laid his hand on her
shoulder.

"No, Gussie; stay where you are. I'll sit
down here." He dropped into the chair. "You
come on this side, Jennie. Gladys—"

But Gladys had already crouched at his feet,
while Jennie, balancing Gussie, sank beside the
other arm of the chair. Pansy sprang up to her
place on his knee.

He told them about Teddy and his mother—about
Teddy's vision and his own.

"I don't say I know what to make of it. I'm
not at all sure that we're obliged to explain that
sort of thing unless we're scientists or psychologists.
It seems to me that when beauty
and comfort flash on us at a time of great need,
we're at liberty to take them for what they
seem to be, even if we don't understand them."

As his hand lay on the arm of the chair, Jennie
kissed it again and again. It was the first spontaneous
affection she had ever shown him, and,
though it moved him with a stirring strange and
fundamental, he felt that with the awesome
things so fresh in their minds, the time had not
yet come to respond to it. It was one more
impulse to gather force by being restrained a
little longer.

"It isn't as if this thing stood alone. A great
many people have had experiences like it. They
may be no more than fancy, just as some people
say; but I do know this: that by what he saw
Teddy was helped to do what he had to do, and
that for me—"

"Yes, Bob," Gladys pleaded. "What was it
for you?"

"Something real—and assuring—and beautiful—and
comforting—and glorious." He uttered
the words slowly, as if selecting his terms. "More
than that," he went on, "it was something that's
given me a happiness I can't describe but which
I should like to share with you—which perhaps
I shall be able to share with you—as we get to
know one another better—and time goes on."

The little snub-nosed face, something like
Pansy's, was lifted to him adoringly.

"Are we going to be your very own, Bob?"

"Yes, Gladys, my very own."




CHAPTER XXIX
============


"How can we be your very own when—you
don't know anything about *me*?"

Gussie and Gladys had gone up to get some
sleep. Jennie was crouched, not against the
arm of the chair, as before, but against Bob's
knee. Still pressing back the instincts of his
passion, he did no more than let his hand rest
lightly on her hair.

"I know this much about you, Jennie—that
after all we've gone through we're welded together.
Nothing can separate us now—no past—nor
anything you could tell me."

"Is that why you don't want to know?"

"I don't want to know *now*. That's all I'm
saying. Things are settled for us. They're
settled and sealed. It's what we get out of so
much that's terrible, that we don't have to debate
that point any more. We may have to
adapt ourselves to conditions we don't know
anything about as yet—but it will be a matter
of adapting, not of cutting loose. What should
I be if I were to cut loose from you and the girls
now, Jennie? What should you be if you were
to cut loose from me?"

She pressed her cheek against his knee.

"We'd die," she said, simply.

"So there you are! I know what you mean.
I'd die, too. That is, we mightn't die outwardly;
but something would be so killed in us
that we'd never be really alive again. So why
try to pull apart what life has soldered into one?"

"But you don't *know*!"

"Yes, I do. I know more than you think.
I know that the things that trouble you are
dreams and that our life together is reality.
You'll tell me the dreams as we go on—a little
at a time—and I'll show you that you've waked
from them. I know there are things to explain;
but I know, too, that there's an explanation. But
I don't want the explanation yet. I'm—I'm too
tired, Jennie. I want to rest. And I can't rest
unless we all rest together—you with me—and
the girls with us—in a kind of quiet acceptance
of the things that have happened—and in the—I
hardly know how to express it—but in the
tranquillity of love. I wonder if you understand
me?"

She murmured:

"I don't know that I understand you, Bob—quite—but
I do—I do love you. It's—it's different
from love—it's—it's more. It's like—like
melting into you—"

"That's love, Jennie. It isn't anything different.
It's just—\ *love*."

"But you're so big—"

"And you're so little—so wee. Don't you see?—that's
it! That's the compensating thing in
nature. It's because we're different that we need
each other and complete each other. I can't
explain it as you'd explain a sum in arithmetic.
I only *know*. You complete me, Jennie. As
I've said so often, you're the other half of me—"

"And you're all of me—and more."

"Then since we know that, why not do as I
said—just rest awhile? We've come up to our
next ledge, as I was trying to explain to you a
few months ago; I know we can camp here a bit;
and if we've had some scratches in the climb we
can talk of them by and by. We've learned the
one big thing we needed to know—that we
belong together, that we can't be torn apart.
Just for now, why can't that be enough for us?"

"It will be enough if you will let me tell you
that—that what I've said about Hubert wasn't—wasn't
as bad as perhaps you think. I don't say
it mightn't have been; it was as bad as that in—in
intention; but the magic cloak of your love
which you used to write about seemed to hang
round me—that's the only way I can put it—"

"That'll do, Jennie. Don't try to say any
more now. It's only what—in some way—I can't
tell you how—I know already."

He knew she was crying, but he let her cry.
He would have cried himself, only that, since
the vision at Bond's Corner, he felt this extraordinary
happiness. While his reason would have
striven to accept the psychologist's explanation
his inner self was convinced of Teddy's delight
in beginning his next experiment. He himself
was tired, but at peace—tired, but no longer
with a need of sleep—only with the need of being
quiet with a sense of fulfillment.

There were tears in her voice as she whispered,
brokenly:

"Is it wrong, Bob, to feel so—so comforted—when
momma is lying upstairs—and darling
Teddy is—"

"We can't choose the way by which comfort
comes to us, Jennie darling. Things happen
which we don't want to have happen, and yet
they *can* work together for good if we only give
them half a chance—"

He was interrupted by the loud, sweet thrilling
of a thrush. Jennie raised her head in surprise,
looking at the pallid shimmer through the
curtained window.

"It's day!"

They were both on their feet.

"Yes, Jennie; it's day—again. Let's go out."

They went as they were, bareheaded like
children, into the purity of morning. Pansy,
disturbed by the many strange auras in the house,
scampered ahead of them, relieved by the
escape. The street was still asleep, empty, clean,
with every lawn patch and garden bed drenched
with dew. Only the birds and the flowers were
waking to the light.

Turning toward the cliffs and the river, their
talk became more practical. Bob suggested to
Jennie what his father had suggested to him.
Mr. Huntley was going to Europe in connection
with some new European loan. The proposal
was that Bob should go with him. The trip
might last six months.

"And if I go," he added, "we both go. We
should have a few weeks to settle things finally
here—"

"Oh, but, Bob—how could I go and—and
leave the two girls? They need me more than
ever now. I'm not only their sister, but their
mother."

"Why shouldn't they come with us? I'd love
having them. Six months over there would
make a break with what they've been through
here; and when we come back, Edith has things
she's going to suggest—"

"That would be heavenly, Bob; but—but the
money?"

"The money's all right. In my new job at the
bank I've a bigger salary—five thousand; and
now that dad's giving Edith ten thousand a year
as allowance, he's giving me the same. That's a
pretty good income to begin with, besides which,
dad—you'll have to know dad, Jennie—he
doesn't want me to spare any money while we're—we're
passing through this—this crisis."

"And your mother's lovely. I know *that*."

"Yes; mother's splendid, too. So's Edith.
You'll find that they all want—want to make up
to you—and to the girls—for—"

But he didn't say for what because they came
to where they saw above the cloud-wrapt city the
glory of chrysoprase, turquoise, and topaz which
precedes the sunrise and takes the breath away.

"Oh, look!"

"Oh, look!"

Instinctively they clasped hands as they stood
on the edge of the flowery precipice, watching
the chrysoprase yellow into saffron, and the turquoise
melt into sapphire, while the topaz became
light.

Then silently, above the wraithlike towers and
cubes and battlements, slipped the rim of gold.

"There it is, Bob!"

He drew her to him, holding her close.

"Yes; there it is again, Jennie—always coming
back to us! The last time we were here we had
only the moonrise; and now it is the sun—the
sun!"

Her head lay against his shoulder; and as the
rim became an orb the cloud-built vision of Manhattan
was touched with flecks of fire. Within
its heart lay Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Wall
Street, and the Bowery, shops, churches, brothels,
and banks, all passions, hungers, yearnings, and
ambitions, all national impulses worthy and detestable,
all human instincts holy and unclean,
all loveliness, all lust, all charity, all cupidity,
all secret and suppressed desire, all shameless
exposure on the housetops, all sorrow, all sin, all
that the soul of man conceives of as evil and good—and
yet, with no more than these few miles of
perspective, and this easy play of light, translated
into beauty, uplifting, unearthly, and
ineffable.


.. class:: center large

THE END
-------