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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 41009
   :PG.Title: A Rose of Yesterday
   :PG.Released: 2012-10-09
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: \F. Marion Crawford
   :DC.Title: A Rose of Yesterday
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1897
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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A ROSE OF YESTERDAY
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   .. _`Cover`:

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      Cover

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      A ROSE OF YESTERDAY

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      BY

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      \F. MARION CRAWFORD

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      Author of "Saracenesca," "Dr. Claudius," "Katharine
      Lauderdale," "The Ralstons," etc., etc.

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      New York
      THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
      LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
      1897

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      *All rights reserved*

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      COPYRIGHT, 1897,
      BY \F. MARION CRAWFORD.

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      Set up and electrotyped May, 1897. Reprinted August,
      October, 1897.

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      *Eleventh Thousand*

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      Norwood Press
      \J. \S. Cushing & Co. -- Berwick & Smith
      Norwood, Mass. \U.\S.\A.

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.. _`CHAPTER I`:

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   A ROSE OF YESTERDAY

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   CHAPTER I

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"I wonder what he meant by it," said
Sylvia, turning again in her chair, so that the
summer light, softened and tinted by the
drawn blinds, might fall upon the etching she
held.

"My dear," answered Colonel Wimpole, stretching
out his still graceful legs, leaning back in his
chair, and slowly joining his nervous but
handsome hands, "nobody knows."

He did not move again for some time, and his
ward continued to scrutinize Dürer's Knight.  It
was the one known as 'The Knight, Death, and
the Devil,' and she had just received it from her
guardian as a birthday present.

"But people must have thought a great deal
about it," said Sylvia, at last.  "There must be
stories about what it means.  Do tell me.  I'm
sure you know."

She laid the unframed print upon her knees,
still holding it by the edges, lest the fitful breeze
that came in through the blinds should blow it
to the floor.  At the same time she raised her
eyes till they met the colonel's.

Her earnest young face expressed something
like veneration as she gazed at him, and perhaps
he thought that it was undeserved, for he soon
looked away, with a faint sigh.  She sighed, too,
but more audibly, as though she were not ashamed
of it.  Possibly she knew that he could not guess
what the sigh meant, and the knowledge added
a little pain to what she felt just then, and had
felt daily of late.  She began to study the etching again.

"To me," she said softly, "the Knight is a
hero.  He is making Death show him the way,
and he has made the Devil his squire and
servant.  He will reach the city on the hill in
time, for there is still sand enough in the
hour-glass.  Do you see?"  She held out the print
to the colonel.  "There is still sand enough,"
she repeated.  "Don't you think so?"

Again, as she asked the question, she looked
at him; but he was bending over the etching,
and she could only see his clear profile against
the shadows of the room.

"He may be just in time," he answered quietly.

"I wonder which house they lived in, of those
one can see," said Sylvia.

"Who are 'they'?  Death, the Devil, and the Knight?"

"No.  The Knight and the lady, of course,--the
lady who is waiting to see whether he
will come in time."

The colonel laughed a little at her fancy, and
looked at her as the breeze stirred her brown
hair.  He did not understand her, and she knew
that he did not.  His glance took in her brown
hair, her violet eyes, her delicately shaded cheek,
and the fresh young mouth with its strange little
half-weary smile that should not have been there,
and that left the weariness behind whenever it
faded for a time.  He wondered what was the
matter with the girl.

She was not ill.  That was clear enough, for
they had travelled far, and Sylvia had never
once seemed tired.  The colonel and Miss
Wimpole, his elderly maiden sister, had taken Sylvia
out to Japan to meet her father, Admiral
Strahan, who had been stationed some time with
a small squadron in the waters of the far East.
He had been ordered home rather suddenly, and
the Wimpoles were bringing the girl back by
way of Europe.  Sylvia's mother had been dead
three years, and had left her a little fortune.
Mrs. Strahan had been a step-sister, and no
blood relation, of the Wimpoles; but they had
been as a real brother and a real sister to her,
and she had left her only child to their care
during such times as her husband's service
should keep him away from home.  The girl
was now just eighteen.

Colonel Wimpole wondered whether she could
be destined for suffering, as some women are,
and the thought linked itself to the chain of
another life, and drew it out of his heart that
he might see it and be hurt, for he had known
pain in himself and through one he loved.  He
could not believe that Sylvia was forefated to
sorrow, and the silent weariness that of late was
always in her face meant something which he
feared to learn, but for which he felt himself
vaguely responsible, as though he were not
doing his duty by her.

He was a man of heart, of honour, and of
conscience.  Long ago, in his early youth, he
had fought bravely in a long and cruel war, and
had remained a soldier for many years
afterwards, with an old-fashioned attachment for
arms that was dashed with chivalry, till at last
he had hung up his sword, accepting peace as
a profession.  Indeed he had never loved
anything of war, except its danger and its honour;
and he had loved one woman more than either,
but not against honour nor in danger, though
without any hope.

He had lived simply, as some men can and
as a few do live, in the midst of the modern
world, parting with an illusion now and then,
and fostering some new taste in its place, in a
sort of innocent and simple consciousness that
it was artificial, but in the certainty that it was
harmless.  He was gentle in his ways, with the
quiet and unaffected feeling for other people
which not seldom softens those who have fought
with their hands in the conviction of right, and
have dealt and received real wounds.  War
either brutalizes or refines a man; it never
leaves him unchanged.  Colonel Wimpole had
travelled from time to time, more for the sake
of going to some one place which he wished to
see, than of passing through many places for the
sake of travelling.  There is a great difference
between the two methods.  Wherever he went,
he took with him his own character and his
slightly formal courtesy of manner, not leaving
himself at home, as some people do, nor
assuming a separate personality for Europe, like a
disguise; for, such as he was, he was incapable
of affectation, and he was sure that the manners
which had been good enough for his mother
were good enough for any woman in the world,
as indeed they were, because he was a
gentleman, that is, a man, and gentle at all points,
excepting for his honour.  But no one had ever
touched that.

He looked what he was, too, from head to
foot.  He was a tall, slender man, of nervous
strength, with steady grey eyes, high features,
smooth, short and grizzled hair; simple and yet
very scrupulous in his dress; easy in his
movements; not old before his time, but having
already something of the refinement of age upon
the nobility of his advanced manhood; one of
whom a woman would expect great things in an
extremity, but to whom she would no longer
turn for the little service, the little fetching and
carrying, which most women expect of men still
in prime.  But he did such things unasked, and
for any woman, when it seemed natural to do
them.  After all, he was only fifty-three years
old, and it seems to be established that sixty
is the age of man's manumission from servitude,
unless the period of slavery be voluntarily
extended by the individual.  That leaves ten years
of freedom if one live to the traditional age of
mankind.

But Sylvia saw no sign of age in Colonel
Wimpole.  In connexion with him the mere
word irritated her when he used it, which he
sometimes did quite naturally, and he would
have been very much surprised could he have
guessed how she thought of him, and what she
was thinking as she sat looking from him to
Dürer's Knight and from the etched rider to the
living man again.  For she saw a resemblance
which by no means existed, except, perhaps,
between two ideals.

The Knight in the picture is stern and strong
and grim, and sits his horse like the incarnation
of an unchanging will, riding a bridled destiny
against Death and Evil to a good end.  And
Death's tired jade droops its white head and
sniffs at the skull in the way, but the Knight's
charger turns up his lip and shows his teeth at
the carrion thing and arches his strong neck,
while the Knight looks straight before him, and
cares not, and his steel-clad legs press the great
horse into the way, and his steel-gloved hand
holds curb and snaffle in a vise.  As for the
Devil, he slinks behind, an evil beast, but
subdued, and following meanly with a sort of mute,
animal astonishment in his wide eyes.

And beside Sylvia sat the colonel, quiet,
gentle, restful, suggesting just then nothing of
desperate determination, and not at all like the
grim Knight in feature.  Yet the girl felt a
kinship between the two, and saw one and the
same heroism in the man and in the pictured
rider.  In her inmost heart she wished that she
could have seen the colonel long ago, when he
had fought, riding at death without fear.  But
the thought that it had been so very long ago
kept the wish down, below the word-line in her
heart's well.  Youth clothes its ideals with
the spirit of truth and hides the letter out of sight.

But in the picture, Sylvia looked for herself,
since it was for a lady that the Knight was
riding, and all she could find was the big old
house up in the town, on the left of the tallest
tower.  She was waiting somewhere under the
high-gabled roof, with her spinning-wheel or her
fine needlework, among her women.  Would he
ever come?  Was there time before the sand in
Death's hour-glass should run out?

"I wish the horse would put his fore foot
down, and go on!" she said suddenly.

Then she laughed, though a little wearily.
How could she tell the colonel that he was
the Knight, and that she was waiting in the
tall house with the many windows?  Perhaps
he was never to know, and forever the charger's
fore foot would be lifted, ready for the step that
was never to fall upon the path.

But Colonel Wimpole did not understand.
It was unlike her to wish that an old print
should turn into a page from a child's movable
picture-book.

"Why do you wish that the horse would go
on?" he asked half idly.

"Because the sand will not last, if he waits,"
said Sylvia, quietly; and as she spoke a third
time of the sand in the hour-glass, she felt a
little chill at her heart.

"There will always be time," answered the
colonel, enigmatically.

"As there will always be air, I suppose; and
that will not matter to us, when we are not here
to breathe it any more."

"That is true.  Nothing will matter very
much a hundred years hence."

"But a few years matter much more than
a hundred."  Her voice was sad.

"What are you thinking of?" asked Colonel
Wimpole, changing his position so as to see her
face better.

He resented her sadness a little, for he and
his sister were doing their best to make her
happy.  But Sylvia did not answer him.  She
bent her white forehead to the faint breeze that
came through the closed green blinds, and she
looked at the etching.  The colonel believed
that she was thinking of her dead mother,
whom she had loved.  He hesitated, choosing
his words, for he hated preaching, and yet it
seemed to him that Sylvia mourned too long.

"I was very fond of your mother, too, my
dear," he said gently, after a time.  "She was
like a real sister to us.  I wish I could have
gone instead, and left her to you."

"You?"  Sylvia's voice startled him; she
was suddenly pale, and the old print shook in
her hands.  "Oh, no!" she cried half
passionately.  "Not you--not you!"

The colonel was surprised for a moment.
Then he was grateful, for he felt that she
was very fond of him.  He thought of the
woman he loved, and that he might have had
such a daughter as Sylvia, but with other eyes.

"I am glad you are fond of me," he said.
"You are very good to me, and I know I am
a tiresome old man."

At that word, one beat of the girl's heart sent
resentful blood to her face.

"You are not old at all!" she cried.  "And
you could not be tiresome if you tried!  And
I am not good to you, as you call it!"

The girl's young anger made him think of
summer lightning, and of the sudden flashing
of new steel drawn silently and swiftly from
the sheath into the sunshine.

"Goodness may be a matter of opinion, my
dear," said he.  "But age is a matter of fact.
I was fifty-three years old on my last birthday."

"Oh, what do years matter?"  Sylvia rose
quickly and turned from him, going towards the
window.

The colonel watched her perfectly graceful
movements.  She wore grey, with a small black
band at her throat, and the soft light clung to
the lovely outline of her figure and to her brown
hair.  He thought again of the daughter that
might have been born to him, and even of a
daughter's daughter.  It seemed to him that
his own years might be a greater matter than
Sylvia would admit.  Yet, as their descending
mists veiled hope's height, he was often glad
that there should not be as many more as there
had been.  He said nothing, and there was a
dream in his eyes.

"You are always saying that you are old.
Why?"  Sylvia's voice came from the window,
but she did not turn.  "It is not kind," she
said, still more softly.

"Not kind?"  He did not understand.

"It is not kind to me.  It is as though I did
not care.  Besides, it is not true!"

Just then the conviction had come back to
her voice, stronger than ever, strengthening
the tone just when it was breaking.  She had
never spoken to him in this way.  He called her.

"Sylvia!  Will you come here, my dear?"  She
came, and he took her fresh young hands.
"What is it?  Has anything happened?  Are
you unhappy?  Tell me."

At his question the violet eyes slowly filled,
and she just bent her head once or twice, as
though assenting.

"You are unhappy?"  He repeated his
question, and again she nodded sadly.

"But happy, too,--often."

There was not room for happiness and sorrow
together in her full eyes.  The tear fell, and
gladness took its place at his touch.  But he
looked, and remembered other hands, and began
to know the truth.  Love's unforgotten spirit
came, wafting a breath of older days.

He looked, and wondered whom the girl had
chosen, and was glad for her happiness while he
grew anxious for its life.  She was so young
that she must have chosen lately and quickly.
In a rush of inward questioning his mind ran
back through the long journey they had made
together, and answers came in many faces of
men that glided before him.  One of them
stopped him and held his thought, as a fleeting
memory will.  A young officer of her father's
flagship, lean, brown, bright-eyed, with a strong
mouth and a rare smile.  Sylvia had often
talked with him, and the boy's bright eyes used
to watch her from the distance when he was
not beside her.  Quiet of speech he was, and
resolute, bred in the keen air of a northern sea,
of the few from among whom fate may choose
the one.  That was the man.

The colonel spoke, then, as though he had
said much, glad and willing to take the girl's
conclusion.

"I know who it is," he said, as if all had
been explained.  "I am glad, very glad."

His hands pressed hers more tightly, for he
was a man of heart, and because his own life
had failed strangely, he knew how happy she
must be, having all he had not.  But the violet
eyes grew wide and dark and surprised, and the
faint colour came and went.

"Do you really, really know at last?" she
asked, very low.

"Yes, dear, I know," he said, for he had the
sure conviction out of his sympathy for the child.

"And you are glad?  Even as I am?"

"Indeed I am!  I love you with all my heart,
my dear."

She looked at him a moment longer, and then
her sight grew faint, and her face hid itself
against his coat.

"Say it!  Say it again!" she repeated, and
her white fingers closed tightly upon his sleeve.
"I have waited so long to hear you say it!"

An uneasy and half-distressed look came to
his face instantly, as he looked down at the
brown hair.

"What?" he asked.  "What have you
waited to hear me say?"

"That--the words you said just now."  Her
face still hidden, she hesitated.

"What did I say?  That I loved you, my dear?"

She nodded silently, against his coat.

"That I have always loved you, Sylvia dear,"
he said, while a wondering fear stole through him.

"You never told me.  And I did not dare
tell you--how could I?  But now you
understand.  You know that the years mean nothing,
after all, and that there is still sand in the
hourglass, and you and I shall reach the end of the
road together--"

"Sylvia!"  His voice rang sharply and painfully
as he interrupted her.

He was a little pale, and his grey eyes were
less steady than usual, for he could not be
mistaken any longer.  He had faced many dangers
bravely, but the girl frightened him, clinging to
his sleeve, and talking of her half-childish love
for him.  Then came the shock to his honour,
for it seemed as though it must somehow have
been his fault.

She looked up and saw his face, but could not
understand it, though she had a prevision of
evil, and the stealing sickness of disappointment
made her faint.

"I did not know what you meant, my child,"
he said, growing more pale, and very gently
pushing her back a little.  "I was thinking of
young Knox.  I thought you loved him.  I was
so sure that he was the man."

She drew back, now, of her own will, staring.

"Knox?  Mr. Knox?"  She repeated the
name, hardly hearing her own words, half
stunned by her mistake.  "But you said--you
said you loved me--"

"As your father does," said Colonel Wimpole,
very gravely.  "Your father and I are just of
the same age.  We were boys together.  You
know it, my dear."

She was a mere child, and he made her feel
that she was.  Her hands covered her face in
an instant as she fled, and before the door had
closed behind her, the colonel heard the first
quick sob.

He had risen to his feet, and stood still,
looking at the door.  When he was alone, he might
have smiled, as some men might have done, not
at Sylvia, indeed, though at the absurdity of the
situation.  But his face was sad, and he quietly
sat down again by the table, and began to think
of what had happened.

Sylvia was very foolish, he said to himself,
as he tried to impose upon his mind what he
thought should have been his conviction.  Yet
he was deeply and truly touched by her
half-childish love, and its innocence seemed pathetic
to him, while he was hurt for her pain, and most
of all for her overwhelming confusion.

At the same time came memories and visions,
and his head sank forward a little as he sat in
his chair by the table.  The vision of hope was
growing daily more dim, but the remembrance
of the past was as undying as what has been
is beyond recall.

Sylvia would wake from her girlish dream,
and, in the fulness of young womanhood, would
love a man of her own years.  The colonel knew
that.  She would see that he was going in under
the gateway of old age, while she was on the
threshold of youth's morning.  A few days, or
a few months, or, at most, a few years more,
and she must see that he was an old man.  That
was certain.

He sighed, not for Sylvia, but because age is
that deadly sickness of which hope must perish
at last.  Time is a prince of narrow possessions,
absolute where he reigns at all, cruel upon his
people, and relentless; for, beyond his scanty
principality, he is nothing, and his name is not
known in the empire of eternity.  Therefore
while he rules he raises the dark standard of
death, taking tribute of life, and giving back a
slow poison in return.

Colonel Wimpole was growing old, and, though
the woman he still loved was not young, she was
far younger than he, and he must soon seem an
old man even in her eyes.  And then there would
not be much hope left.  Sadly he wondered what
Sylvia saw in him which that other woman,
who had known him long, seemed to have never
quite seen.  But such questioning could find no
satisfaction.

He might have remained absorbed in his
reflexions for a long time had he been left alone,
but the door opened behind him, and he knew by
the steady and precise way in which it was opened
and shut that his sister had entered the room.

"Richard," she said, "I am surprised."  Then
she stood still and waited.

Miss Wimpole was older than her brother,
and was an exaggeration of him in petticoats.
Her genuine admiration for him was curiously
tempered by the fact that, when they had been
children, she, as the elder, had kept him out of
mischief, occasionally by force, often by
authority, but never by persuasion.  When in
pinafores the colonel had been fond of sweets.  Miss
Wimpole considered that he owed his excellent
health to her heroic determination to save him
from destruction by jam.  Since those days she
had been obliged to yield to him on other points,
but the memory of victory in the matter of
preserves still made her manner authoritative.

She was very like him, being tall, thin, and
not ungraceful, though as oddly precise in her
movements and gestures as she was rigid in her
beliefs, faithful in her affections, and just in
her judgments.  She had loved a man who had
been killed in the civil war, and, being what she
was, she had never so much as considered the
possibility of marrying any one else.  She was
much occupied in good works and did much
good, but she was so terribly accurate about it
as to make Sylvia say that she was like a public
charity that had been brought up in good society.

The colonel rose as she spoke.

"What is the matter?" he asked.  "Why
are you surprised?"

"What have you been saying to Sylvia,
Richard?" enquired Miss Wimpole, not moving.

It would have been hard to hit upon a question
more certain to embarrass the colonel.  He
felt the difficulty of his position so keenly that,
old as he was, a faint colour rose in his cheeks.
No answer occurred to him, and he hesitated.

"She has locked herself up in her room,"
continued Miss Wimpole, with searching severity,
"and she is crying as though her heart would
break.  I heard her sobbing as I passed the
door, and she would not let me in."

"I am very sorry," said the colonel, gravely.

"You do not seem much concerned," retorted
his sister.  "I insist upon knowing what is the
matter."

"Girls often cry," observed Colonel Wimpole,
who felt obliged to say something, though he
did not at all know what to say.

"Sylvia does not often cry, Richard, and you
know it.  You must have said something very
unkind to her."

"I hope not," answered the colonel, evasively.

"Then why is she sobbing there, all by herself?
I should like you to answer that question."

"I am very sorry that I cannot.  When she
is herself again you had better ask her."

Colonel Wimpole thought this good diplomacy.
Since he meant not to tell his sister
the truth, and was incapable of inventing a
falsehood, he saw no means of escape except
by referring Miss Wimpole directly to Sylvia.

"Richard," said the maiden lady, impressively,
"I am surprised at you."  And she turned away
rather stiffly.  "I thought you had more
confidence in me," she added, as she reached the door.

But Colonel Wimpole made no further
answer, for he saw that she had accepted his
silence, which was all he wanted.  When he
was quite sure that she was in her own room,
he went and got his hat and stick and slipped
quietly out of the hotel.





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.. _`CHAPTER II`:

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   CHAPTER II

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Colonel Wimpole did not like Lucerne, and
as he strolled along the shady side of the street,
he unconsciously looked up at the sky or down
at the pavement rather than at the houses and
the people.  He disliked the tourists, the
buildings, the distant scenery and the climate, and
could give a reason for each separate aversion.
Excepting the old tower, which was very much
like a great many other old towers, he
maintained that the buildings were either flat and
dull, or most modernly pretentious.  The
tourists were tourists, and that alone condemned
them beyond redemption.  The climate was
detestable, and he was sure that every one must
think so.  As for the scenery, with its prim
lake, its tiresome snow mountains, and its toy
trees, he said that it was little better than a
perpetual chromolithograph, though at sunset
it occasionally rose to the dignity of a
transparent 'landscape' lamp-shade.  The colonel's
views of places were not wholly without
prejudice.  Being a very just man, where men and
women were concerned, he allowed himself to
be as unfair as he chose about inanimate things,
from snow mountains to objects of art.

It was the pretension of Switzerland, he said,
to please and to attract.  Since it neither
attracted him nor pleased him, he could not see
what harm there could be in saying so.  The
Rigi's feelings could not be hurt by a sharp
remark, nor could Mount Pilatus be supposed
to be sensitive.  He never abused Switzerland
where any Swiss person could hear him.  The
same things, he said, were true of objects of art.
If they failed to please, there could be no reason
for their existence, or for not saying so, provided
that the artist were not present.  As for the
latter, the charitable colonel was always willing
to admit that he had done his best.  It was
gratuitous to suppose that any man should
wilfully do badly what he could do well.

The colonel strolled slowly through the back
streets, keeping in the shade.  The day was hot,
and he felt something like humiliation at having
allowed himself to yield to circumstances and
come out of the house earlier than usual.  He
would certainly not have acknowledged that he
had been driven from the hotel by the fear of
his sister's curiosity, but he would have faced a
hotter sun rather than be obliged to meet her
inquisitive questions again.

It was true that, being alone, he had to meet
himself, and discuss with himself the painful
little scene which had taken place that
afternoon, for he was not one of those people who can
get rid of unpleasant difficulties simply by
refusing to think about them.  And he examined
the matter carefully as he went along, staring
alternately at the sky and at the pavement,
while his stick rang sharply in time with his
light but still military step.  He did not see
the people who passed, but many of them looked
at him, and noticed his face and figure, and set
him down for a gentleman and an old soldier,
as he was.

At first sight it seemed ridiculous that Sylvia
should be in love with him; then it seemed sad,
and then it seemed childish.  He remembered
the tragedy of Ninon de l'Enclos and her son,
and it was horrible until he recalled an absurd
story of a short-sighted young man who had
fallen in love with his grandmother because his
vanity would not allow him to wear spectacles.
At this recollection, Colonel Wimpole smiled a
little, though he was obliged to admit that
Sylvia's eyes had always been very good.  He
wished, for a moment, that he were quite old
already, instead of being only on the edge of old
age.  It would have been more easy to laugh at
the matter.  He was glad that he was not ten
years younger, for in that case he might have
been to blame.  As he was turning into the
main street, he caught sight of his own reflexion
in the big plate glass window of a shop.  He
stopped short, with a painful sensation.

Had the image been that of a stranger, he
should have judged the original to be a young
man.  The figure he saw was tall and straight
and active, dressed in the perfection of neatness
and good taste.  The straw hat shaded the upper
part of the face, but the sunlight caught the
well-cut chin and gilded the small, closely trimmed
moustache.

The colonel was extremely annoyed, just then,
by his youthful appearance.  He stopped and
then went close to the plate glass window, till
he could see his face distinctly in it, against the
shadows of the darkened shop.  He was positively
relieved when he could clearly distinguish
the fine lines and wrinkles and grey hairs, which
he saw every morning in his mirror when he
shaved.  It was the sunshine playing with
shadow that had called up the airy reflexion of
his departed youth for a moment.  Sylvia could
never have seen him as he had appeared to
himself in the window.

He looked a little longer.  A lady in black
was talking with the shopkeeper, and a short
young man stood beside her.  Colonel
Wimpole's fingers tightened suddenly upon the
familiar silver knob of his stick, his face grew a
little pale, and he held his breath.

The lady turned quietly, walked to the
window, followed by the shopkeeper and the young
man, and pointed to a miniature which lay
among a great number of more or less valuable
antiquities and objects of art, all of them
arranged so as to show them to an undue
advantage.  She stood quite still, looking down at
the thing she wanted, and listening to what the
shopkeeper said.  The colonel, just on the other
side of the thick plate glass, could hear nothing,
though he could have counted the heavy lashes
that darkly fringed the drooping lids as the lady
kept her eyes upon the miniature.  But his heart
was standing still, for she was the woman he
had loved so long and well, and he had not
known that she was to pass through Lucerne.
The short young man beside her was her son,
and Colonel Wimpole knew him also, and had
seen him from time to time during the nineteen
years of his life.  But he scarcely noticed him
now, for his whole being was intent upon the
face of the woman he loved.

She was dark, though her hair had never been
jet black, and her complexion had always
reminded the colonel of certain beautiful roses
of which the smooth cream-coloured leaves are
very faintly tinged with a warm blush that
bears no relation to pink, but which is not red
either, a tint without which the face was like
marble, which could come in a moment but was
long in fading as a northern sunset, and which
gave wonderful life to the expression while it
lasted.  The lady's features were bold and well
cut, but there were sad lines of lifelong
weariness about the curved mouth and deep-set eyes;
and there was a sort of patient but not weak
sadness in all her bearing, the look of those who
have tired but have not yielded, who have borne
a calm face against a great trouble from without
and a true heart against a strong temptation
from within.

She was neither tall nor short, neither heavy
nor light in figure, a woman of good and strong
proportion, and she was dressed in black, though
one small jewelled ornament and a coloured
ribbon in her hat showed that she was not in mourning.

The elderly man at the window did not move
as he watched her, for he felt sure that she
must presently look up and meet his eyes.  Then
he would go in.  But it did not happen just in
that way, for her son recognized him first, a
dark youth, very squarely built, with a heavy
face and straight eyebrows that met over his
nose.  When he saw the colonel he smiled,
lifted his hat, and spoke to his mother.  The
lady started perceptibly and seemed to press
the handle of her black parasol to her side.
Several seconds passed after that, before the
fringed lids were lifted, and the two looked at
each other fixedly through the thick glass.  A
soft, slow smile smoothed and illuminated the
lady's face, but Colonel Wimpole felt that he
was paler than before, and his lips moved,
unconsciously pronouncing a name which he had
never spoken carelessly during two and twenty
years.  Nor, in that long time, had he ever met
Helen Harmon suddenly, face to face, without
feeling that his cheeks grew pale and that his
heart stood still for a moment.

But his pulse beat quite regularly again when
he had entered the shop and stood before her,
extending his hand to meet hers, though he felt
that he was holding out his heart to meet her
heart, and he was full of unexpected happiness.
So, in dim winter days, the sun shines out in a
sudden glory, and spring is in the air before
her time, for an hour; but afterwards it is cold
again, and snow falls before night.  Many a far
glimpse of the flower-time had gladdened the
colonel's heart before now, but the promised
summer had never come.

The two stood still for a moment, hand in
hand, and their eyes lingered in meeting, just a
second or two longer than if they had been
mere friends.  That was all that a stranger
could have seen to suggest that Richard
Wimpole had loved Helen Harmon for twenty-two
years, and the young man at her side did not
even notice it.  He shook hands with the colonel
in his turn, and was the first to speak.

"One meets everybody in Lucerne," he
observed, in a tactless generalization.

"I certainly did not hope to meet you,"
answered the colonel, smiling.  "It is true that the
cross-roads of Europe are at Lucerne if they are
anywhere.  My sister and I are taking Sylvia
Strahan home from Japan.  Of course we stopped here."

"Oh, of course!" laughed young Harmon.
"Everybody stops here.  We have been here
ever so long, on our way to Carlsbad, I believe."

His mother glanced at him nervously before
she spoke, as though she were not sure of what
he might say next.

"I am thinking of buying a miniature," she
said.  "Will you look at it for me?  You know
all about these things.  I should like your advice."

The dealer's face fell as he stood in the
background, for he knew the colonel, and he
understood English.  But as she spoke, Mrs. Harmon
was thinking more of Wimpole than of the
miniature; and he, when he answered, was
wondering how he could succeed in being alone
with her for one half-hour--one of those little
half-hours on which he lived for weeks and
months after they were past.

Mrs. Harmon's manner was very quiet, and
there was not often very much change in her
expressions.  Her laugh was low, regretful,
and now and then a little bitter.  Sometimes,
when one might have expected a quick answer,
she said nothing at all, and then her features
had a calm immobility that was almost
mysterious.  Only now and then, when her son was
speaking, she was evidently nervous, and at the
sound of his voice her eyes turned quickly and
nervously towards his face, while the shadows
about the corners of her mouth deepened a
little, and her lips set themselves.  When he said
anything more witless than usual, she was
extraordinarily skilful and quick to turn his
saying to sense by a clear explanation.  At other
times she generally spoke rather slowly and
even indolently, as though nothing mattered
very much.  Yet she was a very sensible woman,
and not by any means unpractical in daily life.
Her tragedy, if it were one, had been slow and
long drawn out.

First, a love which had been real, silent, and
so altogether unsuspected, even by its object,
that Richard Wimpole had never guessed it even
to this day.  Then a marriage thrust upon her
by circumstances, and which she had accepted at
last in the highest nobility of honest purpose.
After that, much suffering, most scrupulously
covered up from the world, and one moment of
unforgotten horror.  There was a crooked scar
on her forehead, hidden by the thick hair which
she drew down over it.  When she was angry
it turned red, though there was no other change
in her face.  Then a little while, and her
husband's mind had gone.  Even then she had tried
to take care of him, until it had been hopeless,
and he had become dangerous.  The mercy of
death seemed far from him, and he still lived,
for he was very strong.  And all along there
had been the slowly increasing certainty of
another misfortune.  Her son, her only child, had
been like other children at first, then dull and
backward, and in the end, as compared with
grown men, deficient.  His mind had not
developed much beyond a boy's; but he was
unusually strong, he had learned to apply his
strength, and had always excelled in athletic
sports.  One might have been deceived at first
by the sharp glance of his eyes, but they were
not bright with intelligence.  The young man's
perfect physical health alone made them clear
and keen as a young animal's; but what they
saw produced little reaction of understanding or
thought.

Nor was that all that Helen Harmon had
borne.  There was one other thing, hardest of
any to bear.  By an accident she had learned at
last that Richard Wimpole had loved her, and
she had guessed that he loved her still.  He had
fancied her indifferent to him; and Harmon
had been his friend in young days.  Harmon
had been called fast, even then, but not vicious,
and he had been rich.  Wimpole had stood aside
and had let him win, being diffident, and really
believing that it might be better for Helen in
the end.  He thought that she could make
anything she chose of Harmon, who was furiously
in love with her.

So the two had made the great mistake, each
meaning to do the very best that could be done.
But when Harmon had gone mad at last, and
was in an asylum without prospect of recovery,
and Helen found herself the administrator of
his property for her son, it had been necessary
to go through all his disordered papers, and she
had found a letter of Wimpole's to her husband,
written long ago.  Had it been a woman's letter,
she would have burned it unread.  But it was
a duty to read every paper which might bear
upon business matters, from the beginning, and
she naturally supposed that Harmon must have
had some reason for keeping this one.  So she
read it.

It had been written in the early days of her
husband's courtship.  He, too, had been generous,
then, with impulses of honour in which there
had been, perhaps, something of vanity, though
they had impelled him to do right.  There had
been some conversation between the friends, and
Harmon had found out that Wimpole loved
Helen.  Not being yet so far in love as he was
later, he had offered to go away and let the young
colonel have a chance, since the latter had loved
her first.  Then Wimpole had written this letter
which she found twenty years later.

It was simple, grateful, and honourably
conceived.  It said what he had believed to be the
truth, that Helen did not care for him, that
Harmon was quite as good as he in all ways,
and much richer, and it finally and definitely
refused the offer of 'a chance.'  There was
nothing tragic about it, nor any high-flown word
in its short, clear phrases.  But it had decided
three lives, and the finding of it after such a long
time hurt Helen more than anything had ever
hurt her before.

In a flash she saw the meaning of Wimpole's
life, and she knew that he loved her still, and
had always loved her, though in all their many
meetings, throughout those twenty years, he had
never said one word of it to her.  In one sudden
comprehension, she saw all his magnificent
generosity of silence.  For he had partly known how
Harmon had treated her.  Every one knew
something of it, and he must have known more than
any one except the lawyer and the doctor whom
she had been obliged to consult.

And yet, in that quick vision, she remembered,
too, that she had never complained to him, nor
ever said a word against Harmon.  What
Wimpole knew, beyond some matters of business in
which he had helped her, he had learned from
others or had guessed.  But he had guessed
much.  Little actions of his, under this broad
light of truth, showed her now that he had often
understood what was happening when she had
thought him wholly in ignorance.

But he, on his side, found no letter, nor any
unexpected revelation of her secret; and still,
to him, she seemed only to have changed indifference
for friendship, deep, sincere, lasting and calm.

She kept the old letter two days, and then,
when she was alone, she read it again, and her
eyes filled, and she saw her hands bringing the
discoloured page towards her lips.  Then she
started and looked at it, and she felt the scar on
her forehead burning hot under her hair, and the
temptation was great, though her anger at
herself was greater.  Harmon was alive, and she
was a married woman, though he was a
madman.  She would not kiss the letter, but she
laid it gently upon the smouldering embers, and
then turned away, that she might not see it
curling and glowing and blackening to ashes on
the coals.  That night a note from the director
of the asylum told her that her husband was in
excellent bodily health, without improvement in
his mental condition.  It was dated on the first
of the month.

After that she avoided the colonel for some
time, but when she met him her face was again
like marble, and only the soft, slow smile and
the steady, gentle voice showed that she was
glad to see him.  Two years had passed since
then, and he had not even guessed that she knew.

He often sought her, when she was within
reach of him, but their meeting to-day, in the
fashionable antiquary's shop, at the cross-roads
of Europe, was altogether accidental, unless it
were brought about by the direct intervention
of destiny.  But who believes in destiny
nowadays?  Most people smile at the word 'fate,'
as though it had no meaning at all.  Yet call
'fate' the 'chemistry of the universe' and the
sceptic's face assumes an expression of abject
credulity, because the term has a modern ring
and smacks of science.  What is the difference
between the two?  We know a little chemistry:
we can get something like the perfume of spring
violets out of nauseous petroleum, and a flavour
of strawberries out of stinking coal-tar; but we
do not know much of the myriad natural laws
by which our bodies are directed hither and
thither, mere atoms in the everlasting
whirlpool of all living beings.  What can it matter
whether we call those rules chemistry or fate?
We shall submit to them in the end, with our
bodies, though our souls rebel against them ever
so eternally.  The things that matter are quite
different, and the less they have to do with our
bodies, the better it is for ourselves.

Colonel Wimpole looked at the miniature and
saw that it was a modern copy of a well-known
French one, ingeniously set in an old case, to fit
which it had perhaps been measured and painted.
He looked at the dealer quickly, and the man
expressed his despair by turning up his eyes a
very little, while he bent his head forward and
spread out his palms, abandoning the contest,
for he recognized the colonel's right to advise a
friend.

"What do you think of it?" asked Mrs. Harmon.

"That depends entirely on what you mean to
do with it, and how much you would give for
it," answered the colonel, who would not have
let her buy an imitation under any circumstances,
but was far too kind-hearted to ruin
the shopkeeper in her estimation.

"I rather liked it," was the answer.  "It
was for myself.  There is something about the
expression that pleases me.  The lady looks so
blindly happy and delighted with herself.  It
is a cheerful little thing to look at."

The colonel smiled.

"Will you let me give it to you?" he asked,
putting it into her hand.  "In that way I shall
have some pleasure out of it, too."

Mrs. Harmon held it for a moment, and looked
at him thoughtfully, asking herself whether
there was any reason why she should not accept
the little present.  He was not rich, but she
had understood from his first answer that the
thing was not worth much, after all, and she
knew that he would not pay an absurd price
for it.  Her fingers closed quietly upon it.

"Thank you," she said.  "I wanted it."

"I will come back this afternoon and pay
for it," said the colonel to the dealer, as the
three went out of the shop together a few
moments later.

During the little scene, young Harmon had
looked on sharply and curiously, but had not spoken.

"How are those things made, mother?" he
asked, when they were in the street.

"What things?" asked Mrs. Harmon, gently.

"Those things--what do you call them?
Like what Colonel Wimpole just gave you.
How are they made?"

"Oh, miniatures?  They are painted on ivory
with very fine brushes."

"How funny!  Why do they cost so much
money, then?"

His questions were like those of a little child,
but his mother's expression did not change as
she answered him, always with the same
unvarying gentleness.

"People have to be very clever to paint
them," she said.  "That is why the very good
ones are worth so much.  It is like a good
tailor, my dear, who is paid well because he
makes good coats, whereas the man who only
knows how to make workmen's jackets earns
very little."

"That's not fair," said young Harmon.  "It
isn't the man's fault if he is stupid, is it?"

"No, dear, it isn't his fault, it's his misfortune."

It took the young man so long to understand
this that he said nothing more, trying to think
over his mother's words, and getting them by
heart, for they pleased him.  They walked along
in the hot sun and then crossed the street
opposite the Schweizerhof to reach the shade of the
foolish-looking trees that have been stuck about
like Nuremberg toys, between the lake and the
highway.  The colonel had not spoken since
they had left the shop.

"How well you are looking," he said
suddenly, when young Harmon had relapsed into
silence.  "You are as fresh as a rose."

"A rose of yesterday," said Helen Harmon,
a little sadly.

Quite naturally, Colonel Wimpole sighed as
he walked along at her elbow; for though he
did not know that she had ever loved him,
he remembered the letter he had written to
the man she had afterwards married, and he
was too much a man himself not to believe that
all might have been different if he had not
written it.

"Where are you stopping?" he asked, when
they had gone a few steps in silence.

Mrs. Harmon named a quiet hotel on the
other side of the river.

"Close to us," observed the colonel, just as
they reached the new bridge.

They were half-way across when an
exclamation from young Harmon interrupted their
conversation, which was, indeed, but a curiously
stiff exchange of dry information about
themselves and their movements, past, planned, and
probable.  For people who are fond of each
other and meet rarely are first of all anxious
to know when they may meet again.  But the
boy's cry of surprise made them look round.

"Jukes!" he exclaimed loudly.  "Jukes!"
he repeated, more softly but very emphatically,
as though solely for his own benefit.

'Jukes' was his only expression when pleased
and surprised.  No one knew whether he had
ever heard the word, or had invented it, and
no one could ever discover what it meant nor
from what it was derived.  It seemed to be
what Germans call a 'nature-sound,' by which
he gave vent to his feelings.  His mother hated
it, but had never been able to induce him to
substitute anything else in its place.  She
followed the direction of his eager glance, for she
knew by his tone that he wanted what he saw.

She expected to see a pretty boat, or a big
dog, or a gorgeous posted bill.  Archie had a
passion for the latter, and he often bought them
and took them home with him to decorate his
own particular room.  He loved best the ones
printed in violent and obtrusive colours.  The
gem of his collection was a purple woman on
a red ground with a wreath of yellow flowers.

But Mrs. Harmon saw neither advertisement
nor dog, nor boat.  She saw Sylvia Strahan.
She knew the girl very well, and knew Miss
Wimpole, of course.  The two were walking
along on the other side of the bridge, talking
together.  Against the blaze of the afternoon
sun, reflected from the still lake, they could
hardly have recognized the colonel and the
Harmons, even if they had looked that way.

"It's Sylvia, mother," said Archie, glaring at
the girl.  "But isn't she grown!  And isn't she
lovely?  Oh, Ju-u-ukes!"

His heavy lips thickened outwards as he
repeated the mysterious ejaculation, and there
was more colour than usual in his dark face.
He was but little older than Sylvia, and the two
had played together as small children, but he
had never shown any special preference for her
as a playmate.  What struck him, now, was
evidently her beauty.  There was a look in
his eyes, and a sort of bristling of the meeting
eyebrows that reminded Helen of his father,
and her white lids quivered for an instant at
the recollection, while she felt a little chill run
through her.

The colonel also saw.

"Shall we cross over and speak to them?"
he asked in a low voice.  "Or shall we just go on?"

"Let us go on," answered Helen.  "I will
go and see them later.  Besides, we have passed
them now.  Let us go on and get into the
shade; it is dreadfully hot here."

"Won't you stop and speak to them, mother?"
asked Archie Harmon, in a tone of deep
disappointment.  "Why, we have not seen them for
ever so long!"

"We shall see them by and by," answered
his mother.  "It's too hot to go back now."

The young man turned his head and lagged
a little, looking after the girl's graceful figure,
till he stumbled awkwardly against a curbstone.
But he did not protest any more.  In his dull
way, he worshipped his mother as a superior
being, and hitherto he had always obeyed her
with a half-childish confidence.  His arrested
intelligence still saw her as he had seen her
ten years earlier, as a sort of high and
protecting wisdom incarnate for his benefit, able
to answer all questions and to provide him
with unlimited pocket-money wherewith to buy
bright-coloured posters and other gaudy things
that attracted him.  Up to a certain point, he
could be trusted to himself, for he was almost
as far from being an idiot as he was from being
a normally thinking man.  He was about as
intelligent and about as well informed as a
rather unusually dull schoolboy of twelve years
or thereabouts.  He did not lose his way in the
streets, nor drop his money out of his pockets,
and he could speak a little French and German
which he had learned from a foreign nurse,
enough to buy a ticket or order a meal.  But
he had scarcely outgrown toys, and his chief
delight was to listen to the stories his mother
told him.  She was not very inventive, and she
told the same old ones year after year.  They
always seemed to be new to him.  He could
remember faces and names fairly well, and had
an average recollection of events in his own
life; but it was impossible to teach him
anything from books, his handwriting was the
heavy, unformed scrawl of a child, and his
spelling was one long disaster.

So far, at least, Helen had found only his
intellectual deficiency to deal with, and it was
at once a perpetual shame to her and a cause
of perpetual sorrow and sympathy.  But he
was affectionate and docile enough, not cruel as
some such beings are, and certainly not vicious,
so far as she could see.  Dull boys are rarely
mischievous, though they are sometimes cruel,
for mischief implies an imagination which
dulness does not possess.

Archie Harmon had one instinct, or quality,
which redeemed him from total insignificance
and raised him above the level of an amiable
and harmless animal.  He had a natural horror
of taking life, and felt the strongest possible
impulse to save it at any risk to himself.  His
mother was never quite sure whether he made
any distinction between the value of existence to
a man, and its worth to an animal, or even to
an insect.  He seemed not to connect it with its
possessor, but to look upon it as something to be
preserved for its own sake, under all
circumstances, wherever it manifested itself.  At
ordinary times he was sufficiently cautious for his
own safety, and would hesitate to risk a fall or
scratch in climbing, where most boys would have
been quite unaware of such possibilities.  But at
the sight of any living thing in danger, a
reckless instinct to save it took possession of him,
and his sluggish nature was roused to sudden
and direct activity, without any intermediate
process of thought.  He had again and again
given proof of courage that might have shamed
most men.  He had saved a child from drowning
in the North River, diving after it from a
ferryboat running at full speed, and he had
twice stopped bolting horses--once, a pair with
a heavy brougham in the streets of New York,
and once, in the park, a dog-cart driven by a
lady.  On the first of these two occasions he
had been a good deal cut and bruised, and
had narrowly escaped with his life.  His mother
was too brave not to be proud of his deeds, but
with each one her fears for his own daily safety
increased.

He was never violent, but he occasionally
showed a strength that surprised her, though
he never seemed to care about exhibiting it.
Once, she had fallen and hurt her foot, and he
had carried her up many stairs like a child.
After that, she had felt now and then as men
must feel who tame wild beasts and control them.

He worshipped her, and she saw that he
looked with a sort of pity on other women,
young or old, as not worthy to be compared
with her in any way.  She had begun to hope
that she might be spared the humiliation of ever
seeing him in love, despised or pitied, as the case
might be, by some commonplace, pretty girl with
white teeth and pink cheeks.  She feared that,
and she feared lest he should some day taste
drink, and follow his father's ways to the same
ruin.  But as yet he had been like a child.

It was no wonder that she shuddered when,
as he looked at Sylvia Strahan, she saw
something in his face which had never been there
before and heard that queer word of his uttered
in such a tone.  She wondered whether Colonel
Wimpole had heard and seen, too, and for some
time the three walked on in silence.

"Will you come in?" asked Mrs. Harmon, as
they reached the door of her hotel.

The colonel followed her to her little sitting-room,
and Archie disappeared; for the conversation
of those whom he still, in his own thoughts,
regarded as 'grown-up people' wearied him beyond bearing.

"My dear friend," said Colonel Wimpole, when
they were alone, "I am so very glad to see you!"

He held one of her hands in his while he spoke
the conventional words, his eyes were a little
misty, and there was a certain tone in his voice
which no one but Helen Harmon had ever heard.

"I am glad, too," she said simply, and she
drew away her hand from his with a sort of
deprecation which he only half understood, for
he only knew that half of the truth which was
in himself.

They sat down as they had sat many a time
in their lives, at a little distance from each
other, and just so that each had to turn the
head a little to face the other.  It was easier
to talk in that position because there was a
secret between them, besides many things which
were not secrets, but of which they did not
wish to speak.

"It is terribly long since we last met," said
the colonel.  "Do you remember?  I went to
see you in New York the day before we started
for Japan.  You had just come back from the
country, and your house was in confusion."

"Oh yes, I remember," replied Mrs. Harmon.
"Yes, it is terribly long; but nothing is changed."

"Nothing?"  The colonel meant to ask her
about Harmon, and she understood.

"Nothing," she answered gravely.  "There
was no improvement when the doctor wrote, on
the first of last month.  I shall have another
report in a day or two.  But they are all exactly
alike.  He will just live on, as he is now, to the
end of his life."

"To the end of his life," repeated the colonel,
in a low voice, and the two turned their heads
and looked at each other.

"He is in perfect health," said Mrs. Harmon,
looking away again.

She drew out a long hat-pin and lifted her
hat from her head with both hands, for it was
a hot afternoon, and she had come into the
sitting-room as she was.  The colonel noticed
how neatly and carefully she did the thing.  It
seemed almost unnecessary to do it so slowly.

"It is so hot," she said, as she laid the hat
on the table.

She was pale now, perhaps with the heat of
which she complained, and he saw how tired her
face was.

"Is this state of things really to go on?" he
asked suddenly.

She moved a little, but did not look at him.

"I am not discontented," she said.  "I am
not--not altogether unhappy."

"Why should you not be released from it
all?" asked the colonel.

It was the first time he had ever suggested
such a possibility, and she looked away from him.

"It is not as if it had all been different
before he lost his mind," he went on, seeing that
she did not answer at once.  "It is not as if you
had not had fifty good reasons for a divorce
before he finally went mad.  What is the use of
denying that?"

"Please do not talk about a divorce," said
Mrs. Harmon, steadily.

"Please forgive me, if I do, my dear friend,"
returned the colonel, almost hotly; for he was
suddenly convinced that he was right, and when
he was right it was hard to stop him.  "You
have spent half your life in sacrificing all of
yourself.  Surely you have a right to the other
half.  There is not even the excuse that you
might still do him some good by remaining his
wife in name.  His mind is gone, and he could
not recognize you if he saw you."

"What should I gain by such a step, then?"
asked Helen, turning upon him rather suddenly.
"Do you think I would marry again?"  There
was an effort in her voice.  "I hate to talk in
this way, for I detest the idea of divorce, and
the principle of it, and all its consequences.  I
believe it is going to be the ruin of half the
world, in the end.  It is a disgrace, in whatever
way you look at it!"

"A large part of the world does not seem to
think so," observed the colonel, rather surprised
by her outbreak, though in any case excepting
her own he might have agreed with her.

"It would be better if the whole world
thought so," she observed with energy.  "Do
you know what divorce means in the end?  It
means the abolition of marriage laws
altogether; it means reducing marriage to a mere
experiment which may last a few days, a few
weeks, or a few months, according to the people
who try it.  There are men and women, already,
who have been divorced and married again half
a dozen times.  Before the next generation is
old that will be the rule and not the exception."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Colonel Wimpole.  "I hope not!"

"I know you agree with me," said Mrs. Harmon,
with conviction.  "You only argue on the
other side because--"  She stopped short.

"Why?"  He did not look at her as he
asked the question.

"Because you are my best friend," she
answered, after a moment's hesitation, "and
because you have got it into your head that I
should be happier.  I cannot imagine why.  It
would make no difference at all in my life--now."

The last word fell from her lips with a regretful
tone and lingered a little on the air like the
sad singing of a bell's last note, not broken by
a following stroke.  But the colonel was not
satisfied.

"It may make all the difference, even now,"
he said.  "Suppose that Harmon were to recover."

Helen did not start, for the thought had been
long familiar to her, but she pressed her lips
together a little and let her head rest against
the back of her chair, half closing her eyes.

"It is possible," continued the colonel.  "You
know as well as I do that doctors are not always
right, and there is nothing about which so little
is really certain as insanity."

"I do not think it is possible."

"But it is, nevertheless.  Imagine what it
would be, if you began to hear that he was
better and better, and finally well, and, at last,
that there was no reason for keeping him in
confinement."

Mrs. Harmon's eyes were quite closed now, as
she leaned back.  It was horrible to her to wish
that her husband might remain mad till he died,
yet she thought of what her own life must be if
he should recover.  She was silent, fighting it
out in her heart.  It was not easy.  It was hard
even to see what she should wish, for every
human being has a prime right of self-preservation,
against which no argument avails, save
that of a divinely good and noble cause to be
defended.  Yet the moral wickedness of
praying that Harmon might be a madman all the
rest of his life frightened her.  Throughout
twenty years and more she had faced suffering
and shame without flinching and without
allowing herself one thought of retaliation or
hatred.  She had been hardened to the struggle
and was not a woman to yield, if it should begin
again, but she shrank from it, now, as the best
and bravest may shrink at the thought of
torture, though they would not groan in slow fire.

"Just think what it might be," resumed
Colonel Wimpole.  "Why not look the facts
in the face while there is time?  If he were let
out, he would come back to you, and you would
receive him, for I know what you are.  You
would think it right to take him back because
you promised long ago to love, honour, and obey
him.  To love, to honour, and to obey--Henry Harmon!"

The colonel's steady grey eyes flashed for an
instant, and his gentle voice was suddenly thick
and harsh as he pronounced the last words.
They meant terribly much to the woman who
heard them, and in her distress she leaned
forward in her seat and put up her hands to her
temples, as though she had pain, gently pushing
back the heavy hair she wore so low on her
forehead.  Wimpole had never seen her so much
moved, and the gesture itself was unfamiliar to
him.  He did not remember to have ever seen
her touch her hair with her hands, as some
women do.  He watched her now, as he
continued to speak.

"You did all three," he said.  "You
honoured him, you loved him, and you obeyed him
for a good many years.  But he neither loved,
nor honoured, nor cherished you.  I believe that
is the man's part of the contract, is it not?
And marriage is always called a contract, is it
not?  Now, in any contract, both parties must
do what they have promised, so that if one
party fails, the other is not bound.  Is not
that true?  And, Heaven knows, Harmon failed
badly enough!"

"Don't!  Please don't take it that way!  No,
no, no!  Marriage is not a contract; it is a
bond, a vow--something respected by man
because it is sacred before God.  If Henry failed
a thousand times more, I should be just as much
bound to keep my promise."

Her head sank still more forward, and her
hands pushed her hair straight back from the
temples.

"You will never persuade me of that,"
answered the colonel.  "You will never make me
believe--"  He stopped short, for as he watched
her, he saw what he had never seen before, a
deep and crooked scar high on her forehead.
"What is that?" he asked suddenly, leaning
towards her, his eyes fixed on the ugly mark.

She started, stared at him, dropping her hands,
realized what he had seen, and then instantly
turned away.  He could see that her fingers
trembled as she tried to draw her hair down
again.  It was not like her to be vain, and he
guessed at once that she had some reason other
than vanity for hiding the old wound.

"What is that scar?" he asked again,
determined to have an answer.  "I never saw it
before."

"It is a--I was hurt long ago--"  She
hesitated, for she did not know how to lie.

"Not so very long ago," said the colonel.  "I
know something about scars, and that one is not
many years old.  It does not look as though you
had got it in a fall either.  Besides, if you had,
you would not mind telling me, would you?"

"Please don't ask me about it!  I cannot tell
you about it."

The colonel's face was hardening quickly.
The lines came out in it stern and straight, as
when, at evening, a sudden frost falls upon a
still water, and the first ice-needles shoot out,
clear and stiff.  Then came the certainty, and
Wimpole looked as he had looked long ago in battle.

"Harmon did that," he said at last, and the
wrathful thought that followed was not the less
fierce because it was unspoken.

Helen's hands shook now, for no one had ever
known how she had been wounded.  But she
said nothing, though she knew that her silence
meant her assent.  Wimpole rose suddenly,
straight as a rifle, and walked to the window,
turning his back upon her.  He could say
things there, under his breath, which she could
not understand, and he said them, earnestly.

"He did not know what he was doing," Helen
said, rather unsteadily.

The colonel turned on his heels at the window,
facing her, and his lips still moved slowly, though
no words came.  Helen looked at him and knew
that she was glad of his silent anger.  Not
realizing what she was thinking of, she wondered
what sort of death Harmon might have died if
Richard Wimpole had seen him strike her to the
ground with a cut-glass decanter.  For a moment
the cloak of mercy and forgiveness was rent from
head to heel.  The colonel would have killed
the man with those rather delicate looking hands
of his, talking to him all the time in a low voice.
That was what she thought, and perhaps she
was not very far wrong.  Even now, it was well
for Harmon that he was safe in his asylum on
the other side of an ocean.

It was some time before Wimpole could speak.
Then he came and stood before Helen.

"You will stay a few days?  You do not mean
to go away at once?" he said, with a question.

"Yes."

"Then I think I shall go away now, and
come and see you again later."

He took her hand rather mechanically and
left the room.  But she understood and was
grateful.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER III`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER III

.. vspace:: 2

When Archie Harmon disappeared and left
the colonel and his mother together, she
supposed that he had gone to his room to sleep,
for he slept a great deal, or to amuse himself
after his fashion, and she did not ask him where
he was going.  She knew what his favourite
amusement was, though he did his best to keep
it a secret from her.

There was a certain mysterious box, which he
had always owned, and took everywhere with
him, and of which he always had the key in his
pocket.  It took up a good deal of space, but
he could never be persuaded to leave it behind
when they went abroad.

To-day he went to his room, as usual, locked
the door, took off his coat, and got the box out
of a corner.  Then he sat down on the floor and
opened it.  He took out some child's building-blocks,
some tin soldiers, much the worse for
wear, for he was ashamed to buy new ones,
and a small and gaudily painted tin cart, in
which an impossible lady and gentleman of
papier-mâché, dressed in blue, grey, and
yellow, sat leaning back with folded arms and
staring, painted eyes.  There were a few other
toys besides, all packed away with considerable
neatness, for Archie was not slovenly.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, a strong
grown man of nearly twenty years, and began
to play with his blocks.  His eyes fixed
themselves on his occupation, as he built up a little
gateway with an arch and set red-legged French
soldiers on each side of it for sentinels.  He
had played the same game a thousand times
already, but the satisfaction had not diminished.
One day in a hotel he had forgotten to lock the
door, and his mother had opened it by mistake,
thinking it was that of her own room.  Before
he could look round she had shut it again, but
she had seen, and it had been like a knife-thrust.
She kept his secret, but she lost heart from that
day.  He was still a child, and was always to be one.

Yet there was perhaps something more of
intelligence in the childish play than she had
guessed.  He was lacking in mind, but not an
idiot; he sometimes said and did things which
were certainly far beyond the age of toys.
Possibly the attraction lay in a sort of companionship
which he felt in the society of the blocks,
and the tin soldiers, and the little papier-mâché
lady and gentleman.  He felt that they
understood what he meant and would answer him if
they could speak, and would expect no more
of him than he could give.  Grown people
always seemed to expect a great deal more,
and looked at him strangely when he called
Berlin the capital of Austria and asked why
Brutus and Cassius murdered Alexander the
Great.  The toy lady and gentleman were quite
satisfied if their necks were not broken in the
cunningly devised earthquake which always
brought the block house down into a heap
when he had looked at it long enough and
was already planning another.

Besides, he did all his best thinking among
his toys, and had invented ways of working out
results at which he could not possibly have
arrived by a purely mental process.  He could
add and subtract, for instance, with the bits of
wood, and, by a laborious method, he could even
do simple multiplication, quite beyond him with
paper and pencil.  Above all, he could name the
tin soldiers after people he had met, and make
them do anything he pleased, by a sort of
rudimentary theatrical instinct that was not
altogether childish.

To-day he built a house as usual, and, as
usual, after some reflexion as to the best means
of ruining it by taking out a single block, he
pulled it down with a crash.  But he did not
at once begin another.  On the contrary, he sat
looking at the ruins for a long time in a rather
disconsolate way, and then all at once began to
pack all the toys into the box again.

"I don't suppose it matters," he said aloud.
"But of course Sylvia would think me a baby if
she saw me playing with blocks."

And he made haste to pack them all away,
locking the box and putting the key into his
pocket.  Then he went and looked through the
half-closed blinds into the sunny street, and he
could see the new bridge not far away.

"I don't care what mother thinks!" he
exclaimed.  "I'm going to find her again."

He opened his door softly, and a moment
later he was in the street, walking rapidly
towards the bridge.  At a distance he looked
well.  It was only when quite near to him that
one was aware of an undefinable ungainliness
in his face and figure--something blank and
meaningless about him, that suggested a heavy
wooden doll dressed in good clothes.  In
military countries one often receives that
impression.  A fine-looking infantry soldier, erect,
broad shouldered, bright eyed, spotless, and
scrupulously neat, comes marching along and
excites one's admiration for a moment.  Then,
when close to him, one misses something which
ought to go with such manly bearing.  The
fellow is only a country lout, perhaps, hardly able
to read or write, and possessed of an intelligence
not much beyond the highest development of
instinct.  Drill, exercise, and the fear of black
bread and water under arrest, have produced a
fine piece of military machinery, but they could
not create a mind, nor even the appearance of
intelligence, in the wooden face.  In a year or
two the man will lay aside his smart uniform
and go back to the class whence he came.  One
may give iron the shape and general look of
steel, but not the temper and the springing quality.

Archie Harmon looked straight ahead of him
as he crossed the bridge and followed the long
street that runs beside the water, past the
big hotels and the gaudy awnings of the
provincially smart shops.  At first he only looked
along the pavement, searching among the many
people who passed.  Then as he remembered
how Colonel Wimpole had seen him through a
shop window, he stopped before each of the big
plate glass ones and peered curiously into the
shadows within.

At last, in a milliner's, he saw Sylvia and
Miss Wimpole, and his heavy face grew red,
and his eyes glared oddly as he stood motionless
outside, under the awning, looking in.  His
lips went out a little, as he pronounced his own
especial word very softly.

"Jukes!"

He stood first on one foot and then on the
other, like a boy at a pastry cook's, hesitating,
while devouring with his eyes.  He could see
that Sylvia was buying a hat.  She turned a
little each way as she tried it on before a big
mirror, putting up her hands and moving her
arms in a way that showed all the lines of her
perfect figure.

Archie went in.  He had been brought up by
his mother, and chiefly by women, and he had
none of that shyness about entering a women's
establishment, like a milliner's, which most boys
and many men feel so strongly.  He walked in
boldly and spoke as soon as he was within hearing.

"Miss Sylvia!  I say!  Miss Sylvia--don't
you know me?"

The question was a little premature, for
Sylvia had barely caught sight of him when he
asked it.  When she had recognized him, she
did not look particularly pleased.

"It's poor Archie Harmon, my dear," said
Miss Wimpole, in a low voice, but quite audibly.

"Oh, I have not forgotten you!" said Sylvia,
trying to speak pleasantly as she gave her
hand.  "But where in the world did you come
from?  And what are you doing in a milliner's shop?"

"I happened to see you through the window,
so I just came in to say how do you do.  There's
no harm in my coming in, is there?  You look
all right.  You're perfectly lovely."

His eyes were so bright that Sylvia felt oddly
uncomfortable.

"Oh no," she answered, with an indifference
she did not feel.  "It's all right--I
mean--I wish you would go away now, and
come and see us at the hotel, if you like, by
and by."

"Can't I stay and talk to you?  Why can't
I stay and talk to her, Miss Wimpole?" he
asked, appealing to the latter.  "I want to
stay and talk to her.  We are awfully old
friends, you know; aren't we, Sylvia?  You
don't mind my calling you Sylvia, instead of
Miss Sylvia, do you?"

"Oh no!  I don't mind that!"  Sylvia
laughed a little.  "But do please go away now!"

"Well--if I must--" he broke off, evidently
reluctant to do as she wished.  "I say," he
began again with a sudden thought, "you like
that hat you're trying on, don't you?"

Instantly Sylvia, who was a woman, though
a very young one, turned to the glass again,
settled the hat on her head and looked at
herself critically.

"The ribbons stick up too much, don't they?"
she asked, speaking to Miss Wimpole, and quite
forgetting Archie Harmon's presence.  "Yes,
of course they do!  The ribbons stick up too
much," she repeated to the milliner in French.

A brilliant idea had struck Archie Harmon.
He was already at the desk, where a young
woman in black received the payments of
passing customers with a grieved manner.

"She says the ribbons stick up too much," he
said to the person at the desk.  "You get
them to stick up just right, will you?  The
way she wants them.  How much did you say
the hat was?  Eighty francs?  There it is.  Just
say that it's paid for, when she asks for the bill."

The young woman in black raked in the note
and the bits of gold he gave her, catching them
under her hard, thin thumb on the edge of the
desk, and counting them as she slipped them
into her little drawer.  She looked rather
curiously at Archie, and there was still some
surprise in her sour face when he was already on
the pavement outside.  He stopped under the
awning again, and peered through the window
for a last look at the grey figure before the
mirror, but he fled precipitately when Sylvia
turned as though she were going to look at
him.  He was thoroughly delighted with
himself.  It was just what Colonel Wimpole had
done about the miniature, he thought; and
then, a hat was so much more useful than a
piece of painted ivory.

In a quarter of an hour he was in his own
room again, sitting quite quietly on a chair by
the window, and thinking how happy he was,
and how pleased Sylvia must be by that time.

But Sylvia's behaviour when she found out
what he had done would have damped his
innocent joy, if he had been looking through the
windows of the shop, instead of sitting in his
own room.  Her father, the admiral, had a hot
temper, and she had inherited some of it.

"Impertinent young idiot!" she exclaimed,
when she realized that he had actually paid for
the hat, and the angry blood rushed to her face.
"What in the world--"  She could not find words.

"He is half-witted, poor boy," interrupted
Miss Wimpole.  "Take the hat, and I will
manage to give his mother the money."

"Betty Foy and her idiot boy over again!"
said Sylvia, with all the brutal cruelty of extreme
youth.  "'That all who view the idiot in his
glory'--"  As the rest of the quotation was not
applicable, she stopped and stamped her little
foot in speechless indignation.

"The young gentleman doubtless thought to
give Mademoiselle pleasure," suggested the
milliner, suavely.  "He is doubtless a relation--"

"He is not a relation at all!" exclaimed
Sylvia in English, to Miss Wimpole.  "My relations
are not idiots, thank Heaven!  And it's the only
one of all those hats that I could wear!  Oh,
Aunt Rachel, what shall I do?  I can't possibly
take the thing, you know!  And I must have
a hat.  I've come all the way from Japan with
this old one, and it isn't fit to be seen."

"There is no reason why you should not take
this one," said Miss Wimpole, philosophically.
"I promise you that Mrs. Harmon shall have
the money by to-night, since she is here.  Your
Uncle Richard will go and see her at once, of
course, and he can manage it.  They are on
terms of intimacy," she added rather primly,
for Helen Harmon was the only person in the
world of whom she had ever been jealous.

"You always use such dreadfully correct
language, Aunt Rachel," answered the young girl.
"Why don't you say that they are old friends?
'Terms of intimacy' sounds so severe, somehow."

"You seem impatient, my dear," observed
Miss Wimpole, as though stating a fact about nature.

"I am," answered Sylvia.  "I know I am.
You would be impatient if an escaped lunatic
rushed into a shop and paid for your gloves, or
your shoes, or your hat, and then rushed off
again, goodness knows where.  Wouldn't you?
Don't you think I am right?"

"You had better tell them to send the hat
to the hotel," suggested Aunt Rachel, not
paying the least attention to Sylvia's appeal for
justification.

"If I must take it, I may as well wear it at
once, and look like a human being," said Sylvia.
"That is, if you will really promise to send
Mrs. Harmon the eighty francs at once."

"I promise," answered Miss Wimpole, solemnly,
and as she had never broken her word
in her life, Sylvia felt that the difficulty was
at an end.

The milliner smiled sweetly, and bowed them out.

"All the same," said Sylvia, as she walked
up the street with the pretty hat on her head,
"it is an outrageous piece of impertinence.
Idiots ought not to be allowed to go about alone."

"I should think you would pity the poor
fellow," said Miss Wimpole, with a sort of severe
kindliness, that was genuine but irritating.

"Oh yes!  I will pity him by and by, when
I'm not angry," answered the young girl.  "Of
course--it's all right, Aunt Rachel, and I'm not
depraved nor heartless, really.  Only, it was
very irritating."

"You had better not say anything about it to
your Uncle Richard, my dear.  He is so fond of
Archie's mother that he will feel very badly
about it.  I will break it to him gently."

"Would he?" asked Sylvia, in surprise.
"About herself, I should understand--but
about that boy!  I can't see why he should mind."

"He 'minds,' as you call it, everything that
has to do with Mrs. Harmon."

Sylvia glanced at her companion, but said
nothing, and they walked on in silence for some
time.  It was still hot, for the sun had not sunk
behind the mountains; but the street was full
of people, who walked about indifferent to the
temperature, because Switzerland is supposed to
be a cold country, and they therefore thought
that it was their own fault if they felt warm.
This is the principle upon which nine people out
of ten see the world when they go abroad.  And
there was a fine crop of European and American
varieties of the tourist taking the air on that
afternoon, men, women, and children.  The men
who had huge field-glasses slung over their
shoulders by straps predominated, and one, by whom
Sylvia was particularly struck, was arrayed in
blue serge knickerbockers, patent-leather
walking-boots, and a very shiny high hat.  But there
were also occasional specimens of what she
called the human being--men in the ordinary
garments of civilization, and not provided with
opera-glasses.  There were, moreover, young and
middle-aged women in short skirts, boots with
soles half an inch thick, complexions in which
the hue of the boiled lobster vied with the
deeper tone of the stewed cherry, bearing
alpenstocks that rang and clattered on the pavement;
women who, in the state of life to which Heaven
had called them, would have gone to Margate
or Staten Island for a Sunday outing, but who
had rebelled against providence, and forced the
men of their families to bring them abroad.
And the men generally walked a little behind
them and had no alpenstocks, but carried shawls
and paper bundles, badges of servitude, and
hoped that they might not meet acquaintances
in Lucerne, because their women looked like
angry cooks and had no particular luggage.
Now and then a smart old gentleman with an
eyeglass, in immaculate grey or white, threaded
his way along the pavement, with an air of
excessive boredom; or a young couple passed
by, in the recognizable newness of honeymoon
clothes, the young wife talking perpetually, and
evidently laughing at the ill-dressed women,
while the equally young husband answered in
monosyllables, and was visibly nervous lest his
bride's remarks should be overheard and give
offence.

Then there were children, obtrusively English
children, taken abroad to be shown the miserable
inferiority of the non-British world, and to
learn that every one who had not yellow hair
and blue eyes was a 'nasty foreigner,'--unless,
of course, the individual happened to be
English, in which case nothing was said about hair
and complexion.  And also there were the
vulgar little children of the not long rich,
repulsively disagreeable to the world in general, but
pathetic in the eyes of thinking men and
women.  They are the sprouting shoots of the
gold-tree, beings predestined never to enjoy,
because they will be always able to buy what
strong men fight for, and will never learn to
enjoy what is really to be had only for money;
and the measure of value will not be in their
hands and heads, but in bank-books, out of
which their manners have been bought with
mingled affection and vanity.  Surely, if
anything is more intolerable than a vulgar woman,
it is a vulgar child.  The poor little thing is
produced by all nations and races, from the
Anglo-Saxon to the Slav.  Its father was happy
in the struggle that ended in success.  When it
grows old, its own children will perhaps be happy
in the sort of refined existence which wealth can
bring in the third generation.  But the child of
the man grown suddenly rich is a living
misfortune between two happinesses: neither a worker
nor an enjoyer; having neither the satisfaction
of the one, nor the pleasures of the other;
hated by its inferiors in fortune, and a source of
amusement to its ethic and æsthetic betters.

Sylvia had never thought much about the
people she passed in a crowd.  Thought is
generally the result of suffering of some kind, bodily
or intellectual, and she had but little acquaintance
with either.  She had travelled much, and
had been very happy until the present time,
having been shown the world on bright days
and by pleasant paths.  But to-day she was
not happy, and she began to wonder how many
of the men and women in the street had what
she had heard called a 'secret care.'  Her eyes
had been red when she had at last yielded to
Miss Wimpole's entreaties to open the door,
but the redness was gone already, and when
she had tried on the hat before the glass she
had seen with a little vanity, mingled with
a little disappointment, that she looked very
much as usual, after all.  Indeed, there had
been more than one moment when she had
forgotten her troubles because the ribbons on
the new hat stuck up too much.  Yet she was
really unhappy, and sad at heart.  Perhaps
some of the people she passed, even the women
with red faces, dusty skirts, and clattering
alpenstocks, were unhappy too.

She was not a foolish girl, nor absurdly
romantic, nor full of silly sentimentalities, any
more than she was in love with Colonel Wimpole
in the true sense of the word.  For she knew
nothing of its real meaning, and, apart from
that meaning, what she felt for him filled all
the conditions proposed by her imagination.  If
one could classify the ways by which young
people pass from childhood to young maturity,
one might say that they are brought up by the
head, by the imagination, or by the heart, and
one might infer that their subsequent lives are
chiefly determined by that one of the three
which has been the leading-string.  Sylvia's
imagination had generally had the upper hand,
and it had been largely fed and cultivated by
her guardian, though quite unintentionally on his
part.  His love of artistic things led him to talk
of them, and his chivalric nature found sources
of enthusiasm in lofty ideals, while his own
life, directed and moved as it was by a secret,
unchanging and self-sacrificing devotion to one
good woman, might have served as a model
for any man.  Modest, and not much inclined
to think of himself, he did not realize that
although the highest is quite beyond any one's
reach, the search after it is always upward, and
may lead a good man very far.

Sylvia saw the result, and loved it for its own
sake with an attachment so strong that it made
her blind to the more natural sort of humanity
which the colonel seemed to have outgrown,
and which, after all, is the world as we inherit
it, to love it, or hate it, or be indifferent to it,
but to live with it, whether we will or not.  He
fulfilled her ideal, because it was an ideal which
he himself had created in her mind, and to
which he himself nearly approached.  Logically
speaking, she was in a vicious circle, and she
liked what he had taught her to like, but liked
it more than he knew she did.

Sylvia glanced at Miss Wimpole sideways.
She knew her simple story, and wondered
whether she herself was to live the same sort
of life.  The idea rather frightened her, to tell
the truth, for she knew the aridity of the elderly
maiden lady's existence, and dreaded anything
like it.  But it was very simple and logical and
actual.  Miss Wimpole had loved a man who
had been killed.  Of course she had never
married, nor ever thought of loving any one else.
It was perfectly simple.  And Sylvia loved,
and was not loved, as she told herself, and
she also must look forward to a perpetually
grey life.

Then, suddenly, she felt how young she was,
and she knew that the colonel was almost an
old man, and her heart rebelled.  But this
seemed disloyal, and she blushed at the word
'unfaithful,' which spoke itself in her sensitive
conscience with the cruel power to hurt which
such words have against perfect innocence.
Besides, it was as if she were quarrelling with
what she liked, because she could not have it,
and she felt as though she were thinking
childishly, which is a shame in youth's eyes.

Also, she was nervous about meeting him
again, for she had not seen him since she had
fled from the room in tears, though he had seen
her on the bridge.  She wished that she might
not see him at all for a whole day, at least,
and that seemed a very long time.

Altogether, when she went into the hotel
again, she was in a very confused state of mind
and heart, and was beginning to wish that she
had never been born.  But that was childish, too.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IV`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER IV

.. vspace:: 2

Helen Harmon was glad when the colonel
was gone.  She went to a mirror, fixed to the
wall between the two windows of the room, and
she carefully rearranged her hair.  She could
not feel quite herself until she knew that the
scar was covered again and hidden from curious
eyes.  Then she sat down, glad to be alone.
It had been a great and unexpected pleasure to
see Wimpole, but the discovery he had made,
and the things he had said, had disturbed and
unnerved her.

There had been conviction in his voice when
he had said that Harmon might recover, and the
possibility of a change in her husband's
condition had crossed her mind more than once.
She felt that a return to such a state of things
as had made up her life before he had become
insane, would kill her by slow torture.  It was
of no use any longer to tell herself that recovery
was impossible, and to persuade herself that it
was so by the mere repetition of the words.
Words had no more weight, now.

She thought of her freedom since that merciful
deliverance.  It was not happiness, for there
were other things yet to be suffered, but it was
real freedom.  She had her son's affliction to
bear, but she could bear it alone and go and
come with him as she pleased.  She contrasted
this liberty with what she had borne for years.

The whole history of their married life came
back to her, the gradual progress of it from first
to last, if indeed it had yet reached the end and
was not to go back to the beginning again.

First there had been the sort of half-contented
resignation which many young women feel
during the early months of married life, when they
have made what is called by the world a good
match, simply because they saw no reason for
not marrying and because they were ashamed to
own that they cared for a man who did not seem
to be attached to them.  Sometimes the state
lasts throughout life, a neutral, passionless,
negative state, in which the heart turns flat and
life is soon stale, a condition in which many
women, not knowing what pain is, grow restless
and believe that it must be pleasanter to be
hurt than to feel nothing.

Henry Harmon had been handsome, full of
life and nerve and enthusiasm for living, a rider,
a sportsman, more reckless than brave and more
brave than strong-minded, with a gift for being,
or seeming to be, desperately in love, which had
ultimately persuaded Helen to marry him in
spite of her judgment.  He turned pale when he
was long near her, his eyes flashed darkly, his
hands shook a little, and his voice trembled.  An
older woman might have thought it all rather
theatrical, but he seemed to suffer, and that
moved Helen, though it did not make her really
love him.  Women know that weakness of
theirs and are more afraid of pitying an
importunate suitor than of admiring him.  So Helen
married Harmon.

Disillusionment came as daylight steals upon
dancers in a ballroom.  At first it was not so
painful as might have been imagined, for Helen
was not excessively sensitive, and she had never
really loved the man in the least.  He grew
tired of her and left her to herself a good deal.
That was a relief, at first, for after she had
realized that she did not love him, she shrank
from him instinctively, with something very
like real shame, and to be left alone was like
being respected.

"Mrs. Blank's husband is neglecting her," says one.

"She does not seem to care; she looks very
happy," answers another.

And she is temporarily happy, because
Mr. Blank's neglect gives her a sense of bodily
relief, for she knows that she has made a
mistake in marrying him.  It was so with Helen,
and as she was not a changeable nor at all a
capricious person, it might have continued to be
so.  But Harmon changed rapidly in the years
that followed.  From having been what people
called fast, he became dissipated.  He had
always loved the excitement of wine.  When
it failed him, he took to stronger stuff, which
presently became the essential requisite of his
being.  He had been said to be gay, then he
was spoken of as wild, then as dissipated.  Some
people avoided him, and every one pitied Helen.
Yet although he ruined his constitution, he did
not wreck his fortunes, for he was lucky in all
affairs connected with money.  There remained
many among his acquaintances who could not
afford to disapprove of him, because he had power.

He drank systematically, as some men do,
for the sake of daily excitement, and Helen
learned to know tolerably well when he was
dangerous and when he might be approached
with safety.  But more than once she had made
horrible mistakes, and the memories of them
were like dreams out of hell.  In his drunkenness
her face recalled other days to him, and
forgotten words of passion found thick and
indistinct utterance.  Once she had turned on
him, white and desperate in her self-defence.
He struck her on the forehead with a cut-glass
decanter, snatched from her toilet table.  When
she came to herself hours afterwards, it was
daylight.  Harmon was in a drunken sleep, and
the blood on his face was hers.

She shuddered with pain from head to foot
when she thought of it.  Then had come
strange lapses of his memory, disconnected
speech, even hysterical tears, following
senseless anger, and then he had ceased to
recognize any one, and had almost killed one of the
men who took care of him, so that it was
necessary to take him to an asylum, struggling like a
wild beast.  Twice, out of a sense of duty, she
had been to see whether he knew her, but he
knew no one, and the doctors said it was a
hopeless case.  Since then she had received
a simple confirmation of the statement every
month, and there seemed to be no reason for
expecting any change, and she felt free.

Free was the only word she could find, and
she applied it to herself in a sense of her own,
meaning that she had been liberated from the
thraldom in which she had lived so many years
face to face with his brutality, and hiding it
from the world as best she could, protecting and
defending his name, and refusing pity as she
would have refused money had she been poor.
People might guess what she suffered, but no one
should know it from her, and no one but herself
could tell the half of what she underwent.

Yet, now that it was all over, Wimpole
suggested that it might begin again, unless she took
measures to defend herself.  But her heart
revolted at the idea of a divorce.  She wondered,
as she tried to test herself, whether she could
be as strong if the case really arose.  It never
occurred to her to ask whether her strength
might not be folly, for it lay in one of those
convictions by which unusual characters are
generally moved, and conviction never questions itself.

It was not that in order to be divorced she
must almost necessarily bring up in public and
prove by evidence a certain number of her
many wrongs.  The publicity would be
horrible.  Every newspaper in the country would
print the details, with hideous head-lines.  Even
her son's deficiency would be dragged into the
light.  She should have to explain how she had
come by the scar on her forehead, and much more
that would be harder to tell, if she could bring
her lips to speak the words.

Nevertheless, she could do that, and bear everything,
for a good cause.  If, for instance, Archie's
future depended upon it, or even if it could do
him some good, she could do all that for his
sake.  But even for his sake, she would not be
divorced, not even if Harmon were let out of
the asylum and came back to her.

Some people, perhaps many, could not understand
such a prejudice, or conviction, now that
all convictions are commonly spoken of as
relative.  But will those who do not understand
Helen Harmon consider how the world looked
upon divorce as recently as five and twenty
years ago?  Nothing can give a clearer idea
of the direction taken by social morality than
the way in which half the world has become
accustomed to regard marriage as a contract,
and not as a bond, during the lifetime of people
now barely in middle age.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago divorces were
so rare as to be regarded in the light of very,
uncommon exceptions to the general rule.  The
divorce law itself is not yet forty years old in
England, nor twenty years old in France.  In
Italy there is no civil divorce whatever at the
present day, and the Catholic Church only grants
what are not properly divorces, but annullations
of marriage, in very rare cases, and with the
greatest reluctance.

Even in America, every one can remember how
divorce was spoken of and thought of until very
recently.  Within a few years it was deemed
to be something very like a disgrace, and
certainly a profoundly cynical and immoral
proceeding.  To-day we can most of us count in
our own acquaintance half a dozen persons who
have been divorced and have married again.
Whatever we may think of it in our hearts, or
whatever our religious convictions may be on
the subject, it has become so common that when
we hear of a flagrant case of cruelty or
unfaithfulness, by which a man or woman suffers, the
question at once rises to our lips, 'Why does
he not divorce his wife?' or 'Why does she
not divorce her husband?'  We have grown
used to the idea, and, if it does not please us,
it certainly does not shock us.  It shocked our
fathers, but we are perfectly indifferent.

Of course there are many, perhaps a majority,
who, though not Roman Catholics, would in their
own lives put up with almost anything rather
than go to the divorce court for peace.  Some
actually suffer much and ask for no redress.
But there are very many who have not suffered
anything at all, excepting the favourite
'incompatibility of temper,' and who have taken
advantage of the loose laws in certain states to try
a second matrimonial experiment.  In what
calls itself society, there seems still to be a
prejudice against a third marriage for divorced
persons, but at the present rate of so-called
progress this cannot last long, and the old
significance of the word marriage will be quite
lost before our great grandchildren are dead;
in other words, by the end of the next century,
at the furthest.

There are various forms of honourable political
dreaming and of dishonourable political
mischief-making nowadays, which we are accustomed to
call collectively 'socialism.'  Most of these rely
for their hope of popular success upon their
avowed intention of dividing property and
preventing its subsequent accumulation.  Marriage
is an incentive of such accumulation, because it
perpetuates families and therefore keeps property
together by inheritance.  Therefore most forms
of socialism are at present in favour of divorce,
as a means of ultimately destroying marriage
altogether.  A proverb says that whosoever
desires the end, desires also the means.  There
is more truth in the saying than morality in the
point of view it expresses.  But there are those
who desire neither the means nor the end to
which they lead, and a struggle is coming, the
like of which has not been seen since the
beginning of the world, and of which we who are
now alive shall not see the termination.

The Civil War in the United States turned
upon slavery incidentally, not vitally.  The cause
of that great fight lay much deeper.  In the same
way the Social War, which is coming, will turn
incidentally upon religion, and be perhaps called
a religious war hereafter, but it will not be
declared for the sake of faith against unbelief, nor
be fought at first by any church, or alliance of
churches, against atheism.  It will simply turn
out that the men who fight on the one side will
have either the convictions or the prejudices of
Christianity, or both, and that their adversaries
will have neither.  But the struggle will be at
its height when the original steady current of
facts which led to inevitable strife has sunk into
apparent insignificance under the raging storm
of conflicting belief and unbelief.  The
disadvantage of the unbelievers will lie in the fact
that belief is positive and assertive, whereas
unbelief is negative and argumentative.  It is
indeed easier to deny than to prove almost
anything.  But that is not the question.  In life
and war it is generally easier to keep than to
take, and besides, those who believe 'care,' as
we say, whereas those who deny generally 'care'
very little.  It is probable, to say the least of it,
that so long as the socialists of the near future
believe assertively that they have discovered the
means of saving humanity from misery and
poverty, and fight for a pure conviction, they
will have the better of it, but that when they
find themselves in the position of attacking half
of mankind's religious faith, having no idea, but
only a proposition, to offer in its place, they will
be beaten.

That seems far from the question of divorce,
but it is not.  Before the battle, the opposing
forces are encamped and intrenched at a little
distance from each other, and each tries to
undermine the other's outworks.  Socialism,
collectively, has dug a mine under Social Order's
strongest tower, which is called marriage, and
the edifice is beginning to shake from its
foundations, even before the slow-match is lighted.

To one who has known the world well for a
quarter of a century, it seems as though the
would-be destroyers of the existing order had
forgotten, among several other things, the
existence of woman, remembering only that of the
female.  They practically propose to take away
woman's privileges in exchange for certain more
or less imaginary 'rights.'  There is an apparent
justice in the 'conversion,' as it would be called
in business.  If woman is to have all the rights
of man, which, indeed, seem reducible to a
political vote now and then, why should she keep all
the privileges which man is not allowed?  But
tell her that when she is allowed to vote for the
president of the United States once in four years,
no man shall be expected to stand up in a public
conveyance to give her a seat, nor to fetch and
carry for her, nor to support her instead of being
supported by her, nor to keep her for his wife
any longer than he chooses, and the 'conversion'
looks less attractive.

The reason why woman has privileges instead
of rights is that all men tacitly acknowledge the
future of humanity to be dependent on her from
generation to generation.  Man works or fights,
and takes his rights in payment therefor, as
well as for a means of working and fighting to
greater advantage.  And while he is fighting or
working, his wife takes care of his children
almost entirely.  There is not one household in a
hundred thousand, rich or poor, where there is
really any question about that.  It sounds
insignificant, perhaps, and it looks as though
anybody could take care of two or three small
children.  Those who have tried it know better,
and they are women.  Now and then rich mothers
are too lazy to look after their children
themselves.  To do them such justice as one may,
they are willing to spend any amount of money
in order to get it well done for them, but the
result is not encouraging to those who would
have all children brought up 'by the state.'  Even
if it were so, who would bring them up?
Women, of course.  Then why not their own
mothers?  Because mothers sometimes--or often,
for the sake of argument--do not exactly know
how.  Then educate the mothers, give them
chances of knowing how, let them learn, if you
know any better than they, which is doubtful,
to say the least of it.

Moreover, does any man in his senses really
believe that mothers, as a whole, would
submit and let their children be taken from them
to a state rearing-house, to be brought up
under a number on a ticket by professional
baby-farmers, in exchange for the 'right' to
vote at a presidential election, and the 'right'
to put away their husbands and take others
as often as they please, and the 'right' to run
for Congress?  Yet the plan has been proposed
gravely.

There seems to be a good deal to be said in
favour of the existing state of things, after all,
and particularly in favour of marriage, and
therefore against divorce; and it is not
surprising that woman, whose life is in reality far
more deeply affected by both questions than
man's life is, should have also the more
profound convictions about them.

Woman brings us into the world, woman is
our first teacher, woman makes the world what
it is, from century to century.  We can no more
escape from woman, and yet continue to live our
lives as they should be lived, than we can hide
ourselves from nature.  We are in her care or
in her power during more than half our years,
and often during all, from first to last.  We are
born of her, we grow of her, as truly as trees
and flowers come of the mother earth and draw
their life from the soil in which they are planted.
The man who denies his mother is a bad man,
and the man who has not loved woman is a
man in darkness.

Man is not really unjust to woman in his
thoughts of her either, unless he be a lost soul,
but he has not much reason in respect of her
nor any justice in his exactions.  Because within
himself he knows that she is everything and all
things for the life and joy of men, therefore he
would seem perfect in her eyes; and he rails
against whatsoever in her does not please him,
as a blot upon the lustre of his ideal, which
indeed he would make a glorified reflexion of
his own faults.  When he is most imperfect,
he most exacts her praise; when he is
weakest, she must think him most strong; when he
fails, she must call failure victory, or at the
least she must name it honourable defeat; she
must not see his meanness, but she must
magnify the smallest of his generosities to the great
measure of his immeasurable vanity therein;
she must see faith in his unfaithfulness, honour
in his disgrace, heroism in his cowardice, for his
sake; she must forgive freely and forgettingly
such injury as he would not pardon any man;
in one word, she must love him, that in her love
he may think and boast himself a god.

It is much to ask.  And yet many a woman
who loves a man with all her heart has done
and daily does every one of those things, and
more; and the man knows it, and will not think
of it lest he should die of shame.  And,
moreover, a woman has borne him, a woman has
nursed him, a woman taught him first; a
woman gives him her soul and her body when
he is a man; and when he is dead, if tears are
shed for him, they are a woman's.

If we men are honest, we shall say that we
do not give her much for all that, not much
honour, not much faith.  We think we do
enough if we give her life's necessities and
luxuries in fair share to the limit of our poverty
or wealth; that we give much, if we love her;
too much, if we trust her altogether.

It is a wonder that women should love, seeing
what some men are and what most men may be
when the devil is in them.  It is a wonder that
women should not rise up in a body and demand
laws to free them from marriage, for one-half
the cause that so many of them have.

But they do not.  Even in this old age of
history they still believe in marriage, and cling
to it, and in vast majority cry out against its
dissolution.  No man ever believes in anything
as a woman who loves him believes in him.
Men have stronger arms, and heads for harder
work, but they have no such hearts as women.
And the world has been led by the heart in all ages.

Even when the great mistake is made, many
a woman clings to the faith that made it, for
the sake of what might have been, in a
self-respect of which men do not dream.  Even
when she has married with little love, and taken
a man who has turned upon her like a brute
beast, her marriage is still a bond which she
will not break, and the vow made is not void
because the promise taken has been a vain lie.
Its damnation is upon him who spoke it, but
she still keeps faith.

So, when her fair years of youth lay scattered
and withered as blown leaves along the desert
of her past, Helen Harmon, wisely or unwisely,
but faithfully and with a whole heart, meant to
keep that plighted word which is not to be
broken by wedded man and woman 'until death
shall them part.'





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER V`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER V

.. vspace:: 2

Miss Wimpole was walking up and down the
little sitting-room in considerable perplexity.
When she was greatly in doubt as to her future
conduct, she puckered her elderly lips, frowned
severely, and talked to herself with an
occasional energetic shaking of the head.  She
always did up her hair very securely and neatly,
so that this was quite safe.  Women who are
not sure of their hairpins carry their heads as
carefully as a basket of eggs and do not bend
them if they have to stoop for anything.

Talking to oneself is a bad habit, especially
when the door is open, whether one be swearing
at something or examining one's own conscience.
But Miss Wimpole could not help it, and the
question of returning the price of the hat to
Archie Harmon's mother was such a very difficult
one, that she had forgotten to shut the door.

"Most impossible situation!" she repeated
aloud.  "Most terrible situation!  Poor boy!
Half idiotic--father mad.  Most distressing
situation!  If I tell his mother, I shall hurt her
feelings dreadfully.  If I tell Richard, I shall
hurt his feelings dreadfully.  If I tell nobody,
I shall break my promise to Sylvia, besides
putting her in the position of accepting a hat
from a young man.  Ridiculous present, a hat!
If it had only been a parasol!  Parasols are not
so ridiculous as hats.  I wonder why!
Perfectly impossible to keep the money, of course.
Even Judas Iscariot--dear me!  Where are
my thoughts running to?  Shocking!  But a
terrible situation.  It was dear, too--eighty
francs!  We must get it into Mrs. Harmon's
hands somehow--"

"Why must you get eighty francs into Mrs. Harmon's
hands?" enquired the colonel, laying
his hat upon a chair.

The door had been open, and he had heard
her talking while he was in the corridor.  She
uttered an exclamation as she turned and saw him.

"Oh--well--I suppose you heard me.  I
must really cure myself of talking when I am
alone!  But I was not saying anything in particular."

"You were saying that you must manage to
pay Mrs. Harmon eighty francs.  It is very
easy, for she happens to be here and I have just seen her."

"Oh, I know she is here!" cried Miss
Wimpole.  "I know it to my cost!  She and
that--and her son, you know."

"Yes, I knew.  But what is the matter?
What is the trouble?"

"Oh, Richard!  You are so sensitive about
anything that has to do with Mrs. Harmon!"

"I?"  The colonel looked at her quietly.

"Yes.  Of course you are, and it is quite
natural and I quite understand, and I do not
blame you in the least.  But such a dreadful
thing has happened.  I hardly know how I can
tell you about it.  It is really too dreadful for
words."

Wimpole sat down and fanned himself slowly
with the Paris *Herald*.  He was still rather
pale, for his nerves had been shaken.

"Rachel, my dear," he said mildly, "don't be
silly.  Tell me what is the matter."

Miss Wimpole walked slowly once round the
room, stopped at the window and looked through
the blinds, and at last turned and faced her
brother with all the energy of her seasoned
character.

"Richard," she began, "don't call me silly
till you hear.  It's awful.  That boy suddenly
appeared in a shop where Sylvia was buying a
hat, and paid for it and vanished."

"Eh?  What's that?" asked Wimpole,
opening his eyes wide.  "I don't think I quite
understood, Rachel.  I must have been thinking
of something else, just then."

"I daresay you were," replied his sister,
severely.  "You are growing dreadfully
absent-minded.  You really should correct it.  I say
that when Sylvia was buying a hat, just now,
Archie Harmon suddenly appeared in the shop
and spoke to us.  Then he asked Sylvia whether
she liked the hat she was trying on, and she said
she did.  Then he went off, and when we wished
to pay we were told that the hat had been paid
for by the young gentleman.  Now--"

The colonel interrupted and startled his sister
by laughing aloud at this point.  He could not
help it, though he had not felt in the least as
though he could laugh at anything for a long
time, when he had entered the room.  Miss
Wimpole was annoyed.

"Richard," she said solemnly, "you surprise me."

"Does it not strike you as funny?" asked
the colonel, recovering.

"No.  It is--it is almost tragic.  But
perhaps," she continued, with a fine point of irony,
"since you make so light of the matter, you
will be good enough to return to Mrs. Harmon
the price of the hat purchased by her half-witted
boy for your ward."

"Don't call him half-witted, Rachel," said the
colonel.  "It's not so bad as that, you know."

"I cannot agree with you," replied his sister.
"Only an idiot would think of rushing into a
shop where a lady is buying something, and
suddenly paying for it.  You must admit that,
Richard.  Only an idiot could do such a thing."

"I have done just such a thing myself,"
observed Wimpole, thoughtfully, for he
remembered the miniature he had bought for Helen
that afternoon.  "I suppose I was an idiot,
since you say--"

"I said nothing of the kind, my dear!  How
can you accuse me of calling you an idiot?
Really, Richard, you behave very strangely
to-day!  I don't know what can be the matter
with you.  First, you manage to make Sylvia
cry her eyes out--Heaven knows what dreadful
thing you said to her!  And now you deliberately
accuse me of calling you an idiot.  If
this sort of thing goes on much longer, there
will be an end of our family happiness."

"This is not one of my lucky days," said the
colonel, resignedly, and he laid down the folded
newspaper.  "How much did the hat cost?
I will return the money to Mrs. Harmon, and
explain."

Miss Wimpole looked at him with gratitude
and admiration in her face.

"It was eighty francs," she answered.  "Richard,
I did not call you an idiot.  In the first
place, it would have been totally untrue, and in
the second place, it would have been--what
shall I say?  It would have been very vulgar
to call you an idiot, Richard.  It is a vulgar
expression."

"It might have been true, my dear, but I
certainly never knew you to say anything
vulgar.  On the other hand, I really did not assert
that you applied the epithet to me.  I applied
it to myself, rather experimentally.  And poor
Archie Harmon is not so bad as that, either."

"If he is not idiotic--or--or something like
it, why do you say 'poor' Archie?"

"Because I am sorry for him," returned the
colonel.  "And so are you," he added presently.

Miss Wimpole considered the matter for a
few seconds; then she slowly nodded, and came
up to him.

"I am," she said.  "Richard, kiss me."

That was always the proclamation of peace,
not after strife, for they never quarrelled, but
at the close of an argument.  It was done in
this way.  The colonel rose, and stood before
his sister; then both bent their heads a little,
and as their cool grey cheeks touched, each
kissed the air somewhere in the neighbourhood
of the other's ear.  They had been little
children together, and their mother had taught
them to 'kiss and make friends,' as good
children should, whenever there had been any
difference; and now they were growing old
together, but they had never forgotten, in
nearly fifty years, to 'kiss and make friends'
when they had disagreed.  What is childlike
is not always childish.

The colonel resumed his seat, and there was
silence for a few minutes.  The folded
newspaper lay on the table unread, and he looked
at it, scarcely aware that he saw it.

"I think Archie Harmon must have fallen
in love with Sylvia," he said at last.  "That
is the only possible explanation.  She has grown
up since he saw her last, and so has he, though
his mind has not developed much, I suppose."

"Not at all, I should say," answered Miss
Wimpole.  "But I wish you would not
suggest such things.  The mere idea makes me
uncomfortable."

"Yes," assented the colonel, thoughtfully.
"We will not talk about it."

Suddenly he knew what he was looking at,
and he read the first head-lines on the paper,
just visible above the folded edge.  The words
were 'Harmon Sane,' printed in large capitals.
In a moment he had spread out the sheet.

The big letters only referred to a short
telegram, lower down.  "It is reported on good
authority that Henry Harmon, who has been
an inmate of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum
for some years, is recovering rapidly, and will
shortly be able to return to his numerous friends
in perfect mental health."

That was all.  The colonel searched the paper
from beginning to end, in the vain hope of
finding something more, and read the little
paragraph over and over again.  There was no
possibility of a mistake.  There had never been
but one Henry Harmon, and there could
certainly be but one in the Bloomingdale asylum.
The news was so sudden that Wimpole felt his
heart stand still when he first read it, and as he
thought of it he grew cold, and shivered as
though he had an ague.

It had been easier to think of Harmon's
possible recovery before he had seen that scar on
Helen's forehead.  For many years he had borne
the thought that the woman he had silently loved
so long was bound to a man little better than a
beast; but it had never occurred to him that
she might have had much to bear of which he
had known nothing, even to violence and
physical danger.  The knowledge had changed him
within the last hour, and the news about
Harmon now hardened him all at once in his anger,
as hot steel is chilled when it has just reached
the cutting temper, and does not change after that.

The colonel was as honourable a man as ever
shielded a woman's good name, or rode to meet
an enemy in fair fight.  He was chivalrous with
all the world, and quixotic with himself.  He
had charity for the ways of other men, for he
had seen enough to know that many things
were done by men whom no one would dare to
call dishonourable, which he would not have done
to save his own life.  He understood that such a
lasting love as his was stronger than himself, yet
he himself had been so strong that he had never
yielded even to its thoughts, nor ever allowed
the longing for a final union with Helen at all
costs to steal upon his unguarded imagination.

He was not tempted beyond his strength,
indeed, and in his apparent perfection, that
must be remembered.  In all those years of
his devoted friendship Helen had never let him
guess that she could have loved him once, much
less that she loved him now, as he did her, with
the same resolution to hide from her inward
eyes what she could not tear from her inmost
heart.  But it is never fair to say that if a man
had been placed in a certain imaginary position,
he might have been weak.  So long as he has
not broken down under the trials and burdens
of real life, he has a right to be called strong.

The colonel set no barrier, however, against
the devotion to Helen's welfare which he might
honourably feel and show.  In day-dreams over
old books he had envied those clean knights of
a younger time, who fought for wives not theirs
so openly and bravely, and so honestly that the
spotless women for whom they faced death took
lustre of more honour from such unselfish love.
And for Helen's sake he had longed for some
true circumstance of mortal danger in which to
prove once more how well and silently an honest
man can die to save an innocent woman.

But those were dreams.  In acts he had done
much, though never half of what he had always
wished to do.  The trouble had all come little
by little in Helen's existence, and there had not
been one great deciding moment in which his
hand or head could have saved her happiness.

Now it seemed as though the time were full,
and as if he might at last, by one deed, cast the
balance by the scale of happiness.  He did not
know how to do it, nor whither to turn, but he
felt, as he sat by the table with the little
newspaper in his hand, that unless he could prevent
Harmon from coming back to his wife, his own
existence was to turn out a miserable failure, his
love a lie, and his long devotion but a worthless
word.

His first impulse was to leave Lucerne that
night and reach home in the shortest possible
time.  He would see Harmon and tell him what
he thought, and force from him a promise to
leave Helen in peace, some unbreakable promise
which the man should not be able to deny, some
sort of bond that should have weight in law.

The colonel's nostrils quivered, and his steady
grey eyes fixed themselves and turned very
light as he thought of the interview and of the
quiet, hard words he would select.  Each one
of them should be a retribution in itself.  He
was the gentlest of men, but under great
provocation he could be relentless.

What would Harmon answer?  The colonel
grew thoughtful again.  Harmon would ask
him, with an intonation that would be an
insult to Helen, what right Wimpole had acquired
to take Helen's part against him, her lawful
husband.  It would be hard to answer that,
having no right of his own to fight her battles,
least of all against the man she had married.

He might answer by reminding Harmon of
old times.  He might say that he at least
resigned the hope of that right, when Harmon
had been his friend, because he had believed
that it was for Helen's happiness.

That would be but a miserably unsatisfactory
answer, though it would be the truth.  The
colonel did not remember that he had ever
wished to strike a man with a whip until the
present moment.  But the sight of the cut on
Helen's forehead had changed him very quickly.
He was not sure that he could keep his hands
from Harmon if he should see him.  And slowly
a sort of cold and wrathful glow rose in his face,
and he felt as though his long, thin fingers were
turning into steel springs.

Miss Wimpole had taken up a book and was
reading.  She heard him move in his chair, and
looked up and saw his expression.

"What is the matter with you, Richard?"
she enquired, in surprise.

"Why?" He started nervously.

"You look like the destroying angel," she
observed calmly.  "I suppose you are gradually
beginning to be angry about Sylvia's hat,
as I was.  I don't wonder."

"Oh yes--Sylvia's hat; yes, yes, I
remember."  The colonel passed his hand over his
eyes.  "I mean, it is perhaps the heat.  It's a
warm day.  I'll go to my room for a while."

"Yes, do, my dear.  You behave so strangely
to-day--as if you were going to be ill."

But the colonel was already gone, and was
stalking down the corridor with his head high,
his eyes as hard as polished grey stones, and his
nervous hands clenched as they swung a little
with his gait.

His sister shook her head energetically, then
slowly and sadly, as she watched him in the
distance.

"How much more gracefully we grow old
than men!" she said aloud, and took up her
book again.





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.. _`CHAPTER VI`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VI

.. vspace:: 2

Helen had not seen the paragraph about
Harmon.  She rarely read newspapers, and
generally trusted to other people to learn what
they contained.  The majority read papers for
amusement, or for the sort of excitement
produced on nervous minds by short, strong shocks
often repeated.  There are persons who ponder
the paper daily for half an hour in absorbed
silence, and then lift up their voices and cackle
out all they have read, as a hen runs about and
cackles when she has laid an egg.  They fly at
every one they see, an unnatural excitement in
every tone and gesture, and ask in turn whether
each friend has heard that this one is engaged
to be married, and that another is dead and
has left all his money to a hospital.  When they
have asked all the questions they can think
of, without waiting for an answer, they relapse
into their normal condition, and become again
as other men and women are.  Very few really
read the papers in order to follow the course of
events for the mere sake of information.
Mrs. Harmon was more or less indifferent to things
that neither directly concerned her nor appealed
to her tastes and sympathies.

Her letters were brought to her before she
had left the sitting-room after the colonel had
gone away, and she looked at the addresses on
them carelessly, passing them from one hand to
the other as one passes cards.  One arrested her
attention, among the half-dozen or so which she
had received.  It was the regular report from
the asylum, posted on the first of the month.
But it was thicker than usual; and when she
tore open the envelope, rather nervously and
with a sudden anticipation of trouble, a second
sealed letter dropped from the single folded
sheet contained in the first.  But even that one
sheet was full, instead of bearing only the few
lines she always received to tell her that there
was no change in her husband's condition.

There had been a change, and a great one.
Since last writing, said the doctor, Harmon had
suddenly begun to improve.  At first he had
merely seemed more quiet and patient than
formerly; then, in the course of a few days,
he had begun to ask intelligent questions, and
had clearly understood that he had been insane
for some time and was still in an asylum.  He
had rapidly learned the names of the people
about him, and had not afterwards confused
them, but remembered them with remarkable
accuracy.  Day by day he had improved, and
was still improving.  He had enquired about
the state of his affairs, and had wished to see
one or two of his old friends.  More than once
he had asked after his wife, and had evidently
been glad to hear that she was well.  Then he
had written a letter to her, which the doctor
immediately forwarded.  So far as it was
possible to form a judgment in the case, the
improvement seemed to promise permanent
recovery; though no one could tell, of course,
whether a return to the world might not mean
also a return to the unfortunate habit which
had originally unbalanced Harmon's mind, but
from which he was safe as long as he remained
where he was.

It was not easy for Helen to read to the end
of such a letter: it shook in her hands as she
went on from one sentence to the next, and the
sealed envelope slipped from her knees to the
floor while she was reading.  When she had
got to the end, she stared a moment at the
signature, and then folded the sheet, almost
unconsciously, and drew her nail sharply along
the folds, as though she would make the paper
feel what she felt, and suffer as she suffered, in
every nerve of her body, and in every secret
fibre of her soul.

She had not believed a recovery possible.  Now
that it was a fact, she knew how utterly beyond
probability she had thought it; and immediately
the great problem rose before her, confusing, vast,
terrifying.  But before she faced it she must
read Harmon's letter.

It had fallen to the floor, and she had to look
for it and find it and pick it up.  The
handwriting was large, somewhat ornamental, yet
heavy in parts and not always regular.  As
she glanced at the address, she remembered
how she had disliked the writing when she
had first seen it, at a time when she had seen
much to admire in Harmon himself.  Now she
did not like to touch the envelope on which he
had written her name, and she unreasoningly
feared the contact of the sheet it held, as of
something that might defile her and must surely
hurt her cruelly.  The hand that had traced the
characters on the paper was the hand that had
struck her and left its mark for all her life.
And as she remembered the rest, an enormous
loathing of the man who was still her husband
took possession of her, so that she could not
open the letter for a few moments.

It was at once a loathing of bodily disgust,
like a sickness, and a mental horror of a
creature who was so far from her natural nobility
that it frightened her to know how she hated
him, and she began to fear the letter itself, lest
it should make some great change in her for
which she should at last hate herself also.  The
spasm ran all through her, as the sight of some
very disgusting evil thing violently disturbs body
and mind at the same time.

The temptation to destroy the letter unread
came upon her with all possible force, and the
vision of a return to peace was before her eyes,
as though the writing were already burned
and beyond her power to recover.  But that
would be cowardly, and she was brave.  With
drawn lips, pale cheeks, and knitted brows she
opened it, took out the folded contents, and
began to read.  As though to remind her of the
place where he was, and of all the circumstances
from first to last, the name of the asylum was
printed at the head of each sheet in small,
businesslike letters.

She began to read:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: left smaller

MY DEAR HELEN,--You will be surprised to hear
directly from me, I suppose, and I can hardly expect
that you will be pleased, though you are too good not to
be glad that I am better after my long illness.  I have
a great many things to write to you, and no particular
right to hope that you will read them.  Will you?  I
hope so, for I do not mean to write again until I get an
answer to this letter.  But if you do read this one, please
believe that I am quite in my right senses again, and
that I mean all I say.  Besides, the doctor has written
to you.  He considers me almost 'safe' now.  I mean,
safe to remain as I am.

It is not easy for me to write to you.  You must hate
me, of course.  God knows, I have given you reason
enough to wish that I might stay here for the rest of my
life.  You are a very good woman, and perhaps you will
forgive me for all I have done to hurt you.  That is the
main thing I wanted to say.  I want to ask your pardon
and forgiveness for everything, from beginning to end.

'Everything' is a big word, I know.  There has been
a great deal during these many years,--a great deal
more than I like to think of; for the more I think of it,
the less I see how you can forgive even the half, much
less forget it.

I was not myself, Helen.  You have a right to say
that it was my fault if I was not myself.  I drank hard.
That is not an excuse, I know; but it was the cause of
most of the things I did.  No woman can ever understand
how a man feels who drinks, and has got so far
that he cannot give it up.  How should she?  But you
know that most men cannot give it up, and that it is a
sort of disease, and can be treated scientifically.  But I do
not mean to make excuses.  I only ask your forgiveness,
and in order to forgive me you will find better excuses
for me than I could invent for myself.  I throw myself
upon your kindness, for that is the only thing I can do.

They say that it would not be quite safe for me to
leave the asylum for another month or two, and I am
quite resigned to that; for the life is quiet here, and I
feel quiet myself and hate the idea of excitement.  I
suppose I have had too much of it.

But by and by they will insist upon my leaving, when
I am considered quite cured; and then I want to go back
to you, and try to make you happy, and do my best to
make up to you for all the harm I have done you.
Perhaps you think it is impossible, but I am very much
changed since you saw me.

I know what I am asking, dear Helen.  Do not think
I ask it as though it were a mere trifle.  But I know
what you are and what you have done.  You could have
got a divorce over and over again, and I believe you could
now if you liked.  It is pretty easy in some states, and
I suppose I could not find much to say in defence.  Yet
you have not done it.  I do not know whether you have
ever thought of it.

If you think of it now that I want to come back to
you and try to do better, and make you happy, for God's
sake give me another chance before you take any step.
Give me one more chance, Helen, for the sake of old
times.  You used to like me once, and we were very
happy at first.  Then--well, it was all my fault, it was
every bit of it my fault, and I would give my soul to
undo it.  If you will forgive me, we can try together
and begin over again, and it shall all be different, for
I will be different.

Can we not try?  Will you try?  It will be easy if
you will only let us begin.  It is not as if we should
have other troubles to deal with, for we have plenty of
friends and plenty of money, and I will do the rest.  I
solemnly promise that I will, if you will forgive me and
begin over again.  I know it must seem almost impossible.
It would be quite impossible for any other woman,
though you can do it if you will.

I shall wait for your answer, before I write again,
though it will seem a very long time, and I am very
anxious about it.  If it is what I hope it will be, perhaps
you will cable a few words, even one word.  'Forgiven'
is only one word.  Will you not say it?  Will you not
give me one chance more?  Oh, Helen dear, for God's
sake, do!  H.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: left larger

Helen read the letter to the end, through
every phrase and every repetition.  Then the
fight began, and it was long and bitter, a
battle to death, of which she could not see the
issue.

The man wrote in earnest, and sincerely meant
what he said.  No one could read the words and
doubt that.  Helen believed all he had written,
so far as his intention was concerned, but she
could not cut his life in two and leave out of
the question the man he had been, in order to
receive without fear or disgust the man he
professed himself to be.  That was too much to ask
of any woman who had suffered what she had
of neglect, of violence, of shame.

'No one could tell,' the doctor wrote,
'whether a return to the world might not
mean also a return to the unfortunate habit'--no
one could tell that.  And Harmon himself
wrote that most men could not give it up, that
it was a disease, and that no woman could
understand it.  What possible surety could he give
that it should never get hold of him again?
None.  But that was only a small matter in
the whole question.

If she had ever loved him, perhaps if she
could have felt that he had ever loved her truly,
it would have been different.  But she could
not.  Why had he married her?  For her
beauty.  The shame of it rose in her eyes as
she sat alone, and she could not help turning
her face from the light.

For love's sake, even for an old love, outraged
long ago and scarred past recognizing, she could
have forgiven much.  Old memories, suddenly
touched, are always more tender than we have
thought they were, till the tears rise for them,
and the roots of the old life stir in the heart.

Helen had nothing of that.  She had made
the great mistake of marrying a man whom she
had not loved, but whom she had admired, and
perhaps believed in, more than she understood.
She had married him because he seemed to love
her very much, and the thought of being so
loved was pleasant.  She had soon found out
what such love meant, and by and by she had
seen how traces of it survived in Henry
Harmon, when all thought of honouring her, or
even of respecting her, was utterly gone.

A bitter laugh rang through the quiet room,
and she started, for it was her own voice.  She
was to forgive!  Did he know what he was
asking, and for what things he was praying
forgiveness?  Yet when he was sober he had
generally remembered what he had done when
he had been drunk.  That is to say, he had
seemed to have the faculty of remembering
what he chose to recall, and of forgetting
everything else.  She was to forgive what he
chose to remember!

'Oh, Helen dear, for God's sake, do!'  She
could see the last written words of his letter
before her eyes, though the sheet was folded and
bent double in her tightly closed hand.  He
meant it, and it was an appeal for mercy.  She
hated herself for having laughed so cruelly a
moment earlier.  There was a cry in the words,
quite different from all he had written before
them.  It did not touch her, it hardly appealed
to her at all, but somehow it gave him the right
to be heard, for it was human.

Then she went over all he said, though it
hurt her.  She was not a woman of quick
impulses, and she knew that what was left of her
life was in the balance.  Even he seemed to
acknowledge that, for he spoke of a possibility
of freedom for her by divorce.  To speak so
easily of it, he must have thought of it often,
and that meant that it was really an easy
matter, as Colonel Wimpole had said.  It was
in her power, and she had free will.  He knew
that she had a choice, and that she could either
take him back, now that he was cured, or make
it utterly out of the question for him to approach
her.  He said as much, when he implored her
to give him one more chance 'before taking any
step.'  She went over and over it all, for hours.
In the cool of the evening she opened the
blinds, collected her letters, and then sat down
again, no nearer to a decision than she had
been at first.  A servant came and told her
that Colonel Wimpole was downstairs.  He had
written a word on his card, asking to see her again.

Her first impulse was the natural one.  She
would let him come in and she would lay the
whole matter before him, as before the best
friend she had in the world, and ask him how
she should act.  There was not in all the world
a man more honourable and just.  She would
let him come to her.

The words were on her lips, while the servant
stood in the open door, waiting for her answer.
She checked herself with an effort.  She wrote
a line and gave it to the man.

She would not see Wimpole just then, for it
would not be fair to him nor perhaps quite just
to Harmon.  Wimpole loved her, though he was
quite unaware that she knew it.  She believed
firmly that when he had advised her that very
afternoon to divorce her husband, he was
thinking only of her happiness; but he had advised
it, all the same, just because he believed that
Harmon might recover.  He could not change
his mind now that what he feared for her was
taking place.  How could he?  He would use
every argument in his power, and he would find
many good ones, against her returning to her
husband.  He could influence her against her
free will, and far more than he could guess,
because she loved him secretly as much as he
loved her.  It was bitter not to see him, and
tell him, and ask his help; it was desperately
hard, but as soon as she saw that it was right,
she wrote the words that must send him away,
before she could have time to hesitate.  Deep in
her heart, too, there was a thought for him.
Loving her as he did, it would not be easy for
him, either, to go into the whole matter.  His
honour and his love would have to fight it out.
So she sent him away.

Then Archie came into the room, vague and
childish at first, but with an odd look in his
eyes, and he began to talk to her about Sylvia
Strahan in a way that frightened her, little by
little, as he went on.

"Marry me to her, mother," he said at last,
as though asking for the simplest thing.  "I
want to be married, and I want Sylvia.  I
never saw any other girl whom I wanted."





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.. _`CHAPTER VII`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VII

.. vspace:: 2

There are times when trouble accumulates
as an avalanche, or like water in one of those
natural intermittent springs that break out
plentifully, and dry up altogether in a sort of
alternation.  But the spring has its regular
period, and trouble has not, and in an avalanche
of disasters it is impossible to say at any
moment whether the big boulders have all passed
in the sliding drift of smaller stuff, or whether
the biggest of all may not be yet coming.

There are days in a lifetime which decide all
the rest, and sometimes explain all that has
gone before, happy days, or days of tears, as the
case may be.  Perhaps they are the most interesting
days to describe, after all, for they are the
ones which generally terminate a period in
existence.  But many say that in real life
situations, as they are called, never have any
satisfactory termination, and that the story
which is most true of men and women is that
one which has neither beginning nor end.  The
fact is that what appears to be the beginning is
often in reality the termination of a long series
of events.  Novels often end in marriage, yet
real life frequently begins there.  There is a
very old proverb to that effect.

On such days all sorts of things happen that
never occurred before and perhaps never occur
again, and every one who has had one or two
such short and eventful periods of confusion
can remember how a host of unforeseen trifles
thrust themselves forward to disturb him.  It
was as though nothing could turn out right, as
if nobody could take a message without a
mistake, as if the post and the telegraph had
conspired together to send letters and telegrams
to wrong addresses, and altogether all things,
including the most sober and reliable institutions,
seem to work backwards against results
instead of for them.  Those are bad times.
When they last long, people come to grief.
When they are soon over, people laugh at
them.  When they decide a whole life, as they
sometimes do, people can afterwards trace the
causes of happiness or disaster to some very
small lucky coincidence or unfortunate mistake
over which they themselves had no control.

When Colonel Wimpole had left Helen so
abruptly, he had looked upon his going away as
a mere interruption of his visit, necessary,
because he could not be sure of controlling himself
just then, but not meant to last any length of
time.  But after so suddenly learning the change
in Harmon's condition, he would have waited
till the evening before going back, if his sister
had not been so absurdly nervous about the price
of the hat, insisting that he should go at once
and return the money.  He had gone to his
own room in a disturbed state of mind and had
stayed there an hour, after which Miss Wimpole,
judging that he must be sufficiently rested, had
knocked at his door and urged him to go at once
to see Mrs. Harmon.  As he had no very good
reason to give for refusing to do so, he had made
the attempt and had been refused admittance.
He went for a walk along the lake and came
back again after an hour, and wrote on his card
a special request.

"May I see you now?  It is about a rather
awkward little matter."

It was growing late.  Helen reflected that he
could not stay long before his own dinner time
and hers, that he evidently had something
especial to say, and that she was certainly strong
enough to keep her own counsel for a quarter
of an hour if she made up her mind to do so.
Besides, it must seem strange to him to be
refused a second time; he would infer that
something was wrong and would ask questions when
they next met.  She decided to see him.

His face was grave, and he was quite calm
again.  As he took her hand and spoke, there
was a sort of quiet tenderness in his manner
and tone, a little beyond what he usually
showed, perceptible to her, who longed for it,
though it could hardly have been noticed by
any one else.

"It is rather an awkward little matter," he
said, repeating the words he had written.

Then he saw her face in the twilight, and he
guessed that she had seen the newspaper.

"You are in trouble," he said quickly.

She hesitated and turned from him, for she
had forgotten that her face must betray her
distress.

"Yes," she answered, but she said no more
than that.

"Can I help you?" he asked after a short pause.

"Please do not ask me."

She sat down, and Wimpole sighed audibly as
he took his seat at a little distance from her.
He knew that she must have seen the paragraph
about Harmon's recovery.

"Then I will explain my errand," he said.  "May I?"

It seemed rather a relief to have so small a
matter ready to hand.

"Yes.  It will not take long, will it?" she
asked rather nervously, for she felt how his
presence tempted her to confidence.  "It--it
will soon be dinner time, you know."

"I shall not stay long," said the colonel,
quietly.  "It is rather an awkward little
matter.  You know Archie was with you this
morning when I saw you in the shop and got that
miniature."

Helen looked at him suddenly with a change
of expression, expecting some new trouble.

"Yes, Archie was with us.  What is it?"  Her
voice was full of a new anxiety.

"It is nothing of any great importance,"
answered Wimpole, quickly, for he saw that
she was nervous.  "Only, he went out by himself
afterwards, and came across my sister and
Sylvia in a milliner's shop--"

"What was he doing in a milliner's shop?"
interrupted Helen, in surprise.

"I don't know," said the colonel.  "I fancy
he saw them through the window and went in
to speak to them.  Sylvia was trying on a hat,
you know, and she liked it, and Archie, without
saying anything, out of pure goodness of heart,
I suppose--"

He hesitated.  On any other day he would
have smiled, but just now he was as deeply
disturbed as Helen herself, and the absurd incident
of the hat assumed a tremendous importance.

"Well?  What did he do?"  Helen's nerves
were on edge, and she spoke almost sharply.

"He paid for the hat," answered Wimpole,
with an air of profound sorrow, and even penitence,
as if it had been all his fault.  "And then
he went off, before they knew it."

Helen bit her lip, for it trembled.  He had
not told the story very clearly or connectedly,
but she understood.  Archie had just been
talking to her strangely about Sylvia, and she had
seen that he had fallen in love with his old
playmate, and she was afraid.  And now, she
was horribly ashamed for him.  It was so
stupid, so pitifully stupid.

The colonel, guessing what greater torment
was tearing at her heart, sat still in a rather
dejected attitude, waiting for her to speak, but
not watching her.

The matter which had brought him was certainly
not very terrible in itself, but it stirred
and quickened all the ever-growing pain for her
son which was a part of her daily life.  It
knitted its strength to that of all the rest, to
hurt her cruelly, and the torture was more than
she could bear.

She turned suddenly in her seat and half
buried her face against the back of the chair, so
that Wimpole could not see it, and she bit the
coarse velvet savagely, trying to be silent and
tearless till he should go away.  But he knew
what she was doing.  If he had not spoken, she
could still have kept back the scalding tears
awhile.  But he did speak, and very gently.

"Helen--dear Helen--what is it?"

"My heart is breaking," she said, almost
quietly.

But then the tears came, and she shook once
or twice, like an animal that has a deep
wound but cannot die.  The tears came slowly,
and burned her like drops of fire.  She kept her
face turned away.

Wimpole was beside her and held her passive
hand.  It twitched painfully as it lay in his,
and every agonized movement of it shot through
him, but he could not say anything at first.
Besides, she knew he was there and would help
her if he could.  At last he spoke his thought.

"I will keep him from you," he said.  "He
shall not come near you."

Her hand tightened upon his, instantly, and
she sat up in her chair, turning her face to him,
quite white in the dusk, by the open window.

"Then you know?" she asked.

"Yes.  It is in the Paris paper to-day.  But
it is only a report.  I do not believe it is true."

She rose, mastering herself, as she withdrew
her hand, and steadied herself a moment against
the chair beside him.

"It is true," she said.  "He has recovered.
He has written to me."

Wimpole felt as if he had been condemned to
death without warning.

"When?" he managed to ask.

"I got the letter this afternoon."

Their voices answered each other, dull and
colourless in the gloom, and for some moments
neither spoke.  Helen went to the window and
leaned upon the broad marble sill, breathing the
evening air from the lake, and Wimpole
followed her.  The electric lamps were lighted in
the street, glaring coldly out of the grey dusk,
and many people were moving slowly along the
pavement below, in little parties, some gay, some
silent.

"That is why I did not let you come up,"
said Helen, after a long time.  "But now--since
you know--"  She stopped, still hesitating,
and he tried to see her expression, but there
was not enough light.

"Yes?" he said, with a question, not pressing
her, but waiting.

"Since you know," she answered at last,
"you can guess the rest."

A spasm of pain half choked her, and Wimpole
put out his hand to lay it gently upon her
arm, but drew it back again.  He had never
done even that much in all those years, and he
would not do it now.

"I will keep him from you," he said again.

"No.  You must not do that."  Her voice
was steady again.  "He will not come to me
against my will."

Wimpole turned sharply as he leaned on the
window-sill beside her, for he did not understand.

"You cannot possibly be thinking of writing
to him, of letting him come back?"

"Yes," she said.  "That is what I am thinking of doing."

She hardly dared think that she still could
hesitate, now that Wimpole was beside her.  If
he had not come, it might have been different.
But he was close to her now, and she knew how
long and well he had loved her.  Alone, she
could have found reasons for refusing ever to
see Harmon again, but they lost their look of
honour now that this man, who was everything
to her, was standing at her elbow.  Exaggerating
her danger, she feared lest Wimpole should
influence her, even unintentionally, if she left
the question open.  And he, for her own
happiness and honourably setting all thoughts of
himself aside, believed that he ought to use
whatever influence he had, to the utmost.

"You must not do it," he said.  "I implore
you not to think of it.  You will wreck your life."

She did not move, for she had known what he
would say.

"If you are my friend," she answered, after a
pause, "you should wish me to do what is right."

It was a trite commonplace, but she never
tried to be original, at any time, and just then
the words exactly expressed her thought.  He
resented it.

"You have done more than enough of that
sort of right already.  It is time you thought
a little of yourself.  I do not mean only of your
happiness, but of your safety.  You are not safe
with that man.  He will drink again, and he
may kill you."

She turned her white face deliberately towards
him in the gloom.

"And do you think I am afraid of that?" she
asked slowly.

There was a sort of reproach in the tone, and
a great good pride with it.  Wimpole did not
know what to say, and merely bent his head gravely.

"Besides," she added, "he is in earnest.  He
is sorry.  He was mad then, and he asks me to
forgive him now.  How can I refuse?  He was
really mad, really insane.  No one can deny it.
Shall I?"

"You can forgive him without going back to
him.  Why should you risk your life?"

"It is the only way of showing him that
I forgive him, and my life will not be in danger."

"Do you think that you can ever be happy
again, if you go back to him?" asked Wimpole.

"My happiness is not the question.  The only
thing that matters is to do right."

"It seems to me that right is more or less
dependent on its results--"

"Never!" cried Helen, almost fiercely, and
drawing back a little against the side of the
window.  "If one syllable of that were true,
then we could never know whether we were
doing right or not, till we could judge the result.
And the end would justify the means, always,
and there would be no more right and wrong at
all in the world."

"But when you know the results?" objected
Wimpole.  "It seems to me that it may be
different."

"Then it is fear!  Then one is afraid to do
right because one knows that one risks being
hurt!  What sort of morality would that be?
It would be contemptible."

"But suppose that it is not only yourself who
may be hurt, but some one else?  One should
think of others first.  That is right, too."  He
could not help saying that much.

Helen hesitated a moment.

"Yes," she answered presently.  "But no
one else is concerned in this case."

"I will leave your friends out of the
question," said Wimpole.  "Do you think it will
do Archie any good to live under the same roof
with his father?"

Helen started perceptibly.

"Oh, why did you say that!" she exclaimed
in a low voice, and as she leaned over the
window-sill again she clasped her hands together in
a sort of despairing way.  "Why did you say
that!" she repeated.

Wimpole was silent, for he had not at first
realized that he had found a very strong
argument.  As yet, being human, she had thought
only of herself, in the first hours of her trouble.
He had recalled all her past terrors for her
unfortunate son, and the memory of all she
had done to keep him out of his father's way
in old days.  He had been a mere boy, then, and
it had been just possible, because his half-developed
mind was not suspicious.  Now that he
was grown up, it would be another matter.
The prospect was hideous enough, if Harmon
should take a fancy to the young man, and
make him his companion, and then fall back
into his old ways.

"Why did you say it?  Why did you make
me think of that?"  Helen asked the questions
almost piteously.  "I should have to send Archie
away--somewhere, where he would be safe."

"How could he be safe without you?"  The
argument was pitilessly just.

But, after all, her life and happiness were at
stake.  Wimpole saw right in everything that
could withhold her from the step to which she
had evidently made up her mind.

"And if I refuse to go back to my husband,
what will become of him?" she asked, still
clasping her hands hard together.

"He could be properly taken care of," suggested Wimpole.

"And would that be forgiveness?"  Helen
turned to him again energetically.

"It would be wisdom, at all events."

"Ah, now you come back to your argument!"
Her voice changed.  "You are pressing me to
do what is wise, not what is right.  Don't do
that!  Please don't do that!"

"Do you forgive him?" asked the colonel,
very gravely.

Again she paused before answering him.

"Why should you doubt it?" she asked in
her turn.  "Don't you see that I wish to go
back to him?"

"You know what I mean.  It is not the same
thing.  You are a very good woman, and by
sheer force of goodness you could make an
enormous sacrifice for the sake of what you
thought right."

"And would not that be forgiveness?"

"No.  If you freely forgave him, it would be
no sacrifice, for you would believe in him again.
You would have just the same faith in Harmon
which you had on the day you married him.  If
forgiveness means anything, it means that one
takes back the man who has hurt one, on the
same real, inward terms with oneself on which
one formerly lived with him.  You cannot do
that, for it would not be sane."

"No, I cannot quite do that," Helen answered,
after a moment's thought.  "It would not be
true to say that I had even thought I could.
But then, if you put it in that way, it would be
hard to forgive any one, and it would generally
be foolish.  There is something wrong about
your way of looking at it."

"I am not a woman," said Wimpole, simply.
"That is what is the matter.  At the same time,
I do not see how you, as a woman, are ever going
to reconcile what you believe to be your duty to
Harmon with what is certainly your duty to
your son."

"I must," said Helen.  "I must."

"Then you must do it before you write to
Harmon, for afterwards it will be impossible.
You must decide first what you will do with
Archie to keep him out of danger.  When you
have made up your mind about that, if you
choose to sacrifice yourself, nobody can prevent
you.  At least you will not be ruining him, too."

He saw no reason for not putting the case
plainly, since what he said was true.  Yet as he
felt his advantage, he knew that by pressing it
he was increasing her perplexity.  In all his life
he had never been in so difficult a position.  She
stood close beside him, her arm almost touching
his, and he had loved her all his life, as few men
love, with an honesty and purity that were more
than quixotic.  What there was left, he could
have borne for her sake, even to seeing her
united again with Henry Harmon.  But the
thought of the risk she was running was more
than he could bear.  He would use argument,
stratagem, force, anything, to keep her out of
such a life; and when he had succeeded in
saving her, he would be capable of denying himself
even the sight of her, lest his conscience should
accuse him of having acted for himself rather
than for her alone.

He remembered Harmon's face as he had last
seen it, coarse, cunning, seamed with dissipation,
and he looked sideways at Helen, white, weary,
bruised, a fast fading rose of yesterday, as she
had called herself.  The thought of Harmon's
touch was more than he could bear.

"You shall not do it!" he exclaimed, after a
long silence.  "I will make it impossible."

Almost before he spoke the last words, he
had repented them.  Helen drew herself up and
faced him, one hand on the window-sill.

"Colonel Wimpole," she said, "I know that
you have always been my best friend.  But you
must not talk in that way.  I cannot allow even
you to come between me and what I think is right."

He bent his head a little.

"I beg your pardon," he answered, in a low
voice.  "I should have done it--not said it."

"I hope you will never think of it again,"
said Helen.

She left the window, and felt in the dark for
matches, on the table, to light a small candle she
used for sealing letters.  It cast a faint light up
to her sad face.  Wimpole had stayed by the
window, and watched her now, while she looked
towards him over the little flame.

"Please go, now," she said gravely.  "I
cannot bear to talk about this any longer."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VIII`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER VIII

.. vspace:: 2

After the door had closed, Helen stood a
moment by the table, motionless.  Then she sat
down by the feeble light of the taper and wrote
upon a sheet of paper her husband's address
and one word--'forgiven.'  She looked at the
writing fixedly for a minute or two, and then
rang the bell.

"Have this telegram sent at once, please, and
bring me a lamp and dinner," she said to the
servant.

With the lamp came Archie, following it with
a sort of interest, as children do.

"You must have been in the dark ever so
long, mother," he said, and just then he saw
her white face.  "You are not looking all right,"
he observed.

Helen smiled, from force of habit, rather
wearily.  The servant began to set the table,
moving stealthily, as though he were
meditating some sudden surprise which never came.
He was a fairly intelligent Swiss, with an
immense pink face and very small blue eyes.

Helen watched him for a moment, and sighed.
The man was intellectually her son's superior,
and she knew it.  Any one else might have
smiled at the thought, as grotesque, but it had
for her the cruel vividness of a misfortune that
had saddened all of her life which her husband
had not embittered.  She envied, for her son,
the poor waiter's little powers of mental
arithmetic and memory.

"What's the matter, mother?" asked Archie,
who sat looking at her.

"Nothing, dear," she answered, rousing herself,
and smiling wearily again.  "I am a little
tired, perhaps.  It has been a hot day."

"Has it?  I didn't notice.  I never do--at
least, not much.  I say, mother, let's go home!
I'm tired of Europe, and I know you are.  Let's
all go home together--we and the Wimpoles."

"We shall be going home soon," said Helen.

"I thought you meant to go to Carlsbad first.
Wasn't it to Carlsbad we were going?"

"Yes, dear.  But--here comes dinner--we
will talk about it by and by."

They sat down to table.  In hotels abroad
Helen always dined in her rooms, for she was
never quite sure of Archie.  He seemed strangely
unconscious of his own defect of mind, and was
always ready to enter boldly into conversation
with his neighbours at a foreign hotel dinner
table.  His childish ignorance had once or twice
caused her such humiliation as she did not feel
called upon to bear again.

"I don't know why we shouldn't talk about
it now," began Archie, when he had eaten his
soup in silence, and the servant was changing
his plate.

"We shall be alone, after dinner," answered
his mother.

"Oh, the waiter doesn't care!  He'll never
see us again, you know, so why shouldn't we
say anything we like before him?"

Mrs. Harmon looked at her son and shook
her head gravely, which was an admonition he
always understood.

"Did you see anything you liked, to-day?"
she asked incautiously, by way of changing the
conversation.

"Rather!" exclaimed Archie, promptly.  "I
met Sylvia Strahan--jukes!"

Helen shuddered, as she saw the look in his
face and the glitter in his eyes.

"I wish you could remember not to say
'jukes' every other minute, Archie," she said,
for the thousandth time.

"Do you think Sylvia minds when I say
'jukes'?" asked the young man, suddenly.

"I am sure she thinks it a very ugly and
senseless word."

"Does she?  Really?"  He was silent for a
few moments, pondering the question.  "Well,"
he resumed at last, in a regretful tone, "I've
always said it, and I like it, and I don't see any
harm in it.  But, of course, if Sylvia doesn't
like it, I've got to give it up, that's all.  I'm
always going to do what Sylvia likes, now, as
long as I live.  And what you like, too, mother,"
he added as an apologetic and dutiful afterthought.
"But then, you're pretty sure to like
the same things, after all."

"You really must not go on in this way about
Sylvia, my dear," said Helen.  "It is too
absurd."

Archie's heavy brows met right across his
forehead as he looked up with something like a
glare in his eyes, and his voice was suddenly
thick and indistinct, when he answered.

"Don't call it absurd, mother.  I don't
understand what it is, but it's stronger than I am.
I don't want anything but Sylvia.  Things don't
amuse me any more.  It was only to-day--"

He stopped, for he was going to tell her how he
had found no pleasure in his toys, neither in the
blocks, nor in the tin soldiers, nor in the little
papier-mâché lady and gentleman in the painted
cart.  But he thought she did not know about
them, and he checked himself in a sudden shame
which he had never felt before.  A deep red
blush spread over his dark face, and he looked
down at his plate.

"I'm a man, now," he said, through his teeth,
in a rough voice.

After that, he was silent for a time, but Helen
watched him nervously.  She, too, saw that he
was a man, with almost less than a boy's mind,
and her secret terror grew.  She could not
eat that evening, but he did not notice her.
They dined quickly and then they sat down
together, as they usually did, quite near to each
other and side by side.  She could sometimes
teach him little things which he remembered,
when everything was quiet.  He generally
began to talk of something he had seen, and she
always tried to make him understand it and
think about it.  But this evening he said
nothing for a long time, and she was glad of his
silence.  When she thought of the telegram she
had sent, she had a sharp pain at her heart, and
once or twice she started a little in her chair.
But Archie did not notice her.

"I say, mother," he began, looking up, "what
becomes of all the things one forgets?  Do
they--do they go to sleep in one's head?"

Mrs. Harmon looked at him in surprise, for
it was by far the most thoughtful question he
had ever asked.  She could not answer it at
once, and he went on.

"Because you always tell me to try and
remember, and you think I could remember if
I tried hard enough.  Then you must believe
the things are there.  You wouldn't expect me
to give you what I hadn't got, would you?  That
wouldn't be fair."

"No, certainly not," answered his mother,
considerably puzzled.

"Then you really think that I don't forget.
You must think I don't remember to remember.
Something like that.  I can't explain what I
mean, but you understand."

"I suppose so, my dear.  Something like
that.  Yes, perhaps it is just as you say, and
things go to sleep in one's head and one has to
wake them up.  But I know that I can often
remember things I have forgotten if I try very hard."

"I can't.  I say, mother, I suppose I'm stupid,
though you never tell me so.  I know I'm
different from other people, somehow.  I wish you
would tell me just what it is.  I don't want
to be different from other people.  Of course
I know I could never be as clever as you, nor
the colonel.  But then you're awfully clever,
both of you.  Father used to call me an idiot,
but I'm not.  I saw an idiot once, and his eyes
turned in, and he couldn't shut his mouth, and
he couldn't talk properly."

"Are you sure that your father ever called
you an idiot, Archie?"

Helen's lips were oddly pale, and her voice
was low.  Archie laughed in a wooden way.

"Oh, yes!  I'm quite sure," he said.  "I
remember, because he hit me on the back of the
head with the knob of his stick when he said so.
That was the first time.  Then he got into the
way of saying it.  I wasn't very big then."

Helen leaned back and closed her eyes, and
in her mind she saw the word 'forgiven' as
she had written it after his name,--'Henry
Harmon, New York.  Forgiven.'  It had a
strange look.  She had not known that he had
ever struck the boy cruelly.

"Why did you never tell me?" she asked slowly.

"Oh, I don't know.  It would have been like
a cry-a-baby to go running to you.  I just
waited."

Helen did not guess what was coming.

"Did he strike you again with the knob of
his stick?" she asked.

"Lots of times, with all sorts of things.
Once, when you were off somewhere for two
or three days on a visit, he came at me with
a poker.  That was the last time.  I suppose
he had been drinking more than usual."

"What happened?" asked Helen.

"Oh, well, I'd grown big then, and I got sick
of it all at once, you know.  He never tried to
touch me again, after that."

Helen recalled distinctly that very unusual
occasion when she had been absent for a whole
week, at the time of a sister's death.  Harmon
had seemed ill when she had returned, and she
remembered noticing a great change in his
manner towards the boy only a few months before
he had become insane.

"What did you do?" she asked.

"I hit him.  I hit him badly, a good many
times.  Then I put him to bed.  I knew he
wouldn't tell."

Archie smiled slowly at the recollection of
beating his father, and looked down at his fist.
Helen felt as though she were going mad herself.
It was all horribly unnatural,--the father's
cruel brutality to his afflicted son, the son's
ferocious vengeance upon his father when he had
got his strength.

"You see," continued Archie, "I knew
exactly how many times he had hit me altogether,
and I gave all the hits back at once.  That was
fair, anyhow."

Helen could not remember that he had ever
professed to be sure of an exact number from
memory.

"How could you know just how many
times--"  She spoke faintly, and stopped, half
sick.

"Blocks," answered Archie.  "I dropped a
little blot of ink on one of my blocks every time
he hit me.  I used to count the ones that had
blots on them every morning.  When they all
had one blot each, I began on the other side, till
I got round again.  Some had blots on several
sides at last.  I don't know how many there
were, now; but it was all right, for I used to
count them every morning and remember all
day.  There must have been forty or fifty, I
suppose.  But I know it was all right.  I didn't
want to be unfair, and I hit him slowly and
counted.  Oh,"--his eyes brightened suddenly,--"I've
got the blocks here.  I'll go and get
them, and we can count them together.  Then
you'll know exactly."

Helen could not say anything, and Archie
was gone.  She only half understood what the
blocks were, and did not care to know.  There
was an unnatural horror in it all, and Archie
spoke of it quite simply and without any
particular resentment.  She was still half dazed
when he came back with the mysterious box
in which he kept his toys.

He set it down on the floor at her feet and
knelt beside it, feeling for the key in his
pocket.

"I don't care if you see all the things now,"
he said.  "They don't amuse me any more."

Nevertheless, she saw the blush of shame
rising to his forehead as he bent down and put the
key into the lock.

"I don't care, after all," he said, before he
lifted the lid.  "It's only you, mother, and you
won't think I was a baby just because they
amused me.  I don't care for them any more,
mother.  Indeed I don't; so I may as well
make a clean breast of it and tell you.  Besides,
you must see the blocks.  All the blots are there
still, quite plain, and we can count them, and
then you'll always remember, though I shan't.
Here they are.  I've carried them about a long
time, you know, and they're getting pretty old,
especially the soldiers.  There isn't much paint
left on them, and the captain's head's gone."

Helen leaned forward, her elbow on her knees,
her chin resting on her hand, her eyes dim, and
her heart beating oddly.  It seemed as though
nothing were spared her on that day.

Archie unpacked the toys in silence, and
arranged the blocks all on one side in a neat pile,
while on the other he laid the soldiers and the
little cart, with the few remaining toys.  Helen's
eyes became riveted on the bits of wood.  There
were about twenty of them, and she could plainly
distinguish on them the little round blots which
Archie had made, one for each blow he had
received.  He began to count, and Helen followed
him mechanically.  He was very methodical, for
he knew that he was easily confused.  When he
had counted the blots on each block, he put it
behind him on the floor before he took another
from the pile.  He finished at last.

"Sixty-three--ju--!"  He checked himself.
"I forgot.  I won't say 'jukes' any more.  I
won't.  There were sixty-three in all, mother.
Besides, I remember now.  Yes; there were
sixty-three.  I remember that it took a long
time, because I was afraid of not being fair."

Again he smiled at the recollection, with some
satisfaction, perhaps, at his conscientious
rectitude.  With those hands of his, it was a
wonder that he had not killed his father.  Helen
sat like a stone figure, and watched him
unconsciously, while her thoughts ground upon each
other in her heart like millstones, and her
breath half choked her.

He swept all the blocks back in front of him,
and, by force of habit, he began to build a little
house before he put them away.  She watched
his strong hands, that could do such childish
things, and the bend of his athletic neck.  His
head was not ill-shaped nor defective under the
thick short hair.

"Did he always strike you on the head,
Archie?" she asked suddenly.

He knocked the little house over with a sweep
of his hand and looked up.

"Generally," he said quietly.  "But it doesn't
matter, you know.  He generally went for the
back of my head because it didn't make any
mark, as I have such thick hair, so I hit him in
the same place.  It's all right.  It was quite
fair.  I say, mother, I'm going to throw these
things away, now that you know all about them.
What's the good of keeping them, anyway?
I'm sure I don't know why I ever liked them."

"Give them to me," answered Helen.  "Perhaps
some poor child might like them."

But she knew that she meant to keep them.

"Well, there isn't much paint on those tin
soldiers, you know.  I don't believe any child
would care for them much.  At least not so
much as I did, because I was used to them.  Of
course that made a difference.  But you may
have them, if you like.  I don't want them any
more.  They're only in the way."

"Give them to me, for the present."

"All right, mother."  And he began to pack
the toys into the box.

He did it very carefully and neatly, for the
habit was strong, though the memory was weak.
Still Helen watched him, without changing her
attitude.  He sighed as he put in the last of the
tin soldiers.

"I suppose I shall really never care for them
again," he said.

He looked at them with a sort of affection
and touched some of the things lightly, arranging
them a little better.  Then he shut the lid
down, turned the key, and held it out to his
mother.

"There you are," he said.  "Anyhow, the
blocks helped me to remember.  Sixty-three,
wasn't it, mother?"

"Sixty-three," repeated Helen, mechanically.

Then, for the second time on that evening,
she turned her face to the cushion of her chair,
and shook from head to foot, and sobbed aloud.
She had realized what the number meant.
Sixty-three times, in the course of years, had
Henry Harmon struck his son upon the head.
It was strange that Archie should have any
wits at all, and it was no wonder that they
were not like those of other men.  And it had
all been a secret, kept by the child first, then by
the growing boy, then by the full-grown man,
till his thews and sinews had toughened upon
him and he had turned and paid back blow for
blow, all at once.  And last of all the father
had struck her, with a thought of revenge,
perhaps, as well as in passion, because he dared not
raise his hand against his strong son.

Again she saw the words of her telegram,
'Henry Harmon, New York.  Forgiven,' and
they were in letters of fire that her tears could
not quench.  She had not known how much she
was forgiving.  Archie knelt beside her in
wonder, for he had never seen her cry in his life.
He touched her arm lovingly, trying to see her
face, and his own softened strangely, growing
more human as it grew more childlike.

"Don't, mother!  Please don't cry like that!
If I had thought you would cry about it, I'd
never have told you.  Besides, it couldn't have
hurt him so very much--"

"Him!"

Helen's voice rang out, and she turned, with
a fierce light in her angry eyes.  In a quick
movement her arms ran round Archie's neck
and drew him passionately to her breast, and
she kissed his head, again and again, always his
head, upon the short, thick hair, till he
wondered, and laughed.

When they were quiet again, sitting side by
side, her battle began once more, and she knew
that it must all be fought over on different
ground.  She had forgiven Henry Harmon, as
well as she could, for her own wrongs; but
there were others now, and they seemed worse
to her than anything she had suffered.  It was
just to think so, too, for she knew that at any
time she could have left Harmon without blame
or stain.  It had been in her power, but she
had chosen not to do it.

But the boy had been powerless and silent
through long years.  She had never even
guessed that his father had ever struck him
cruelly.  At the merest suspicion of such a
thing she would have turned upon her husband
as only mothers do turn, tigresses or women.
But Archie had kept his secret, while his
strength quietly grew upon him, and then he
had paid the long score with his own hands.
Out of shame, Harmon had kept the secret, too.

Yet she had said in one word that she forgave
him, and the word determined the rest of her
life.  A suffering, a short, sad respite, and then
suffering again; that was to sum the history of
her years.  She must suffer to the end, more
and more.

And all at once it seemed to her that she
could not bear it.  For herself she might have
forgiven anything.  She had pardoned all for
herself, from the first neglect to the scar on her
forehead.  But it was another matter to forgive
for Archie.  Why should she?  What justice
could there be in that?  What right had she
to absolve Harmon for his cruelty to her child?

She must ask Archie if he forgave his father.
She could no longer decide the question alone,
and Archie had the best of rights to be
consulted.  Wimpole's words came back to her,
asking whether it could do Archie any good
to be under the same roof with his father; and
all at once she saw that her whole married life
had been centred in her son much more than
in herself.

Besides, he must be told that his father had
recovered, for every one must know it soon, and
people would speak of it before him, and think
it very strange if he were ignorant of it.  She
hid from herself the underthought that Archie
must surely refuse to live with his father, after
all that had passed, and the wild hope of escape
from what she had undertaken to do, which the
suggestion raised.

She sat silent and thoughtful, her tears drying
on her cheeks, while her son still knelt beside
her.  But without looking at him, she laid her
hand on his arm, and her grasp tightened while
she was thinking.

"What is it, mother?  What is it?" he asked
again and again.

At last she let her eyes go to his, and she
answered him.

"Your father is well again.  By this time he
must have left the asylum.  Shall we go back
to him?"

"I suppose we must, if he's all right," answered
Archie, promptly.

Helen's face fell suddenly, for she had
expected a strong refusal.

"Can you forgive him for all he did to you?"
she asked slowly.

"I don't see that there's much to forgive.
He hit me, and I hit him just as often; so we're
square.  He won't hit me now, because he's
afraid of me.  I hate him, of course, and he
hates me.  It's quite fair.  He thinks I'm
stupid, and I think he's mean; but I don't see that
there's anything to forgive him.  I suppose he's
made so.  If he's all right again, I don't see but
what we shall have to go and live with him
again.  I don't see what you're going to do
about it, mother."

Helen buried her face in her hands, not sobbing
again, but thinking.  She did not see 'what
she was going to do about it,' as Archie expressed
the situation.  If she had not already sent the
telegram, it would have been different.  The
young man's rough phrases showed that he had
not the slightest fear of his father, and he was
ignorant of what she herself had suffered.  Much
she had hidden from him altogether, and his
dulness had seen nothing of the rest.  He supposed,
if he thought anything about it, that his mother
had been unhappy because Harmon drank hard,
and stayed away from home unaccountably, and
often spoke roughly and rudely when he had
been drinking.  To his unsensitive nature and
half-developed mind these things had seemed
regrettable, but not so very terrible, after all.
Helen had been too loyal to hold up Harmon as
an example of evil to his son, and the boy had
grown up accustomed to what disgusted and
revolted her, as well as ignorant of what hurt
her; while his own unfinished character was
satisfied with a half-barbarous conception of
what was fair so far as he himself was
concerned.  He had given blow for blow and
bruise for bruise, and on a similar understanding
he was prepared to return to similar conditions.
Helen saw it all in a flash, but she could
not forgive Harmon.

"I can't!  I can't!" she repeated aloud, and
she pressed Archie's arm again.

"Can't--what, mother?" he asked.  "Can't go back?"

"How can I, after this?  How can I ever
bear to see him, to touch his hand,--his hand
that hurt you, Archie,--that hurt you so much
more than you ever dream of?"

There were tears in her voice again, and again
she pressed him close to her.  But he did not
understand.

"Oh, that's all right, mother," he answered.
"Don't cry about me!  I made it all right with
him long ago.  And I don't suppose he hurt me
more than I dreamed of, either.  That's only a
way of talking, you know.  It used to make
me feel rather stupid.  But then, I'm stupid
anyway; so even that didn't matter much."  And
Archie smiled indifferently.

"More than you think, more than you know!"
She kissed his hair.  "It was that--it may
have been that--it must have been--I know
it was--"

She was on the point of breaking down again.

"What?" he asked with curiosity.  "What
do you mean?  I don't understand."

Helen's voice sank low, and she hardly seemed
to be speaking to her son.

"Your father made you what you are," she
said, and her face grew cold and hard.

"What?  Stupid?" asked Archie, cheerfully.
Then his face changed, too.  "I say, mother,"
he went on, in another voice, "do you think I'm
so dull because he hit me on the head?"

Helen repented her words, scarcely knowing
why, but sure that it would have been better
not to speak them.  She did not answer the
question.

"That's what you think," said Archie.  "And
it's because I'm not like other people that you
say it's absurd of me to want to marry Sylvia
Strahan, isn't it?  And that's my father's doing?
Is that what you think?"

He waited for an answer, but none came at
once.  Helen was startled by the clear sequence
of ideas, far more logical than most of his
reasonings.  It seemed as if his sudden passion
for Sylvia had roused his sluggish intelligence
from its long torpor.  She could not deny the
truth of what he said, and he saw that she could not.

"That's it," he continued.  "That's what you
think.  I knew it."

His brows knitted themselves straight across
his forehead, and his eyes were fixed upon his
mother's face, as he knelt beside her.  She had
not been looking at him, but she turned to
him slowly now.

"And that's why you ask whether I can
forgive him," he concluded.

"Can you?"

"No."

He rose to his feet from his knees easily, by
one movement, and she watched him.  Then
there was a long silence and he began to walk
up and down.

Helen felt as if she had done something
disloyal, and that he had given the answer for
which she had been longing intensely, as an
escape from her decision, and as a means of
freedom from bondage to come.  She could ask
herself now what right she had to expect that
Archie should forgive his father.  But, instead,
she asked what right she could have had to give
Archie so good a reason for hating him, when
the boy had not suspected that which, after all,
might not be the truth.  She had made an
enormous sacrifice in sending the message of
forgiveness for her own wrongs, but it seemed to her,
all at once, that in rousing Archie's resentment
for his own injuries she had marred the purity
of her own intention.

Indeed she was in no state to judge herself,
for what Archie had told her was a goad in her
wound, with a terror of new pain.

"You cannot forgive him," she said mechanically
and almost to herself.

"Why should I?" asked Archie.  "It means
Sylvia to me.  How can I forgive him that?"

And suddenly, without waiting for any answer,
he went out and left her alone.

After a long time, she wrote this letter to her
husband:

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DEAR HENRY,--I am very glad to hear of your recovery,
and I have received your letter to-day, together with
the doctor's.  I have telegraphed the one word for which
you asked, and you have probably got the message already.
But I must answer your letter as well as I can, and say a
great many things which I shall never say again.  If we
are to meet and try to live together, it is better that I
should speak plainly before I see you.

You asked a great deal of me, and for myself I have
done what you asked.  I do not say this to make it seem
as though I were making a great sacrifice and wished you
to admit it.  We were not happy together; you say that
it was your fault, and you ask me to forgive you.  If I
believed that you had been in full possession of your
senses till you were taken ill, I do not think that
forgiveness could be possible.  You see, I am frank.  I am
sure that you often did not know what you said and
did, and that when you did know, you could not always
weigh the consequences of your words and actions.  So
I will try to forget them.  That is what you mean by
being forgiven, and it is the only meaning either you or
I can put upon the word.  I will try to forget, and I
will bear no malice for anything in the past, so far as I
am concerned.  Never speak of it, when we meet, and
I never will.  If you really wish to try the experiment
of living together again, I am willing to attempt it, as an
experiment.

But there is Archie to be considered, and Archie will
not forgive you.  By a mere chance, to-day, after I had
sent my telegram, he told me that you used to strike
him cruelly and often because his dulness irritated you.
You struck him on the head, and you injured his brain,
so that his mind has never developed fully and never can.

I do not think that if I were a man, as he is, I could
forgive that.  Could you?  Do you expect that I should,
being his mother?  You cannot.  You and he can never
live under the same roof again.  It would perhaps be
harder for you, feeling as you must, than for him; but
in any case it is not possible, and there is only one
arrangement to be made.  We must put Archie in some
place where he shall be safe and healthy and happy,
and I will spend a part of the year with you and a part
with him.  I will not give him up for you, and I am not
willing to give you up for him.  Neither would be right.
You are my husband, whatever there may have been in
the past; but Archie is my child.  It will be harder for
me than for him, too.

You say that I might have got a divorce from you,
and you do me the justice to add that you believe I have
never thought of it.  That is true, but it is not a proof
of affection.  I have none for you.  I told you that I
should speak plainly, and it is much better.  It would
be an ignoble piece of comedy on my part to pretend to
be fond of you.  I was once.  I admired you, I suppose,
and I liked you well enough to marry you, being rather
ignorant of the world and of what people could feel.  If
you had really loved me and been kind to me, I should
have loved you in the end.  But, as it turned out, I could
not go on admiring you long, and I simply ceased to like
you.  That is our story, and it is a sad one.  We made
the great mistake, for we married without much love on
either side, and we were very young.

But it was a marriage, just the same, and a bond
which I never meant to break and will not break now.
A promise is a promise, whatever happens, and a vow
made before God is ten times a promise.  So I always
mean to keep mine to you, as I have kept it.  I will do
my best to make you happy, and you must do your part
to make it possible.

After all, that is the way most people live.  True
love, lasting lifetimes and not changing, exists in the
world, and it is the hope of it that makes youth lovely
and marriage noble.  Few people find it, and the many
who do not must live as well as they can without it.
That is what we must do.  Perhaps, though the hope of
love is gone, we may find peace together.  Let us try.

But not with Archie.  There are things which no
woman can forgive nor forget.  I could not forgive you
this if I loved you with all my heart, and you must not
expect it of me, for it is not in my power.  The harm
was not done to me, but to him, and he is more to me
than you ever were, and far more to me than myself.
I will only say that.  There can be no need of ever
speaking about it, but I want you to understand; and
not only this, but everything.  That is why I write
such a long letter.

It must all be perfectly clear, and I hope I have made
it so.  It was I who suffered for the great mistake we
made in marrying, but you are sorry for that, and I say,
let us try the experiment and see whether we can live
together in peace for the rest of our lives.  You are
changed since your illness, I have no doubt, and you
will make it as easy as you can.  At least, you will do
your best, and so shall I.

Have I repeated myself in this letter?  At least, I
have tried to be clear and direct.  Besides, you know
me, and you know what I mean by writing in this way.
I am in earnest.

God bless you, Henry.  I hope this may turn out
well.  HELEN.

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It was ten o'clock when she had finished.
She laid her hand upon the bell, meaning to
send her letter to the post office by a servant;
but just then the sound of laughing voices came
up to her through the open window, and she
did not ring.  Looking out, she saw that there
were still many people in the street, for it was
a warm evening.  It was only a step from her
hotel to the post office, and if she went herself
she should have the satisfaction of knowing
positively that the letter was safe.  She put
on a hat with a thick veil, and went out.





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.. _`CHAPTER IX`:

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   CHAPTER IX

.. vspace:: 2

Colonel Wimpole looked positively old that
evening when he went down to dinner with his
sister and Sylvia.  His face was drawn and
weary and the lids hung a little, in small
wrinkles; but down in his grey eyes there was
a far-off gleam of danger-light.

Sylvia looked down when she met him, and
she was very silent and grave at first.  At
dinner she sat between him and Miss Wimpole,
and for some time she scarcely dared to glance
at him.  He, on his part, was too much
preoccupied to speak much, and she thought he
was displeased.  Nevertheless, he was more
than usually thoughtful for her.  She
understood by the way he sat, and even by the
half-unconscious shrinking of the elbow next to her,
that he was sorry for her.  At table, seated
close together, there is a whole language in
one's neighbour's elbow and an unlimited power
of expression in its way of avoiding collisions.
Very perceptive people understand that.  Primarily,
in savage life, the bold man turns his
elbows out, while the timid one presses them
to his sides, as though not to give offence with
them.  Society teaches us to put on some little
airs of timidity as a substitute for the modesty
that few feel, and we accordingly draw in our
elbows when we are near any one.  It is
ridiculous enough, but there are a hundred ways of
doing it, a hundred degrees of readiness,
unwillingness, pride, or consideration for others, as
well as sympathy for their troubles or in their
successes, all of which are perfectly natural to
refined people, and almost entirely unconscious.
The movement of a man's jaws at dinner shows
much of his real character, but the movement of
his elbows shows with fair accuracy the degree
of refinement in which he has been brought up.

Sylvia was sure that the colonel was sorry for
her, and the certainty irritated her, for she hated
to be pitied, and most of all for having done
something foolish.  She glanced at Wimpole's
tired face, just when he was looking a little
away from her, and she was startled by the
change in his features since the early afternoon.
It needed no very keen perception to see that
he was in profound anxiety of some kind, and
she knew of nothing which could have disturbed
him deeply but her own conduct.

Under the vivid light of the public dining
table, he looked old.  That was undeniable, and
it was really the first time that Sylvia had
definitely connected the idea of age with him.  Just
beyond him sat a man in the early prime of
strength, one of those magnificent specimens
of humanity such as one sees occasionally in
travelling but whom one very rarely knows in
acquaintance.  He could not have been more
than twenty-eight years old, straight in his seat,
broad-shouldered, with thick, close, golden hair
and splendid golden beard, white forehead and
sunburned cheeks, broad, well-modelled brows
and faultless nose, and altogether manly in
spite of his beauty.  As he leaned forward a
little, his fresh young face appeared beside the
colonel's tired profile, in vivid contrast.

For the first time, Sylvia realized the meaning
of Wimpole's words, spoken that afternoon.  He
might almost have been her grandfather, and he
was in reality of precisely the same age as her
father.  Sylvia looked down again and reflected
that she must have made a mistake with herself.
Youth can sometimes close its eyes to grey hair,
but it can never associate the idea of love with
old age, when clearly brought to its perceptions.

For at least five minutes the world seemed
utterly hollow to Sylvia, as she sat there.  She
did not even wonder why she had thought the
colonel young until then.  The sudden dropping
out of her first great illusion left a void as big
and as hollow as itself.

She turned her head, and looked once more,
and there, again, was the glorious, unseamed
youth of the stranger, almost dazzling her and
making the poor colonel look more than ever
old, with his pale, furrowed cheeks and wrinkled
eyelids.  She thought a moment, and then she
was sure that she could never like such a
terribly handsome young man; and at the same
instant, for the first time in her life, she felt
that natural, foolish, human pity which only
extreme youth feels for old age, and she
wondered why she had not always felt it, for it
seemed quite natural, and was altogether in
accordance with the rest of her feelings for the
colonel, with her reverence for his perfect
character, her admiration for his past deeds, her
attachment to his quiet, protective, wise, and
all-gentle manliness.  That was her view of his
qualities, and she had to admit that though he
had them all, he was what she called old.  She
had taken for love what was only a combination
of reverence and attachment and admiration.
She realized her mistake in a flash, and it
seemed to her that the core had withered in
the fruit of the universe.

Just then the colonel turned to her, holding
his glass in his hand.

"We must not forget that it is your birthday,
my dear," he said, and his natural smile came
back.  "Rachel," he added, speaking to his
sister across the young girl, "let us drink Sylvia's
health on her eighteenth birthday."

Miss Wimpole usually took a little thin
Moselle with the cold water she drank.  She
solemnly raised the glass, and inclined her head
as she looked first at Sylvia and then at the
colonel.

"Thank you," said Sylvia, rather meekly.

Then they all relapsed into silence.  The
people at the big table talked fast, in low tones,
and the clattering of dishes and plates and
knives and forks went on steadily and untunefully
all around.  Sylvia felt lonely in the
unindividual atmosphere of the Swiss hotel.  She
hated the terribly handsome young man, with a
mortal hatred, because he made the colonel look
old.  She could not help seeing him whenever
she turned towards Wimpole.  At last she spoke
softly, looking down at her plate.

"Uncle Richard," she said, to call his attention.

He was not really her uncle, and she almost
always called him 'colonel,' half playfully, and
because she had hated the suggestion of age
that is conveyed by the word 'uncle.'  Wimpole
turned to her quietly.

"Yes, my dear," he said.  "What is it?"

"I suppose I was very foolish to-day, wasn't
I?" asked Sylvia, very low indeed, and a bright
blush played upon her pretty face.

The colonel was a courteous man, and was
also very fond of her.

"A woman need never be wise when she is
lovely," he said in his rather old-fashioned way,
and he smiled affectionately at the young girl.
"It is quite enough if she is good."

But she did not smile.  On the contrary, her
face became very grave.

"I am in earnest," she said, and she waited
a moment before saying more.  "I was very
foolish," she continued, thoughtfully.  "I did
not understand--or I did not realize--I don't
know.  You have been so much to me all my
life, and there is nobody like you, of course.  It
seemed to me--I mean, it seems to me--that
is very much like really caring for some one,
isn't it?  You know what I mean.  I can't
express it."

"You mean that it is a good deal like love, I
suppose," answered the colonel, speaking gravely
now.  "Yes, I suppose that love is better when
people believe each other to be angels.  But it
is not that sort of thing which makes love what
it is."

"What is it, then?"  Sylvia was glad to
ask any question that helped to break through
the awkwardness and embarrassment she felt
towards him.

"There are a great many kinds of love," he
said; "but I think there is only one kind worth
having.  It is the kind that begins when one is
young, and lasts all one's life."

"Is that all?" asked Sylvia, innocently, and
in a disappointed tone.

"All!"  The colonel laughed softly, and a
momentary light of happiness came into his
face, for that all was all he had ever had.  "Is
not that enough, my dear?" he asked.  "To
love one woman or man with all one's heart for
thirty or forty years?  Never to be disappointed?
Never to feel that one has made a mistake?
Never to fear that love may grow old because
one grows old oneself?  Is not that enough?"

"Ah, yes!  That would be, indeed.  But you
did not say all those other things at first."

"They are just what make a life-long love,"
answered the colonel.  "But then," he added,
"there are a great many degrees, far below that.
I am sure I have seen people quite really in love
with each other for a week."

Sylvia suddenly looked almost angry as she
glanced at him.

"That sort of thing ought not to be called
love at all!" she answered energetically.  "It
is nothing but a miserable flirtation,--a
miserable, wretched, unworthy flirtation."

"I quite agree with you," said Wimpole, smiling
at her vehemence.

"Why do you laugh?" she asked, almost
offended by his look.  His smile disappeared
instantly.

"You hit the world very hard, my dear," he
answered.

"I hate the world!" cried Sylvia.

She was just eighteen.  Wimpole knew that
she felt an innocent and instinctive repulsion for
what the world meant to him, and for all the
great, sinful unknown.  He disliked it himself,
with the steady, subdued dislike which is hatred
in such natures as his, both because it was
contrary to his character, and for Sylvia's sake, who
must surely one day know something of it.  So
he did not laugh at her sweeping declaration.
She hated the world before knowing it, but he
hated it in full knowledge.  That was a bond
of sympathy like any other.  To each of us the
world means both what we know, and what we
suspect, both what we see and the completion of
it in the unseen, both the outward lives of our
companions which we can judge, and their
inward motives, which we dimly guess.

But on this evening Sylvia felt that the world
was particularly odious, for she had suffered a
first humiliation in her own eyes.  She thought
that she had lowered herself in the colonel's
estimation, and she had discovered that she had
made a great mistake with herself about him.

"I hate the world!" she repeated, in a lower
tone, almost to herself, and her eyes gleamed
with young anger, while her delicate, curving
lips just showed her small white teeth.

Wimpole watched her face.

"That is no reason for hating yourself," he
said gently.

She started and turned her eyes to him.  Then
she blushed and looked away.

"You must not guess my thoughts," she
answered.  "It is not kind."

"I did not mean to.  I am sorry."

"Oh--you could not help it, of course.  I
was so foolish to-day."

The blush deepened, and she said nothing
more.  The colonel returned to his own secret
trouble, and on Sylvia's other side Miss Wimpole
was silently planning a charitable institution of
unusual severity, while she peeled an orange with
the most scrupulous neatness and precision.





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.. _`CHAPTER X`:

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   CHAPTER X

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Sylvia went to her own room after dinner,
still wondering what had happened to her on
her birthday.  There is an age at which most
of us unexpectedly come across the truth about
ourselves, and sometimes about others, and it
generally happens that in our recollection the
change turns upon one day, or even one hour.

The shock is sudden and unexpected.  Floating
down a quick smooth stream in a boat, a
man is aware of motion, as he watches the bank
without realizing the strength of the flowing
water; but when the skiff is suddenly checked
by any obstacle in midstream, the whole force
of the river rushes upon it, and past it, and
perhaps over it, in an instant.  Something of the
same sort happens now and then in our lives.
The great illusion of childhood carries us along
at a speed of which we have no idea, in the
little boat which is the immediate and
undeniable reality of near surroundings, the child's
cradle afloat upon a fiction which is wide and
deep and strong, and sometimes we are grown
men and women before our small craft strikes
upon a shoal of truth, with a dash that throws
us from the thwart, and frightens the bravest of
us.  There we stick fast upon the rough fact for
a while, and the flood that was so smooth and
pleasant rushes past us, foaming and seething
and breaking against the boat's side and threatening
to tear her to pieces.  And if the tide is
ebbing at the river's mouth, we may be left high
and dry upon the sharp reality for a long time;
but if not, the high water will presently float us,
and off we shall spin again, smoothly and safely,
on the bosom of the sweet untrue.

Such accidents happen more than once to
most people, and almost every one resents them
bitterly.  Even in daily living, few men can
bear to be roughly roused from sleep.  Much
more is the waking rude from year-long dreams
of fancy.

Sylvia sat at her table and stared at the lamp,
as if it were her own heart which she could look
into, and watch, and study, and criticise.  For
most of all, she was in a humour to find fault
with it, as having played her false when she
least expected that it could deceive her.  She
had built on it, as it dictated; she had trusted
it, as it suggested; she had lived, and loved to
live, for its sake; and now it had betrayed her.
It had not been in earnest, all the time, but had
somehow made her think that she herself was
all earnestness.  It was a false and silly little
heart, and she hated it, as she looked at it in
the lamp, and she wished that it would frizzle
and burn like the poor moth that had gone too
near the hot glass while she had been downstairs.

It was positively laughing at her, now, and she
set her small mouth angrily.  To think that she
should ever have fancied herself in love with a
man who might have been her grandfather!
And it wickedly showed her the colonel as he
would be in another ten years, a picture founded
upon the tired look she had just seen in his face.
She was ashamed of herself, and furious against
herself for being ashamed, and she suddenly
wished that she were dead, because that would
give people a real reason for being sorry for her.
It would be very pathetic to die so young!  If
she did, her heart could not laugh at her.

She thought about it for a while, and among
other reflexions she suddenly found herself
wondering whether young Knox, the officer on her
father's ship, would be very sorry.  He had
written her a letter from Japan which she had
not answered.  Indeed, she was not sure that
she had read every word of it, for it had only
come this morning.  Life had been too short
for reading letters on that day.  But there it
was, on the table.  She had the evening before
her, and though it was a long letter, it could
not take more than a quarter of an hour to
go through it.  She put out her hand to take
it and then looked at the lamp again.

A lean, brown young face was suddenly there,
and bright eyes that looked straight at her,
without anything vastly superior in them, but full of
something she liked and understood and instantly
longed for.  Her heart was not laughing at her
any more, for she had forgotten all about it,
which is generally the best thing one can do in
such cases.

Even the expression of her face changed and
softened as she laid her hand upon the letter.
For Wimpole's sake, as she had made herself
think a few hours earlier, she would gladly have
doubled her age, and the forced longing for
equality of years between herself and her ideal
had fleetingly expressed itself in her face by
shadows, where there could not yet be lines.
But as the illusion sank down into the storehouse
of all impossibilities and all mistakes, the
light of early youth fell full and unscreened
upon her face again, and she revived unconsciously,
as day-flowers do at sunrise, when the
night-flowers fold their leaves.

It was surely no thought of love which made
the change; or if that were its cause, it was but
love's fore-lightening in a waking dream.  Much
rather it must have been the consciousness of
living roused by the thought of youth.  For youth
is the elixir of life, and the touch of old age
is a blight on youth, when youth is longing to
be old; but youth that is willingly young has
power to give the old a breath of itself again,
before the very end.  In their children men live
again, and in their children's children they
remember the loveliness of childhood.

From a very far country, across half a world
of land and water, the letter had come to Sylvia
on her birthday, as Harmon's had come to
Helen.  There is something strange and
terrible, if we realize it, in man's power to harm
or help by written words from any distance.
The little bit of paper leaves our hand with its
wishing-carpet in the shape of a postage stamp,
and swiftly singles out the one man or woman,
in two thousand millions, for whom it is meant,
going straight to its mark with an aim far more
unerring than steel or ball.  A man may much
more probably miss his enemy with a pistol at
ten paces, than with a letter at ten thousand
miles.  If the fabled inhabitant of Mars could
examine our world under an imaginary glass, as
we study a drop of water under a microscope, he
would surely be profoundly interested in the
movements of the letter-bacillus, as he might
call it.  He might question whether it is
generated spontaneously, or is the result of an act of
will, more or less aggressive, but he would
marvel at the rapidity of its motion and at the
strength of its action upon the human animal
through the eye.  It would be very inexplicable
to him; least of all could he understand the
instant impulse of man to tear off the shell
of the bacillus as soon as it reaches him, for
he would no doubt notice that in a vast number
of cases the sight of it produces discontent and
pain, and he might even find a few instances in
which death followed almost immediately.  In
others the bacteria produce amazingly
exhilarating results, such as laughter and the
undignified antics of joy, and even sudden improvements
in the animal's health and appearance.  He
would especially notice that these bacilli are
almost perpetually in motion, from the time
they leave one human being until they fasten
themselves upon another, and that in parts of
the world where they are not found at all, or
only sporadically, the animals behave in a very
different way, are healthier, and are less exposed
to the fatal results of their own inventions.  If
the inhabitant of Mars were given to jumping
at conclusions, he would certainly announce to
his fellow-beings that he had discovered in Earth
the germ of a disease called by Terrenes
'Civilization.'  And perhaps that is just what the
letter is.

Young Knox wrote to Sylvia because he was
in love with her, which is the best of all reasons
for writing when love is right, and the worst
imaginable when it is wrong.  He was so much
in love that as soon as she was out of his sight
his first impulse was to set down on paper all
sorts of things which had very little sense in
them, but made up for a famine of wisdom by a
corresponding plenty of feeling.  There is
something almost pathetic in the humbleness of a
young man's strength before the object of his
first true love.  It is the abasement of the real
before the ideal; but if the ideal fails, the real
takes vengeance of the man for having trodden
it under.

Young women rarely understand their power;
older ones too often overrate what they have.
The girl who first breathes the air of the outer
world and first sees in a man's eyes that he
loves her, knows that he is stronger, better
taught, more experienced than she is, and
compares herself with him by a measure which he
rates as nothing.  Man is much more real to
woman, when both are very young, than woman
is to man; and being real he represents to her a
sort of material force.  But to him she is an
imaginary being, strong with a mystic influence
from which he cannot escape when he has come
within the pentagram of the spell.  It is bad
for a man if she comes to know her strength
before he has learned his weakness.  Then she
riots in it, recklessly, for a time, until she has
hurt him.  She says, 'Do this,' and he does it,
like the Centurion's servant; or 'Say this,' and
he says it, be the words wise or foolish, and she
reckons his wisdom to herself and his folly to
him, frankly, and without the least doubt of
her own perfection, for a while, rejoicing
senselessly in driving him.  But by and by, as in a
clock, the mainspring feels the gentle regulation
of the swaying balance, and the balance takes
its motion from the spring, till both together
move in perfect time, while each without the
other would be but a useless bit of machinery.
Sylvia did not know all that, and if she had,
she would perhaps not have reasoned about it
much.  She did not understand why young
Knox wrote that he would live for her, die for
her, and, if necessary, convulse the solar system
for her exclusive pleasure and benefit.  It seemed
a great deal to promise under the circumstances,
and her moderate maiden vanity could not make
her appear, in her own eyes, as an adequate
cause of such serious disturbance in the order
of things; yet it was not displeasing to be
magnified into a possible source of astronomical
miracles, though the idea was slightly ridiculous
and she was glad that she had it entirely
to herself and beyond carping criticism.

She was not in the least in love with the man
who wrote to her, and she had not been in love
with him when they had parted.  That very
morning, when she had received the letter, she
had been a little inclined to smile at the writer's
persistence, and had laid the letter aside, half
read, in no great hurry to finish it.  But since
then, her life had changed.  She had gone
aground on the shoal of truth and she was
already longing for the waters of illusion to
rise and float her away.

So she let the breezy memories come back to
her, and they brought her a sweet forewarning
of her growing life.  All at once, she knew that
she had never met any one so young who had
pleased her so much, any one with such clear
eyes and manly ways, frank smile and honest
voice, as the young officer who had hated this
hollow world with such grave conviction
because Sylvia Strahan could not go home in her
father's ship.  She read on, and felt an
unexpected thrill of pleasure when the words told
her what she had already known; namely, that
the squadron would be far on its way to San
Francisco by the time the letter reached her,
that Knox was to come to the capital with her
father, and that she was quite certain to meet
him there before very long.  She was unconscious
of looking round at her things just then
and wishing that they were already packed for
the homeward journey.

She wrote to him before she went to bed.  It
was a duty of civility to answer him, though
she felt herself under no obligation to reply to
his numerous questions.  On the contrary, she
said nothing at all about them, but she gave
him her impressions of Lucerne and told him
that Aunt Rachel had taken cold, but was now
quite well, a piece of information which, though
satisfactory in its way, was not calculated to
affect her correspondent's happiness in any
marked degree.  'It would be nice to see each
other again,' she said at the end, with which
mild sentiment she signed herself 'sincerely' his.

The only odd thing about it all was that
when the letter was finished she had not the
slightest idea where to send it, a fact which had
not crossed her mind when she had unscrewed
her travelling inkstand, but which sufficiently
proved that she had acted under an impulse of
some sort.  She said to herself that it did not
matter, but she was disappointed, and the smile
faded from her face for a little while.

When she was asleep it came back in the
dark and lingered on her lips all night, waning
and waxing with her maiden dreams.

Her eighteenth birthday had been a good
day in her life, after all.  There are few indeed
who fall asleep happily when the first illusion
has gone down into darkness with the evening sun.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XI`:

.. class:: center large

   CHAPTER XI

.. vspace:: 2

Helen Harmon went out alone to mail her
letter.  She would not have done such a thing
in any great city of Europe, but there is a sense
of safety in the dull, impersonal atmosphere of
Lucerne, and it was a relief to her to be out in
the open air alone; it would be a still greater
relief to have dropped the letter into the mysterious
slit which is the first stage on the road to
everywhere.

No one ever thinks of the straight little cut,
with its metal cover, as being at all tragical.
And yet it is as tragic as the jaws of death, in
its way.  Many a man and woman has stood
before it with a letter and hesitated; and every
one has, at some time or other, felt the sharp
twist at the heart, which is the wrench of the
irrevocable, when the envelope has just slipped
away into darkness.  The words cannot be
unwritten any more, after that, nor burned, nor
taken back.  A telegram may contradict them,
or explain them, or ask pardon for them, but the
message will inevitably be read, and do its work
of peace or war, of challenge or forgiveness, of
cruelty, or kindness, or indifference.

Helen did not mean to hesitate, for she
hastened towards the moment of looking back upon
a deed now hard to do.  It was not far to the
post office, either, and the thing could soon be
done.  Yet in her brain there was a surging of
uncertainties and a whirling of purposes, in the
midst of which she clung hard to her determination,
though it should cost ever so dear to carry
it out.  She had not half thought of all the
consequences yet, nor of all it must mean to her
to be separated from her son.  The results of
her action sprang up now, like sudden dangers,
and tried to frighten her from her purpose, tried
to gain time against her to show themselves,
tried to terrify her back to inaction and doubt.
Something asked her roughly whence she had
got the conviction that she was doing right at
all.  Another something, more subtle, whispered
that she was sacrificing Archie for the sake of
her own morbid conscience, and making herself
a martyr's crown, not of her own sufferings only,
but of her son's loss in losing her.  It told her
that the letter she held in her hand was a
mistake, but not irrevocable until it should have
slipped into the dark entrance of the road to
everywhere.

She had still a dozen steps to make before
reaching the big white building that stands
across the corner of the street, and she was
hurrying on, lest she should not reach the door
in time.  Then she almost ran against Colonel
Wimpole, walking slowly along the pavement
where there was a half shadow.  Both stopped
short, and looked at each other in surprise.  He
saw the letter in her hand, and guessed that she
had written to her husband.

"I was only going to the post office," she said,
half apologetically, for she thought that he must
wonder why she had come out alone at such an hour.

"Will you let me walk with you?" he asked.

"Yes."

He made a step forwards, as though expecting
her to turn back from her errand and go with him.

"Not that way," she said.  "I must go to
the post office first."

"No.  Please don't."  He placed himself in
her way.

"I must."

She spoke emphatically and stood still, facing
him, while their eyes met again, and neither
spoke again for a few seconds.

"You are ruining your life," he said, after
the pause.  "When that letter is gone, you will
never be able to get it back."

"I know.  I shall not wish to."

"You will."  His lips set themselves rather
firmly as he opposed her, but her face darkened.

"Is this a trial of strength between us?" she
asked.

"Yes.  I mean to keep you from going back
to Henry Harmon."

"I have made up my mind," Helen answered.

"So have I," said Wimpole.

"How can you hinder me?  You cannot prevent
me from sending this letter, nor from going
to him if I choose.  And I have chosen to go.
That ends it."

"You are mistaken.  You are reckoning without
me, and I will make it impossible."

"You?  How?  Even if I send this letter?"

"Yes.  Come and walk a little, and we can
talk.  If you insist upon it, drop your letter
into the box.  But it will only complicate
matters, for you shall not go back to Harmon."

Again she looked at him.  He had never
spoken in this way, during all the years of
their acknowledged friendship and unspoken
love.  She felt that she resented his words and
manner, but at the same time that she loved
him better and admired him more.  He was
stronger and more dominant than she had guessed.

"You have no right to say such things to
me," she answered.  "But I will walk with
you for a few minutes.  Of course you can
hinder me from sending my letter now.  I
can take it to the post office by and by."

"You cannot suppose that I mean to prevent
you by force," said Wimpole, and he stood aside
to let her pass if she would.

"You said that it was a trial of strength,"
she answered.

She hesitated one moment, and then turned
and began to walk with him.  They crossed the
street to the side by which the river runs, away
from the hotels and the houses.  It was darker
there and more quiet, and they felt more alone.
It would seem easier, too, to talk in the open
air, with the sound of the rushing water in their
ears.  He was the first to speak then.

"I want to explain," he said quietly.

"Yes."  She waited for him to go on.

"I suppose that there are times in life when
it is better to throw over one's own scruples, if
one has any," he began.  "I have never done
anything to be very proud of, perhaps, but I
never did anything to be ashamed of either.
Perhaps I shall be ashamed of what I am going
to say now.  I don't care.  I would rather
commit a crime than let you wreck your whole
existence, but I hope you will not make me do that."

They had stopped in their walk, and were leaning
against the railing that runs along the bank.

"You are talking rather desperately," said
Helen, in a low voice.

"It is rather a desperate case," Wimpole
answered.  "I talk as well as I can, and there
are things which I must tell you, whatever you
think of me; things I never meant to say, but
which have made up most of my life.  I never
meant to tell you."

"What?"

"That I love you.  That is the chief thing."

The words did not sound at all like a lover's
speech, as he spoke them.  He had drawn himself
up and stood quite straight, holding the rail
with his hands.  He spoke coolly, with a sort of
military precision, as though he were facing an
enemy's fire.  There was not exactly an effort
in his voice, but the tone showed that he was
doing a hard thing at that moment.  Then he
was silent, and Helen said nothing for a long
time.  She was leaning over the rail, trying to
see the running water in the dark.

"Thank you," she said at last, very simply,
and there was another pause.

"I did not expect you to say that," he
answered presently.

"Why not?  We are not children, you and I.
Besides--I knew it."

"Not from me!"  Wimpole turned almost
sharply upon her.

"No.  Not from you.  You wrote Henry a
letter, many years ago.  Do you remember?  I
had to read everything when he went to the
asylum, so I read that, too.  He had kept it all
those years."

"I am sorry.  I never meant you to know.
But it does not matter now, since I have told
you myself."

He spoke coldly again, almost indifferently,
looking straight before him into the night.

"It matters a great deal," said Helen, almost
to herself, and he did not hear her.

She kept her head bent down, though he
could not have seen her face clearly if she had
looked up at him.  Her letter burned her, and
she hated herself, and loved him.  She despised
herself, because in the midst of the greatest
sacrifice of her life, she had felt the breath of far
delight in words that cost him so much.  Yet
she would have suffered much, even in her good
pride, rather than have had them unspoken, for
she had unknowingly waited for them half a
lifetime.  Being a good woman, she was too
much a woman to speak one word in return,
beyond the simple thanks that sounded so
strangely to him, for women exaggerate both
good and evil as no man can.

"I know, I know!" he said, suddenly
continuing.  "You are married, and I should not
speak.  I believe in those things as much as
you do, though I am a man, and most men
would laugh at me for being so scrupulous.
You ought never to have known, and I meant
that you never should.  But then, you are
married to Harmon still, because you choose to be,
and because you will not be free.  Does not
that make a difference?"

"No, not that.  That makes no difference."  She
raised her head a little.

"But it does now," answered Wimpole.  "It
is because I do love you, just as I do, with all
my heart, that I mean to keep you from him,
whether it is right or wrong.  Don't you see
that right and wrong only matter to one's own
miserable self?  I shall not care what becomes
of my soul if I can keep you from all that
unhappiness--from that real danger.  It does
not matter what becomes of me afterwards--even
if I were to go straight to New York and
kill Harmon and be hanged for the murder, it
would not matter, so long as you were free and safe."

The man had fought in honourable battles,
and had killed, and knew what it meant.

"Is that what you intend to do?" asked
Helen, and her voice shook.

"It would mean a great deal, if I had to do
it," he answered quietly enough.  "It would
show that I loved you very much.  For I have
been an honourable man all my life, and have
never done anything to be ashamed of.  I should
be killing a good deal, besides Henry Harmon,
but I would give it to make you happy, Helen.
I am in earnest."

"You could not make me happy in that way."

"No.  I suppose not.  I shall find some other
way.  In the first place, I shall see Harmon and
talk to him--"

"How?  When?"  Helen turned up her face
in surprise.

"If you send what you have written, I shall
leave to-night," said the colonel.  "I shall reach
New York as soon as your letter and see Harmon
before he reads it, and tell him what I think."

"You will not do that?"  She did not know
whether she was frightened, or not, by the idea.

"I will," he answered.  "I will not stay here
tamely and let you wreck your life.  If you
mail your letter, I shall take the midnight train
to Paris.  I told you that I was in earnest."

Helen was silent, for she saw a new difficulty
and more trouble before her, as though the last
few hours had not brought her enough.

"I think," said Wimpole, "that I could
persuade Harmon not to accept your generosity."

"I am not doing anything generous.  You
are making it hard for me to do what is right.
You are almost threatening to do something
violent, to hinder me."

"No.  I know perfectly well that I should
never do anything of that sort, and I think you
know it, too.  To treat Harmon as he deserves
would certainly make a scandal which must
reflect upon you."

"Please remember that he is still my husband--"

"Yes," interrupted Wimpole, bitterly, "and
that is his only title to consideration."

Helen was on the point of rebuking him, but
reflected that what he said was probably true.

"Please respect it, then, if you think so," she
said quietly.  "You say that you care for
me--no, I won't put it so--you do care for me.
You love me, and I know you do.  Let us be
perfectly honest with each other.  As long as
you help me do right, it is not wrong to love
me as you do, though I am another man's wife.
But as soon as you stand between me and my
husband, it is wrong--wicked!  It is wicked,
no matter what he may have been to me.  That
has nothing to do with it.  It is coming between
man and wife--"

"Oh--really--that is going too far!"  Wimpole
raised his head a little higher, and seemed
to breathe the night air angrily through his
nostrils.

"No," answered Helen, persistently, for she
was arguing against her heart, if not against
her head, "it is not going at all too far.  Such
things should be taken for granted, or at least
they should be left to the man and wife in
question to decide.  No one has any right to
interfere, and no one shall.  If I can forgive,
you can have nothing to resent; for the mere
fact of your liking me very much does not give
you any sort of right to direct my life, does it?
I am glad that you are so fond of me, for I
trust you and respect you in every way, and
even now I know that you are interfering only
because you care for me.  But you have not the
right to interfere, not the slightest, and although
you may be able to, yet if I beg you not to, it will
not be honourable of you to come between us."

Colonel Wimpole moved a little impatiently.

"I will take my honour into my own hands," he said.

"But not mine," answered Helen.

They looked at each other in the gloom, as
they leaned upon the railing.

"Yours shall be quite safe," said the colonel
slowly.  "But if you will drop that letter into
the river, you will make things easier in every way."

"I should write it over again.  Besides, I
have telegraphed to him already."

"What?  Cabled?"

"Yes.  You see that you can do nothing to
hinder me.  He has my message already.  The
matter is decided."

She bent her head again, looking down into
the rushing water as though tired of arguing.

"You are a saint," said the colonel.  "I could
not have done that."

"Perhaps I could not, if I had waited,"
answered Helen, in a voice so low that he could
hardly hear the words.  "But it is done now,"
she added, still lower, so that he could not hear
at all.

Wimpole had been a man of quick decisions
so long as he had been a soldier, but since then
he had cultivated the luxury of thinking slowly.
He began to go over the situation, trying to see
what he could do, not losing courage yet, but
understanding how very hard it would be to
keep Helen from sacrificing herself.

And she peered down at the black river, that
rushed past with a cruel sound, as though it
were tearing away the time of freedom, second
by second.  It was done, now, as she had said.
She knew herself too well to believe that even
if she should toss the letter into the stream, she
would not write another in just such words.
But the regret was deep, and thrilled with a
secret, aching pulse of its own, all through her,
and she thought of what life might have been,
if she had not made the great mistake, and of
what it still might be if she did not go back to
her husband.  The man who stood beside her
loved her, and was ready to give everything,
perhaps even to his honour, to save her from
unhappiness.  And she loved him, too, next to
honour.  In the tranquil life she was leading,
there could be a great friendship between them,
such as few people can even dream of.  She knew
him, and she knew herself, and she believed it
possible, for once in the history of man and
woman.  In a measure, it might subsist, even
after she had gone back to Harmon, but not in
the same degree, for between the two men there
would be herself.  Wimpole would perhaps refuse
altogether to enter Harmon's door or to touch
Harmon's hand.  And then, in her over-scrupulousness,
during the time she was to spend with
Archie, she knew that she should hesitate to
receive freely a man who would not be on
speaking terms with the husband whom she
had taken back, no matter how she felt towards
Wimpole.

Besides, he had told her that he loved her,
and that made a difference, too.  So long as the
word had never been spoken, there had been the
reasonable doubt to shield her conscience.  His
old love might, after all, have turned to
friendship, which is like the soft, warm ashes of wood
when the fire is quite burned out.  But he had
spoken at last, and there was no more doubt,
and his quiet words had stirred her own heart.
He had begun by telling her that he had many
things to say; but, after all, the one and only
thing he had said which he had never said
before was that he loved her.

It was enough, and too much, and it made
everything harder for her.  We speak of
struggles with ourselves.  It would really be far
more true to talk of battles between our two
selves, or even sometimes between our threefold
natures,--our good, our bad, and our indifferent
personalities.

To Helen, the woman who loved Richard
Wimpole was not the woman who meant to
go back to Henry Harmon; and neither,
perhaps, was quite the same individual as the
mother of poor Archie.  The three were at
strife with one another, though they were one
being in suffering.  For it is true that we may
be happy in part, and in part be indifferent;
but no real pain of the soul leaves room for any
happiness at all, or indifference, while it lasts.
So soon as we can be happy again, even for a
moment, the reality of the pain is over, though
the memory of it may come back now and then
in cruel little day-dreams, after years.
Happiness is composite; pain is simple.  It may take
a hundred things to make a man happy, but it
never needs more than one to make him suffer.
Happiness is, in part, elementary of the body;
but pain is only of the soul, and its strength
is in its singleness.  Bodily suffering is the
opposite of bodily pleasure; but true pain has no
true opposite, nor reversed counterpart, of one
unmixed composition, and the dignity of a great
agony is higher than all the glories of joy.

"Promise me that you will not do anything
to hinder me," said Helen at last.

"I cannot."  There was no hesitation in the
answer.

"But if I ask you," she said; "if I beg you,
if I entreat you--"

"It is of no use, Helen.  I should do my best
to keep you away from Harmon, even if I were
sure that you would never speak to me nor see
me again.  I have said almost all I can, and so
have you.  You are half a saint, or altogether
one, or you could not do what you are doing.
But I am not.  I am only a man.  I don't like
to talk about myself much, but I would not have
you think that I care a straw for my own
happiness compared with yours.  I would rather
know that you were never to see Harmon again
than--"  He stopped short.

"Than what?" asked Helen, after a pause.

He did not answer at once, but stood upright
again beside her, grasping the rail.

"No matter, if you do not understand," he
said at last.  "Can I give you any proof that it
is not for myself, because I love you, that I want
to keep you from Harmon?  Shall I promise you
that when I have succeeded I will not see you
again as long as I live?"

"Oh, no!  No!"  The cry was sudden, low,
and heartfelt.

Wimpole squeezed the cold railing a little
harder in his hands, but did not move.

"Is there any proof at all that I could give
you?  Try and think."

"Why should I need proof?" asked Helen.
"I believe you, as I always have."

"Well, then--" he began, but she interrupted him.

"That does not change matters," she continued.
"You are right merely because you are
perfectly disinterested for yourself, and
altogether interested for me alone.  I am not the
only person to be considered."

"I think you are.  And if any one else has
any right to consideration, it is Archie."

"I know," Helen answered, "and you hurt
me again when you say it.  But besides all of
us, there is Henry."

"And what right has he?" asked Wimpole,
almost fiercely.  "What right has he to any
sort of consideration from you, or from any
one?  If you had a brother, he would have
wrung Harmon's neck long ago!  I wish I had
the right!"

"I never heard you say anything brutal
before," said Helen.

"I never had such good cause," retorted Wimpole,
a little more quietly.  "Put yourself in my
position.  I have loved you all my life,--God
knows I have loved you honestly, too,--and
held my tongue.  And Harmon has spent his
life in ruining yours in every way,--in ways I
know and in ways I don't know, but can more
than half guess.  He neglected you, he was
unfaithful to you, he insulted you, and at last he
struck you.  I have found that out to-day, and
that blow must have nearly killed you.  I know
about those things.  Do you expect me to have
any consideration for the brute who has half
killed the woman I love?  Do you expect me
to keep my hands off the man whose hands have
struck you and wounded you?  By the Lord,
Helen, you are expecting too much of human
nature!  Or too little--I don't know which!"

He had controlled his temper long, keeping
down the white heat of it in his heart, but he
could not be calm forever.  The fighting instinct
was not lost yet, and must have its way.

"He did not know what he was doing," said
Helen, shrinking a little.

"You have a right to say that," answered the
colonel, "if you can be forgiving enough.  But
only a coward could say it for you, and only a
coward would stand by and see you go back to
your husband.  I am not a coward, and I won't.
Since you have cabled to him, I shall leave
to night, whether you send that letter or not.
Can't you understand?"

"But what can you do?  What can you say
to him?  How can you influence him?  Even if
I admit that I have no power to keep you from
going to him, what can you do when you see him?"

"I can think of that on the way," said
Wimpole.  "There will be more than enough time.
I don't know what I shall say or do yet.  It
does not matter, for I have made up my mind."

"Will nothing induce you to stay here?"
asked Helen, desperately.

"Nothing," answered Wimpole, and his lips
shut upon the word.

"Then I will go, too," answered Helen.

"You!"  Wimpole had not thought of such
a possibility, and he started.

"Yes.  My mind is made up, too.  If you
go, I go.  I shall get there as soon as you, and
I will prevent you from seeing him at all.  If
you force me to it, I will defend him from you.
I will tell the doctors that you will drive him
mad again, and they will help me to protect
him.  You cannot get there before me, you
know, for we shall cross in the same steamer,
and land at the same moment."

"What a woman you are!"  Wimpole bent
his head, as he spoke the words, leaning against
the railing.  "But I might have known it,"
he added; "I might have known you would do
that.  It is like you."

Helen felt a bitter sort of triumph over herself,
in having destroyed the last chance of his
interference.

"In any case," she said, "I should go at
once.  It could be a matter of only a few days
at the utmost.  Why should I wait, since I
have made up my mind?"

"Why indeed?"  The colonel's voice was
sad.  "I suppose the martyrs were glad when
the waiting was over, and their turn came to be
torn to pieces."

He felt that he was annihilated, and he
suffered keenly in his defeat, for he had been
determined to save her at all risks.  She was making
even risk impossible.  If she went straight to her
husband and took him back, and protected him,
as she called it, what could any one do?  It
was a hopeless case.  Wimpole's anger against
Harmon slowly subsided, and above it rose his
pity for the woman who was giving all the life
she still had left for the sake of her marriage vow,
who was ready, and almost eager, to go back to
a state full of horror in the past, and of danger
in the future, because she had once solemnly
promised to be Henry Harmon's wife, and could
not find in all the cruel years a reason for
taking back her word.  He bowed his head, and he
knew that there was something higher in her
than he had ever dreamt in his own honourable
life, for it was something that clung to its belief,
against all suggestion or claim of justice for
itself.

It was not only pity.  A despair for her
crept nearer and grew upon him every moment.
Though he had seen her rarely, he had felt
nearer to her since Harmon had been mad, and
now he was to be further from her than ever
before.  He would probably not go so far as she
feared, and would be willing to enter her
husband's house for her sake, and in the hope of
being useful to her.  But he could never be so
near to her again as he was now, and his last
chance of protecting her had vanished before
her unchangeable resolution.  He would almost
rather have known that she was going to her
death, than see her return to Harmon.  He
made one more attempt to influence her.  He
did it roughly, but his voice shook a little.

"It seems to me," he said, "that if I were a
woman, I should be too proud to go back to
a man who had struck me."

Helen moved and stood upright, trying to
look into his face clearly in the dimness as she
spoke.

"Then you think I am not proud?"

He could see her white features and dark eyes,
and he guessed her expression.

"You are not proud for yourself," he answered
rather stubbornly.  "If you were, you could not
do this."

She turned from him again, and looked down
at the black water.

"I am prouder than you think," she said.
"That does not make it easier."

"In one way, yes.  When you have determined
to do a thing, you are ashamed to change
your mind, no matter what your decision may
cost yourself and others."

"Yes, when I am right.  At least, I hope I
should be ashamed to break down now."

"I wish you would!"

It was a helpless exclamation, and Wimpole
knew it, for he was at the end of all argument
and hope, and his despair for her rose in his
eyes in the dark.  He could neither do nor say
anything more, and presently when he had left
her at the door of her hotel, she would do what
she meant to do, to the letter.  For the second
time on that day he wished that he had acted,
instead of speaking, and that he had set out
on his journey without warning her.  But in
the first place he had believed that she would
take more time to consider her action; and
again, he had a vague sense that it would not
have been loyal and fair to oppose her intention
without warning her.  And now she had utterly
defeated him, and upheld her will against him,
in spite of all he could do.  He loved her the
better for her strength, but he despaired the
more.  He felt that he was going to say
good-bye to her, as though she were about to die.

He put out his hand to take hers, and she
met it readily.  In her haste to come out with
her letter she had not even taken the time to
put on gloves, and her warm, firm fingers closed
upon his thin hand as though they were the
stronger.

"I must go," she said.  "It is very late."

"Is it?"

"Yes.  I want to thank you, for wishing to
help me--and for everything.  I know that
you would do anything for me, and I like to
feel that you would.  But there is nothing to
be done.  Henry will answer my cable, and
then I shall go to him."

"It is as though you were dying, and I were
saying good-bye to you, Helen."

"That would be easier," she answered, "for
you and me."

She pressed his hand with a frank, unaffected
pressure, and then withdrew her own.  He
sighed as he turned from the dark water to
cross the quiet street with her.  The people
who had been walking about had gone home
suddenly, as they do in provincial places, and
the electric light glared and blinked upon the
deserted, macadamized road.  There was something
unwontedly desolate, even the air, for the
sky was cloudy, and a damp wind came up from
the lake.

Without a word the two walked to the post
office, and as Wimpole saw the irrevocable
message dropped into the slit, his heart almost
stopped beating.  A faint smile that was cruelly
sad to see crossed Helen's white face; a reflexion
of the bitter victory she had won over herself
against such great odds.





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.. _`CHAPTER XII`:

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   CHAPTER XII

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The two walked slowly and silently along
the pavement to the hotel, the damp wind
following them in fitful gusts and chilling them
as they went.  They had no words, for they
had said all to each other; each knew that
the other was suffering, and both knew that
their lives had led them into a path of sadness
from which they could not turn back.  They
walked wearily and unwillingly, side by side,
and the way seemed long, and yet too short,
as it shortened before them.

At the lighted porch of the hotel they paused,
reluctant to part.

"May I see you to-morrow?" asked Wimpole,
in a dull voice.

"Yes, I must see you before I go," Helen answered.

In the light of the lamps he saw how pale
she was, and how very tired, and she looked
at him and knew from his face how he was
suffering for her.  They joined hands and forgot
to part them when their eyes had met.  But they
had nothing to say, and they had only to bid
each other a good night which meant good-bye
to both, though they should meet ever so often
again.

The porter of the hotel stood in the doorway
a few steps above them and watched them with
a sort of stolid interest.  The lamplight gleamed
upon his gilt buttons, and the reflexion of them
made Helen aware of his presence.  Then he
went into the entrance, and there was nobody
else about.  Voices came with broken laughter
from the small garden adjacent to the hotel,
where there was a café, and far away, at the
end of the entrance hall, the clerk pored over
his books.

Still Wimpole held Helen's hand.

"It is very hard," he said.

"It is harder than you know," she answered.

For she loved him, though he did not know
it, and she felt as well as he did that she was
losing him.  But because she was Harmon's
wife and meant to stand by her husband, she
would not call it love in her heart, though she
knew her own secret.  She would hardly let
herself think that it was much harder for her
than for Wimpole, though she knew it.  Temptation
is not sin.  She had killed her temptations
that day, and in their death had almost killed
herself.

The sacrifice was perfect and whole-hearted,
brave as true faith, and final as death itself.

"Good night," said Wimpole, and his voice broke.

Helen still had strength to speak.

"Neither you nor I shall ever regret this,"
she answered, but she looked long at him, as
though she were not to see him again.

He pressed her hand hard and dropped it.
Once more she looked at him and then turned
slowly and left him standing there.

The porter of the hotel was facing her on
the steps.  Neither she nor Wimpole had
noticed that he had come back and was waiting
for them to part.  He held a telegram in his
hand, and Helen started slightly as she saw it,
for she knew that it must be Harmon's answer
to her word of forgiveness.

"Already!" she exclaimed faintly, as she took it.

She turned back to Wimpole, and met his
eyes again, for he had not moved.

"It is Henry's answer," she said.

She opened the envelope, standing with her
back to the light and to the porter.  Wimpole
breathed hard, and watched her face, and knew
that nothing was to be spared to either of them
on that day.  As she read the words, he thought
she swayed a little on her feet, and her eyes
opened very wide, and her lips were white.
Wimpole watched them and saw how strangely
they moved, as if she were trying to speak and
could not.  He set his teeth, for he believed
that even the short message had in it some
fresh insult or injury for her.

She reeled visibly, and steadied herself against
one of the pillars of the porch, but she was able
to hold out the thin scrap of paper to Wimpole
as he moved forwards to catch her.  He read
it.  It was a cable notice through the telegraph
office from Brest.

"Your message number 731 Henry Harmon
New York not delivered owing to death of the
person addressed."

Wimpole read the words twice before their
meaning stunned him.  When he knew where
he was, his eyes were still on the paper, and
he was grasping Helen's wrist, while she stood
stark and straight against the pillar of the
porch.  She lifted her free hand and passed it
slowly across her forehead, opening and shutting
her eyes as if waking.  The porter stared at
her from the steps.

"Come," said Wimpole.  "Let us go out
again.  We can't stay here."

Helen looked at him, only half comprehending.
Even in the uncertain light he could see
the colour returning to her face, and he felt it
in his own.  Then her senses came back all at
once with her own clear judgment and decision,
and the longing to be alone, which he could
not understand, as he tried to draw her away
with him.

"No, no!" she cried, resisting.  "Let me
go, please let me go!  Please!"

He had already dropped her wrist.

"Come to-morrow," she added quickly.

And all her lost youth was in her as she
lightly turned and went from him up the steps.
Again he stood still, following her with his eyes,
but an age had passed, with Harmon's life,
between that time and this.

He understood better, when he himself was
alone, walking far on, through the damp wind,
by the shore of the lake, past the big railway
station, just then in one of its fits of silence,
past the wooden piers built out into the lake
for the steamers, and out beyond, not counting
his steps, nor seeing things, with bent head, and
one hand catching nervously at the breast of his coat.

He understood Helen, for he also had need
of being alone to face the tremendous contrast
of the hour and to digest in secret the huge
joy he was ashamed to show to himself, because
it was for the death of a man whose existence
had darkened his own.  Because Harmon was
suddenly dead, the sleeping hope of twenty
years had waked with deep life and strength.
Time and age were rolled away like a mist
before the morning breeze, the world was young
again, and the rose of yesterday was once more
the lovely flower of to-day.

Yet he was too brave a man, and too good, to
let himself rejoice cruelly in Harmon's death,
any more than he would have gloried, in his
younger days, over an enemy fallen in fight.
But it was hard to struggle against this instinct,
deep rooted and strong in humanity ages
before Achilles dragged Hector round the walls of
Troy.  Christianity has made it mean to insult
the dead and their memory.  For what we call
honour comes to us from chivalry and knighthood,
which grew out of Christian doings when
men believed; and though non-Christian people
have their standards of right and wrong, they
have not our sort of honour, nor anything like
it, and cannot in the least understand it.

But Wimpole was made happy by Harmon's
death, and he himself could not deny it.  That
was another matter, and one over which he had
no control.  His satisfaction was in the main
disinterested, being on Helen's behalf; for though
he hoped, he was very far from believing that
she would marry him, now that she was a
widow.  He had not even guessed that she had
loved him long.  It was chiefly because his
whole nature had been suffering so sincerely for
her sake during the long hours since he had read
the paragraph in the paper, that he was now so
immensely happy.  He tried to call up again
the last conversation in the dark, by the river;
but though the words both he and she had
spoken came back in broken echoes, they seemed
to have no meaning, and he could not explain to
himself how he could possibly have stood there,
wrenching at the cold iron rail to steady his
nerves, less than half an hour ago.  It was
incredible.  He felt like a man who has been in
the delirium of a fever, in which he has talked
foolishly and struck out wildly at his friends,
and who cannot believe such things of himself
when he is recovering, though he dimly remembers
them, with a sort of half-amused shame for
his weakness.

Wimpole did not know how long he wandered
by the lake in the windy darkness, before he felt
that he had control of speech and action again
and found himself near the bridge, going towards
his hotel.  It was less than half an hour,
perhaps, but ever afterwards, when he thought of
it, he seemed to have walked up and down all
night, a hundred times past the railway station,
a hundred times along the row of steamboat
piers, struggling with the impression that he
had no right to be perfectly happy, and fighting
off the instinct to rejoice in Harmon's death.

But Helen had fled to her own room and had
locked the door upon the world.  To her, as to
Wimpole, it would have seemed horrible to be
frankly glad that her husband was dead.  But
she had no such instinct.  She had been dazed
beyond common sense and speech by the sudden
relief from the strain she had borne so strongly
and bravely.  She had been dazzled by the light
of freedom as a man let out of a dark prison
after half a lifetime of captivity.  She had been
half stunned by the instant release of all the
springs of her nature, long forced back upon
themselves by the sheer strength of her
conscience.  And yet she was sorry for the dead man.

Far away in her past youth she remembered
his handsome face, his bright eyes, his strong
vitality, his pleasant voice, and the low ringing
tone of it that had touched her and brought her
to the ruin of her marriage, and she remembered
that for a time she had half loved him and
believed love whole.  She is a hard and cruel
woman who has not a little pitiful tenderness
left for a dead past,--though it be buried under
a hideous present,--and some kind memory of
the man she has called dear.

Helen thought of his face as he was lying
dead now, white and stony, but somehow, in her
kindness, it became the face of long ago, and
was not like him as when she had seen him last.
The touch of death is strangely healing.  She
had no tears, but there was a dim softness in
her eyes, for the man who was gone; not for the
man who had insulted her, tortured her, struck
her, but for the husband she had married long ago.

The other, the incarnate horror of her mature
life, had dropped from existence, leaving his
place full of the light in which she was
thereafter to live, and in the bright peace she saw
Wimpole's face, as he waited for her.

In the midst of her thoughts was the
enigmatic spectre of the world, the familiar
tormentor of those with whom the world has
anything to do--a vast, disquieting question-mark
to their actions.  What would the world
say, when she married Wimpole?

What could it say?  It knew, if it knew
anything of her, that her husband had been
little better than a beast--no better; worse,
perhaps.  It knew that Wimpole was a man in
thousands, and perhaps it knew that he had been
faithful to her mere name in his heart during
the best of his years.  She had no enemies to
cast a shadow upon her future by slurring her past.

Yet she had heard the world talk, and the
names of women who had married old friends
within the first year of widowhood were rarely
untouched by scandal.  She did not fear that,
but in her heart there was a sort of unacknowledged
dread lest Wimpole, who was growing
old in patience, should be patient to the end
out of some over-fine scruple for her fair name.

Then came the thought of her new widowhood
and rebuked her, and with the old habit
of fighting battles against her heart for her
conscience, she turned fiercely against her
long-silent love that was crying freedom so loudly
in her ears.  Harmon just dead, not buried yet,
perhaps, and she already thinking of marriage!
Said in those words, it seemed contemptible,
though all her loyalty to her husband had been
for a word's sake, almost since the beginning.

But then, again, as she closed her eyes to
think sensibly, she set her lips to stay the
smile at her scruples.  Her loyalty had been
all for the vow, for the meaning of the bond,
for the holiness of marriage itself.  It had not
been the loyalty of love for Harmon, and
Harmon being dead, its only object was gone.  The
rest, the mourning for the unloved dead, was a
canon of the world, not a law of God.  For
decency, she would wear black for a short time,
but in her heart she was free, and free in her
conscience.

To the last, she had borne all, and had been
ready to bear more.  Her last word had gone
at once, with the message of forgiveness he had
asked, and though he had been dead before
it reached him he could not have doubted her
answer, for he knew her.  If she had been near
him, she would have been with him to the end,
to help him, and to comfort him if she could.
She had been ready to go back to him, and the
letter that was to have told him so was already
gone upon its fruitless journey, to return to her
after a long time as a reminder of what she had
been willing to bear.  She could not reproach
herself with any weakness or omission, and her
reason told her plainly that although she must
mourn outwardly to please the world, it would
be folly to refuse her heart the thought of a
happiness for which she had paid beforehand
with half a lifetime of pain.

When that was all at once and unmistakably
clear to her, she let her head sink gently back
upon the cushion of the chair, her set lips parted,
and she softly sighed, as though the day were
done at last and her rest had come.  As she sat
there, the lines of sorrow and suffering were
smoothed away and the faint colour crept slowly
and naturally to her cheeks, as her eyes closed
by slow degrees under the shaded light of the
lamp.  One more restful sigh, her sweet breath
came slower and more evenly, one hand fell
upon her knee with upward palm and loosened
fingers that did not move again; she was asleep.





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.. _`CHAPTER XIII`:

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   CHAPTER XIII

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So ends the history of a day unforgotten in
the memories of the men and women, young and
old, for whom it chanced to be life's turning-point.
Looking back into the full, past years
through which the fight has been fought, most
of us still know one day and hour in which the
tide of battle turned; we see the faces that rose
up against us, and those that stood beside us in
the struggle; we hear the words spoken which
cheered us to the great charge, or turned our
hearts cold and our daring to fear; even our
bodily hearts, handfuls of wandering atoms of
which not one is left in us from those times,
answer the deep memory and beat loud, or fail,
as those other atoms did in the decisive instant
when one blow more meant victory, and one
blow less, defeat.

Helen's last letter to her husband came back
to her like a ghost, after many weeks, when she
was going over Harmon's papers.  There it lay,
unopened, as she had sealed it, full of the words
that had seemed to cost her life--the promise
to pay a debt not justly owed, which no man
could claim now.  She burned it unread, for she
knew every line of it by heart.  To read it, even
to glance at the writing, she thought, would
rouse some pride in her for what she had done
and stir a sort of gladness in her soul, because
the man was dead and she was safe from him
forever.  She would not let herself feel such
things.  Unconsciously she had fought with
herself for a principle, not, as most of us do,
for the intimate satisfaction of having done
right, which is in itself a reward, an object,
and an aim for ambition, and therefore not
wholly unselfish, not wholly noble, though often
both high and worthy.

Right, as we understand it, is the law for
each individual, the principle is for all mankind;
and as the whole is greater than any of its parts,
so is the principle greater than the law.  The
law says, "Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by
man shall his blood be shed."  But the Blood
which was shed for all men required of man no
lawful avenging.

Moreover, law and all forms of law are only
deductions made by the intelligence from the
right instincts of the people's heart.  Laws
which are evolved out of existing circumstances,
backwards, as it were, to correct bad results, are
rarely anything more than measures of expediency
and have not much lasting power.  They
are medicines, not nourishment for humanity--a
cure for the sick, not a rule of life for the
sound and whole.

When such enactments of law-givers tend
against those impulses which spring from the
roots of human feeling, taking into consideration
the happiness of the few and not the good
of the many, they are bad medicines for the
world.  The instant, quick release by divorce
from all troubles, great and small, between man
and wife, is no better than that other instant,
quick relief from bodily pain, which is morphia,
a material danger no longer at all dim or
shadowy.

We are a cowardly generation, and men shrink
from suffering now, as their fathers shrank from
dishonour in rougher times.  The Lotus hangs
within the reach of all, and in the lives of many
"it is always afternoon," as for the Lotus Eaters.
The fruit takes many shapes and names; it is
called Divorce, it is called Morphia, it is called
Compromise, it is designated in a thousand ways
and justified by ten thousand specious arguments,
but it means only one thing: Escape from Pain.

Soft-hearted and weak-nerved people ask why
humanity should suffer at all, and they hail every
invention, moral or material, which can make
life easier for the moment, as a heaven-sent
blessing.  Why should we be uncomfortable, even an
hour, when a little dose of poison can create a
lazy oblivion?  That is the drunkard's reasoning,
the opium-eater's defence, the invalid's excuse.
It is no argument for men who call themselves
the world's masters.

Civilization and Progress are not the same
thing.  We have too much progress and too
little civilization nowadays.  Progress is
omnivorous, eager after new things, seeking above all
to save trouble and get money.  Civilization is
eclectic, slow, painstaking, wise, willing to buy
good at the price it is worth.  Civilization gave
us marriage, in respecting which we are above
animals.  Progress is giving us divorce,
wholesale, cheap, immoral, a degradation beneath that
of those primitive peoples, who make no promises
and break none, who do not set up right as
a fashion and wrong as a practice, the truth for
the ensign and the lie for the course.

Helen Harmon's existence turned out happily
in the end.  She was fortunate at last, before
the love of life was gone.  But for the accident
of her husband's sudden death, she would have
had to face her cruel difficulties to death's
solution; and with her character she would not have
been defeated, for she had on her side the
accumulated force of all womanliness against the
individual evil that was her familiar enemy.
Far should it be from the story-teller to draw
a moral; furthest of all, that false moral that
makes faith and truth and courage get worldly
pay for their services--servants to be hired as
guides and porters to happiness.  In Helen's
case it chanced that she got what she wanted.
Fate had spent its force against her, and peace
was with her thereafter.

Even "poor Archie" found his vocation at
last.  The day that had meant so much to many
had brought him a sort of awakening of mind,
an increase of reason and a growth of character.
His one strong instinct became a dominating
force.  He would save life, many lives, so long
as he had strength.  Sylvia would never care
for him, of course; he said to himself that she
should at least see what he could do.  He
remembered with constant longing the wild delight
he had felt when he had brought the little child
safely to the deck of the ferryboat on the North
River, and when, bruised and bleeding, he had
stopped the bolting horses in the New York street.

He unfolded his plan to the colonel first,
because he was a man, and must understand; then
he told his mother.  There was nothing to be
said against it, except that it was dangerous.
He had made up his mind to join a Life-Saving
Station on the coast.  It was the one thing he
could do, and he knew it.

"Of course," he said, with his elementary
philosophy, "if I get drowned the first time,
there won't be anything gained.  But if I can
help to save a few people before that, it won't
matter so much, you know.  It'll be like money,
when you get something for it."

The rude bravery of the argument brought a
look into Wimpole's eyes which had not been
there for a long time.  Helen had a lump in her
throat.

"But if anything should happen to you--"
she began, and stopped.

"Well, then," answered Archie, "I suppose
I'd go to heaven, shouldn't I?  And that would
be all right, just the same."

And thereupon he began to whistle thoughtfully.
It was very simple in his eyes, and very
desirable.  Life seemed to him to be man's first
and greatest possession, as it is.  For him, its
possibilities were small, but he had a dim
perception of its value to others, whom he called
"clever" in wholesale distinction from himself.
It was worth having, worth keeping, and worth
saving, for them, at the risk of his own.

As for Miss Rachel Wimpole, as soon as she
heard of Harmon's death, she knew that her
brother would marry Helen.  She had systematically
disapproved of his life-long devotion
to a woman beyond his reach, while she had
involuntarily respected in him the same
unchanging faithfulness which had guarded her
own heart against everything else for so many
years, a little stronghold of no great importance
to the rest of the world, but which held all that
was most dear and precious to her.  So here and
there, in the chaos of the middle ages, some
strong, poor gentleman, a mere atom in the
wide Holy Empire, may have kept his small
castle and his narrow acres of meagre land
against all comers.

When Harmon was dead and gone, Miss Wimpole's
disapprobation instantly disappeared, and
she never at any time afterwards seemed to
remember how she had felt about the matter
during so many years.  Wimpole approached her
with some diffidence, and she met him with
genuine enthusiasm.  She was one of those rare
people who can make others vicars of their
happiness, so to say, whose place has been long
darkened by sad clouds, but who see the
sunshine far away on another's land and are glad
for that other one's sake.

It is a sign of our times that a man whose
fancy leads him now and then to make a story
of characters almost ideal, should feel as if he
owed his reader a sort of apology for so far
disregarding the common fashion.  There must
always be a conflict between the real and the
ideal, between what we are told is knowledge
and what our hearts tell us is truth, between
the evil men do and the good which is beyond
their strength, but not above their aspiration.
And therefore the old question stands
unanswered: Do most people wish to be shown what
they are, or what they might be?  In order to
avoid the difficulty of replying, fashion comes
forward and says to-day that art is truth, and
infers that art must be accurate and
photographic and closely imitative.

What has art to do with truth?  Is not truth
the imagination's deadly enemy?  If the two
meet, they must fight to the death.  It is
therefore better, in principle, to keep them apart,
and let each survive separately with their uses.
Two and two make four, says Truth.  Never
mind facts, says Art, let us imagine a world in
which two and two make five, and see whether
we can get anything pleasant, or amusing, out
of the supposition.  Let us sometimes talk about
men and women who are unimaginably perfect,
and let us find out what they would do with the
troubles that make sinners of most of us, and
puzzle us, and turn our hair grey.

Matter, says the mystic, is the inexhaustible
source and active cause of all harm.  Imagination
can be altogether free from matter.  That
is what we mean by the ideal, and men may say
what they will, it is worth having.  A man must
know the enemy against whom he is matched,
if he hopes to win; he must know his adversary's
fence, his thrusts and feints and parries.
Truth will give him that knowledge.  But
beyond the enemy, and beyond victory over him,
there is the aspiration, the hope, the aim of all
life--and that is the ideal, if it is anything at
all worth hoping; it is transcendent, outside of
all facts and perhaps of any attainment, and
only the imagination can ever tell us what it
may be.

Yet those who guess at it, dwell on it and love
it, and it comes to be the better part of their
lives.  The world holds two great classes of
mankind, artists and truth-seekers.  There are
millions of artists, there always have been, and
there always will be.  One in each million,
perhaps, is born with the gift of creation and knows
the tools of his trade by instinct, and works with
them, as soon as he is old enough to think.  The
rest are not less artists, because they are not
producers.  They have the same aspirations, the
same longings, the same tastes, though they are
not makers, as he is; and when he has finished
his work, they look at it with eyes like his, and
enjoy even more perfectly than he, for they see
the expression of a thought like their own, while
all that he could not express is hidden from them
and does not disturb their satisfaction.  Art for
art's sake, if such a thing could be, would mean
that the one man would work just as hard to
give his imagination a shape, even if the rest of
the million were not there to understand him.
But he knows that they are all living and that
the ideal for which he labours is divine to them
all, whether he fail or whether he succeed.


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   THE END

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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   TAQUISARA.

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   BY
   \F. MARION CRAWFORD,

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   *Author of "Saracinesca," "Pietro Ghisleri," "Katharine
   Lauderdale," "The Ralstons," etc.*

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   Two Volumes.  16mo.  In Box, $2.00.

"Mr. Crawford once more shows that mastery of his art which entitles
him to rank among the very foremost of living novelists....  The interest
of the reader is at once compelled, while there is enacted a drama as dark
and terrible as some legend of the Medici or the Borgias, and so exquisite
is the art of the narrator that the reader's interest is never suffered to
relax.

"'Taquisara' the Sicilian, the Princess Veronica, and the invalid
Gianluca are characters drawn with the power and poetic feeling that
Mr. Crawford's readers know so well."--*New York Sun*.

"The plot needs no telling; it is one of Mr. Crawford's best, and the
scene, Naples, and the mountain country back of it, united with the
characteristics and temperaments of the Italian people, give the noted author
splendid opportunities to realize his best work.  Mr. Crawford continues
to reap fame with every novel that comes from his pen."--*Boston Budget*.

"'Taquisara' in vigor of language and sustained interest of plot easily
ranks with Mr. Crawford's best work, which, by the way, is quite as good
as the best by any living writer."--*Oneonta Herald*.

"'Taquisara,' as its name indicates, is another of Mr. Crawford's happily
told stories of Italian life, and must find many admirers.  Here the author
is at his best.  He knows his Italy--who could have read his 'Casa
Braccio' and not been conscious of it?  In this last novel the interest is
unflagging, and all the imaginative charm and literary force which belong
to the author are to be found."

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   CASA BRACCIO.

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   BY
   \F. MARION CRAWFORD.

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   WITH THIRTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS
   BY CASTAIGNE.

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   Buckram.  2 vols., in box.  $2.00.

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   PRESS COMMENTS.

"Mr. Crawford's latest novel, 'Casa Braccio,' may not improbably come
to be regarded as the supreme masterpiece in fiction--of the English tongue
at least--that has appeared since 'Daniel Deronda.'  Its breadth of human
emotion, its vividness of individualities, its splendor of coloring, all entitle
this novel to a lasting place in the literature of fiction."--*Chicago
Inter-Ocean*.

"Mr. Crawford has won success in two different fields of fiction.  In this,
his present work, he combines these fields, and wins a greater success than
ever.  There is but little question that 'Casa Braccio' will prove to be the
great novel of the year."--*Boston Daily Advertiser*.

"We are grateful when Mr. Crawford keeps to his Italy.  The poetry
and enchantment of the land are all his own, and 'Casa Braccio' gives
promise of being his masterpiece....  He has the life, the beauty, the
heart and the soul of Italy at the tips of his fingers."--*Los Angeles
Express*.

"Admirably strong and impressive."--*Boston Beacon*.

"From all points of view 'Casa Braccio' is the most artistically finished,
dramatic, and powerful work Mr. Crawford has produced."--*New York
World*.

"The people who are fond of prating about the thinness of American
novels should read 'Casa Braccio,' for it is rich in all the qualities that go to
make up a good story....  It is safe to say that any one who reads one or
two of Crawford's stories will extend his acquaintance with this singularly
versatile and charming writer."--*San Francisco Chronicle*.

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THE RALSTONS.

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   A Sequel to "Katharine Lauderdale."

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   BY
   \F. MARION CRAWFORD.

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   2 vols.  16mo.  Cloth.  $2.00.

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   PRESS COMMENTS.

"The interest is unflagging throughout.  Never has the author done
more brilliant, artistic work than here."--*Ohio State Journal*.

"It is immensely entertaining; once in the full swing of the narrative,
one is carried on quite irresistibly to the end.  The style throughout is easy
and graceful, and the text abounds in wise and witty reflections on the
realities of existence."--*Boston Beacon*.

"The book is admirably written; it contains passages full of distinction;
It is instinct with intensity of purpose; the characters are drawn with a
living touch."--London Daily News.

"Mr. Crawford's new story, 'The Ralstons,' is as powerful a work as
any that has come from his pen....  Harmonized by a strength and
warmth of imagination uncommon in modern fiction, the story will be heartily
enjoyed by every one who reads it."--*Edinburgh Scotsman*.

"As a picture of a certain kind of New York life, it is correct and literal;
as a study of human nature, it is realistic enough to be modern, and
romantic enough to be of the age of Trollope."--*Chicago Herald*.

"The whole group of character studies is strong and vivid."--*Literary
World*.

"Mr. Crawford's pen portraits are wonderfully vivid.  His analysis of
motive is keen and subtle.  His portrayal of passion, be it love or avarice,
is most graphic."--*Boston Advertiser*.

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   UNIFORM EDITION
   OF THE WORKS OF

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   \F. MARION CRAWFORD.

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   12mo.  Cloth.  Price $1.00 per volume.

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   KATHARINE LAUDERDALE

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   The first of a series of novels dealing with New York life.

"Mr. Crawford at his best is a great novelist, and in 'Katharine
Lauderdale' we have him at his best."--*Boston Daily Advertiser*.

"A most admirable novel, excellent in style, flashing with humor, and
full of the ripest and wisest reflections upon men and women."--*The
Westminster Gazette*.

"It is the first time, we think, in American fiction that any such breadth
of view has shown itself in the study of our social framework."--*Life*.

"It need scarcely be said that the story is skilfully and picturesquely
written, portraying sharply individual characters in well-defined
surroundings."--*New York Commercial Advertiser*.

"'Katharine Lauderdale' is a tale of New York, and is up to the highest
level of his work.  In some respects it will probably be regarded as his best.
None of his works, with the exception of 'Mr. Isaacs,' shows so clearly his
skill as a literary artist."--*San Francisco Evening Bulletin*.

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   PIETRO GHISLERI.

"The imaginative richness, the marvellous ingenuity of plot, the power
and subtlety of the portrayal of character, the charm of the romantic
environment,--the entire atmosphere, indeed,--rank this novel at once among
the great creations."--*The Boston Budget*.

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   SARACINESCA.

"His highest achievement, as yet, in the realms of fiction.  The work
has two distinct merits, either of which would serve to make it great,--that
of telling a perfect story in a perfect way, and of giving a graphic picture
of Roman society in the last days of the pope's temporal power....  The
story is exquisitely told."--*Boston Traveler*.

"One of the most engrossing novels we have ever read."--*Boston
Times*.




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   SANT' ILARIO.

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   A sequel to "Saracinesca."

"The author shows steady and constant improvement in his art.  'Sant'
Ilario' is a continuation of the chronicles of the Saracinesca family....
A singularly powerful and beautiful story....  Admirably developed,
with a naturalness beyond praise....  It must rank with 'Greifenstein' as
the best work the author has produced.  It fulfils every requirement of
artistic fiction.  It brings out what is most impressive in human action,
without owing any of its effectiveness to sensationalism or artifice.  It is
natural, fluent in evolution, accordant with experience, graphic in
description, penetrating in analysis, and absorbing in
interest."--*New York Tribune*.




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   DON ORSINO.

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   A continuation of "Saracinesca" and "Sant' Ilario."

"The third in a rather remarkable series of novels dealing with three
generations of the Saracinesca family, entitled respectively 'Saracinesca,'
'Sant' Ilario,' and 'Don Orsino,' and these novels present an important
study of Italian life, customs, and conditions during the present century.
Each one of these novels is worthy of very careful reading, and offers
exceptional enjoyment in many ways, in the fascinating absorption of good
fiction, in interest of faithful historic accuracy, and in charm of style.  The
'new Italy' is strikingly revealed in 'Don Orsino.'"--*Boston Budget*.

"We are inclined to regard the book as the most ingenious of all
Mr. Crawford's fictions.  Certainly it is the best novel of the
season."--*Evening Bulletin*.




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   WITH THE IMMORTALS.

"Altogether an admirable piece of art worked in the spirit of a thorough
artist.  Every reader of cultivated tastes will find it a book prolific in
entertainment of the most refined description, and to all such we commend it
heartily."--*Boston Saturday Evening Gazette*.

"The strange central idea of the story could have occurred only to a
writer whose mind was very sensitive to the current modern thought and
progress, while its execution, the setting it forth in proper literary clothing,
could be successfully attempted only by one whose active literary ability
should be fully equalled by his power of assimilative knowledge both literary
and scientific, and no less by his courage and capacity for hard work.  The
book will be found to have a fascination entirely new for the habitual reader
of novels.  Indeed, Mr. Crawford has succeeded in taking his readers quite
above the ordinary plane of novel interest."--*Boston Advertiser*.




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   MARZIO'S CRUCIFIX.

"We take the liberty of saying that this work belongs to the highest
department of character-painting in words."--*Churchman*.

"We have repeatedly had occasion to say that Mr. Crawford possesses in
an extraordinary degree the art of constructing a story.  His sense of
proportion is just, and his narrative flows along with ease and perspicuity.  It
is as if it could not have been written otherwise, so naturally does the story
unfold itself, and so logical and consistent is the sequence of incident after
incident.  As a story 'Marzio's Crucifix' is perfectly constructed."--*New
York Commercial Advertiser*.




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   KHALED.

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   A Story of Arabia.

"Throughout the fascinating story runs the subtlest analysis, suggested
rather than elaborately worked out, of human passion and motive, the
building out and development of the character of the woman who becomes the
hero's wife and whose love he finally wins, being an especially acute and
highly finished example of the story-teller's art....  That it is beautifully
written and holds the interest of the reader, fanciful as it all is, to the very
end, none who know the depth and artistic finish of Mr. Crawford's work
need be told."--*The Chicago Times*.




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   PAUL PATOFF.




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   MR. ISAACS.

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   A Tale of Modern India.

"The writer first shows the hero in relation with the people of the East
and then skilfully brings into connection the Anglo-Saxon race.  It is in
this showing of the different effects which the two classes of minds have
upon the central figure of the story that one of its chief merits lies.  The
characters are original, and one does not recognize any of the hackneyed
personages who are so apt to be considered indispensable to novelists, and
which, dressed in one guise or another, are but the marionettes, which are
all dominated by the same mind, moved by the same motive force.  The men
are all endowed with individualism and independent life and thought....
There is a strong tinge of mysticism about the book which is one of its
greatest charms."--*Boston Transcript*.

"No story of human experience that we have met with since 'John
Inglesant' has such an effect of transporting the reader into regions differing
from his own.  'Mr. Isaacs' is the best novel that has ever laid its scenes in
our Indian dominions."--*The Daily News, London*.




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   DR. CLAUDIUS.

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   A True Story.

"There is a suggestion of strength, of a mastery of facts, of a fund of
knowledge, that speaks well for future production....  To be thoroughly
enjoyed, however, this book must be read, as no mere cursory notice can
give an adequate idea of its many interesting points and excellences, for
without a doubt 'Dr. Claudius' is the most interesting book that has been
published for many months, and richly deserves a high place in the public
favor."--St.  Louis Spectator.

"To our mind it by no means belies the promises of its predecessor.
The story, an exceedingly improbable and romantic one, is told with much
skill; the characters are strongly marked without any suspicion of caricature,
and the author's ideas on social and political subjects are often brilliant
and always striking.  It is no exaggeration to say that there is not a dull
page in the book, which is peculiarly adapted for the recreation of student or
thinker."--*Living Church*.




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   TO LEEWARD.

"A story of remarkable power."--*Review of Reviews*.

"Mr. Crawford has written many strange and powerful stories of Italian
life, but none can be any stranger or more powerful than 'To Leeward,' with
its mixture of comedy and tragedy, innocence and guilt."--*Cottage
Hearth*.




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   A CIGARETTE-MAKER'S ROMANCE.

"It is a touching romance, filled with scenes of great dramatic
power."--*Boston Commercial Bulletin*.

"It is full of life and movement, and is one of the best of Mr. Crawford's
books."--*Boston Saturday Evening Gazette*.

"The interest is unflagging throughout.  Never has Mr. Crawford done
more brilliant realistic work than here.  But his realism is only the case and
cover for those intense feelings which, placed under no matter what humble
conditions, produce the most dramatic and the most tragic situations....
This is a secret of genius, to take the most coarse and common material, the
meanest surroundings, the most sordid material prospects, and out of the
vehement passions which sometimes dominate all human beings to build up
with these poor elements scenes and passages, the dramatic and emotional
power of which at once enforce attention and awaken the profoundest
interest."--*New York Tribune*.




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   GREIFENSTEIN.

"'Greifenstein' is a remarkable novel, and while it illustrates once more
the author's unusual versatility, it also shows that he has not been tempted
into careless writing by the vogue of his earlier books....  There is
nothing weak or small or frivolous in the story.  The author deals with
tremendous passions working at the height of their energy.  His characters
are stern, rugged, determined men and women, governed by powerful prejudices
and iron conventions, types of a military people, in whom the sense of
duty has been cultivated until it dominates all other motives, and in whom
the principle of 'noblesse oblige' is, so far as the aristocratic class is
concerned, the fundamental rule of conduct.  What such people may be capable
of is startlingly shown."--*New York Tribune*.




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   A ROMAN SINGER.

"One of Mr. Crawford's most charming stories--a love romance pure
and simple."--*Boston Home Journal*.

"'A Roman Singer' is one of his most finished, compact, and successful
stories, and contains a splendid picture of Italian life."--*Toronto Mail*.




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   THE THREE FATES.

"The strength of the story lies in its portrayal of the aspirations,
disciplinary efforts, trials, and triumphs of the man who is a born writer, and
who, by long and painful experiences, learns the good that is in him and the
way in which to give it effectual expression.  The analytical quality of the
book is excellent, and the individuality of each one of the very dissimilar
three fates is set forth in an entirely satisfactory manner....  Mr. Crawford
has manifestly brought his best qualities as a student of human nature
and his finest resources as a master of an original and picturesque style to
bear upon this story.  Taken for all in all it is one of the most pleasing
of all his productions in fiction, and it affords a view of certain phases of
American, or perhaps we should say of New York, life that have not hitherto
been treated with anything like the same adequacy and felicity."--*Boston
Beacon*.




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   CHILDREN OF THE KING.

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   A Tale of Southern Italy.

"A sympathetic reader cannot fail to be impressed with the dramatic
power of this story.  The simplicity of nature, the uncorrupted truth of a
soul, have been portrayed by a master-hand.  The suddenness of the unforeseen
tragedy at the last renders the incident of the story powerful beyond
description.  One can only feel such sensations as the last scene of the story
incites.  It may be added that if Mr. Crawford has written some stories
unevenly, he has made no mistakes in the stories of Italian life.  A reader
of them cannot fail to gain a clearer, fuller acquaintance with the Italians
and the artistic spirit that pervades the country."--M. L. B. in *Syracuse
Journal*.




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   THE WITCH OF PRAGUE.

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   A Fantastic Tale.

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   ILLUSTRATED BY W. J. HENNESSY.

"'The Witch of Prague' is so remarkable a book as to be certain of as
wide a popularity as any of its predecessors.  The keenest interest for most
readers will lie in its demonstration of the latest revelations of hypnotic
science....  It is a romance of singular daring and power."--*London
Academy*.

"Mr. Crawford has written in many keys, but never in so strange a one
as that which dominates 'The Witch of Prague.' ... The artistic skill
with which this extraordinary story is constructed and carried out is
admirable and delightful....  Mr. Crawford has scored a decided triumph, for
the interest of the tale is sustained throughout....  A very remarkable,
powerful, and interesting story."--*New York Tribune*.




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   ZOROASTER.

"The field of Mr. Crawford's imagination appears to be unbounded....
In 'Zoroaster' Mr. Crawford's winged fancy ventures a daring flight....
Yet 'Zoroaster' is a novel rather than a drama.  It is a drama in the
force of its situations and in the poetry and dignity of its language; but its
men and women are not men and women of a play.  By the naturalness of
their conversation and behavior they seem to live and lay hold of our human
sympathy more than the same characters on a stage could possibly
do."--*The Times*.




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   A TALE OF A LONELY PARISH.

"It is a pleasure to have anything so perfect of its kind as this brief and
vivid story....  It is doubly a success, being full of human sympathy, as
well as thoroughly artistic in its nice balancing of the unusual with the
commonplace, the clever juxtaposition of innocence and guilt, comedy and
tragedy, simplicity and intrigue."--*Critic*.

"Of all the stories Mr. Crawford has written, it is the most dramatic, the
most finished, the most compact....  The taste which is left in one's mind
after the story is finished is exactly what the fine reader desires and the
novelist intends....  It has no defects.  It is neither trifling nor trivial.
It is a work of art.  It is perfect."--*Boston Beacon*.




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   MARION DARCHE.

"Full enough of incident to have furnished material for three or four
stories....  A most interesting and engrossing book.  Every page unfolds
new possibilities, and the incidents multiply rapidly."--*Detroit Free Press*.

"We are disposed to rank 'Marion Darche' as the best of Mr. Crawford's
American stories."--*The Literary World*.




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   AN AMERICAN POLITICIAN.




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   THE NOVEL: What It Is.

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   18mo.  Cloth.  75 Cents.


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   THE MACMILLAN COMPANY,
   66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.

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