.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 47272
   :PG.Title: The Potter and The Clay
   :PG.Released: 2014-11-02
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Maud Howard Peterson
   :MARCREL.ill: Charlotte Harding
   :DC.Title: The Potter and The Clay
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1901
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

=======================
THE POTTER AND THE CLAY
=======================

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   .. _`*"It's a storm!" he cried.*`:

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      :alt: "*It's a storm!*" *he cried.*  (See page 90.)

      "*It's a storm!*" *he cried.*  (See page `90`_.)

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      *The*
      POTTER *and*
      *The* CLAY

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      A ROMANCE *of* TODAY

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      *By*
      MAUD HOWARD PETERSON

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      ILLUSTRATED BY
      CHARLOTTE HARDING

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      LOTHROP
      PUBLISHING COMPANY
      BOSTON

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      COPYRIGHT,
      1901,
      *By*
      LOTHROP
      PUBLISHING
      COMPANY.

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      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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      ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL

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      Published May 7, 1901.
      6th Thousand, June 11, 1901.
      10th Thousand, July 19, 1901.
      13th Thousand, Aug. 16, 1901.

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      Norwood Press:
      Berwick & Smith, Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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      To
      \M. \C. \P.
      and
      \M. \T. \C.

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      WHOSE LIVES
      REVEAL THE
      POTTER'S TOUCH

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   AUTHOR'S NOTE

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      The comparatively
      unknown rendering
      of the verse from the
      Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám,
      quoted on the succeeding
      page, is to be found in the
      *first* edition of Fitzgerald's
      translation of the Persian
      poem.

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..

   |  "For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day,
   |  I watch'd the Potter thumping his wet clay:
   |    And with its all-obliterated Tongue
   |  It murmur'd—'Gently, Brother, gently, pray!'"
   |
   |                              *From the Rubáiyát.*

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      PERMISSION to use the poem,
      "The Potter's Wheel," which appears
      on the next page, was granted by the
      owners of the English copyright of
      Browning's works through Messrs. Smith,
      Elder & Co., London, and by
      the American publishers of Browning,
      Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
      Boston.

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   The
   Potter's Wheel

..

   |  Ay, note that Potter's wheel,
   |  That metaphor! and feel
   |  Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—
   |  Thou, to whom fools propound,
   |  When the wine makes its round,
   |  "Since life fleets, all is change; the past gone, seize to-day!"
   |
   |  Fool! All that is, at all,
   |  Lasts ever, past recall;
   |  Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
   |  What entered into thee,
   |  *That* was, is, and shall be:
   |  Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
   |
   |  He fixed thee mid this dance
   |  Of plastic circumstance,
   |  This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest:
   |  Machinery just meant
   |  To give thy soul its bent,
   |  Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
   |
   |  What though the earlier grooves,
   |  Which ran the laughing loves
   |  Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
   |  What though, about thy rim,
   |  Skull-things in order grim
   |  Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
   |
   |  Look not thou down but up!
   |  To uses of a cup,
   |  The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
   |  The new wine's foaming flow,
   |  The Master's lips aglow!
   |  Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?
   |
   |  But I need, now as then,
   |  Thee, God, who mouldest men;
   |  And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
   |  Did I—to the wheel of life
   |  With shapes and colors rife,
   |  Bound dizzily—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:
   |
   |  So, take and use Thy work:
   |  Amend what flaws may lurk,
   |  What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
   |  My times be in Thy hand!
   |  Perfect the cup as planned!
   |  Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!
   |
   |                                     *Robert Browning.*

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   CONTENTS

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`PROLOGUE`_

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`BOOK ONE`_

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*The clay takes shape*

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`BOOK TWO`_

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*The break in the clay*

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`BOOK THREE`_

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*The Potter's touch*

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   LIST *of* ILLUSTRATIONS

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`*"It's a storm!" he cried.*`_  (*Frontispiece.*)

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`"*You—saw—me—then?*"`_

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`"*What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam?*"`_

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`"*Trevelyan lay on the floor.*"`_

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.. _`PROLOGUE`:

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   PROLOGUE

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   *The* POTTER
   *and the* CLAY

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   *PROLOGUE*

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The Lieutenant's small daughter was
swinging on the railing of the
drawbridge that spanned the moat.

Her companions, two boys, questioned each
other with their eyes.

"She says she won't come," said the elder in
what he fondly believed to be an undertone.
"She says she won't play—"

"I never did!  So there!"

The small girl wheeled about suddenly and
descended from her perch and stamped her
foot; her long, straight hair of an indefinite
brown, shaken by the tempest the boy's words
had awakened.

"No; but you won't," said Rob, promptly.

There was an ominous silence; but instead
of the tirade the anxious watchers expected, a
tear appeared on Cary's little nose and quietly
dropped into the waters of the moat.  Cary
was nothing if she was not a bundle of
contradictions.  Johnny shuffled nervously from one
foot to the other, but Rob grew impatient.

"Well, are you coming?" he asked after the
pause in which he had vainly waited for Cary
to smile again.

"No, I'm tired.  I hate walking, too," said
Cary peevishly.

"'Course not—to walk," said Rob, scornfully.
"We can steal Lieutenant Burden's boat."

"You wouldn't dare," said Cary, but her
voice was tremulous with eagerness, and the
tears she had forgotten to wipe away were
still shining on her cheeks.

"Wouldn't I, though!  Come along and see!"

Cary balanced herself carefully on one foot
and considered.  It wasn't well to let Rob
think she didn't have to be persuaded.  He
had been so cross too.

"I haven't got my sunbonnet," she began.
"And I've forgotten the gun I put it in."

"I'd just as lieve hunt for it," said Johnny,
politely.

"That's just like a girl!  You don't need
the old thing—anyway I thought you hated
it," retorted Rob, who did not fill the role of
pleader.

"'Course Mammy Amy is 'way—gone for
a week to see her grandbaby.  I don't s'pose
I really need my pinafore either—*if I go*!"  The
Lieutenant's small daughter hesitated to
watch the effect of the words.  Rob apparently
was not to be moved, so she buried her pride
and backed up to Johnny.

"Please undo me," she said, calmly, and the
older boy struggled manfully with the holes
and buttons.

"I'll be right back—quick as a wink," and
she flew over the drawbridge back to the
fort, her long hair and short dress blowing in
the wind.  She hid the pinafore under her arm,
and when she reached the circle of the parade
ground, she sidled up to one of the great guns
captured in the war, and surreptitiously poked
the gingham roll down its mouth.  Clothes
were a necessary evil, but sunbonnets and
pinafores were the worst and most evil things of
all—and not to be endured when Mammy Amy
was not around, and the big show guns offered
such a safe and charming hiding place.  It
only needed coolness and care to accomplish the
feat without detection.  Of course, a thing
once buried in the heart of one of the big guns
was lost forever—which was just as well,
thought Cary, being one less to bother her—since
it was one thing to force the articles
down into the big black mouths and another to
extract the sunbonnets and pinafores, even if
she could have remembered which particular
gun held which particular thing—which she
could never do.

She hurried back to the drawbridge, and the
sentry, who adored every inch of the "Post
Baby," stood at "attention" and saluted her
with a twinkle in his eye as she passed him.
Cary slowed her walk and inclined her head
graciously in greeting.

"Good evenin', Jones," she said, innocently.

Then she rejoined the boys.

"Well, are you really ready?" said Rob, a
bit crossly.

The Lieutenant's small daughter did not
deign to notice him.

"I think," she said, condescendingly, "*if I
go*, I'll go 'round by the road way—it's
shorter."

The "road way" was a good deal longer,
but it was out of the reach of Cary's father and
the fort.

She wiped her dry eyes on one of Johnny's
handkerchiefs—Johnny always had more than
one, while Rob and herself frequently went
"shares" on a stolen or a borrowed one—and
then she raced Rob to the end of the drawbridge.

Cary's conscience was troubling her.  She
told herself it was her stomach and the lemon
pie she had appropriated from the pantry shelf,
but it was undoubtedly her conscience, mingled
with a fear that papa-lieutenant or some of the
other officers might loom in sight and inquiring
into the project, carry her off.

Ahead, thirteen-year old Johnny was moralizing.

"Perhaps we oughtn't to take her—she's so
little."

"She's seven," said Rob, "and what's going
to hurt her?"  He kept his eyes away from
the over-clouding sky.

"I don't know—" said the cautious Johnny, "but—"

"I guess we can take care of a small girl like
her.  You're thirteen and I'm eleven."

At the water edge, conscience spoke once
more but was overruled when at Johnny's
question as to the judiciousness of her going,
Rob declared she was afraid.

"I ain't afraid, so there!  Robby Trevelyan!
My papa never said I *couldn't* go!"

Cary majestically slipped into the stolen boat,
and seated herself in the bow.  Johnny took the
rudder and Rob the oars.

The boy was as much at home on the sea as
he was in his bed at night.  Indeed, more so,
since he hated the one and loved the other with
all the passionate strength of a coast-child's
heart.  He had been born in inland England,
but had lived most of his life in western
Scotland where the great rocks rise boldly along the
coast—that coast intersected by numerous
sea-lochs, bounded by hills and separated from each
other by mountainous peninsulas.

The burden of the deep sea's song of eternal
restlessness had become the controlling passion
of the boy's life.  The wild freedom of wild
living things appealed to him and fear was a
word unknown.  Not a nearby cliff he had not
climbed; not a nearby, darkened cave, formed
by the overhanging rocks, he had not explored.
The Scottish folk forgot he was an English
lad as his skiff became a familiar feature of
the western sea-bound landscape.  There was
scarcely a Scottish boy of double his age who
could outstrip him in swimming, and when the
hated books had been laid to one side and the
tutor had gone away for the summer months,
old Mactier, a retainer of his father's, had taken
the child in charge, carrying him over to the
moorland country and teaching him the
meaning and the use of firearms.  His mother had
at first protested, but Trevelyan had only
laughed.  "Let the boy alone," he said, and he
gloried with old Mactier at the lad's stocky
build, firm muscles and enduring fearlessness,
knowing that in her secret heart his wife
remembered the traditions of her Scottish clan,
and was glad.

Then Trevelyan's wife had died.  The home
on western, rock-bound Scotland had been
closed, until the boy should grow to man's
estate and enter on his mother's heritage.
Trevelyan sent the boy to his sister—Johnny's
mother—living in east Scotland, and then
returned to England.  The sudden loss, the still
more sudden change from the wild free life
lived on the western coast to the quietness of
the life lived by the Stewarts, told upon the
child.  Mercifully, his healthy training was
stronger than the inroads made by childish
grief, but his mind was ill at ease and homesick.
He hated the flatness of this new eastern
country—the low and shelving coast.  This
was not Scotland to him.  It was not the
Scotland he had known.  It was not Mactier's
Scotland—and his.

His aunt was kind—overkind, her own
children sometimes thought when she sat out all
their bedtime hour on the foot of Robert's bed,
instead of theirs—but "auntie" couldn't
understand.  All the three children were kind
but they couldn't quite understand either.
Johnny was undoubtedly the best, but Johnny
loved books as passionately as Rob hated them,
and would listen to his father discuss politics
by the hour, if he only had the chance.  Robert
loathed politics.

Then one day Johnny's mother had a talk
with her husband.  It ended in her giving up a
London season and starting with Johnny and
Trevelyan's boy, for America.  A long
promised visit to a life friend, who had married a
United States officer, was the excuse.  It was
not until years after, when Trevelyan's little
son had grown to manhood that he knew the
real reason for that sudden ocean voyage.

The change had the desired effect.  He met
new people.  He saw new things.  He
watched new customs.  He knew Cary.

But the wistfulness for Mactier was in the
boy's eyes now as he looked over Johnny's head
in front of him, to the long stretch of low sand
country he was leaving.  He pulled with long,
even strokes.

Cary was talkative.

"Is this—" she waved her arms intending to
designate the new sweep of coast line and of
water, "all this I mean—is it like England or
Scotland?"

"Something," said Johnny slowly.  "It's
really quite like home—my home," he added
quickly, seeing that his younger cousin had
stopped rowing and was leaning forward with
hurt eyes.

Suddenly, the boy drew in his oars, resting
on them and allowing the boat to drift.
"It isn't like my home," he cried passionately;
a wild thrill of homesickness surging over him,
"It isn't like *my* Scotland—one little bit!  We
have great big rocks rising out of the water—not
long beaches like this!  And the sea beats
and beats and *beats* against them—it doesn't
just lap the sand as it does here—" the boy
drew in his breath quickly, hurrying on, "And
you haven't got our heather and our bracken,
and our country isn't flat—except the
moorlands where Mactier used to take me to hunt,
and even our moors are not like this!"

He stopped suddenly; and he buttoned and
unbuttoned his pea-jacket.  He wouldn't for
the world have let Johnny see his eyes, but
Johnny was looking at Cary.  The child was
leaning forward with angry face.

"You're a horrid, horrid boy!" she cried,
"You haven't a single nice thing to say about
us or our flag or—or me!  You're impolite and
you're dreadfully rude and I'll never play with
you again!"

Trevelyan's boy continued to button and
unbutton his pea-jacket.  He didn't care now if
Johnny did see his eyes.  Johnny saw them,
too, and he was frightened.  One day, Rob's
eyes had had that look when their tutor had
threatened to strike him.  He spoke hastily.

"Rob didn't mean to be rude, Cary," he
said; "but Rob's home was beautiful—a great
deal more beautiful than mine, and—and even
more beautiful than your home, and so you
mustn't—"

Cary's anger melted like a mist before the
sun.  She slid to the bottom of the boat and
then crept along to Rob on the rower's seat.
She pulled at his sleeve.

"Rob—I'm sorry—I didn't mean—really
truly mean—"

Trevelyan's boy shook away the child's
clinging fingers.

Cary drew back; her lips quivering.

"I'm cold," she said, for Cary never would
have admitted that a boy could hurt her so,
"I'm cold, and—and tired.  Can't we go
home, Johnny?"

"Yes," he said.

"No, we won't," said Rob, moodily, "the
oars are gone."

The oars were gone—slipped from the locks
when he had drawn them in, and in the
excitement of the quarrel they had floated away.
The two boys knew that the oars were not the
only things on the surface of the deep, drifting
out to sea.

Behind them a bank of storm clouds was
gathering and a sudden stone-color fell upon
the face of the waters.

The clouds increased in size and swept
toward them, seemingly poised directly overhead.
Then they parted and the rain fell in a great
straight sheet of water.  The oarless boat
tossed dangerously, and the rain gathered in
the bottom.

Cary, half rose, beside herself with terror.
The storm had drenched her to the skin, and
her long, straight hair lay, matted with the
wet, close to her small head.  Her wide gray
eyes looked out dark against the pallor of her
skin.

"Sit down!"

It was Johnny's voice.  Mechanically, the
child obeyed.

Once, years later, he so commanded her, and
she yielded then as now.

She cowered in the bow and was silent.
In the stern the elder boy grasped the rudder,
forcing the boat for a time in the direction of
the far-off Point.  The rough ropes slipped
through his hands, in spite of effort, and tore
them cruelly.

Trevelyan's boy had crept to the bottom of
the boat, the better to balance it.  The wind
swept across his hair, forcing it back from his
forehead, as with a mighty hand.  The joy of
an unknown danger was in his blood and the
color was in his cheeks.  The wild spirit of the
storm found a challenge in his eyes.

He was a being apart from the other two,
and yet sharing their danger.  The freedom
and the peril were as elixir to his soul, and yet
he never lost consciousness of the wind cloud
in the distance; and he knew it to be as
merciless as it was strong.

"Steer for the Point," he shouted.  Johnny
nodded.

They neared the shore.  Then the wind
came upon them and churned the bay into a
white foam.  It turned the frail boat around
as on a pivot, heading it for the open sea, and
with the effort the ropes that held the rudder
broke.

The boys looked at each other.  It was
characteristic of both; it was characteristic of their
training and their birth, that the sense of
personal danger did not touch them and that it was
solely for the small girl they thought.

In the face of the older boy was a strong
courage that soothed and sustained the frightened
child; but in the face of Trevelyan's son
was defiance against the might of the storm,
and the sea, and death.

He ripped open his pea-jacket; he unlaced
his water-soaked boots; he stripped to his
shirt.

"Keep the boat steady," cried Trevelyan's
son, "I'm going to swim to the Point and get
help!"

The older boy caught him by the wrist.

"You'll be drowned.  I'll go!"

Trevelyan's son shook him off.  He threw
back his head.

"I've swum double the distance," he shouted,
"Anyhow, we'll all die here."

He balanced himself on the rower's seat.
Then he raised his arms above his head before
he sprang.  The joy of the coming struggle
was in the boy's eyes—the joy of testing his
strength against the sea's forces.

He dived.  The boat, lightened of his weight,
rocked, sprang higher in the water and then
righted.  From the bow came the sob of a
girl-child's terror.

Trevelyan's son rose, striking out for shore.

Cary and the elder boy watched him—even
as they drifted seaward.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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Trevelyan's son was gaining.  The fight had
been a long one and a hard one.  The rain had
lessened, but the wind and tide had carried him
a quarter of a mile below the landing he had
intended to make.  His thoughts were growing
disconnected.  At first, he had only gloried
in his own skill; then he thought of
Scotland—he could scarcely have told why—and of old
Mactier.  Then he remembered Cary—and
after awhile, he wondered if he had ever drank
as much salt water before.

Then the wind changed.  That was a help.
Once he trod water, looking out over the face
of the sea for a sign of the boat.  He saw it.
It was far away and still drifting seaward, but
it was upright and the coast boy knew that
unless the storm began again, it could live in
spite of the long swells that bore it outward.

His arms began to get numb, and a mist—he
supposed it was the rain—got between him
and his vision.  The low banks of clouds on
the horizon, too, assumed strange shapes.  They
looked like the gray crags at home.

Once his breath seemed to leave him and his
arms grew suddenly powerless and he sank.
The emersion gave him new energy.  The love
of life, the wild thrill of fearless conquest,
swept right over him anew, and he pulled for
shore.  After a little he raised his right arm
and sounded.  The waters were up to his eyes,
but he touched land.  He rose and struck out
again, and again, and—again.

Then he waded in and stood upon the beach,
his face turned seaward.

Trevelyan's boy threw back his head and
laughed at the waters and the storm.

"I beat you," he shouted passionately, "*I
beat you!*"

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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The Lieutenant was in his office.  It had
been a busy day of petty annoyances and he
was tired.

He leaned back in his chair and filled his
pipe, packing it carefully.  Then he lighted a
match.

Some one fumbled at the door knob in an
uncertain way; hesitated, and tried again.

"Come in!" shouted the Lieutenant.  The
noise hurt his nerves.

The door opened and Rob entered.  His
eyes looked shadowy by contrast to the pinched
paleness of his face.  He walked with difficulty.
His short legs got tangled up in the
long coat he had gotten from one of the men
of the rescuing party, and he stumbled over it.

The Lieutenant rose.  The match burned
down to his fingers and he mechanically tossed
it into the fire.  Then he laid down his pipe.

The short odd figure in the long overcoat
advanced to the middle of the room, facing
Cary's father.

"Cary—" he began, and then stopped a
moment and cleared his throat.  It seemed still
full of salt water.  "I stole Lieutenant
Burden's boat and I took Cary and Johnny out.
The storm came.  I knew it was coming, but
I didn't care, and I went.  And I lost the oars
and—"  The salt water feeling came back.

"Cary?" asked Cary's father.

Trevelyan's boy shook the long sleeves away
from his hands, which he pushed down into the
great pockets of the coat, where they hunted
around for themselves.  The Lieutenant was
tall and Trevelyan's boy was short, and he had
to look up a long way before he could look him
full in the face.

"She's coming," he said, "and so's Johnny.
They both feel sort of sick, but I'm all right,
and so I've come here.  I thought we'd better
have it over with."

"What?" asked the Lieutenant.

"Why, the thrashing!  Of course, you'll
thrash me."

He came forward a step and swayed.

Cary's father caught him as he fell and laid
him on the lounge.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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That night Cary was ill.  The next day she
was worse.  She complained of a sharp pain
in her side and toward evening she began to
breathe heavily.

At nine, when the post surgeon came again,
she was burning with fever, and he shook his
head when he listened to her lungs.

"It looks confoundedly like pneumonia," he
told the Lieutenant who was standing anxiously
by Cary's little brass bed, and he went
off to look up a nurse.

The Lieutenant bent over the child a moment
after the surgeon had left, and then he turned
hastily away and lowered the lamp and shaded
its glare from Cary's eyes.  Then he went over
to the window and stood looking out.  Below
him stretched the yard of his quarters.  It was
Cary's playground.  Beyond the garden lay
the parade ground and further off the other
officers' quarters.  He could see Cary now, her
long, straight hair flying in the wind as she
tore by the flagstaff to meet him on his return
from duty.  Way off in the distance he could
see the dim, dark outline of the Fort's walls,
and beyond, the strip of moonlit sea.  He had
used to carry Cary on his shoulders, when she
was a baby, along those walls and she had used
to clap her hands at the sunlight dancing on the
water.  Everything spoke to him of Cary.  He
turned and went back to the bed and knelt down
by it and buried his head close to the child's—so
close that he could feel her hot breath on his
cheek.

"I was a fool," he told himself, passionately,
"to fancy I could care for a little flower, but I
couldn't give her up after her mother died."

He rose presently and cautiously heightened
the lamp and wrote a hurried line on a scrap of
paper.

"Cary is ill.  Pneumonia.  Mam' Amy is
away.  Will you come?"

He signed the note and then crept down
stairs and gave it to the colored boy.  The
colored boy carried it across the parade ground to
the house where the English children were
staying and waited, as he had been bidden, for
an answer.

The Lieutenant went back to the window.
He could see the house across the parade
ground from there, and presently he saw the
shadowy figure of a woman accompanied by
his colored boy passing the flagstaff.

"Heaven bless her!  I knew she'd come."

He went down stairs to open the door for
her and it was not until he had closed it
and turned to thank her that he saw it was not
the wife of his comrade.

"Mary was away," the exquisitely modulated
English voice fell on his overwrought
nerves like a balm.  "I took the liberty of
opening the note, fearing something might be
wrong with your little girl after yesterday's
terrible experience.  I have come to nurse her.
I know you won't send me away."

John's mother threw off the long cloak she
had flung over her shoulders.

"Really, Mrs. Stewart—"

"There—please don't!  I am the mother of
three children—I once was the mother of
four," the English woman looked down steadily
at her wedding ring, twisting it on her
finger, "I am the adopted mother of
another—"  She raised her eyes, smiling gravely,
"We are all alike—we women; be we American
or English.  Besides if it hadn't been for
my two boys Cary would never be ill now.
Come, take me to her."

There was not a nurse to be found, and at
midnight the post surgeon returned,
discouraged from a fruitless search.

A sense of order and exquisite peace seemed
to permeate the child's sick room.  It
impressed him before he had crossed the
threshold.  A woman was sitting by the little brass
bed and he could hear her speaking soothingly
to Cary.

She turned when she heard his step and rose.
He took in the situation at a glance.

"You're a trump," he said, concisely, and
went over to the bed.

"How is she?"

"Bad—very bad!  Where's the child's father?"

"In the next room.  He cannot stand seeing
her suffer."

"Humph!  Shouldn't wonder.  She's the
apple of his eye.  You know we call her the
'Post Baby'—have ever since her mother died."

"How're your young rascals?" he inquired,
when he was leaving.  "They and the 'Post
Baby' here had a pretty time of it yesterday."

"God only knows what saved them."

"Well, I know.  It was your two youngsters.
They're both game.  The Queen will
have two good soldiers some day."

The English woman smiled.

"I left Rob in a perfect fury at the foot of
his bed.  He woke up when I was getting
ready to come over, and wanted to come, too.
He says Cary belongs to him.  I threatened
severe punishment, and—left him."

The post surgeon chuckled.

"He'll risk that if he takes it in his head to
come."

"I'm afraid he will.  I left Johnny consoling him."

"The two of them called seven times this
afternoon."

"I know—but I never dreamed Cary was
really ill."

"Well—"  The post surgeon hesitated,
"I'll be back after awhile and if the baby's
worse, I'll spend the night with you."

He closed the front door softly; hesitated
for an instant before he recrossed the shadowy
parade ground, and starting to go on, stumbled
over a dark object on the porch.

The dark object turned out to be a boy, who
rose and pulled at the surgeon's sleeve.

"How is she?  Oh! tell me how she is!"
he asked.  His thin, high bred face with the
delicately chiseled features, showed out sharply
in the waning moonlight.

"Great Scott!"

"No, it's only Johnny Stewart," said the
boy, a faint flash of humor lighting up his pale
face for a moment.  "I couldn't sleep—tell
me—is she—worse?"

"She's a pretty sick little girl," said the
surgeon, amused at the situation.  "Your mother
has been expecting trouble from your quarter,
but she rather looked for it from Rob."

"He's asleep," said the boy, simply, "I sat
with him until he went to sleep, but—you know
I'm the oldest, and I'm responsible for it all."  He
looked up gravely, self-accusing, in the post
surgeon's weather-beaten face.

"Well, you're a pair of you!" said the surgeon,
looking hard at the flagstaff.  "Now,
what do you propose to do with yourself?"

"You couldn't slip me in, somehow?"
pleaded the boy.  "I'd stay down stairs and I'd
be awfully quiet and I wouldn't trouble a soul.
There might be errands—" he broke off, "I'd
like to be near her," he said.  "Do you think
you could manage it?"

The post surgeon thought he could, and the
post surgeon did.

Then he started once more to cross the
parade grounds.

As he passed the flagstaff and entered the
shadows of the trees, a small whirlwind struck
him.  The whirlwind proved to be Rob.  He
was only half dressed: his shirt being open at
the throat and devoid of tie.  One stocking
had been forgotten in his haste and he was
hatless.  The surgeon caught him by his hair and
pulled him back.

Then the whirlwind developed into a small tornado.

"Let me go," he cried.  "*Let me go!*"

"I'll take you to the guard house if you don't
behave," threatened the surgeon.  "Now what
in thunderation are you after?"

"Going to see Cary," said Rob, sullenly.

"You are, hey?  Well, you're not going to
do anything of the kind.  You'd scare any
little girl into a fit.  You're going home."

"No, I'm not," said Rob, rebelliously.

"Yes, you are."

"I'll come out again."

"Not behind locked doors."

"Yes I will, too, through the window."

"I'll see to the window."

"I'll climb through the transom."

He made a dive under the surgeon's arm.
The surgeon caught him by the seat of his
small trousers.

"Where's Johnny?"

"That's the trouble—is it?  Well, Johnny's
a different quantity from you.  Johnny's safe
enough."

"Johnny's at Cary's house.  I know it.  I'm
going, too," cried the younger boy, passionately.

"If you make a sound, I'll thrash you within
an inch of your life," said the surgeon, in
desperation, retracing his steps across the parade
ground.

"I'd scratch your eyes out if you tried to,"
said the boy, a flood of crimson sweeping his face.

"Well—look out that your noise don't kill
Cary," said the surgeon.

Trevelyan's boy caught the surgeon's hand.

"Indeed I'll try to be good," he said,
earnestly, "if you'll only take me to Cary."

Mrs. Stewart opened the door.

"Here's one boy," said the surgeon grimly,
pushing Trevelyan's son over the threshold,
"There's another in the dining-room."

"You're a nice one to leave a chap asleep
and then sneak off.  I wouldn't have been so
mean!"

Rob blinked in the glare of the dining-room
lamp, and shifted from the stockingless leg to
the covered one, "I didn't think Johnny
Stewart—"  His voice rose.

Johnny came forward.

"Stop that shouting!" he commanded,
"Don't you know Cary's very, very sick?"

Rob blinked again.  It was a blink of
astonishment.  He had never seen Johnny quite so
angry before.

"'Course I know she's sick.  That's why
I've come."  He sat down on the extreme edge
of a chair.

There was a long, long silence.  Johnny sat
at the big table, his chin between his hands and
looked straight ahead of him.  Rob looked
moodily into the fire.  Once the younger boy
rose and went to the foot of the stairs.

"What you suppose is happening up there?"
he inquired when he came back.

"I don't know."

"Suppose she's dying?"

"Don't!"

The elder boy turned sharply and lowered
the lamp that was smoking.

The long hours crept away.  By and by the
lamp flickered and went out, and the fire died
down, and left only a heap of white ashes on
the hearth.  Then the gray dawn crept in and
after awhile the gray was tinged with gold.
Later, the sunrise gun boomed through the
stillness, to be followed by the ringing notes of
the reveille.

Upstairs, the post surgeon was leaning over
the little brass bed.

"I'll spend the night," he had said briefly,
on his last visit.  There were symptoms about
Cary's labored breathing and dry cough that he
did not like.

The child's sleepless eyes and flushed face
looked wan in the grayness of the early dawn.

As the hours dragged by, Cary became more
restless and her mind began to wander.

"Don't let him, Johnny!  Don't let him!
He'll drown!  He'll dro——" the voice rose in
a shriek and then trailed off.

The cry had reached the children below
stairs.  A moment later and Rob, wide-eyed
and excited, appeared at the sick-room door.
He was confronted by his old foe the post
surgeon.

"Can't come in here," said the surgeon
briefly.  "It—"

"Oh, but tell her I'm not drowned!  Let me
tell her—"

The surgeon took him by the shoulders and
marched him down stairs.

"Is this the way you promise to keep still?"

The post surgeon was skilled in other arts
than his own profession.  He had appealed to
the boy's honor.

Trevelyan's son flung himself face downward
on the hearth rug and lay motionless.
Johnny went to him and knelt beside him and
touched him on the arm.  Something of Johnny's
childhood had vanished in the night, never
to return.  He did not say anything to Rob;
he just continued to kneel beside him with his
hand on his arm.

Presently Rob sat up.  His wakeful night
had not improved his appearance.  His shirt
was a crumpled mass; his hair was disheveled,
and one of his ill-laced boots was gone.

"She shan't die!" he cried, passionately, "I
won't let her die!  I won't!  *I won't!*"

Johnny said nothing.  Once, long ago, a
little brother had died, and Johnny still
remembered how vainly he had tried to wake him.
Johnny had seen death.

Upstairs Cary tossed in her delirium.

"Johnny, don't make me keep still!  I can't
keep still any longer!  The water looks so
cold—"

And so the day wore on.  The dry cough
stopped and the fever ran higher and the breathing
came more labored, and Cary lay wide eyed
and sleepless.

The children wandered like little ghosts
through the rooms of the lower floor.  They
pleaded that they might see Cary once.  The
post surgeon tried an experiment.

"The child's strength is going fast for lack
of sleep," he told Mrs. Stewart, "We'll see
what your boys can do."

He brought Rob in first, and Trevelyan's son
stood at the foot of the bed, and was silent as
they had bidden him to be; but they could see
that he trembled.

Cary's eyes, bright with delirious fever,
rested on him for a moment.  Then she started
up in bed.

"It's Rob, dear," said Rob's aunt, bending
over her.

"No, it isn't!" cried Cary.  "No—it—isn't!
Take him away; away—a-w-a-y!"

Rob let go of the brass railing and rushed
impetuously to the little girl's side and flung
himself down by the bed.

"Cary!  Cary!  Don't you know me?  It's
me!  It's only Rob!"

But Cary shrank back from his touch.

"I'm frightened," she moaned.

The Lieutenant came and lifted the boy and
took him from the room.  Trevelyan's son
was crying passionately.

The excitement proved to be the worst
possible thing for Cary.  The fever ran higher
and sapped and sapped her strength and still
she moaned and cried in her delirium and still
sleep did not come.

"She can't grow much worse and stay alive,"
muttered the post surgeon, "And something
has got to be done."

He went down stairs in search of Johnny.
He found the boy standing by the window, his
white face turned toward the sea.  Rob, his
passion of tears spent, lay sleeping heavily on
the lounge.  The surgeon touched the elder
boy on the arm and motioned him to follow him.
Outside in the little square hall, they faced each
other—the skilled man of science, and the
delicately featured English boy with the firm
mouth.

"You're going to take me to Cary?"

The surgeon nodded.

"Yes.  She wouldn't see Rob, but perhaps
she'll see you.  I've an idea she will.  She's
been calling your name all day.  If I take you
to her, will you be very quiet?"

"I'll be very quiet," promised the little
Briton, gravely.

"And we've got to get her to sleep.  Perhaps—"

The boy's firm mouth quivered for an instant.

"Yes," he said.

The post surgeon let him go into Cary's room
alone, and he motioned the boy's mother and
Cary's father away from the bed.

The boy went directly to the head of the bed
and stood there looking down at Cary.  For a
long while Cary did not notice him.  But he
waited.

The stillness of the room grew—broken only
by Cary's piteous moans.  After awhile she
became conscious of the boy's slim figure at
her side, and she turned her restless, feverish
eyes to him.

Then he stroked her long straight hair timidly.

The moans ceased suddenly.

"It's Johnny," said the boy.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and took
one of the child's hot hands in his.

Then the terror of the delirium fell on her
again.  She sat up in bed, flinging out her
arms and crying, and still the boy kept that
firm pressure on her hand.  The sustaining
touch won her back from the thraldom of the
fever and she threw herself into the boy's arms
and lay there, sobbing—sobbing.

The post surgeon nodded.

"I thought so," he muttered from the doorway,
and beckoned the others into the adjoining room.

For an hour they sat there.  Gradually the
child's sobs grew weaker; after awhile they
caught their echo at long intervals and by and
by they died away altogether.

The shadows of the dying day crept into the
sick room and the wanness of its departing
struggle was reflected on Cary's small, pinched
face.  She still lay in the boy's arms,
quiet—spent with the effort of her delirium.  The
boy sat rigidly mute, supporting her.

The day sank into evening and the post
surgeon came in quietly from the adjoining room.
The boy's eyes met his as he entered.  It was
his only movement.  Otherwise he might have
been carved of stone.  The boy's eyes smiled
and the post surgeon retraced his steps.

"She's sleeping.  The boy holds her life in
his hands.  If he can only remain motionless—"

Another hour slipped by.  The post surgeon
came in again.  Cary was sleeping still, her
whole weight resting in the boy's rigid arms.
He was growing white with the strain of his
enforced position.  The surgeon looked down
at him.

"Can you hold out?" he asked, below his
breath.

The boy nodded.

The post surgeon went down stairs noiselessly
to the sideboard where the Lieutenant
kept his wines.

Rob sat up as he entered.

"How's Cary?  What time is it?  Where's
Johnny?"

The post surgeon went up and laid his finger
on Rob's mouth.

"Cary's sleeping.  If you wake her, you'll
kill her.  Don't speak above a whisper."

He filled a glass with wine and turned to
leave the room.

"Where's Johnny?"

"With Cary.  He put her to sleep."

Trevelyan's boy clenched his hands convulsively.

"Johnny—with—Cary," he said, slowly,
and then something choked him.

He followed the post surgeon to the foot of
the stairs and watched him until he disappeared.
Then he went back to the dimly lighted, lonely
dining-room and hesitated.

Suddenly a passionate cry rose in his throat,
which he smothered.

He turned and flung himself on the lounge.

"Dear God," he moaned, "Dear God, be
good to a little boy.  I want to die!  Quick!"

Upstairs the surgeon held the brim of the
wine glass to the elder boy's white lips.

The enforced position had become an agony.
Once, the surgeon saw the boy bite his under
lip until a drop of blood appeared.  He got a
pillow; two—half a dozen and supported the
boy's stiff back.

Three more hours dragged away, and then
Cary stirred and woke.  Great beads of
perspiration stood out on her thin, drawn little
face, but the fever had been broken in her sleep.

The boy's grasp suddenly relaxed and Cary
sank back on the pillow.

The Lieutenant helped the boy to rise; ending,
by picking him up in his arms and carrying
him from the room.

He re-entered Cary's room by way of the
hall.  By the light of the early breaking dawn,
he saw something dark lying before Cary's
outer door.

He stooped over it.

It was Trevelyan's boy.





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.. _`BOOK ONE`:

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   BOOK ONE

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   THE CLAY
   TAKES SHAPE

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   BOOK ONE

.. class:: center large bold

   THE CLAY TAKES SHAPE

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   \I.

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The six-foot Englishman, with the
military carriage and the rough tweed
cap, continued to stare at the back
of the girl in the brown tailor suit, leaning
over the ship's rail.  There was something
in the attitude that recalled a child
swinging on the railing of a fort's drawbridge.
He could not have told exactly why.  Perhaps
it was because he so often recalled that picture;
perhaps it was because he had always held fast
to a vague hope that some day he might meet
that child again.

The girl in the brown tailor suit remained
motionless, her face turned toward the Liberty
that was melting into an indistinct blur.  The
young Englishman came a little nearer.  She
had not been there when he had come aboard.
Of that he was sure.  Well, he had probably
missed half of his fellow passengers while he
was changing to his seafaring clothes, and there
had been a couple of letters to be written to be
carried back by the pilot.  All that had taken
time.

The girl turned.  The last faint trace of
Liberty had faded; she might just as well
admit that, and give her attention to the novelties
of ship-board life.  She looked curiously down
the long white deck.  Passengers were appearing
every moment, clad in ulsters and soft hats;
the deck steward was hurrying to and fro
adjusting steamer chairs and wraps.  The
voyage had undoubtedly begun.

Suddenly the line of her vision was
interrupted by a tall man in a rough tweed cap.
And then she noticed that he had snatched it
from his head and was coming toward her with
both hands outstretched.

"Isn't it—Cary?" he asked, eagerly.

The girl looked into his eyes.  Somewhere
in their grave depths a smile was hidden.

"Why, it's Johnny," she cried, delightedly.

"To be sure it's Johnny!  And what do *you*
mean by sailing under an English flag?"

She laughed again, showing her perfect teeth.

"Isn't it absurd?  But Daddy dragged me
into it."

"Which?  The Cunarder or the trip?"

"Both.  Where in the world have you been
all this time, and oh! how's Rob?  I declare
I've so many questions to ask you I don't know
where to begin."

Stewart smiled.

"You're the same old Cary," he said, "Only
a bit taller.  Let me find your chair for you.
You're not crossing alone?"

"Do you think I'd leave my father?"

"Of course not.  Where is he?"

"There, forgive me.  I was rude.  I'm
afraid I *am* as bad as ever."  Cary sighed.

"I never said that—"

"Well, Papa's writing a note to be carried
back on the pilot.  If he does not come up soon,
I'll have to hunt him up.  I'm his shadow.
To tell you a secret; I'm chaperoning him on
this trip!"

"Indeed!"  Stewart's eyes were smiling.

"To be sure.  Now, about yourself—"

"Your eyes say, 'What have you been doing
in America that you failed to look me up?"
said Stewart.

"That is just what I was thinking, and when
we were going to hunt for you, too, when we
landed!  Come!"

"There isn't much to tell," said Stewart,
meeting her eyes squarely.  "There have been
a good many years—uneventful ones—of a
pretty steady 'grind', and rather rigid military
training at Woolwich—"

She looked up quickly.

"You are an officer?  An engineer?"

He laughed, pleased.

"You know more about our English military
schools than the majority of American girls."

"You forget I am an Army woman.  Go on!"

"And so I'm a member—a young one—of
the Royal Engineers.  I was ordered to India,
where I served out my sub-lieutenancy.  I was
in a bit of a row there, and after, I took the
jungle fever and got sick leave.  They've sent
me over the Atlantic for a sea trip.  I'm to be
transferred later.  I was only in New York
two days.  That's why I couldn't look you up.
You see, I didn't know if you were still at the
old fort down South, or in Texas or Montana
or—any other of your big states."  He was
rapidly getting off of the subject of "self."  "Now,
where have you been and why didn't
you keep on writing?"

"I did write, but you wouldn't answer—sent
the letters to your home in Scotland."

"Ah!  We were traveling; the old place has
been rented almost steadily for years.  They
must have miscarried in the forwarding.
Father has preferred London political life, and
mother wanted to be near us boys when at
school and afterwards when we became cadets—"

"How is your mother?"

"Well; thanks.  She'll be glad to see you again."

Cary looked seaward.

"I shall never forget," she said, "how she
nursed me."  She was silent a moment.
"How's Rob?" she asked, presently.

"I'm inclined to think he's less changed than
any one of the three of us.  He's fiery, fierce,
affectionate, as ever, with a wonderful talent
for getting into scrapes and scrambling out of
them again."

"What is he—a sailor?"

"He wanted to go in the navy—bad.  Poor
Rob.  But my uncle had set his heart on the
army for him.  You know he was a great
fighter in his day—retired on a wound that
would have killed most men.  He wanted him
to go to Sandhurst, but Rob kicked on that, and
they compromised on Woolwich."

"I didn't know Rob would ever have brains
enough for the Engineers."  Cary laughed and
caught wildly at her hat, which the wind was
trying to tear from her head.

"Rob's clever enough—cleverer than most
men, if he'd only study.  He leaves Woolwich
in a couple of months now—graduated.  How
he has ever stayed there as long as he has is a
marvel.  Such doings!"  Stewart shook his
head even as he smiled.

"I believe," he said, after a pause, "It's for
his father's sake and my mother's that he has
drawn the line where he has!  There isn't an
officer or an instructor who don't like him,
though.  He's as straight as a string where
honor is concerned, and as brave—Well!  You
know how brave he could be as a child."

Stewart went on.

"As for the cadets—they swear by him—every
last boy of them!  Rob will be wild
when he hears you are in England, and
will probably take 'French leave'!"  Stewart
laughed again.  "There!  That's the family
history.  Now, what about yourself?"

The girl ran her hand thoughtfully along the
railing.

"Papa was stationed at the Fort for three
years after you left us.  Since then we've been
moving from pillar to post—in regular Army
fashion.  You know how it is?"  She raised
her eyes to Stewart and Stewart nodded.
"He was ordered to Florida and then to
Arkansas and then to Alaska—" she laughed.
"He sent me to boarding school for a year but
I couldn't stand not seeing him, and he was
even worse about me.  After that he taught
me himself—dear, old Daddy—he taught me
everything from calculus to colt riding.  It's
been a wild kind of a life, but I've missed the
old Fort and the sea.  None of the other places
was ever much like home—"  Cary raised her
eyes from the railing and looked soberly toward
the receding shore.

Stewart watched her; realizing that while
she had not grown pretty she was possessed of
an indefinable magnetism.

Cary went on.

"Then Daddy got notions about me—about
my lack of advantages, social and—otherwise,"
Cary was laughing again.  "He was retired
last month and now he's carrying me off to
Europe, to be polished.  Am I such a rough
specimen?" she asked Stewart, suddenly.

He shook his head so gravely in denial that
she smiled.

"There!  Of course, I was only fooling!
And so I'm going over to your great, beautiful,
strange Old World to be 'finished'—as if
anyone could ever be 'finished' as long as they
live!  I'm to see all the celebrated Old Masters
and to visit all the old historic places and see
the old ruins—" she broke off suddenly, "I
think by the time I've finished, I'll be very
tired, don't you?"

"And then?" asked Stewart.

"Why, then Daddy and I will return to
America and have a little home somewhere—I
hope near the Fort where I lived as a child;
close by the sea and the capes and the beach."

They were silent a moment.  Behind them
was the merry hum of voices and the rapid
movement of feet hurrying to and fro, but
for that moment they were as much alone as
though they were in the shadow of the old fort wall.

"My home," said Stewart, looking out over
the sea into nothingness.  "My home in eastern
Scotland is like that.  Some day I hope you
will see it.  If you ever grow very homesick
for America let me know, and I'll try to
arrange to run up there for a day with you and
mother.  The long beach will remind you of home."

"Thank you," said the girl, gently.

There was a long quiet between them, and
then the young officer's face changed suddenly
and he broke into an infectious laugh.

"Oh, the guns—*do* you remember the guns,
and the pinafores and the sunbonnets?
Weren't you ever caught?"

The tall girl joined in with his laugh and the
two—his deep and hers low—mingled and
drifted back to the passers-by who smiled
sympathetically at the sound.  Cary shook her
head.

"No—that is, not until long afterwards.  It
seems that the Department issued orders that
the big show guns should be recast, and when
they were taken away and broken up—they
were found to be storehouses for a small girl's
wardrobe!  Lieutenant Burden happened to be
on the spot and the story he tells—" she broke
off, still laughing.

"Was there anything left of the things?"
asked the Briton, amused.

"Yes, indeed—some were pretty well
preserved!  And how poor old Mammy Amy
would worry over the thief who dared to steal
her 'chile's clothes!'  It's all too funny!"

"And Mam' Amy?"

"Dead.  She followed us out to Alaska, but
she died.  I suppose it must have been the
climate."

Stewart's face grew a little grave.

"Lieutenant Burden—wasn't he the officer
we stole the boat from?"

The girl nodded, smiling.

"And that row!  Wasn't that a row we
had that day," he said.  "Do you remember
the terrible swim Rob took and how he saved us?"

"Yes.  And how you comforted me.  I
went to sleep—didn't I?"

"Yes; and how ill you were afterwards!
Do you know I've never forgiven myself for
all that.  I was thirteen, and the oldest, and
should have had more horse sense."

"What children we were!" Cary sighed.

"Are you wishing the time back?"

"I hardly know—" she hesitated, "No, I
suppose not."

Then:

"They told me that you saved me in that illness."

"Did they?"

"Do you believe in confessions?" he asked,
with an odd smile.

Cary laughed.

"That depends.  Well—what have you been doing?"

"Do you know I kissed you that day when
you fell asleep in the boat—when we were
facing death together—and again when I was
fighting death for you that long night?"

"You wretch!  Well, it didn't count much
then," Cary's eyes were twinkling, "You were
thirteen and I was only seven.  Rob!
Imagine Rob ever kissing me!"

Stewart laughed a little nervously.

"Look out, Rob may yet!"

"Preposterous!  Don't you remember when
you said you lived in Aberdeen and Rob in
Argyll, and I innocently asked whether they
were not near together?  How indignant Rob
was!  And then I crossly retorted that they
both began with 'a', anyway, and—" she
paused for breath, and Stewart laughingly took
up the story and finished it.

"And how Rob scornfully answered that so
did 'cat' and 'crow'!  He's never deigned to
tell me which applied to which!"

"That was Rob all over!"

Late that night the quartermaster at his
lonely wheel, watched a tall man pacing the decks.

After awhile the figure paused at the ship's
railing and leaned against it heavily, looking
out over the moonlit sea.  The deep throbbing
of the mighty engines came up to him and beat
and beat against his senses.

"Twice," said the Briton, slowly, speaking
to the stillness of the stars and the restlessness
of the ocean, "Twice, as a boy, I kissed her,
when we fought death together.  Some day, in
an hour of danger, I shall kiss her again."





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Cary was singing.  Trevelyan heard her
before he had reached the second flight
of stairs in the lodgings.  The clear
contralto voice sifted down into the dark
passage as sunlight sifts into a ravine.  It rose;
swelled higher and filled the entrance way.
Trevelyan's pulses kept time to its swinging
measure as he came on up the stairs, and quietly
opened the door of the little sitting room.  The
measure died away.  Cary finished the running
accompaniment and rose from the piano.

"Bravo!" cried Trevelyan from the doorway.

"You have deserted me of late," she said,
reproachfully, coming forward to greet him.

"Impossible!  Let me explain, and all will
be forgiven—" Trevelyan cut his sentence
short, "Why, hello, John, where did you come from?"

He nodded indifferently to Stewart standing
by the window, walked over to a table and
began to idly turn over the pages of a book.  It
was annoying always to find Stewart hanging
around.  The fact that Stewart was his cousin,
and had shared everything he possessed with
him since he had been a child, even down to his
mother, did not count for anything in the world,
just at this juncture.  Stewart's mother was
all right; indeed, she was undoubtedly the very
best woman who ever lived, excepting his own
mother who had been dead so long, and
possibly Cary!  But against Stewart himself he
bore a well-founded grudge.  Stewart had
been the one to meet Cary on the steamer and
bring her and her father to London and help
them get settled in lodgings and introduce them
to his friends.  That was bad enough, in all
conscience, but then it had been Stewart, who
had constituted himself a combined walking
Baedeker, and unfailing friend of the American
officer and his daughter.  That had been in
those last wretched weeks before he had been
graduated from Woolwich, and Stewart, with
that confounded sick leave, had taken
advantage of the opportunity offered.  Even when
Stewart reported for duty again, his transfer
had been to a home regiment, and in the few
times that he, Trevelyan, had seen them before
his graduation, John had always been with
Cary, and Cary had been overflowing with their
mutual experiences.  Now John had taken the
Captain and herself to dine at the Albion, in
Russell Street, Covent Garden; and had pointed
out the traditional places occupied by Dickens,
and Sothern, and Toole, and the rest.  Now,
it had been a morning ride with John, on
Rotten Row, when Maggie, John's sister, had sent
around her favorite mount.  Again, it had
been a trip to Hampstead Heath or Richmond
Park, where, from the famous hill, standing
with John, she had looked toward the towers
of Windsor; or to the left had seen on the
horizon, the bold outline of the Surrey Downs.  It
was John—or if John couldn't possibly manage
it—it was John's mother or John's sister who
had taken her everywhere.  She had been to
the Derby on the Stewarts' coach; she had been
to Oxford with John's sister, and met Kenneth,
John's younger brother; she had visited
Stratford and seen Kenilworth, and generally
"done" London almost before he had begun to
serve his sub-lieutenancy.  And if John had
been unable to think of some new place to show
her, he had walked with her down the Strand
or through Fleet street or Cheapside, and the
two of them had retraced Dickens's or Charles
Lamb's steps, and explored all the little out of
the way shops!  That was just like John!
Trevelyan detested such things, and Trevelyan
detested them even more when John and Cary
had done them together, and he had been left out!

That sub-lieutenancy was another thing that
rankled!  Stewart had served his, and Stewart
had done good work in that "row" in India,
and had even got an honorable mention.
Stewart always was a lucky dog.  Trevelyan
envied Stewart that "mention" more than he
envied any man in the world anything.  Cary
thought so much of that "mention," and now
Cary was going away!

A wild throbbing resentment against his own
position in the affair; against Cary's leaving
England, rose up within him, as the sea rose up
and beat against the crags at home.  He did
not define it, but it possessed him, as did the
memory of Cary's face when he was away from her.

He let the book fall back heavily on the table
and walked over and leaned his elbows on the
mantel, his head in his hands, and looked
moodily into the open fire.

Once Cary tried to draw him into the
conversation, but Trevelyan refused to be won
from the depths of his own depression, to the
genial atmosphere pervading the little room,
and Cary, used to his ways, let him alone.  She
had looked at John and shaken her head.

"I can't do a thing with him to-night," it
had said, but Stewart, grown wonderfully
quick-witted in regard to Cary, fancied that he
heard her sigh.

Outside the daylight faded and a heavy fog
crept up and fell over the Thames and London
like a pall.  Here and there a street lamp
flickered faintly through the mist, and the rumble
of carriage wheels, heard, though unseen,
reached them, and Cary lighted the big red
lamp, preparatory to afternoon tea and the
Captain's return.  Once she went to the
window to look for her father, pressing her face
against the glass, but she could not see through
the heavy, yellow mist.  Trevelyan could hear
her and John talking in the window recess,
although he could not distinguish what they were
saving.  Once Cary laughed.  The sound
irritated him.

After awhile Cary came back into the room
and began to handle the tea-cups absent-mindedly.
Her table was close to the fire, and Trevelyan,
by turning his head, could watch the
ruddy reflection play over her face.  He turned
back to the glowing logs.

"Sugar?" asked Cary suggestively, a little
later of Trevelyan.

"No," said Trevelyan, moodily, "No sugar
and no tea!"

Cary shrugged her shoulders.

"You're impossible, to-day," she said,
"Bread and butter, John?"

After awhile Stewart prepared to leave.
Trevelyan still leaned against the mantel, his
face turned to the fire.  He knew Stewart was
going, but he did not move.  From the doorway
he could hear Stewart's voice calling out
good-bye.

"Good-bye," he called back, shortly.

Cary returned to the tea table, paused and
looked at Trevelyan's back in an uncertain way.
Trevelyan was acutely conscious of her
nearness.  She sat down, resting her intertwined
fingers on the edge of the table and looked
down at them.

"Well?"

Trevelyan turned at the sound of her quiet
voice and faced her, still resting one elbow on
the mantel.

"Well!" he repeated, a touch of sarcasm in
his voice, "It isn't 'well' at all!  It's as
confoundedly bad as it can be!  Here you're going
to leave London day after to-morrow, to be
gone—"

"Three months," said Cary.

"Exactly!"

"I'll be back before you know it!"

Trevelyan laughed bitterly.

"You think so?"  Then: "I can tell you
how long two months can be!  I learned that
at Woolwich before I graduated, and after I
had seen you."  He stopped abruptly and beat
his foot impatiently on the fender.

"Nonsense!  You're going to be a British
officer.  Where's your backbone?"

"I've backbone enough—there's no trouble
about that!"  Trevelyan laughed oddly.  "I
could fight all right.  I could face danger.  I
could lead a charge into the mouth of the
cannon!  I've backbone enough!"

He had turned to her full as he was speaking.
His face was aflame with the possibilities his
words had awakened.  It was transformed
back into the face of the boy who conquered the
storm and the sea and death, and it was burning
with a newer passion still.

Cary's eyes fell before the look in his and
rested on her folded hands.  After a little she
began to trace an intricate pattern on the table
with her forefinger.  A weight of fear was
resting on her breast.

Trevelyan stood silent looking down at her
for a moment, and then he turned sharply and
went over to the window.  The perfume of the
violets she wore possessed him.  The clock on
the mantel struck the half hour, and a log broke
noisily on the hearth.  Cary looked toward
him.  The oppressive fear had passed.

"There will be a month in Switzerland!
Think of it—the Alps at last!  Three weeks
of Paris; three more of Ireland, and two in
Scotland with the Camerons.  Did you know
I was going to your Scotland and to Argyll?"

Trevelyan turned away from the window.

"No.  Since when?"

"The Camerons asked me last week.  They
are to have a house party, I think.  They asked
John, too—"

Trevelyan bit his lip.

"Is John going?"

"Not for the full time, but he hopes to get
a three days' leave."

Trevelyan came back to the fire and
drummed on the mantel.

"When we were children," he said,
suddenly, "down at the Fort, I used to tell you
about Scotland.  I am glad you are to see it.
You will like it!  And when you watch the sea
beat against the crags, and the breakers tossing
their white heads, you can think of me,
remembering it used to be my home.  I hope you will
see a storm," Trevelyan went on, "such a
storm as I used to glory in as a little chap!
They don't have such storms anywhere else, I
think!"

He stopped short, and looked hard at the fire.

"The Camerons' place is within driving distance
of my home.  If I can get off for a day
will you let me take you there?  I want you to
see it, and to meet old Mactier, and go with me
into the caves where I used to play as a boy,
and climb the crags, way up to their topmost
peaks, and breathe the freedom that is in the air!"

Cary sprang up, flinging out her hands.
There was an odd pulsing in her throat.

"Go! of course I'll go!" she cried, and then
the pulsing grew and grew, and choked her.

At six Trevelyan left.  She did not meet his
eyes in parting, and Trevelyan missed her
bantering voice, that usually followed him down
stairs.

"It's Stewart," he told himself with passionate
resentment, and he stumbled over the lower
step and swore at the darkness.

Cary went back into the empty room, over
to the mantel and looked into the fire, as
Trevelyan had done.  She could hear the echo of
the closing front door.  Outside, the fog grew
thicker.  Inside, the red lamp threw its
coloring on the crimson roses Stewart had brought
that day, making them more glorious still, and
the heat of the fire intensified the odor of the
violets on the woman's breast.  Stewart had
brought the violets too.

Cary turned away from the fire, and moved
restlessly about the room, fixing a chair here,
straightening a book there, and fingering some
familiar object.  As she passed the open piano,
she hesitated, put out one finger and struck a
key.  The sound vibrated through the quiet
room, deep and full and strong.  A bar of an
old Scotch song rose in her throat and broke.
She closed the piano hastily.  Once she leaned
over the roses.

"Dear John," she murmured, and her hands
touched for a moment the violets on her breast.

Then she went back to the fire, and stood
wide-eyed and silent, looking into the heart of
it.  She was dimly conscious of the violets'
perfume, but it was Trevelyan's face she saw in
the flames.





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There was a storm chill in the air.
Trevelyan readjusted the carriage
robe that had slipped away from Cary,
and turned up the collar of his driving coat.
Now and again he glanced at Cary.  The
girl's face was turned away and she was
looking out over the gray crags to the grayer sea
beyond.  The last three months had wrought
an indefinable change in her.  Trevelyan had
noticed it on his arrival at the Camerons' that
morning.  He wondered vaguely if it had
anything to do with travel and the process of
"polishing" to which Cary so often banteringly
referred.  Well he was not going to
worry over it.  He had only one day and he
meant to make the most of it.

He had written the Camerons he was
coming, and had not even waited for an answer.
He had announced his intention and it was
enough.  He had known Tom Cameron since
they wore kilts together, and back of their
friendship, his mother's family had known the
Camerons for generations.  Somewhere in the
history of the houses, there had been an
inter-marriage.  That had been the enduring seal
on the intimacy.  The Scotch are clannish.

It had taken him hours to reach the Camerons'.
It would take him hours to return.  But
this one afternoon, at least, was his.  After it,
might come the deluge.  After it—probably
would come the deluge!  He wasn't feeling
very sure of himself or of his own self power.
After a man has been in torment for three
months—

Tom Cameron's horse knew the road well—almost
as well as Trevelyan did—and kept
up a steady pace, and Tom Cameron's cart was
comfortable.

John was expected that afternoon for three
days.  Well; Cary would not be there to
welcome him.  Cary would be with him.  Stewart
might have her—undoubtedly would have
her, for those three days, but to-day—this
afternoon, was his.

The Camerons, learned in the signs of the
sky, had demurred at the storm chill in the air
and the threatening clouds, when after an early
lunch, Trevelyan and the American girl had
stepped into the cart.  Trevelyan, however, had
no intention of having his well laid plans
frustrated, and in his masterful way, had over-ruled
the objections.  The storm was a possibility.
His return next morning at daybreak, a
necessity.  Let the storm come.  He defied it.

Cary shivered.  Trevelyan noticed it and
leaned toward her.

"You are cold?"

Cary turned her eyes away from the gray
crags and the gray sea.  Trevelyan's were near
her own.  She shook her head.

"No," she faltered.  "It must be Scotland—the
Scotland you told me of as a child.  Once,
long ago I fought you about it.  If I had
dreamed—if I had known—" her voice faded
into the boom of the nearing surf and she
turned her eyes away from Trevelyan's,
coastward again.

The music of her voice and the roar of the
ocean mingled and surged over Trevelyan.

"God!" he said under his breath.





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As Trevelyan and the girl drove up the
long entrance way and neared the
house, they could distinguish through
the faint Scotch mist that had fallen, the
outline of Mactier waiting for them at the door.

The old retainer hurried forward to welcome them.

"Ay, sir, but 'tis gude to see ye!  My
heart's been sore for a sight o' thy face this
lang time!" he cried to Trevelyan.

Trevelyan jumped down from the cart.

"Hello, Mactier!" he cried.  "Jove!  But
it's good to see *you* again!"

Then he turned to Cary and helped her to the
ground.

"This is Mactier," he said, as one saying all
that is sufficient.  "Mactier, I used to tell Miss
Cary about you when I was a little shaver."

"Aweel ye were ever a mindful lad o' me!"  The
old man smiled.

He opened the door for them, and stood to
one side to let them enter.

"'Tis a bad day ye have for seeing the old
place," he said as they passed him.

"You can bring the horse around in an
hour," called Trevelyan as the old man drove
away.

Then Trevelyan went back to Cary.  The
girl was standing at the furthest end of the
great hall, looking out of the window.  She
could hear the beat of the sea on the near-by
crags and through the faint mist catch a
glimpse of the water.

Mactier had opened the long-closed blinds
and the light seemed concentrated around the
figure of the girl.  Trevelyan tore his riding
gloves from his hands and bent and unbent his
fingers rapidly.  "If I had dreamed—if I had
known—"  He reached her side.

"I'm afraid it's a gloomy day we've struck,"
he said quietly, "but I'm in hopes the mist
won't last.  On clear days from here you can
see the highest crag of all.  It's where I used
to spend half my days, as a little shaver,—up
there on the top.  It was my eyrie.  I used to
be a robber king and a shipwrecked mariner
and a Viking all rolled in one."

Trevelyan laughed, bending forward and
nearer to her and looked out of the window, as
though to penetrate the mist.  Cary leaned
against the frame of the window listening.

"When I got a bit older," Trevelyan's voice
fell heavily on the silence of the big lonely hall,
"I used to climb up there—to get away from
everyone, and where no one could find me; and
I would hide up there, and sit by the hour,
looking out at the sea and watching the white
spray breaking below me.  And then later I
used to try and think of what love meant—what
love could be—if I should ever love—"

He turned away abruptly and walked up and
down the hall.  After a little he came back to
Cary, who had not stirred.

"And sometimes I used to dream of a woman
who would some day come into my life—and
I used to crawl to the edge of the crag and lean
over and look into the white foam below, until
I got dizzy—looking for her face.  It seemed
her face must be in the white foam—foolish,
wasn't it?"

Cary ran her finger along the ledge of the
window.

"We all have our dreams."

Trevelyan watched her, as she turned her
face again to the window.  The mist outside
increased and seemed to muffle the beat of the
sea and all the sounds of nature, and it hung
around her and softened her face into wonderful
curves.  He turned his eyes away from her
suddenly.  He could have crushed that face in
his hands, bringing it up to his own—

"Mactier will be around in an hour," he
said after a while in a matter of fact way, "and
then I'll drive you about the place a bit before
we return.  We can easily make it and be back
for dinner."

"Yes?" asked Cary, absent-mindedly.

"Come!  Wake up!  And look around you!
Isn't this a fine old hall?"  But Trevelyan's
voice lacked enthusiasm.

Cary turned and looked around her.  Her
dream spell had passed.  The odd throbbing in
her throat, she had felt long ago in London,
the evening she had bidden Trevelyan good-bye,
returned with triple force.  A wave of
color swept over the usual pallor of her skin;
her eyes were shining.  Cary was transformed.

"Fine?" her voice pulsed with the enthusiasm
Trevelyan's had lacked.  "It's the finest
old hall in all the world!  The dearest old
home!  Take me over it—from the top to the
bottom, and show me where you and John and
Tom Cameron used to play!"

Trevelyan led her from room to room; passing
quickly this one, that held memories of his
mother; pausing on the threshold of another, to
tell the story of the Scotch boy's playtime; to
show to her the first stag's head, shot when
hunting with Mactier.  Trevelyan told the
story well, for he loved with all the unyielding
strength of an unyielding nature, the memories
his words called up.  Now it was how Tom
and he had slipped out of the window one night
and scaled the ivy covered turret wall, that
they might investigate the old cave down at
the water's edge, by the light of the waning
moon.  Mactier had told them strange tales of
the happenings in the cave when the moon was
on the wane.  Again it was the day he had
stumbled with his gun and the bullet had
entered his thigh; how old Mactier had flung
him across his shoulders, and borne him home
through the darkness of the falling night.
Again it was the morning his mother had died;
how he had been awakened by the hurrying of
many feet, and starting up in bed had found his
father bending over him, calling him by name.

Never had the girl known Trevelyan to be so
eloquent; never had she seen him as he was
to-day.  Now Trevelyan's voice was blithe with
the blitheness of glad remembered things; now
it broke with feeling, or vibrated with the
passion of reviving scenes long dead to life.  He
seemed not to be speaking of himself.  He was
telling her the story of an English boy, Scottish
bred; of his wild escapades; of his love of
freedom and unrestricted things; of his dangers
and his hopes; of what he meant to be when
he became a man!

And Cary, held fast by the magic of the story,
felt her pulses throb; her being thrill.  An
unreasonable regret that she had not been a
Scottish child to follow where he led, up the high
crags or down into the black caves, took
possession of her; and she recalled a picture of a
sea churned into foam; of a boat drifting out
toward the waste of ocean; and above the gray
surface of the stone-hued waters, a boy's head
turned landward.

Once, in following Trevelyan from one room
to another, she glanced out of the window and
noticed vaguely that the heavy rain drops lay
upon the glass.  Later, she was conscious of
the dull booming of thunder, echoing among
the nearby crags and losing itself in the beat of
the surf.  Then a flash of vivid lightning lit
up the sudden darkness that had fallen on the
room.

Trevelyan rushed to the window.  The
thralldom of the Scotch boy's story was upon
him still.

.. _`90`:

"It's a storm!" he cried.  "It's a storm come
to welcome me!"

He turned to Cary.

"Come here!" he commanded, "where you
can watch the sea and the storm fight it out
together!"

She came instantly.

The darkness increased until they could not
distinguish each other's faces.  The thunder
came and beat itself against the crags and spent
itself.  Now and again they could see, by the
glare of the prolonged lightning, the waters
lashed into a white fury.  Once, by its light,
she looked at Trevelyan's face.  It was white
and he was breathing deeply.  He was looking
seaward and seemed unconscious of her
presence.  Once, he flung out his hand and it
touched hers.  It was colder than the storm
chill in the air.  Once, she looked at him again,
and he, turning, met her eyes.  Some power
as mighty as the storm held her look to his, and
then above the beating of the thunder on the
crags and the booming, of the surf, she heard
his voice.

"Just you and I and the storm!  You and
I in all the world—all that the world holds!"  She
felt his hand upon her shoulder; she felt its
coldness through her heavy dress and she
shrank away from him, her voice and her words
broken, with a nameless fear.

Above the storm she could hear Trevelyan laugh.

"Let you go, when I've got you at last!
Let you go when your face has haunted me
through all the days and all the nights of the
long months!  *Let—you—go!*"

"Oh, Robert!"

"Oh, you think I'm mad!  Well, perhaps I
am for love of you.  You haunt me.  You
possess me.  It was your face I dreamed of in
the foam.  There! don't tremble so!  I won't
hurt you, child!"  The thunder drowned his
voice.

"Do you dream what you are to me or could
make of me?  Do you know what it is to hold
a man's soul in your hands?"

The spell of his words lifted.  The instinct
of an unknown danger possessed her.  She
slipped away in the blackness toward the door.
The silence grew and grew.

Gradually the darkness lifted and the thunder
and the boom of the surf lessened and the
lightning came at long and longer intervals.
Cary became acutely conscious of every sound.
Somewhere in the distance she heard voices and
the echo of men's footfalls.  She kept her eyes
away from Trevelyan who was standing with
his back to her.  Danger lay that way.

Then the spell of Trevelyan's nearness crept
over her again.  She tried to fight it off,
trembling.  She moved a step toward him, one hand
pressed close to her breast.  Then she paused,
arrested by a voice.

"Robert!  Cary!  *Cary!*"

The sound echoed down the great hall, across
the still deserted rooms, to the study where
they stood.

Trevelyan turned sharply.

"John!"

Cary's hand crept from her breast to her face
and she covered her eyes.

"John!"

Trevelyan crossed the space between them.

"Cary!"

The woman shrank back.

"Don't—you frighten me!" she moaned.

Trevelyan caught her by the wrist.

"Cary!  Cary!  Take that back!  How
can love frighten?  See, I love you—love
you!"

She was in his arms and he was leaning over
her, his mouth close to her face.

"Cary!" he whispered.

Down the long hall, through the silence of
the deserted rooms, came the voice.

"Cary!  Where are you?  Cary!"

She wrenched herself out of Trevelyan's arms.

"You are a coward!" she said slowly.

A wild tide of passion leaped up in Trevelyan.

"How dare you call me a coward," he said,
and his lips could hardly articulate, "If you
were not a woman—" he choked and his voice
died away.

Cary moved nearer to the door.  Once, she
turned her pale face and looked at Trevelyan.
Trevelyan stood rigid and mute where she had
left him, the knuckles of one hand pressed to
his mouth.  She faltered.

"Cary!  Cary!  Where are you?"

She turned, her thumb and forefinger
pressing her throat.

"Here!" she cried.  Then, louder: "Here!"

Trevelyan passed her, and strode through
the deserted rooms into the great hall.

"Cary is in the study," he said to the group
of men he found there, "Hello Tom!"

"John arrived an hour after you left," said
Cameron, regarding Trevelyan's rigid face
curiously, "and when the storm came up
nothing would do but that he must come for you
both in a closed carriage.  I knew you'd be safe
enough—if necessary find shelter with some of
the tenant's wives.  But John—"

Trevelyan turned to old Mactier.

"You can close up the house," he said shortly.

Stewart found the girl standing in the study.
He went up to her and drew her arm through
his and quietly led her down the long dark
passage that connected with the great hall.  He
could feel that she was trembling.  He patted
her hand soothingly.

"There, there! child.  It's all right.  I know!"





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Instead of returning to London from the
Camerons' place in Scotland, Cary and
the Captain went to the south of France.
Just what it was that had suddenly made Cary
so persistent in her desire not to return to
England, was not known.  Trevelyan, indeed
fancied that he knew, when he had finished
reading Cary's brief note telling of their change of
plans and their intended prolonged absence
from England, and he cursed the folly that had
separated him from Cary in the long months
that lay ahead.

To Stewart, and indeed to the world at large,
she gave the old, threadbare excuse—the
London climate.  If Stewart ever suspected
otherwise, he kept it to himself.

The Captain, like Trevelyan, fancied he knew
something of the cause, but the Captain was a
wise man, and he asked no more than Cary
chose to impart—which was next to nothing
at all.  Still Cary wanted to get away from
London and Cary was not given to whims.
The climate was a sufficiently good excuse.
The fact that it was an excuse made no difference
to the Captain, and to the south of France
they went.

They were gone all winter, traveling in a
desultory way, since there was no call for haste
and Cary's pleasure was the chief consideration.
And Cary delighted in the quaint old
towns and grew enthusiastic again over the
trifles of life, as she had done as a child down
by the sea-coast fort, or out on the western
plains.  Now it was a month at Cette, on the
Gulf of Naples; then it was down to the
Eastern Pyrenees, and over, and a month in Spain,
and back again to France and up to Bayonne
and Bordeaux, and then to Paris by easy stages,
and then on to Calais and to England.

There were letters from Stewart awaiting
to welcome her, whenever he knew her next
stopping place, and they often enclosed notes
of introduction to people who could add either
to her comfort or her pleasure.  Stewart knew
the country like a book.  He had toured it on
foot after his Eton days.  As for London—London
was duller than he had ever known it;
the fogs were unusually frequent and heavy,
and he was glad that she had escaped them.
He hoped she was enjoying herself; she must
surely see such and such a thing, or take such
and such a drive.  He had not taken it in years,
himself, but she would tell him all about it.  He
supposed she would be able to brush up his
French when she returned.  By the way, when
was she returning to England?

She returned to England in the late spring
and in all that time Trevelyan had not written
her a line.  He was at the station to meet her
though, and it was he who took possession of
her while the Captain and Stewart went to see
about the luggage.

Indeed, in the weeks that followed, London
observed that it was Trevelyan who monopolized
the American officer's daughter.  It was
Trevelyan who dropped in to afternoon tea
with unfailing regularity, and fought with her,
and scolded her, and laughed with her, and took
her driving, or riding on the Row.  His
superior officer fretted and speculated at the
change in the young Engineer, until he passed
him one day with Cary.

"There's a brilliant young chap being
ruined," he said crossly to his aide.  "Served
out his sub-lieutenancy finely, and has behaved
this winter like an officer and a gentleman.
Now the barracks can't hold him, and he
shirks like a weak-livered chicken.  Who's the
girl?"

"An American—the daughter of a retired
officer.  I fancy you've often seen them
together—elderly man with iron gray hair; sat
next to you, but one, at the Stewarts' dinner."

The aide broke off and looked fixedly after
Trevelyan.

"Some day in danger—" he said, as if to himself.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`1-VI.`:

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   \VI.

.. vspace:: 2

Cary was drumming idly on the piano.
Her attitude was the personification of
listlessness.  When the Captain had
spoken of it that morning she said it was "the
spring feeling in the air."

The Captain smiled as he walked down the
stairs of the lodgings.

"It's London climate—fog and rain—in
the winter; and it's London sunshine in the
spring!"

Cary continued to drum on the piano after he
left.  Then she let her hands fall from the
keys and looked absently about the room.  She
supposed Trevelyan would drop in later or
anyhow in the evening.  Trevelyan had been
irreproachable since her return—since that day in
Scotland.

Presently she dashed into a popular song and
sung it with a touch of the old gleeful
enthusiasm she had left behind in France.  Trevelyan
loathed that song.

She broke off suddenly and twirled around
on her stool.  Someone was knocking.

"Come in," she shouted, not rising, and
thinking it was either Robert or John.

The landlady entered bearing a card.  Cary
held out her hand for it.

"But my father is out.  Please tell Captain
Trevelyan—"

"But miss, the Captain asked for you."

Cary rose.

"For me?"

Then she laughed.

"Oh, you must be mistaken, but if you'll
ask Captain Trevelyan up, I'll explain."

She remained standing by the door of their
little sitting room.  She could hear the
English officer tramping slowly and heavily up the
stairs.  She remembered Robert telling her of
the charge his father had led at Inkerman, and
how he had gotten that wound in his hip.
After awhile she caught sight of the top of
the officer's white head.  She went forward to
meet him and led him into the room and rolled
up a big leather chair.

"It's Papa's favorite," she said, smiling and
standing with one hand resting invitingly on
the big tufted back.

The English officer smiled back from under
his shaggy brows, and sank into the great chair
with a sigh of genuine comfort.  Cary drew up
a chair and sat down near him.

"Papa is out," she said.  "He has only just
gone, too.  I'm so sorry.  If you care to
wait—and perhaps later let me give you a cup of
tea—" she went on with a certain charming
spontaneity, "John says my tea is almost like
the tea the English girls make—" she
questioned Trevelyan's father with her laughing
eyes.

"And what does my boy say about your
tea?" asked the English officer, watching her
curiously.

"Robert?  Oh, Robert never says anything
nice about it.  He never says nice things to
me anyway," Cary pouted.  "But I notice he
nearly always drinks three cups when he comes
and after all I believe that counts for a good
deal—don't you?"

"Undoubtedly—for a good deal of tea!
And does he often come to drink it with you?"

Cary laughed.

"Oh—frequently," she said vaguely.

The old British officer drew patterns on the
floor with his cane and was silent.

Cary looked at him stealthily from under
her long lashes.  She had only met Trevelyan's
father when he had called formally on
their coming to England, or sometimes when he
stopped by to take the Captain to drive, and
once at the Stewarts', at dinner.  He had
always inspired her with a certain awe.  It
might have been his lameness which Cary was
wont to regard as a badge of an honor legion,
or simply his brusque manner, not unlike his
son's, but lacking much of his son's odd
charm.  She sometimes had fancied she had
seen a physical likeness between them, and
once she had caught herself wondering if the
father had looked like the son in his youth and
if the son would resemble more closely the
father in age.  She patted thoughtfully the
arm of her chair.

"Papa will be so sorry to miss you," she began.

Trevelyan's father leaned forward.  He
suddenly stopped drawing patterns on the floor
with his cane.

"I did not come to see your father," he said,
"I came especially when I knew he was out
and you were in.  I am calling on you."  He
smiled grimly, forcing the boy's face from his mind.

Cary stared.  Then she recovered herself.
"Yes?" she said politely.

The old officer sat up very straight grasping
his cane, and then he led direct to the object of
his visit, as he had led direct his famous charge
into the center of the enemy's lines, on the
heights of Inkerman, way back in '54.

"I've come to see you about that boy of
mine," he said bluntly.

"You mean—Robert?" asked Cary slowly,
and for lack of something to say.

"He's a good enough kind of a chap—"  Cary
suppressed a smile, remembering how the
old man adored him, "but he's a bit hot-headed
and reckless, and he's—mad over you, and—"
he broke off.  It seemed to him almost as
though he was disloyal to the boy.

Cary leaned forward with burning cheeks.

"And you hope he won't do anything rash—is
that it?"  There was a trace of indignation
in her voice.

"Jove! no, child.  I haven't come to plead
for him, but to ask you to be careful."

"I don't understand you," said Cary, the hot
flush not fading.

"There!  You must not be offended.  You
know the boy is the apple of my eye, but he
isn't faultless.  He has got good stuff in him
if he is only moulded right, but there would
be the very devil to pay—I beg your pardon—if
he was ever thwarted in anything he'd set
his stubborn mind on."

Trevelyan's father rose and crossed over to
the window and stood there looking out on the
lengthening English twilight.  His son's face
as it had looked years ago as a baby, rose
before him, but the baby had reproachful eyes.

"He's brave and he's strong and he's every
inch a soldier; but a woman, child, needs
gentleness as well as strength."

The soft dim twilight crept into the room;
passed the rigid form of the old soldier at the
window and stole onward to the chair in which
the girl sat motionless.  The outline of her
figure and the whiteness of her half averted
cheek, showed vaguely through the gloom.

After a long, long time she rose.

"Thank you," she said, and the unconscious
dignity in her voice touched the old warrior
at the window strangely.  "It was good of you
to think of me so kindly, even though it is not
deserved and—not necessary."

After a little Trevelyan's father turned, and
came toward the shadowy standing figure.

"I understand," he said; and then: "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Cary, gently, but she did
not offer to shake hands.

Half an hour later the Captain came in.
The kettle was not singing, nor the curtains
drawn, nor his chair rolled up in its accustomed
place, with his easy slippers near by, and the
red lamp was unlighted.

"Where is she?  Where's my baby?"

Cary rose from the big chair that Trevelyan's
father had occupied, and came slowly forward.

"Here," she said, simply, her voice quiet as
the deepening twilight that surrounded her, and
she rubbed her cheek up and down against the
Captain's.

The Captain lighted the red lamp, and
turned to look at her, arrested by the vague
trouble in the voice.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`1-VII.`:

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   \VII.

.. vspace:: 2

Trevelyan's father walked slowly
down the stairs and out into the long
twilight.

"For all the good I've done, for all I've
saved her, or learned about her real feelings for
the boy, I might have spared myself the call.
Gad! but she has pride though, and damn me if
I don't like it!  The boy hasn't got half bad
taste anyway.  Heaven bless the boy—and
spare the woman he marries!"

Then he pressed his lips together suddenly as
though all had been said, and he planted his
cane very firmly on the pavement with each
step, swinging it very high when he raised it
again.  But he kept on thinking of Robert,
and all the memories he had ever cherished of
him, assailed him now, as though charging
against the breastworks he had raised of duty.
And every memory had those reproachful eyes.
He, his father, had gone to plead with the
woman he loved.  What right had he to do
this thing, questioned the eyes.

The old officer walked slower.

She had told him that she thanked him, but
that his call had been unnecessary.  How
*dared* she tell him so; how dared she be
indifferent to his son, or sit in judgment on him!

Yet, hadn't she a right?

The old British officer paused on the corner
and stared at the carriages going by, beating
his cane on the curb.

But he loved him, as he was, with all his
faults; he loved him for his faults; and the
whole thing was hard—harder than the charge
at Inkerman.

Then he began to think of Cary, and the
more he thought of Cary, the more resolved he
became on the course to be pursued, and with
the strengthening resolve the reproachful eyes
retreated.  The boy was ruining his life here.
His career of which he had once thought so
much had become dwarfed by his love for a
woman.  In India—but there, he could prove
the stuff he was made of.  An officer who has
seen Indian service is always a bit better than
he was before, or a bit worse.  He was never
quite the same again.  And Cary—well, that
girl was worth saving, even if the boy was his own.

The British officer turned into Grosvenor
Square, and went up the broad steps of the
house the Stewarts had rented for the past five
years.  He found the older Stewart in his
library, as he knew he would, absorbed in the
latest political news.  The Scotchman looked
up as he entered.

"Well, what do you want?  I can see it is
something by your face."

"Yes.  I want you to use your influence
with the Secretary and get Robert transferred
to the regiment that sails for India next
month."

"*What?*"

Trevelyan's father flung himself into one of
the big chairs, leaned his elbow on the edge of
the table and shaded his eyes, "It could be
done—I suppose, without his knowing?"

"Why, y-e-s, but—"  Stewart broke off doubtfully.

Trevelyan's father leaned forward, still
shading his eyes and staring hard at his boots.

"I'm not much of a talker, as you know,
Malcolm," he said concisely.  "And what I've
once done for a man I don't generally remind
him of, but at Inkerman, years ago when you
were a bit of a boy lieutenant, I did you a slight
service—"

"You saved my life," said the Scotchman briefly.

"I suppose I did.  Well, you are always
harping on that, and a service to me.  If you
will get the boy ordered off without his
suspecting—" the older Trevelyan broke off and
then went on, "You're a power in politics and
could do it better than I.  Politics count
three-fourths, now-a-days, even with the army."

"I'll do it, but may I know your reason?
I always fancied you liked having Robert
stationed in England—"

Trevelyan's father dropped the hand that
was shading his eyes, with a dull thud on the
table.

"I have.  But the boy's ruining himself.
He will never make even a tin soldier at this
rate.  He is throwing his chance of a career
to the winds—and he don't care.  He was
reprimanded a month ago for negligence of
duty, and again yesterday," the old soldier
flushed, "and he don't care!  It is not the
easiest thing for a man to talk so about his
flesh and blood, but—the boy's whole future
depends on what he makes of his life now; and
I would not give a penny for what it will turn
out to be, if he is not hauled up with a sharp
turn and gotten out of England.  The boy will
do the Queen and the Service honor, where
there is danger to be faced and courage needed,
but the idleness of barrack life—" he broke off.

The elder Stewart nodded.

"True," he said.

"There is something else that has decided
me.  I went to call on the little American this
afternoon."

"Ah?"

"She's game, and worth the best fellow born."

"Is not your Robert good enough for her?"

"No; but your John is."

There was a long silence.  Somewhere
outside a carriage drove into the Square, the echo
of its wheels deadened by the heavy curtains.
Somewhere in the house a door closed noisily.

"I always used to fancy I would want a
Scotch lassie, for John," said the Scotchman
with a slow smile, "but lately I have not been
so sure; not—so—sure!"

Trevelyan's father sat silent.

"Out in India," he said after a while, "there
will be something for him to do and think of
besides the little American girl—" he rose,
"You will see to it then?"

The elder Stewart looked thoughtfully down
at the table.

"Since you think it wisest—yes."

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

"Out in India," said Trevelyan's father, to
himself as he paused on the steps of the
Grosvenor Square house, and stared hard into the
darkness, "But, God, how I'll miss the boy."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`1-VIII.`:

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   \VIII.

.. vspace:: 2

Trevelyan had been gone a year.
His orders for Indian service had
been a nine days' wonder to London.

"Of course he will get his uncle to work
him back on a home regiment or do something
on the strength of his father's gallant action
at Inkerman and his wound."  Tom Cameron
had said.  "Of course he won't go."

"Of course not," London had said.

"I'll be hanged if I'll go," Trevelyan had
exploded to Stewart, and he spent most of his
time between his father's chambers and his
uncle's house, relieved by frantic calls to every
influential man he knew.  But the powers that
could have worked in his behalf, remained
passive, and for the first time his father and uncle
refused to help him.  Trevelyan wondered
wildly what suddenly possessed them all, and
what had become of his own persuasiveness.

"Jove!  I should think you would be
pleased," his father had said, purposely
avoiding his eyes.  "As a little chap you were
eternally wanting to grow up and get into active
service.  Here you have only been vegetating
in barrack life and now that you have the
chance to win your spurs—"

"Damn the spurs," Trevelyan had said.

"Sorry, but I can't help you," his uncle had
answered when he had made his sixth and last
desperate appeal to him.  "I've seen the
Secretary.  He says the commander of the
regiment wants just such a fellow—one of the
Engineers.  You can't expect to remould the
entire military force of the United Kingdom,
my boy, when you have just about finished
serving your sub-lieutenancy."

"John's an Engineer and has seen Indian
service too," Trevelyan had suggested moodily,
and the elder Stewart had remained silent.

Trevelyan continued to fight passionately
against the orders until the hour of sailing.

Cary went down with the family to see the
transport off, and when Trevelyan caught his
last glimpse of her she was standing out
distinctly from the background of the faint fog
that had arisen, with Stewart at her side.

He turned his face away sharply and gripped
at the ship's rail.  Then a sudden pressure
came against his throat and breast as though
the strength was being crushed from him.  He
swallowed hard.

For once, Fate had conquered Trevelyan.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

He wrote to Cary just one time that year—on
the voyage out—a letter that a man does
not often write more than once in his life.  In
it were the passion and the love; the strength
and weakness of his nature.  On one page he
stripped his heart for her, that she might know
its faults, and fairly judge.  On the next, he
tried to vindicate his failings.

"I would be as clay in your hands," he
wrote toward the close, "You could do with
me what you would.  I love you more than it
is generally given to a man to love—more
than an English officer should.  I would
desert for you, for I love you more than England
and more than my honor—" and then there
came a blot upon the page, that half covered
the last word.  The letter ended as a child's
struggle ends—brokenly: and he asked her in
a few disjointed sentences to be his wife.

Weeks later when the letter was delivered,
Cary was out with John.  On her return she
sat far into the night to answer it, that her reply
might go back to him by the next Indian mail.

"Your love frightens me," she said in part,
"and I cannot bind myself through time and
distance.  If I loved you as I should—and
as I *could* love a man—I would say 'yes'—as
it is, I must say 'no.'  It lies with you if
my answer ever changes.  I do not demand
love that would prove disloyal to an officer's
vow of courage in the service.  I do not want
such love.  I am an army woman, and army
women, all the world over, have one code of
allegiance—which is absolute.  You cheapen
me when you suggest I would be satisfied with
anything less.  As for moulding you—a man
moulds himself into the perfect and complete,
or he breaks the clay with his own hands.
When I marry it shall be a man whose nature
is stronger than my own.  It is the way of
women."

And Trevelyan had been gone a year.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`1-IX.`:

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   \IX.

.. vspace:: 2

At the end of the twelve months Stewart
got a letter from Trevelyan.

He smiled a bit curiously as he tore
open the travel worn flap.  He wondered what
Robert had to say for himself or what he
wanted.  It was the first letter he had received
since Robert had been ordered to India, but he
laughed genuinely in the silence of the deserted
club room, at the opening, and characteristic
words:

"This is a damnable hole!  It is hot as—well
I won't swear any more—but it is hotter
than I ever imagined a place could be on the
*surface* of the earth.  We are miles from any
decent civilization, and how you can talk
decently about the natives and the native
regiments, staggers me!  I don't trust 'em, and
what's more I doubt very much if they hold me
in any higher regard.  But what is the good
of writing so to you.  You know what Indian
service is.  Your station was either a good
deal better than mine, or you have a lot more
back bone than I have.  The first idea making
me jealous, and the last not being conducive
to self-respect, there don't seem to be any
choice!  To move requires a strenuous effort.
The life is stagnation.  It is a living death and
the death numbness is creeping into my veins.
They tell me that the natives have not been so
quiet for years, and most of the officers and
men wish they'd stir up a bit and give them
some trouble.  I don't.  I don't want trouble.
I don't believe I could fight if I had to!
Damned odd, isn't it, when my blood used to
boil and my head throb queer, when I was a
little shaver at home and there was danger
around?  I guess I wasn't cut out for the
Service, after all.  Mactier would wonder—
* * * I think I'm going mad.  As you
may have caught on I am writing all this with
a purpose; for it is only fair for you to know
what this station is, and I'm asking more than
one man ought of another, but if you'd get
transferred out here—  There wouldn't be any
trouble about the technical part of it, for the
Engineers are needed bad for surveying.
Your last letter said something about your
getting a commission in the Gordon Highlanders—if
you could only come here instead—I suppose
I am selfish, but I can't get a grip on
things.  If—"

Stewart looked up from the letter, toward
the window and the street—seriously.  Then
he went over to the window and sat down in
a big chair and leaned forward, still looking
out.  The noise of the passing carriages and
the stir of the passing crowd crept in to meet
the silence of the empty reading room.  He
sat motionless, heedless alike of the noise and
the stillness.  Once he thought of Cary, and
his face changed swiftly.

Then he went back to the letter and finished
it, and later he re-read it, and folded it, and put
it in his vest pocket.  Then he went back to
his old occupation of looking out of the window.

The crowd was no longer one big indistinct
blur, and he was vaguely conscious that he
saw his mother's carriage among the others
coming down the street.  It came nearer and
he could see that his sister was in it.  There
was a girl sitting beside her.  The girl was
Cary.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

It was a week before Stewart called again
at the lodgings.  Cary firmly expected him the
second day; grew bewildered as the evening
of the fourth came and went without bringing
him; on the fifth grew anxious and on the sixth
wrote to him.  Calling on his family just then
for news was out of the question.  They had
gone to Brighton for a week.

He came to her the day her letter reached him.

"I would scold you," the girl said, "if it
were not for these.  You never forget my
violets."

She buried her face in the purple bloom,
before she fastened the bunch on her dress.

"I have left the order with the florist," said
Stewart quietly.  "He will send you the violets
every week, and when they are gone, I have
told him about your roses.  I am going away."

She looked up quickly from the flowers she
had just fastened in her dress.

"For long?"

"I think so—yes."

"Where are you going?"

Stewart pulled at his gloves.

"India," he said briefly.

"You have received your orders?"

"Yes.  I asked for them."

Cary went up to him and pulled him by the
sleeve.

"I—don't—quite—understand," she said.
"I—is it the Highlanders?"

He shook his head.

"No, it's Rob.  He is just about mad
enough to blow his brains out.  I'm going to him."

"He's sent for you?"

"He's *asked* me to come."

Stewart sat with her in the little room all
that long afternoon, and they had tea together,
and they watched the sunset from the windows
together, as they had done almost every day
that year.  It would seem strange to drink tea
alone and watch the sunset by herself, thought Cary.

"If you would sometimes write—" he suggested once.

"Of course, I will write," she retorted quickly.

When the twilight came, he left.

.. vspace:: 2

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   *End of Book One.*

.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BOOK TWO`:

.. class:: center large bold

   BOOK TWO

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center large bold white-space-pre-line

   THE BREAK
   IN THE CLAY

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center x-large bold

   BOOK TWO

.. class:: center large bold

   THE BREAK IN THE CLAY

.. class:: center large bold

   \I.

.. vspace:: 2

Trevelyan's face was the first that
greeted Stewart at his journey's end.

Trevelyan had been in the wildest
spirits for days before Stewart's arrival, and
his fellow officers spoke about the sudden
change in him.  For the first time in the year
that Trevelyan had served with them, he
became less moody and unsociable and whimsical,
and they grew to think less critically of one who
had never been a favorite.  It was probably
only the Colonel, remembering the stock from
whence he sprang, who took the trouble to look
beneath the inertia.

"The boy will come around all right in
time—he's only a bit homesick and strange
to the new life now.  When there's an opportunity
for fighting he'll show himself up true,"
he would say.  "Why, his father at Inkerman—"

And then the officer or officers of whom he
had gotten hold, would be obliged to listen all
over again to the story of the charge led by
Trevelyan's father in the Crimea.

But the story had its unconscious influence
on their treatment of the young Engineer.
They never really cared for him but they
respected him—for what the Colonel believed
he would some day be—which was all that
Trevelyan seemed to desire.  After their first
trial at pleasantries which he had met with
ill-concealed indifference, they left him to himself.
They rarely saw him except at mess, or on
duty, and his ungraciousness then did not help
to heal the widening breach of unfavorable
opinion.

Toward the end of the year his fellow
officers found out that he was cousin to young
Stewart—Stewart who had won that honorable
mention—and son of Malcolm Stewart
of Aberdeen.  That helped matters a little.
They could pardon a chap's unpardonable
moodiness for young Stewart's sake.

Months later they heard that young Stewart
himself had re-applied for Indian service, and
that he was coming to them.  It was Trevelyan
who told them in confidence, first, and from
then Trevelyan was changed.  That night he
joked them at mess, in a dry Scotch fashion,
fostered long ago in the Argyll years; later he
joined them at cards and proposed the toast
to Stewart with a dash and a charm that made
some of them wonder if they had not
misjudged a deuced good chap after all.

As a matter of course Trevelyan formed one
of the squad of officers and men who rode over
from the Station to meet young Stewart when
he came.  It was Trevelyan who got them
started a needless hour before the time; it was
Trevelyan who laughed at the dust and the heat
of the long ride and bribed them, with all he
possessed from the last cent of his pay, to his
helmet and the braid on his uniform, to races
which he always won, swinging himself far
out of the saddle and stooping low to pick up
withered bits of native growth from the
ground as he swept past at a gallop.

Trevelyan's two mess companions who had
been with Stewart in the "row" where he had
won his mention, imbibed something of
Trevelyan's spirits, and they laughed at the dust,
in their turn, and the heat, as they rode from
the military station to welcome back their old
comrade.

They saw him long before the train had
come to a dead stop and they cheered him now,
in the desolate little way-station, remembering
how they had cheered him that day, but it was
only Trevelyan's bronzed face that Stewart
saw as he descended.

"Hello, Bobby," he said, slapping him on
the back, "You see I've come."

Trevelyan looked at him queerly for a
moment in silence.

"I knew you would.  You're a—" he broke
off and turned away, and the officers and men
wondered what had become of Trevelyan's
spirits during the return trip.

Trevelyan sat up late into the night with
Stewart, listening while he told of England and
the home people.  Once or twice Stewart
mentioned Cary.

"How is she?" asked the younger man.

He only alluded to her once again.

At midnight he rose to leave.

"Of course there isn't anything to say to
you about—your leaving England and—and
all that—to come to me out here in this
devilish hole—" he began disjointedly, "but it's
only fair to try to say something.  The fellows
and the men can tell you I've been a different
chap since I heard of the transfer.  When I
left England, and for all this year, well—I
haven't much cared what happened.  Out
here—the loneliness without her—"

He turned sharply on his heel and left.

Young Stewart of the Engineers stood still
in the middle of his quarters, listening to
Trevelyan's footsteps growing fainter.  Presently
they were lost in the silence of the Indian
night.  Now and again came sounds from the
jungle, but Stewart stood motionless.

Suddenly he flung his right arm across his
forehead.

"The loneliness without her—"

And Cary, sleepless in far-away England,
watched the sun rise, wondering what made the
nights so long.





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Trevelyan's excitement over Stewart's
coming died away as one monotonous
week followed another, and he
became more moody than before.  Stewart tried
to draw him into the life of the station, and the
pastimes by which the officers and men helped
to kill the long inactive days, but Trevelyan
steadily refused to be won from his taciturnity.
A few used to laugh at Stewart for his pains,
but the majority of the mess, grew, while
watching his struggle for Trevelyan, to know
him better and to appreciate him more.  Before,
to a few, young Stewart of the Engineers had
been a man with a good name; to the most of
them he had been unknown, but, aside from
his devotion to Trevelyan, his knowledge of
surveying and military niceties, his genial
spirit and his unfailing patience, won for him
the distinct approval of the officers and the
absolute adoration of the rank and file.

He used to try to include Trevelyan in the
atmosphere of approbation that surrounded
himself, but Trevelyan obstinately refused even
his advances.

Once, indeed, one evening, Stewart got him
to join a game of cards.  Trevelyan did more
drinking than he did playing, and three hours
later, Stewart carried him to his own quarters
and nursed him through the long still night.

When Trevelyan awoke in the dawn of the
early morning, he found Stewart still watching,
and later as the wan grayness of the dawn
turned to deepening gold, Stewart talked to
him as an older man talks to a younger one.
He spoke to him of self-respect and honor and
of self-control.  He spoke to him of Cary.

"Take a brace and redeem yourself with the
mess and the men," he said, as he finished.
"Where's your grit and your hold on things?
You don't think you're growing more worthy
of her; do you?"

Trevelyan sat up, supporting himself by his
rigid arms, on the palms of his hands.  The
light of the coming sunrise gave to his bronzed
face a strange reddish hue.

"Think!" he exclaimed, "I wish to God I
could stop thinking!  Her face haunts and
haunts and *haunts* me!  She says my love
frightens her, and that it lies with me
and what I make of myself, if her
answer changes.  I can't change my love—it's
all of me; it's the soul of me, and if it
frightens her—!"  Trevelyan leaned forward,
"I can't change myself!  I can't see her; I
know I'll never win her!  How?  I can't tell
you, but I know I never shall, and I don't
care what becomes of me or how soon I go to hell!"

The rigidity of his arms increased and he
stared straight in front of him.

Stewart sprang up, his firm mouth quivering
with passion.

"If a man had ever dared to tell me that you
would talk so, I would have knocked him down.
You're not worthy to be born of such a father
and it's a blessing that your mother's dead.
You're not worthy to have had my mother
foster you ever since you were a little shaver.
You're not worthy of the worst woman that
ever lived.  You've lost your manhood.  You
can be cashiered from the army—and you can
go to hell!  You're not worth saving!"

Young Stewart of the Engineers turned on
his heel and swung out of the room as he
would have swung, face forward, at the head
of a line, leading into action.

Later when he returned Trevelyan had gone.
He stood in the doorway of the deserted room
and stared fixedly at where Trevelyan had lain
through the night.  He was himself again,
and a great shame at his lost control swept
over him.  He had preached of self-control to
Trevelyan.

"And I'd give my life for the boy's," he
said to himself.

It was remarked at mess that night that
Trevelyan did not touch his food, and that he left
earlier even than was his wont.  Stewart
followed him out into the stillness of the evening.

"Trevelyan," he called, following the
quickly moving figure up the steps of his quarters.

Trevelyan turned sharply.

"I don't want any more of your talk," he
said.  "Good-night!"  And slammed the door
in Stewart's face.

Stewart stood there for a moment tapping
his booted foot against the floor of the piazza.
Then he went to his own quarters.

"I've come out to this cursed hole to serve
the boy, and I've lost him instead!  I've made
a jolly mess of it all, this time!"

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After that Trevelyan spent all of his "off
duty" time alone.  He used to go on long
tramps or wild rides, returning with his horse
flecked with foam and himself worn out, and
his evenings were passed in his own quarters
with no one better than himself for company.
He would walk up and down and down and up
again until he turned in, or he would take to
studying Hindoostanee, or sit idly, staring into
nothingness.  At first he fastened his door
against possible intrusion, but no one ever
came, and his solitude was unbroken.  Once
his strained ears caught the sound of
Stewart's familiar step outside and he stealthily
crept over to the door and unfastened it and
stood by it listening.  The even steady steps
came nearer, and then without halting, passed on.

Trevelyan wiped his moist face.  After all,
why should Stewart have tried again?  He
had been refused so often—

Stewart pushed back his ponderous volume
on military engineering and stared ahead of
him, his firm lips pressed close together.

If there was only some way to help the boy—





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   \III.

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In the spring the natives grew restless.

"They're stretching themselves after a
long sleep," said a young subaltern,
knowingly.

"They're planning mutiny," said the Colonel
to himself, and he ordered out a band of men
for investigating the neighborhood.

The little band was delayed seven hours over
the extremest limit set for its return.

When it came it bore a dead man back to the
Station.  The man had been a Briton and of
the regiment.

Then the grim spirit of the military station
rose, as the gray, still sea rises at the onsweep
of the gale.

War had come.





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For an hour the Colonel was closeted.
There was a line of attack to be
planned.  He would talk it over with
his older officers presently; for the time being
he could think better alone.  It was necessary
not to be too hasty—to keep a controlling hand
on the lever of this engine of war, of which
he was in command.  It was necessary to
strike decisively, when he did strike, and to the
heart of it.  That was it—to the heart!  The
natives were on the move, the investigating
band had reported.  *Where* to strike?  A
surveying officer; an engineer could judge.  Who
was the best man to send.  It was like ordering
a man into the mouth of death.

The Colonel leaned his head in his hand
and beat the end of his pen against the deal of
the table.  Coolness was wanted; knowledge
of surveying; courage.  That was it—courage!

Only two faces rose before him and haunted
him, to the exclusion of all others.  Of the
two, Trevelyan's was the most persistent.

True, he was young and he was untried,
and he was probably the most unpopular officer
at the Station, but in his veins was the blood
that endures and slays and conquers!

Properly executed the fulfilling of the orders
would mean his proved skill as an officer.  If
he failed—the Colonel laid down his pen.
That blood could not fail.

There was his unusual strength, too, to be
taken in his favor, his strength and his
endurance.  He remembered that Trevelyan had
stood intense heat better than any man at the
Station; that he could live on less food, and
had a nicer knowledge of horsemanship than
any officer or trooper in his command; that
technically he was brilliant at surveying.  The
majority of commanders would probably
decide between the two in favor of Stewart, but
the Colonel had run the gauntlet to success a
good deal on instinct.  The Colonel prided
himself on instinct.  It would be Trevelyan!

Two hours later Trevelyan received his orders.

"Very well, sir," "I understand, sir,"
"Yes, sir," he had replied, and after he had
left, the Colonel nodded and smiled grimly at
the young engineer's self-control in the face of
an order that might mean death.

Trevelyan walked blindly back to his
quarters.  There was a queer singing in his head
and beating at his temples.  He stumbled
across the threshold and he sat down on the
edge of his bunk and pressed his hands hard
against his temples to still that mad, incessant
beating.  His eyes remained wide and fixed at
one spot on the floor.

It had come at last; the test and the
opportunity for which he had blindly, passionately
prayed as a child; for which he had striven and
worked as a boy; it had come and it had found
him unprepared to meet it!

He thought of the ride—alone, except for a
trooper—and on the spot of the floor, he
pictured the blackness and the danger, as a man
brings forth a likeness on a dark plate.  The
picture came and went, and went and came
again on the spot on the floor and he sprang
up with a choked cry.  To go out into that
stillness and darkness; to face the blackness of
death—

They might get back his body—what good
would his body do anyone—and they might
get it home, but they probably wouldn't.  The
utter silence in that blackness of death—so
great that her voice could never reach him!

He put his foot over the possessed spot on
the floor, and his leg shook as he did so.  He
saw his leg tremble, and he knew it and he did
not care!  He had turned coward, and—he did
not care!  What was courage when her voice
could not reach him in the blackness of death?
He might live through it, and she might care
more for him, for it, but the chances were
two-thirds for death.

The man they had brought in that morning!
What a ghastly sight he had been!  The eyes
had refused to remain closed and they had
stared at him in all the horror of dead
sightlessness.  And the lips had been drawn back
from the teeth and had stiffened so, in the
agony of the death struggle.  God!  And they
would bring him back like that—like that—*like
that*!

What vision did those staring eyes see but
unutterable, unpenetrable blackness?  What
speech could that grinning mouth ever form
again?  What sound could pierce the seal laid
on the hearing?

They had told him that the trooper had a
sweetheart waiting for him somewhere off in
Ireland.  Well, even love could not break the
bonds of death, and make him speak and hear
and caress her as of old.

There was something mightier than love
after all—mightier even than the love he had
for Cary.

And Trevelyan cowered, afraid.





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   \V.

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Mackenzie, the surgeon, lounging in
a big wicker chair, his heels higher
than his head, lazily rolled cigarettes
and winked at the dazzling reflection of the sun
on the walls of the barracks.  Off in the
distance he could see the little subaltern walking
energetically down the road.  The little
subaltern was gotten up regardless in white linen.
He was evidently on his way to drink tea with
the Colonel's daughter.

"My eyes," said Mackenzie, aloud, "Will
nothing interfere with his afternoon tea!  The
devil only knows if he'll be alive this time
to-morrow.  Better keep cool when he can.
He's a blank little fool!  Thinks Jessica Q
will tumble when he says good-bye—does he?
Tea and love-making *now*!" and the surgeon
fanned himself with his hand.  The surgeon
had never taken kindly to the little subaltern.

Suddenly his feet came down with a crash
and he leaned forward in the wicker chair.
Bennett had stopped the little subaltern and the
little subaltern was talking back excitedly and
kicking up the white dust, regardless of the
fresh linen suit.

Mackenzie rose and stretched himself.

"Wonder if the old man has issued orders?
Something's up, sure as a gun, when that kid
forgets Jessica Q and his clothes."

Three of the mess who had been talking
earnestly at the end of the piazza, turned at the
sound of voices in the road and joined the two
there.

"Not Trevelyan, you say?  It isn't Trevelyan?"
one of them was saying, as Mackenzie
came up.

"Yes, it is, too!  Jove!  If I only had his
chance," sighed the little subaltern, twirling
around distractedly on one heel.

"There!  There!  That'll do, Baby," said
Bennett, patting him on the head.  The little
subaltern squirmed, but he kept listening to
what Bennett was saying.

"He's a rum comrade, but I imagine he can
do it," said Bennett looking toward the
barracks, thoughtfully, "He knows the fine points
of surveying from A to Z, and—"

"—He's got more nerve than any chap I
ever knew," put in Mackenzie.

"Is the old man going to send an escort with
him?  I bet if he does, it'll be Sandy McCann,"
said Pearson.

"What's this?  What's this I hear about
Robert being sent off to-night?"

Young Stewart of the Engineers joined the
group hastily.  His uniform was covered with
dust and he held his helmet under his arm,
wiping the moisture from his face.

"Why, it's almost certain death.  I—"

"That's why we're here—to face death, if
we have to," said the little subaltern, with an
odd new gravity, and Bennett suddenly stopped
short in patting his head.

Stewart turned.

"True," he said, briefly, running his right
hand up and down the sleeve of his left arm
"but—"

"And it probably won't be any worse than
what we'll have to face to-morrow or next
day," said Bennett, as Stewart paused.  "He
hasn't been sociable and over decent to us, but
we'll call on him and wish him luck.  Come
along, boys!"

The group laughed a little.  "All right,"
they said.

Stewart followed them up to Trevelyan's
quarters.

After all, why should he feel it so!  It was
Trevelyan's one chance to redeem himself with
the regiment and turn the tide of popularity in
his favor.  Fate was not as cruel as she seemed.
And Trevelyan bore a charmed life.  And he
knew Trevelyan could do it.  Trevelyan would
do it—*well*!  Trevelyan might have failed in
the shaping of the details of life this last year,
but in the supreme hour—

For Stewart remembered the climb down the
turret tower and the mad scaling of the crags
in Scotland, and the storm and the white fury
of the waters near the American fort, and the
desperate swim, and the child who had done
these things because of what he would one day
do as a man.

The little subaltern banged on Trevelyan's door.





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   \VI.

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Trevelyan, still standing over the
spot on the floor, raised his eyes and
looked vaguely in the direction of the
sound.  He remained silent.

The little subaltern banged again, and
Trevelyan heard the echo of voices.

He put his hand up to his collar, loosening it,
and then he crossed the room and flung open
the door.

"Hello, you fellows," he cried, "What
d'you want of a chap now?"

The little subaltern tumbled into the room,
the other half dozen members of the mess on
top of him.

"Hello, yourself," they cried, "How d'you
like the job the Colonel's given you?"

"Like it!"  Trevelyan threw back his head
and his large, well formed throat pulsed as he
spoke, "Why, it's the greatest thing that ever
happened to a chap of my age!"

His messmates formed a little group around him.

"How's your nerve?"

Trevelyan laughed.  It was only Stewart,
who stood by silent, listening, who felt vaguely
the jar in it.

"Oh, *my* nerve is all right.  How's your
own at the prospect of a row?  'I go to
prepare a place for you'—" he went on in a deep
chant.

"Robert!"

It was Stewart.

"Oh, I suppose that was a bit in bad taste,
but when a chap's making his last will and
testament, he forgets the teachings of the old
kirk—"

"Sure!  What time do you start?" from
the little subaltern.

"Fire arms in good order?" put in Bennett.

"In an hour.  No, I'm not going to trust
any of these oily natives to clean them.  I'll see
to them myself."

Trevelyan moved away from the group.

"We'll have something on the strength of
it!" said the little subaltern, "A toast: 'To
the Queen—God bless her—and the Queen's
courier!'  How's that?"

He glanced conceitedly about the room.  The
men of the mess laughed good naturedly.

"Well, here's my hand on the success of it,"
said Mackenzie, a little later, at leaving.  He
suddenly regretted he had not been a bit
kinder to the young engineer.  A fellow with
such nerve, deserved more than they had all
given him.

They filed out after awhile.  Stewart alone
remained.  He put his hand on Trevelyan's
shoulder, as he had used to do long ago when
they were boys, pacing the great library of a
rainy afternoon, and he walked with Trevelyan
up and down the length of the room.

"It's a risky business, Robert," he said, in
his grave voice, "but I believe you're the man
for it."

"I suppose," said Trevelyan, "if it hadn't
been me it would have been Pearson."

"I suppose so, but Pearson couldn't do it."

"Neither may I."

"*You* will," said Stewart.

After a little, he went on, speaking as though
to himself.

"I wish to God—"

He did not finish his sentence.

Trevelyan shook off the hand on his shoulder.

"I understand, and—I'm grateful, of course,
and all that, but if you'd leave me alone for
awhile.  There is a letter or two and—"

"Of course."

At the door Stewart turned.

"I'll see you before you go," he said.

Trevelyan listened until his footsteps, faded
away and then he sat down at his small deal
table, his eyes turned away from the spot on
the floor.  The vision of that dead, ghastly
face had come back.

If it wasn't him it would be Pearson,
probably, or anyhow, some other man—glad of the
chance.  Why should he deprive him, whoever
he was, of the chance?  A grim smile crept
around Trevelyan's mouth, and then he let his
head fall forward against the edge of the wood;
his arms hanging limp between his long legs
stretched out straight under the table.  The
horrible fear had returned, and the darkness
and the blackness of death seemed swallowing
him up.  Never to see her again!  Never to
touch her hand again, or to hear her footsteps
in passing, or the sound of her voice; to
die—not with other men in the daylight and in
battle—but to be shot down like a dog, alone, in
the darkness—

The steady ticking of the watch he had laid
in front of him on the table, throbbed feebly
like a dying pulse, close to his ear, and he sat,
his forehead against the edge of the table, his
eyes staring down at the shadowed floor.

After awhile he got up and steadied himself
and went over to the door and flung it open and
looked out.  Far off, the little subaltern was
coming his way.  He hurried back to the other
end of the room and got out his fire arms and
examined them, and began to polish them
vigorously.  The little subaltern looked in.

"Hard at work?  Do you want help?"

Trevelyan looked up and nodded.

"No, I guess not," he said, pleasantly.

The little subaltern sighed enviously,
hesitated, and then passed on.

Trevelyan drew a deep breath and laid down
his polishing cloth and picked up his revolver.
His hands played nervously over the trigger a
moment.  The catch seemed stiff.  He tried it
again.

There was a sudden glare and a loud report,
and Trevelyan sank back, the blood staining the
shoulder of his uniform.

After all, if one had nerve, it could be easily
done and was soon over!

He turned sharply and leaned against the
table, facing the window, one hand to his
shoulder.  He fancied he heard footsteps receding.
After awhile he wiped the sweat from his
face and staggered across the floor, out into the
gathering dusk, to headquarters.

"I was seeing to my fire arms, sir, preparing
for to-night's survey.  The revolver was
loaded.  I didn't know it—it went off."  Trevelyan's
big frame began to sway a little.  "I
came to report, sir.  If I could have it dressed,
I'd be able to go.  Of course, I expect to go.
You won't—"

The Colonel signaled for his orderly.

"My respects to Dr. Mackenzie, and will he
come over at once."

Then to Trevelyan:

"It's a most unfortunate affair, but it would
be murder to allow you to undertake the trip.
I'll hear the details later."

"But, sir—"

"Don't question my orders, Lieutenant,"
interrupted the Colonel, briefly.

"Flesh wound," Mackenzie said.

Later, when the dressing was done and
Trevelyan was in the hospital, the surgeon looked
down at him curiously.  "Odd," he said, "that
shot!  I don't understand how—"

Trevelyan turned his drawn face to the
surgeon's, meeting his eyes squarely.

"Confound you!  You don't think I shot
myself on purpose, do you?"

Mackenzie sat down on the edge of the bed,
and rubbed his chin.

"Oh—of course, not," he said slowly.

An hour later he and Vaughan, the assistant
surgeon, returned.

"Well, there goes the best officer in the
service to his death," the younger man was
saying, as he entered, and then as he met
Trevelyan's wide, questioning eyes, he broke off.

"Who's that?" asked Trevelyan, sharply.

"Your substitute."

Trevelyan picked at the sheet.

"Who did the old man send—Pearson?"

"Pearson!  Not on your life!  Stewart, of course."

Trevelyan stopped picking at the sheet.  He
rose with an effort and sat up in bed, supporting
himself on his elbows and leaning forward.

"He has gone?"

The assistant standing at the foot of the bed
nodded.  Trevelyan sat rigid.

"And I was never told!  And he's gone
without coming to me!" he said, hoarsely.

"He spoke about it, but he said he wouldn't
disturb you—" the assistant broke off.

Suddenly, Trevelyan flung up his arms.

"God!  Why couldn't I have gone!  I
wouldn't have been a loss to anyone—God!"
he choked, and fell back, his face buried in the
pillow.

The assistant left the room and the surgeon
went to the window.  Once or twice he
glanced at the great, motionless figure on the
bed.

"Jove! that's genuine enough!  Guess I
must have been mistaken about the shot!"





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   \VII.

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After awhile the surgeon turned from
the window, came back to Trevelyan
and stooping over him, listened to his
breathing, and felt his pulse.  Then he went
away.

Trevelyan lifted his head slowly and looked
about him.  The room was deserted and he sat
up in bed again, grasping its sides.  It was as
if everything was slipping away from him, and
the agony in his brain had crept down to his
feet, engulfing and making as nothing the
throbbing in his shoulder, or the heat of the
growing fever.

He stared at the shadows cast by the flickering
lamp on the wall opposite.  The vision
of the trooper's ghastly face had faded for the
time, but intenser visions appeared and shifted
and reappeared again.  First there came the
shadow face of his mother, who had been dead
for years, and then that of his father—his
father who had led that charge at Inkerman.
The face seemed turned away.  Then there
came the face of the aunt who had mothered
him so long, and then the shadowy forms
haltered as the fever grew and the wall became a
glowing blank.  Later a face appeared, Stewart's,
against the fiery glow.  It looked like a
dead face—like the dead, ghastly face of the
trooper; and then there came Cary's face.  It
haunted him in a hundred different guises.  It
came to him as the child-face, as he had known
it years ago down at the sea coast fort; and it
faded and came again as the face touched with
time's maturity, as he had seen it when she first
came to England; it shifted again and
reappeared as it had been that day of the storm,
when he and she had been housed in the old
Scottish home together, and the tenderness and
the fear were on it; it came again to him as he
had seen it last before the receding transport and
the oncoming mist had stolen it away from him.
And it came once more as he had never seen
it—horror-stricken, wide-eyed, and pale—as he
*would* see it, when she looked at him again,
knowing the truth.

"Allegiance—which is absolute."  So she
had written, and so she would say to him.
And he had betrayed his allegiance, and he had
lied, and he had turned coward, and had sent
Stewart off to die!

His fingers gripped at the edges of the bed
and he stared fascinated at that face of Cary
on the wall—Cary as he had never seen her.
It remained fixed.  It would *not* fade.

She had known life's truths better than he.
Honor, after all, was a tangible thing—as
tangible as the devouring agony in his brain.
And he had lost his honor—

She had written that a man moulds himself
into the perfect and complete, or he breaks the
clay with his own hands, and he had not
believed her until now, when the clay lay broken.

It had been coming to this all these months,
and he had gone on blindly.  Cary had tried
to save him by that letter; John had tried to
save him, and had come out to this accursed
hole to serve him, because he had been a coward
and had written for him—not strong enough to
serve himself—and he had sent John off to
meet the death that he himself deserved.  No,
he was not worthy of such a death.  Death
would glorify John.  It would have redeemed him.

The irrevocable past that had gone from his
keeping haunted him ghost-like through the
night watches, as did the agony of the future.
If there were but a chance—the shadow of a
chance—of winning back the last hours!

If that face would only fade!

And he had thought himself so strong, and
he and death had looked each in the face of the
other so often!

And the long line of pictures on the wall
began again, fading and reappearing, but the
face of Cary did not fade.

After awhile the personality of the face lost
itself and it became to him but the symbol of
that high living, toward the attainment of
which he had failed, falling in the dust.

His stiff fingers relaxed on the sides of the
bed, and he sank back with a thud like a dead
weight.  The dead trooper could not have
fallen more heavily.

The wound in his shoulder was only a flesh
hurt—he had been careful of that—he remembered
with a grim, awful self-accusation.  If it
only *had* gone deeper than he had planned.
Before the thought had died he was searching
for his handkerchief and when he had found it
he began to knot it feverishly and pull it around
his throat—sudden strength coming to his
hands.  Then, with an oath, he jerked at the
linen band and flung it from him to the hospital
floor, where it lay—a spot of white in the
darkness.  The power to move deserted him,
and his arms hung over the sides of the
bed—limp and motionless.

And then, remembering Stewart, the agony
in his brain increased.

He fancied Stewart starting out on the
mission, silent, with the silence that comes with
the realization of danger—grave with the
gravity of its acceptance—the test of courage.
Stewart had never been guided by the heedless,
passionate impulses that had possessed him,
Trevelyan, all his life; but he had held high
the standards of life for a man, and he had
lived up to the standards.

Trevelyan fancied he saw him riding into the
thickness of the black shadows.

He might do it, and come back from the
jaws of death.  If a man could do it, he
would, but was it humanly possible?

Trevelyan beat his hands against his face.
No; no man could do it!  The Station
would wait for Stewart, and wait and wait,
and Stewart would not come.  They would go
to look for him and they would bring him back
to him, Trevelyan—dead.  But he would not
look like the trooper.  The vision on the wall
had been a mistake.

Long ago, the night that Stewart had saved
Cary as a child, by his vigil; he, Trevelyan, had
crept into the room where they had carried him,
and he was sleeping, exhausted.  The peace,
born of a great sacrifice and a purpose
accomplished, had rested on the boy's face.  The
peace of it came back to Trevelyan, a gift from
that dead year.

When they brought Stewart home to the
Station he would look so.

And the minutes turned to hours and the
fever increased, and later Trevelyan sank into a
doze.  The surgeons came in now and again
and administered medicines of which he was
only dimly conscious, and the fever and the
drowsiness grew, and the long night wore away.

In the early dawn he was awakened by the
feeling that someone was looking steadily at
him.  His eyes, free from the fever that had
gone, met those of the assistant surgeon.

Before the full consciousness of the night's
agony had come back, the young surgeon spoke.

"Stewart has returned," he said, quietly,
"but he's been badly hurt and he wants you.
If you feel strong enough—"

Trevelyan sprang to the floor.  He was
trembling with excitement and the weakness
left by the fever.

"Thank God, he's safe—" and then as he
looked more closely in the assistant's face, "He
isn't hurt seriously—" his voice trailed off.

The assistant got Trevelyan's slippers and
threw a blanket over him and drew his arm
through his, giving him support.  It seemed
strange to be supporting Trevelyan.

"I'm afraid he is," he said.  "He did the
job all right and reported like the soldier he is.
McCann's game, too, and not hurt.  Stewart—"  The
assistant was killing time.

Trevelyan wiped the moisture from his face.

"Yes?"

Vaughan looked straight ahead of him, to
avoid meeting Trevelyan's eyes.

"Mackenzie is with him," he said, slowly.
"He's doing everything on earth, but the
wound's in the back, and there—isn't the ghost
of a chance—and, he's sent for you."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`2-VIII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VIII.

.. vspace:: 2

The assistant walked slowly, adapting
himself to Trevelyan's halting steps,
and he braced his arm against the
weight Trevelyan had thrown upon it.  He
did not speak again, and Trevelyan did not
question him further.

Trevelyan's big frame reeled across the
threshold, when, after what seemed to him an
interminable time, the assistant led him into
the room where Stewart lay.  He caught
himself up immediately, however, and stared at
the group around the bed.  The Colonel was
there and one of the older officers, and
Mackenzie was leaning over something long and
still that lay stretched on the bed.  The dead
weight suddenly increased on Vaughan's arm
and he winced with the pain.  The two officers
near the foot of the bed turned at the shuffling
footsteps and Mackenzie looked up for an
instant.  Then he went back to feeling Stewart's
pulse, and without glancing around again,
spoke quietly to his assistant.

"The other syringe—this doesn't work just
right."

The assistant went away and returned with
the syringe.  Trevelyan was left standing
alone in the middle of the room.  No one
noticed him.  He waited until the hypodermic
stimulant had been administered and Mackenzie
had straightened himself from his stooping
position over the bed.  Then he came forward,
and pushed his way past the Colonel and the
officer and Vaughan and Mackenzie, and leaned
over the bed.

"John," he said.

The head turned on the pillow slowly, and
Stewart looked up at him.  He made an almost
imperceptible motion of recognition with his
head.

"You sent for me?"

"Yes," Stewart said, weakly.

Trevelyan remained motionless, and no one
spoke.  The Colonel, at the foot of the bed,
stirred a little.

Stewart's hot hands drew the covering up
between his fingers and crushed it with a
sudden strength, born of a terrible agony.  He
turned his eyes to Mackenzie.

"If you could get me more on my side—that's better."

Mackenzie leaned over him.

"Don't try to talk to Trevelyan just yet," he
suggested.

"I must.  If you'd all leave us for a little—"

"You won't wait?"

Stewart looked straight into Mackenzie's eyes.

"There's no waiting; there's no 'yet'—is
there?" he asked.

Mackenzie stared at the covering on the bed.

"You're pretty sick," he said, very slowly,
and he tried to say something else, but the
words refused to come.

He turned and went out of the room and
Vaughan and the officers followed him.

Trevelyan still remained motionless.

"Have they gone?" Stewart asked, looking
up at him, "I can't turn my head to see."

"They've gone," said Trevelyan.

"Then sit down on the edge of the bed—carefully,
if you can; jars hurt.  I've a good
deal to say and the time's short—Mackenzie
will be back before long."

"You want to give me messages?"

"No," said Stewart, "It's about yourself.
Why were you afraid?"

The lump in Trevelyan's throat broke, and
something of the old strength came back then.

"It was Cary," he said, hoarsely.

"I thought so.  It was a risky thing to have
tried, though—that shooting.  It might have
gone deeper, or someone else might have seen you."

"You—saw—me—then?"

.. _`"*You—saw—me—then?*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-162.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "*You—saw—me—then?*"

   "*You—saw—me—then?*"

Stewart nodded.  Speaking was exquisite
torture.

"Do you realize what you've done—that
you've broken your life—"

Trevelyan sat motionless on the edge of the
bed, his eyes fixed on a point of the pillow.
The agony of the night before had been as
nothing to this.

"You were an officer and you were afraid of
danger—you!  And you were coward enough
to be willing to send another man to his death—"
the young engineer broke off, breathing
with labor.  "You were willing to let me die.
Did you think that would make it easier to win
Cary?"

Then Trevelyan spoke.

"It's all true," he said, speaking so slowly
that each word fell upon the deathly stillness
in the room, like the slow thud of earth upon a
coffin, "It's—all—true——but that!  I was
afraid and I was all you say, coward enough to
let another man die or suffer as you are
suffering now; and I've dishonored the Service and
I've broken my life, but before God, I didn't
know that you'd be sent in my place.  As for
Cary—"

"For Cary," said Stewart, "and for your
father and my mother you're to swear to me
to hold your tongue over this business.  It's
like you to go and blurt the whole thing out,
but you're to swear you won't open your lips
on the subject—ever; and you're to resign your
commission in the Service as soon as it's
possible without exciting suspicion."

Trevelyan drew back; his throat pulsing.
There was the old, odd throbbing in his head,
and the dimness of vision, too.  After awhile
the mist passed.

"God! man, but you're hard!"

"I'm kind to the home people, and I'm just
with you—am I not?"

"Yes; oh, yes; but to bear it in silence—never
to be able to meet one of the men of
the mess without the dead haunting shadow
of it on me; to leave the Service—that's the
worst of all—never to be able to fight for
England again as a soldier, or redeem myself—as a
man!"

He rose from the bed and went over to the
opposite wall, flinging his bent arm against it
and leaning forward, his face hid.  Stewart
watched him from the bed, his eyes reflecting
a great pity.  If Trevelyan knew half of what
his judgment cost him!  If Trevelyan only
knew how gladly he was dying in his stead!
If only Trevelyan knew that he was more kind
than cruel!

Through the window, into the absolute quiet
of the room, came the hurrying of feet and the
neighing of horses.  The Colonel was sending
out a squad of armed men to strike to the heart
of the native trouble.  Somewhere in the
distance a bugler was playing.

Trevelyan turned, his back to the wall, his
arms flung out.

"Isn't there any other way?"

Stewart struggled to a reclining position,
supporting himself on one arm, and he
summoned all his love and all his mercy.

"You injured me," he said.  "Mackenzie
says I can't pull through the day—but if I
should, I'm injured for life.  I have a right to
judge you.  There is no other way."

The music of the bugle rose, and swelled,
and then melted away.

Trevelyan came back to the bed—passive!

"I'll swear anything you ask."

Then a little later:

"Am I to tell Cary?"

"You are to tell Cary or not, as you want
to," said Stewart, looking at him curiously.

"Is there nothing I can say to Cary for
you—when—when I—get back to England?"

Stewart shook his head.  The weakness he
had fought against so long came back, as did
the agony.

"Nothing; but that I thought of her—of
them all.  Can you reach that water?  Ah!"

Trevelyan flung himself down by the bed.

"You shan't slip off this way!" he said,
tensely, the pain of his own crushed life
disappearing before the thought of Stewart's ebbing
one.

Stewart did not hear him.

"Call Mackenzie," he said, shortly, "Call
Mackenzie—quick!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`2-IX.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \IX.

.. vspace:: 2

Outside the hurrying and the tramping
and the neighing of the horses
increased and intensified the silence
inside where Stewart lay unconscious, Mackenzie
and Vaughan and Trevelyan working over him.

Later in the morning the fighting squad
departed, and over the Station fell a stillness as
great as that which brooded over the hospital.

After a desperate struggle they brought
Stewart to, and then Mackenzie, happening to
glance at Trevelyan, saw that the dressing had
slipped from his shoulder and that his shirt
was stained.

He got him into an adjoining room and
redressed the shoulder and insisted on his lying
down, in spite of Trevelyan's entreaties to get
back to Stewart.

"Everything in the world is being done for
him.  Keep quiet."

"Keep quiet, while his life's slipping
away!" cried Trevelyan, fiercely, "Not while
there's a breath left in my own body.  I'll
pull him through or I'll die!"

"You'll lie still, just where you are,"
ordered Mackenzie.  "He's holding his own just
now.  He'll need all the strength he's got, and
yours, and all he can get—later.  I'll call you."

Trevelyan slept for two hours—heavily,
exhaustively; then Mackenzie woke him.

"Come," he said, briefly, "Stewart's worse."

Trevelyan sat up on the lounge and flung
back his head; through his being thrilled the
old lost defiance; the old lost strength.  He
went into Stewart's room and sat down by the bed.

The long hours crept away and the still shadows
of night gathered, and through the hours
and the shadows Mackenzie and Trevelyan
watched.  Stewart continued to sink.

At midnight, Mackenzie went over to the
window, turning his back on the bed and Trevelyan.

There was no hope—but Trevelyan wouldn't
believe it!  Stewart was dying, and Trevelyan
obstinately refused to relinquish the fight.
Trevelyan didn't know when he was beaten.
And Mackenzie, grown prematurely gray in
the service of life against death, wondered all
over again why human strength is so weak
when waged against the great, mute Force of
the world.

Trevelyan sat rigid; and he gathered all the
strength of his life and his love; and that
imperishable part that had been crushed by his
crime, but not destroyed, and turned them to
the conquering of this hour, and that grim
Presence that was drawing nearer.

He had ceased to think of himself and the
future for the first time since he had fallen.  If
it ever once occurred to him, he regarded it
vaguely and indifferently.  To-morrow, he
would wake up to the living death that lay
before him, but for the present, he had no
thought beyond the still, motionless form
stretched on the bed.  He concentrated all his
passion, all his will strength, and massed them
together, as a breastwork, around Stewart's
ebbing life.

The grasp of the hand that was clasping his
grew weaker.

Trevelyan did not think to call Mackenzie.
He had forgotten he was over there by the
window; that they three, Stewart and Death and
he, Trevelyan, were not alone together.  He
forced stimulant between Stewart's blue lips.
And then he went in search of Stewart's ebbing
life, as a swimmer goes down into the depths
to bring forth a living man, drowning.

Once the chill of the Shadowy Presence
touched him, through the growing chill of
Stewart's fingers; and he rubbed them, beating
back into the icy veins the heat of his nature,
and by and by the Shadowy Presence sullenly
drew back, and back, and *back*.

After a time, Mackenzie, aroused by the
oppressive stillness, turned.

He hesitated, and then came to the bed and
leaned over Stewart's relaxed form.  Stewart's
face was turned up to his, drawn and thin and
pinched, in the light of the failing lamp, but he
was breathing regularly.  Mackenzie touched
one of his hands.  It was moist and warm.
And then, dumbly, he turned to Trevelyan.

Trevelyan still sat by the bed, rigid; and his
eyes looked back at Mackenzie—dull and spiritless,
and his fingers were cold, with the chill
of the depths.

Mackenzie touched him on the arm.

Trevelyan struggled to his feet.

"If you could give me a bracer.  I'm a bit
gone off—"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`2-X.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \X.

.. vspace:: 2

Trevelyan's hurt shoulder healed
rapidly, and two weeks later,
Mackenzie discharged him, and he
reported for duty again.

"The row's all over, I hear," he said later,
to the little subaltern.

The little subaltern nodded ruefully.

"Yes, and holy smoke, didn't the chicken-hearted
things run when they caught sight of
us.  We gave it to 'em hot, though!  Guess
they'll let off their funny business for a time,
and—" the little subaltern grew suddenly
sober, "Of course, you've heard about Pearson
and Bennett and the men?"

Trevelyan nodded.

"Yes," he said, and the little subaltern never
knew how gladly Trevelyan would lay down
his life if he could have Pearson's or Bennett's
chance—or the chance of the men.

Trevelyan went down the long piazza to his
own quarters.

He had been in the hospital having his
shoulder dressed and caring for Stewart, who was
still ill; when they had brought Pearson and
Bennett and the men back to the Station.

And through all the years of his life he
would never have Pearson's or Bennett's
chance, or the chance of Pearson's or Bennett's
burial.  He would die as other men died, who
had failed in life; he would never be brought
back from the front; he would never fall
defending the Service and England.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

A month later he filed his resignation papers,
preparatory to having them endorsed and sent
to the War Office.

The Colonel was in a fighting humor when
the matter was brought up to him next day!
The son of Trevelyan of Inkerman fame!
And he sent for Trevelyan and talked to him of
his duty to the Service, and the Queen, and
the colonial policy of England, and a good
deal more; but Trevelyan was firm.  The
Colonel grew apoplectic; still, Trevelyan was
unmoved.  Then, the Colonel, who had never lost
a battle in his life, retreated ungraciously,
trying to think of some reason why the order
should not be endorsed and—failed.  He had
inquired into the shoulder affair, but that was
explained by the little subaltern, who testified
that he had seen and spoken to Trevelyan the
moment before the shot.  Trevelyan had been
all eagerness to go.  He had not paid any
attention to the report, thinking some of the men
were probably practicing at target.  The
Colonel had gone over that matter carefully.
Then, in spite of the injury, Trevelyan had
offered to undertake the survey—the Colonel
could not get around that—even though he was
not fit.  Trevelyan might have been unpopular
in the regiment, but he had always done his
duty as an officer of the Service.  And so the
Colonel wrathfully saw the application go off
on the next mail to England.

And then Trevelyan waited; waited as a man
waits for the warrant that is to close his lease
on life; and, as though to make the most of the
time remaining, when he was not on duty, or
with Stewart in the hospital, he was with the
younger officers of the mess.  They grew, then,
to know a new phase in his character.  He no
longer closed the door of his quarters on them;
it was Trevelyan's room to which they flocked;
it was Trevelyan who joked them and teased
them and smoked with them, and who played
tennis with the garrison girls, and drank tea
with the officers' wives; it was Trevelyan, with
his great strength and courage, who shared
their pastimes and helped to kill the long,
inactive days that had settled back over the
Station like a pall.  Even the little subaltern
ceased to dress up regardless in white linen and
go and drink tea with Jessica Q, and became
Trevelyan's shadow instead.

Weeks later the official acceptance of the
resignation came.  It was handed to him at
mess.  He glanced at it indifferently and laid
it to one side.  Later, he left.  He did not join
the crowd that evening.  He went back to his
own quarters and closed the door and drew to
the covering at the window, and he sat down
in the dark and fought it out alone.

Two hours after he went over to the hospital
to make his nightly inquiry for Stewart.

Stewart had had a bad day, they told him.
It was a case for time.

He did not go in to see Stewart that night.

He wished that he could have waited and
taken Stewart home, he thought, as he
retraced his steps to his dark bungalow, but it
might be months before Stewart could bear the
journey, and Stewart would not hear of his
waiting.  Perhaps, it was because Stewart was
not strong enough to bear the sight of Trevelyan's
face, with its imprint of despair; it might
have been he fancied something of the despair
would lift when Trevelyan was once again in
Scotland.  At any rate, he had ordered
Trevelyan home and Trevelyan had planned to
leave—alone.

The next day he dismantled his quarters and
made his preparations.  He packed his
uniforms and his helmets and his sword, and sent
them home—to Scotland, to Mactier's care.

In the morning he put on civilian's clothes
and left the Station.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 1

The stretch of distant land grew clearer with
each throb of the ship engine's heart.

The long voyage was over and Trevelyan
was coming back to England.

And he had betrayed his allegiance to
England because he had loved!  * * *

He leaned over the ship's rail and looked idly
at the whirling foam, that beat an angry protest
at its birth against the ship's great side, and
then grew less and lost itself in the deep waters
of the Channel.

Had he loved Cary? he questioned.  Had
he not mistaken the baser passion for the
diviner love that alone is built on honor?

She had told him to mould himself into the
divine and he had broken the clay instead.

His eyes rested somberly on the long green
line of land.  All his honor and allegiance,
with which he had broken faith, came back to
him and filled him with unspeakable emotion.

He would stoop and he would gather up the
broken pieces and remould them for the service
of England.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: center medium

   *End of Book Two.*

.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BOOK THREE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   BOOK THREE

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center large bold white-space-pre-line

   THE
   POTTER'S TOUCH

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center x-large bold

   BOOK THREE

.. class:: center large bold

   THE POTTER'S TOUCH

.. class:: center large bold

   \I.

.. vspace:: 2

The long months had swelled into two
years and more before Trevelyan
came home—to England and to Cary.

Cary and the Captain had spent one winter in
Palestine and on the Nile, and the summers in
travel.  When the Captain mildly suggested
Italy or a return to America on the dawning of
the second winter, Cary shook her head and
begged for London and the old lodgings.  Cary,
for some reason never spoke of going home
now.  And so the Captain took her back to
London, and Cary seemed to enjoy the great
familiar city, better than all the sights and
novelties of Egypt and the Holy Land.

The weekly gift of violets or of roses began
again with her return to England.  Now and
then, letters came from John, but they were
not frequent, and were, to Cary's critical
judgment, unsatisfactory.  Of course, she was glad
to hear of the life of the Station, and what the
men and officers did to pass the off-duty time;
and how the army women spent the days in
India, and how they all kept cool—or tried to.
It was kind of John, too, to think to tell her all
the details, and the account of their hunting
trip and the "man-eater" Trevelyan had killed,—Cary
wondered if the skin was for her—and
what their quarters looked like, but somehow
Cary wanted more.  She wasn't quite sure
what she did want; perhaps she told herself
it was some more definite mention of
Trevelyan.  Trevelyan never wrote.

She thought of Trevelyan often, and in the
silences of the night she would sometimes
recall the blackness and the thunder of that
Scottish storm, and the terror of the hour without
its charm would come back to her and she
would cower among her white pillows and
shut, very fast, her eyes.

In the fall the Camerons had asked her to a
house party but for some reason she herself
could not define, she sent regrets.  The
Camerons' place was so near his home!  She
wondered if it were because he would not be there,
or if she would be afraid when she saw his
home again.  When Trevelyan came back—

But she was lonelier in the late afternoon
when the Captain had gone to walk, than at any
part of the day, and she would sit with idle
hands folded in her lap and look at the silent
little tea-kettle on the tea-table; or rise and
watch the sunset, quite alone.  She wasn't ever
afraid then, she was only unutterably lonely!
Perhaps when Trevelyan came back—

And then Trevelyan did come back.  She
heard it from the Captain one afternoon, and
it was then the Captain told her, gently, of the
delayed accounts of Stewart's and Trevelyan's
part in the native struggle.  There were no
details regarding them; it was only known
certainly, that both Stewart and Trevelyan had
been hurt; that Stewart was still ill at the
Station, and that Trevelyan had sent in a
resignation.  His return was expected.  They would
have to wait.

They waited; and Cary grew older in the
waiting.

Little by little details were added to the
story, and she would go around to the Stewarts'
and talk it over with John's mother and
John's sister, and women-like they would try
to fit the ill-formed pieces together.

Then she would go back slowly to the lodgings.

She had waited so long for Trevelyan to
come home, and she had thought to welcome
him in promotion; she had dreamed that some
day Trevelyan would do something great for
the Service and for England; she had believed
it, and now—Trevelyan was coming home—resigned;
and all her dreams and all her faith
had not been worth while.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-II.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \II.

.. vspace:: 2

Trevelyan had landed.  The Captain
saw it in the morning paper and
read the item out to Cary.  The ship
had gotten in a day before it had been looked for.

Cary pushed back her untasted cup of coffee,
and she remained in doors all day, unconsciously
listening for his footfall on the stairs,
and when night came without bringing him,
she laughed at herself for fancying that he
would come direct to her.

It was three days before he did come and
she met him on the stairs.  She was about to
do some delayed shopping, and as she was
going down, she met him coming up.  She
turned and they went back to the quiet little
sitting room together, and she ran over to the
window impetuously and flung back the curtains.

"Come here," she said, gaily, "I can scarcely
believe it is you, yourself!  Come here, and let
me see your Indian tan!"

He smiled a little, obeying her, but he did
not meet her eyes.

*Could* he ever tell her? he wondered.

"Why you haven't got half the tan I expected!
You're not chocolate at all!" she said
like a grieved child.

He forgot the haunting shadow for a
moment and he laughed genuinely.

"I'm sorry I don't please you."

"You don't please me at all," Cary pouted.
"You're not chocolate, and you haven't
returned a captain, and you're not in uniform
with a medal on your breast, and what is worse
than everything, you've grown chicken-hearted
and turned your back on the Service and run
away."

He winced.

"And you're as solemn as a funeral, and you
haven't told me you're glad to see me,
and—you don't please me at all!"

"That's a nice greeting for a chap!"

"Well—you deserve it!" Cary retorted;
then she brightened up, "And you really got
hurt?  Did it come just 'within a shade of a
vital spot,' like it always does in the story
books?"

"I got a scratch."

"Good boy!  How did it happen?  You
must sit down and tell me all about it.  Was
it one of those horrid natives?"

Trevelyan sat down near the window in the
deep shadow of the curtains.  He put his hand
to his head and pressed it there tightly for a
moment.

"No," he said, "It wasn't one of the natives.
It was my own revolver."

"What?"

Trevelyan faltered.

"Must you hear the story to-day?  Won't
you wait?  It's so long since I've seen you—"

If this brief hour could only be his,
unspoiled, to remember!

"Don't be aggravating," said Cary, "I'm
interested, and I want to hear."  She could not
have told why a dull weight should suddenly
have laid itself upon her.

Trevelyan sat silent.

"First," he said presently, playing with the
tassel of the curtain cord, "first, let me tell you
about John."

She flushed.  She had forgotten John in
the dread that lay upon her.

"Yes, please tell me about John.  Is he
coming home soon?"

"When he is able to bear the journey—and
I believe a little before.  He is sick for a
sight of England."  Trevelyan let the last
words fall slowly.  He had thought to add
"of you."

After a moment he went on.

"I had a long talk with Mackenzie—the
surgeon, you know—before I left.  He says the
wound hurt something in the back and went
clear through to the lung.  He'll have to get
out of the Service."

Cary rose quickly.  She went over to the
piano and stood there pressing her hands
against the top and hiding her face on them.

"It's too cruel," she moaned, "both you
fellows—out of the Service!  *It's too cruel!*"

Trevelyan knit and unknit his fingers, and
was silent.

"He'll be all right—in time," he said
slowly, with a dim idea of giving her comfort,
"but he just won't be physically strong enough
again for the army."

"And you've resigned!"

Trevelyan still sat in the shadows cast by the
curtains.  He was massing all his courage and
his strength against his love.

"Cary!"  She raised her head from her
arms, and she shivered at the tone of his voice,
without knowing why.  "Cary, if you'll come
over here—I'll tell you why—" he broke off.

She obeyed him mechanically.

"Sit down."

She did as he bade her.

"Shall I light the lamp?" she faltered.
"The days are short and—and it's dark—"

"No, not yet.  Sit here where I can see
your face by the fire.  There!  Like that!"

And then he began on the cause and the
details of the native trouble.  She moved
restlessly.  She did not understand the technicalities
very well, and the odd dread and oppression
would not lift.  She was conscious that Trevelyan's
voice filled the room, but she scarcely
heeded his words.  And then he told her of
Stewart and something of what Stewart had
tried to do for him, and grew eloquent over it,
and she forgot herself and the dread in listening
to him.  Even on the day of the storm in
Scotland, when he had told her the stories of his
childhood, he had not been as eloquent as this.
Then he halted.  After a while he resumed.
He did not pause again, but went on rapidly
with the old resoluteness born afresh, now that
he had once begun.  He continued steadily,
mercilessly, leading up to the heart of it as he
would have aimed at and hit the bull's eye at
target practice with an unerring hand.

"And the Colonel ordered me to make the
survey.  It meant danger and probable death,
and—I was afraid.  I shot myself to prevent
going.  I lied about it.  I said the revolver
had gone off.  He sent John."

He leaned forward, grim with the grimness
of despair, and the moisture came out on his
face and his throbbing throat, but she did not
see his face, she only heard the words that fell
heavily on the silence.

She rose to her feet; he could see her, in the
beauty of her height, silhouetted against the
bright firelight.  Her breast was rising and
falling quickly with emotion.

"I don't believe it," she cried.  "There is
nothing that will make me believe it!  Why,
you're not afraid of anything!  You to turn
coward!"

She paused, waiting for his denial, and
remained standing.

He rose too; came from out of the shadows
and sat down in the Captain's big chair by the
fire, where she could see and read his face.

"I was afraid," he repeated.

It was as if he knew no other word.

She went over to him and dropped down by
the chair, and looked up at him.

"Tell me that it isn't true," she said.  "If
you tell me that it isn't true, I'll believe you
against the world."

"It is true," he said.

The girl pressed the palms of her hands
against her cheeks and drew them slowly down,
away from her face.

Suddenly she rose to her feet and leant over,
looking steadily into his face.

The shadowy spaces at the ends of the room
grew and came to meet each other.

She looked down into his face searchingly
and in silence, and he met her look as a brave
man meets death—squarely.  Her hand
dropped from his shoulder and fell at her side
lifelessly.  She shrank away.

"Good God," she whispered.

She went over into the shadows, to the
window and stood looking out, motionless.  It
seemed to her that she could never look at him
again.

"John saw me," said Trevelyan, over by
the fire, "and he swore me to keep quiet about
it—except to you; he left that to me to
decide—he made me swear to resign.  I wasn't fit
to serve England."

He spoke without emotion and briefly, stating facts.

After awhile he went over to her in an
uncertain manner.  She shrank closer to the
window.

"Don't come near me," she said in a low voice.

He went back and sat down by the fire.  The
minutes passed.

"If you would say something to me,—" he
began, looking toward her.

She came out of the shadows into the firelight.

"There *is* nothing to say," she said, and her
face looked then like the face on the hospital
wall.

"I know it," he answered.

She covered her face with her hands, and
turned quickly and fell down by a chair,
burying her face in its cushions, and sobbing as
though to break her heart.

Trevelyan did not move to go to her; he did
not even look at her as she was crying there
over his lost honor.  Honor was so much to
her.  He had always known it.  Perhaps it
was for that he had first loved her.

After awhile she moved and leaned one elbow
on the seat of her chair, her cheek in her
hand.  She turned her face, looking into his.

"I—I didn't mean to be cruel," she said,
and her voice caught in sobs as she spoke.  "I
was—selfish.  I—was only thinking of—myself.
Of—of how I'd trusted you, and—and
that!  But oh, I'm—so sorry for—you.
I—" she broke off, impatiently brushing the
tears away with her hand.

Trevelyan stared into the fire.

"Don't talk that way," he said slowly, "I
can bear anything but—that!"

"What—what made you—afraid?"

He left the big chair by the fire and came
over to where she was sitting on the floor, and
looked down at her.

"I was afraid I should never see you again,"
he said.  "I—" and he put out his hand as
though to touch her hair, "I wish—well I
wish, I had known there was something
besides you in the world!"

She said nothing.

"What are you going to do now?" she
asked after awhile.

"I don't know," he said slowly, "*I—don't—know!*"

He turned abruptly and picked up his coat
and hat.  He did not offer to shake hands in
parting.  Cary had used to help him on with
his coat and shake hands, but Cary did not
move to-night.  He walked over to the door,
turning to look back at her.

"Good night," he said, in a matter of fact
way, "Good-bye."

Cary sat motionless and she looked up at
him dumbly.

"Good-bye," he repeated.

"Good-bye," she said slowly.

Trevelyan took the night train home—to
Scotland and to old Mactier.  Perhaps up there,
he would learn "what he was going to do now."

Cary sat motionless, in the shadows, by the
big chair.  After awhile she crept over to the
dead fire and stared at the white ashes.  It
seemed to her that all her faith was dead.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-III.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \III.

.. vspace:: 2

After Trevelyan had come and gone,
each day seemed to Cary like the one
before; and they all stretched out,
crushed and dead and lifeless, as a string of
pearls from which the luster has disappeared.

After awhile there were rumors that
Stewart was coming home; that Stewart was
making a desperate effort to come home—to
England.  London was agog—Stewart's part of
London.  Everyone by this time had gotten a
pretty clear idea of affairs, and because Stewart
had come up to what they had expected of him,
and had faced danger and death like the soldier
he was, and had generally conducted himself
like a gentleman,—London was pleased.  London,
like a woman, derived satisfaction in
saying, "I always knew it.  I told you so."

Little by little the excitement penetrated
Cary's inertia.  After all, it was not quite fair
that because one man had broken her faith and
his honor, she should judge all men by him.
John had not failed her.  Perhaps John would
pull things straight again for her, and make
her see life as she ought.

The warm days of early spring came—the
English spring and the sunshine, and there was
no need any longer for a fire on the hearth,
and every day brought the ship nearer, and
every fair breeze helped to bring him into port
quicker—John, coming back, sick and wounded
for life, from battle.

After all, she had forgotten that part of
it—his part; and his burden that was heavier than
her own, and Trevelyan's burden, that was
heavier than all.

After awhile she brought a pity, wholly
womanly and half divine, out of the ashes that
had seemed so dead, and on the awful truth of
these men's lives, broken by the failure of one,
she built the mercy that is stronger than
justice, and the faith that is stronger than doubt.

Something, though, remained in the ashes,
dead, never to be rekindled, and woman-like
she used to cry a little over the dead part of it;
not because she could not relight it, but because
it was so dead.

She grew into a woman in those weeks
lapsing between Trevelyan's call and Stewart's
return—gradually, as clay is moulded in the
hands of a potter, who cuts it on his wheel, to
give to it the finer tracings and the smoothness
of completion.

And every day and every fair breeze brought
Stewart nearer, and Cary turned from the ashes
to the sunsets again.  Fires would go out, even
with careful tending, but the sunsets were
God's, Cary told herself, and, therefore, eternal.





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.. _`3-IV.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \IV.

.. vspace:: 2

Malcolm Stewart went down to
Southampton to meet the ship and
bring John back to London.

"No excitement," the doctor had said, and
so he had gone alone.

Now that young Stewart had really accomplished
the task of getting back to England, his
false strength deserted him and he became
weaker than before.  The two men, the sturdy
father and the wasted son, made the journey
to town, John being carried to and from the
railway carriages.

For a moment, when he reached London,
and the carriage was turning into Grosvenor
Square, he rallied a little and insisted on
getting out of the carriage himself, and walking
up the steps, leaning heavily on his father's
arm.

"We won't frighten the Little Madre," he
had said.

The tall, womanly figure of the Little Madre.
who had been standing by the window for the
last hour, appeared at the door, silently holding
out her arms.

After awhile they got him up to his own
room and to bed, and all day the Little Madre
sat by him, tending to his few wants.  Once
he fell asleep, and when he awoke the room was
full of flowers.

"What is it?" he asked his mother feebly,
"Where did they come from?"

"From friends," she said, rising and
moving from one great bunch to another.  "The
white and pink roses are from Cousin
Kenneth's wife," and so she went on.  "The
heather and the bracken came without a name.
I think they must be from Rob—don't you?"

She paused, turning to him questioningly.
Stewart swallowed.

"Probably," he said, in a low voice.

"The Camerons sent the lilies, and those
red roses are from the old Major of the
Department—you should read the card," she
smiled proudly, coming back to his bed.

He smiled at her eagerness, and laid the
card down.

"That's pretty nice, isn't it?" he asked.

And then he looked up at her.

"But the violets?" he asked slowly.  "Who
left the violets?"

"The violets are from Cary," she replied,
meeting his look.

A slow flush mounted over his pale face.

"Please bring them here."

She did so, holding them close to his face
that he might smell of them before she put the
little vase on the table by him.  He took them
out of the water, feebly, and laid them on the bed.

"Everyone is awfully kind," he said, "and
I don't deserve the fuss.  Have—many
inquired—to-day?"

"All my visiting list," she replied,
laughingly, "and a good many more besides.  Why
the officers—" she paused, shaking her head.

"Has—Cary called?" he asked, looking
hard at the foot board of the bed.

"Yes, and left the flowers herself.  You
are to see her—" she broke off, anxiously
watching the haggard face that he turned
quickly to her own.

"When?"

"In three or four days—if you are stronger.
She shall be the first."

His mother leaned over him, stroking his
hair from his forehead.  He met her eyes
gravely.

The late sunlight sifted through the drawn
curtains and touched the flowers; their exquisite
odor crept through the stillness of the room
as the sweet memory of an old song steals
through the silent chambers of the heart.

"I love her," he said simply.  "I have loved
her always," he said, still looking into her eyes.

She smiled.

"I have known it always," she answered.

But the four days lengthened into four weeks
before he saw Cary.  That night the half
healed wound reopened, and he had a sinking
spell.

The next morning before the news had had
time to become generally known, Trevelyan
mysteriously appeared at the house on
Grosvenor Square, and went straight to Stewart's
room.

"You go and lie down," he said briefly to his
aunt, who had been up all night, "I guess I
ought to know how to take care of him.  I
did it once before in India.  I won't leave you
until I've pulled him through."

And then Trevelyan and Death fought it out
again, and Trevelyan beat back the Shadowy
Presence in the great still London house, as he
had done weeks before in the government
hospital in India.  He hardly left the sick room,
and he seemed scarcely ever to sleep.  He
would sit for hours at a time, his finger on
Stewart's pulse; quieting his ravings and
forcing back the fever by the might of his own will.

Except in the dim sick room where Stewart
lived again in delirium the night of the
perilous ride, over the great Grosvenor Square
house rested the hush of grave sickness and
impending death.  The servant stationed at the
door, guarded against the possible ringing of
the muffled bell, and answered inquiries, and
received the cards left, and the offerings of
flowers.  None ever reached Stewart's
darkened room except the small bunch of violets
that came daily, and which his mother would
bring up and place on the table by his bed,
hoping in woman-fashion that the perfume might
attract and hold his wandering faculties, or
arouse him from the stupor into which he
would fall from time to time; but it never did.
If she had ever dreamed of the exquisite
torture the flowers and their scent were to
Trevelyan, she would have placed them with
the others down stairs, but Trevelyan never
told, and she never knew the moments in which
the perfume seemed to drive him mad.

Once she suggested getting a professional
nurse to relieve him, but catching sight of
Trevelyan's face she had stopped short.

"There!  Forgive me," she said.  "It is
not that I don't trust you, or am ungrateful or
believe that anyone else could do so well, but I
am afraid for you."

"I'm all right," Trevelyan had answered shortly.

"You are unselfish; you are only thinking
of us and of John.  You are always thinking
and doing for John."

"Don't!" he interrupted, and through the
dimness of the room she could see that his face
quivered, and she wondered.

"I could not get along without you," she
went on.  "None of us could, and it has been
you who have pulled him through so far."

She looked toward the long, motionless
figure on the bed.

"I shall pull him through to-night and
to-morrow, and to-morrow again, and next
week—until he is out of danger," said Trevleyan.

That was the day the two doctors had given
Stewart up.

The crisis came and passed, and Stewart lived.

When the thralldom and the stupor of the
fever had partly lifted, and before Stewart
came to himself, Trevelyan left and went back
to Scotland and to old Mactier, nor could
anyone persuade him to remain.

Days later, when Stewart was sitting up,
he saw Cary for the first time.

"There is some one waiting outside whom
you will be glad to see," his mother had said.

"It is Cary?  You are going to let me see
Cary?" he cried.

"If you will be good and not talk," she
answered, leaving the door ajar.

Stewart turned his face to the door, pressing
his long, thin fingers resting on his knee, close
together.

She came in carrying a bunch of violets, and
stood by his chair, looking down at him.  He
looked up at her, and it seemed to him that she
was beautiful, and her voice the sweetest he had
ever heard.

"I have waited and wanted so to give you
these myself," she said, "and you have frightened
us all so."

She spoke with the simplicity of a little girl,
but there was a quality in her voice that
Stewart had not heard before, and he knew that
Cary had become a woman.

He clung to her hand in parting with that
pathetic bodily weakness that makes a man, in
illness, like a child.

"Don't go yet," he pleaded, "You've been
here such a little while.  Oh, *please* don't go!"

She patted his hand.

"I will come again," she said, and on her
way to the door, she kept looking back at him
and smiling.  He sat motionless until her light
footstep was lost in the distance, and all day
he sat quiet, scarcely speaking, dreaming of her.

The next day he waited, expecting her, but
she did not come; nor the next.

"What's become of Cary?" he asked on the
third day of his mother.  "Why don't she come
any more?"

"I suppose she thinks you're out of danger
now, and she may have other things to do."

"If that isn't just the way of women!  Coming
all the time when a chap don't know anything
or anybody, and then just when he needs
cheering—" he broke off, pulling viciously at
the shawl over his feet.

His mother smiled, knowing better "the
way of women."

But two days later, when Cary called again,
she spoke to her of his loneliness.

"He gets tired of the home faces," she said,
"and he isn't strong enough yet to see the men
or strangers.  Perhaps if you could read aloud
to him now and then——"

"Why, of course I could," said Cary, and
after that she came oftener.  They would carry
Stewart down to his mother's cheerful little
sitting room, and there one or more of the
family would gather and Cary would talk or
read aloud.  At such times Stewart would lean
back in his chair among his pillows and remain
silent, content to look at her and to listen to her
voice.  One day they were left alone together.
He remained quiet, his eyes fixed on her.  Presently
she finished the chapter and turned the page.

"I think that was a pretty strong scene,
don't you?" she asked, pausing for a moment
before she went on, and peering at him gravely
over the top of the book.

"Yes—it was," he answered absently.

"You weren't listening to a word of it," she
exclaimed reproachfully.

He laughed.

"To tell you the truth—no.  Put the
wretched old thing down and talk to me."

She laid the book down as he had bidden,
but she played nervously with the leaves.

"What shall I talk about?"

"Oh, anything—yourself."

"Upon my word, but you're polite.  There
isn't an earthly thing to tell about myself,"
she added, "And I don't know any topic that
would interest you.  There's that House of
Commons speech, of course, but——"

"Then I'll talk to you."

"Oh, you *mustn't*!" She looked up startled,
"Sir Archibald said you were not to exert
yourself."

"Confound the old codger, anyway!  Does
he expect to keep me tongue-tied the rest of
my life?"

Cary laughed.

"You're cross to-day," she said.  "You're
getting better.  It's a sure sign."

Stewart leaned forward suddenly; then he
leaned back and traced an outline of a sword
on the leather arm of the chair.

"Did you know," he asked her slowly,
"that as far as the Service is concerned, I'm
done for—that I'll never be well enough for it
again; that I've been injured beyond hope for
the Service; that I've had to resign?"

"Yes," said Cary gently, looking hard at
the book in her lap.

"Thirty and—done for," he said bitterly,
"All the Woolwich years to count for nothing;
all the study; all the ambition, all
the—hope, to count for nothing!"  His finger
paused in tracing the outline of the sword.

"Oh, you mustn't say that," cried Cary,
"you must remember what you've done
already—more than many older officers do in
their whole lives.  And then—"

He interrupted her.

"That sounds well," he said.  "But life isn't
worth much to a man when he's laid on the
shelf just when he's beginning to live—  But
the wasted years and the inactive life ahead!"  He
went on rapidly, beating the fist of one hand
against the palm of the other.  "Oh, think
what inactivity will mean after the life I've
been trained to, and worked for, and loved!"

She sat silent, her heart throbbing with a
great pity.

"To have to think of myself—to look out
for draughts like a sickly, nervous old
man!"  Something rose in Stewart's throat, and he
coughed.  "Can't ever command the men
again!  Can't lead them to battle, or ever feel
the soft earth under me, or see the stars and
the night through the flap of my tent!  To
have to give up trying to be something, or do
something—at thirty!"

He stopped short.

The book fell from Cary's lap to the floor,
and she stooped to pick it up with swimming
eyes.  He caught sight of her face and he
leaned forward; all the anger and all the
resentment gone from his voice—melted by
her tears.

"Bah!" he said, "That's just about the
fate I'm fit for if I haven't got any more grit
than that!  Of course I didn't mean it, and you
must try and forget it.  Of course the Service
is out of the question, but I *will* make
something of my life!  And I'm awfully glad, too,
for what I've had of it, and—been allowed
to do.  I'm glad for the Woolwich years
and—and the training—and—all that!  Of course it
hasn't been lost.  And I'm glad I've done
something for the Service—even in a little way,
and saved—" he caught himself up suddenly.

Cary rose, her tears dried by the burning
fever in her eyes.  She finished the sentence.

"Saved Robert from exposure!"

He looked up quickly.

"I—I don't understand you."

"Oh, yes, you do too," said Cary, breathing
hard.  "You think I don't know all about
it!  I do, though!"

"How?"

"Robert told me himself."

Stewart drew a deep breath and looked
away.  There was a long silence in the room.
After awhile she went up to the big leather
chair and laid one hand on the back of it and
bent her head, looking down at him.

"Johnny?"

He looked up, his firm mouth working.

"Johnny, you're the best man that ever lived!"

"Oh, Cary!" he said, and he tried to laugh.

She nodded decidedly.

"But I know.  Robert told me what you'd
been to him, and—he didn't spare himself."

Stewart stared straight ahead of him.

"Poor Rob," he said.  "Poor boy!"

Cary moved off to the window and looked
out, absent-mindedly, folding the edge of the
curtain with her fingers.

"It's all like a terrible dream," she said
slowly, "and I keep thinking I'll awake.  It
doesn't seem possible.  I keep remembering the
time he saved us in that awful storm, years ago
at home, and—it—doesn't—seem—possible!"

"No, but it's all too true," said Stewart.

Cary wheeled around, facing the room.

"And I am responsible.  It was through his
love for me!" she cried.

Stewart shook his head.

"You tried to help him.  I tried to help
him—all the fellows did, but he just let
himself go.  When a man like that wants
something, he sweeps everything out of his way and
rushes on blindly."

"Oh, but it was the love for me!" said
Cary; then suddenly: "How you shielded him!"

"Do you think I did right?  After all,
perhaps, I wasn't meant for the Service.  If I
had done all my duty—"

"I think you did right," said Cary, looking
down with grave eyes at her locked fingers, and
she came back into the room and sat down,
"Shall I tell you why I think so?"

"Yes."

"No exposure could remedy the hurt he gave
himself—to his own manhood and his own
honor—" she broke off, and then went on
hurriedly.  "Oh, if he could only have realized
what that meant—keeping his honor clean—"
she broke off again, and Stewart looked away
so that he might not see her face.  She went on.

"The survey was made all right and so it
was not the hurt to the Service it might have
been, but only to himself; and your punishment
in forcing him to resign was severe enough!
His own remorse makes up the rest, and the
two may bring him another chance."  She paused.

Stewart leaned his head on his hand, his
elbow on the arm of the chair, and looked
fixedly off into space.

"Perhaps you're right—I guess you are,"
he said, slowly.  "I thought something like that
at the time.  It may be the saving of him.  I
didn't do an officer's whole duty, but I tried to
be just.  I tried to spare him and—and—" he
hesitated, "those at home.  I suppose another
man might have told.  I just held my tongue.
It was an accident—my seeing.  I was worried
over the boy and couldn't keep away—" he
was speaking disjointedly.  "I loved the
Service.  God! how I loved it, and I couldn't bear
that he might really harm it some time, so I
made him get out.  But I couldn't disgrace
him; have him court-marshaled and cashiered,
or—or pay the penalty—" he broke off, and
Cary rose to go.

"He is paying the penalty," she said.  "He
pays it with every breath he draws."

"Yes; and they tell me that twice he has
nursed me and saved me, and I never knew!"

Cary looked down thoughtfully at Stewart's
thin hand resting on the arm of the chair, and
Stewart looked at her and the silence grew
and grew.  If only he knew whether——

She looked up quickly, as though divining
his thoughts, and she flushed a little.

"We will keep the secret," she said, "you
and I—won't we?  And we will try and help
him?  Do you know, I believe he'll take his
ambition and courage and—love," the flush
mounted higher, "and remould his life?"  She
hesitated, "Even hopeless love—" and then
she broke off, turning her face away.  Stewart
did not speak or move.

"Then it isn't Robert," he said to himself
after she had gone, "Then—it—isn't—Robert!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-V.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \V.

.. vspace:: 2

Weeks later, when Stewart was able,
he went around to see Cary.

"It's a dreadful pull—up those
stairs," said Cary, rolling forward a chair and
looking anxiously at Stewart as he stood wan
and breathless, but smiling, in the doorway.

"It never used to be," he panted, sitting down.

His eyes wandered about the room.

"Jove, but it's good to get back here!  And
you haven't changed things a bit—even the
Psyche in her old place!  And the little tea
kettle—Jove!"

He leaned back restfully.

She laughed and watched him in silence.

"I'll miss it all like the dickens!"

She looked up quickly from the flowers she
was just beginning to arrange.

"You are not going away, are you?" she asked.

He nodded and sighed.

"Home—to Scotland.  The lease on the
place has run out, and they think country air
will brace me up a bit—so we're going.  It'll
seem queer to get back there after all these
years."

"You—you're going to give up the Grosvenor
Square house?"

"Yes.  I suppose, though, we'll come back
every year for the season and take a suite at
the Langham or the Buckingham Gate.  Father
has an idea that he'll put me through a course
of politics up there, when we're alone, and
there's nothing going on."  Stewart smiled
mirthlessly.

"You are thinking of going into politics,
when you get strong?" asked Cary for
something to say.  A sudden unutterable
homesickness had swept over her.

"I'm not sure—it isn't unlikely though.  I
suppose that's as good a way to serve the
country as half a man can—perhaps a little
better—to try and help keep one detail of the
government's work clean!  Father has set his
heart on the Diplomatic service for me."

"I should think you'd like that," said Cary.
Talking to-day for some reason was an effort.

"I'm not sure.  What are you and the
Captain going to do with yourselves?"

Cary leaned against the back of a chair,
tearing a stray rose leaf to pieces.  She looked
down at it as she spoke.

"Papa wants another tramp through the
Alps.  I'm not in the mood for tramping, but
he's been so good I can't say a word.  When
we've climbed Mont Blanc again and come
down, I think I'll get Daddy to take me home.
I think I'm a little mite homesick."

She turned quickly and buried her face in the
roses.  An odd light sprang to Stewart's eyes.

"Haven't you been happy in England?" he asked.

Cary lifted her head, her face dyed with the
deep red of the roses.

"Happy!  There's no place like England—except
America," she said.  "I love every stone
in England—in the United Kingdom!  Months
ago Daddy and I spent a July in Hertfordshire.
I can see it all now; the glorious green of
everything; the undulating country and the woods
and the scattered old cottages, with the
village in the distance and the church spire
showing, and the little river and the cornfields and
the poppies!"  She breathed quicker.  "There
is only one thing sweeter I know—the old fort
at home and the long beach and the sea."

She stopped, and the red of the roses faded.
She went on slowly.

"Yes, I guess I'm a little bit homesick, for
the beach and the sea."

"Do you remember when we were crossing
I asked you to let me take you to my home in
Scotland when the homesickness came?"
asked Stewart.  "You might come to us when
the Captain is re-climbing Mont Blanc."

He paused, waiting for an answer, but Cary
was silent.

"Wouldn't you come?"

She threw the last bit of the torn leaf away
and came toward him and stopped, her hands
on the back of a chair, a smile creeping into her
eyes.

"I might—if I was asked," she said demurely.

He laughed like a boy.

"Mother'll see to that."

"She'll have to," said Cary, tossing her head.

"But you'd still be homesick?"

She wrinkled up her forehead.

"Goodness, even Scotland isn't America,"
she answered.  "Why, I suppose I would—some!"

Stewart closed the carriage door decidedly.
Then he leaned back and stared into the mirror
opposite, addressing the reflection there.  The
odd light had come back to his eyes.

"It's what I've been waiting for," he said,
speaking aloud and slowly; "it's what I've
been waiting for all these years.  She's
homesick, and she shall come home—to me."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-VI.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VI.

.. vspace:: 2

To Trevelyan, up in Scotland, each day
evolved itself into an eternity.  There
were the lonely breakfasts in the
mornings; the lonely walks about the grounds,
or out on the steep, bare crags; the lonely
lunches; the lonely afternoons spent in wandering
around the silent house; the lonelier evenings
in which the unread book would drop
from his hand to the floor, and he would stare
absently into the shadows; the lonely wakeful
nights—it was always loneliness.

Old Mactier would often pause in his morning
work and look after the solitary figure and
ponder and shake his head before he went back
to his duties.  Trevelyan sometimes used to
stop by him and talk to him a little before he
resumed his walk.  Once he carried Mactier
off to the moorlands for a week's shooting and
Mactier was actually conscious that Trevelyan
seemed happier with his gun under his arm
again than he had been since the day of his
mysterious return.

It was Trevelyan, not Mactier, who led the
hunt in those days, and the old man would
press after him, sometimes stumbling with the
fatigue he was too proud to acknowledge, and
glorying in the prowess of the great strong
figure ahead, that he had carried as a child and
in whose hands he had placed the first
firearms—almost before the child was strong
enough to hold the weapon or could pull the
trigger by himself.

If Trevelyan exhausted the old retainer, he
tired himself too, and at night he would drop,
almost too weary to take off his hunting boots,
and go to sleep, and sleep heavily, dreamlessly,
as he had not done for weeks.

It was a relief, that, to get away from the
haunting shadow in his dreams; and he blessed
passionately the fatigue that brought even for
so brief a time, forgetfulness.

At the end of the week he and Mactier went
home, and the inactivity and the loneliness and
the sleeplessness grew greater than before.

There was no face of his own kind to greet
him here, in Scotland; the Camerons were his
nearest neighbors, and the Camerons were
away—Tom in Aberdeen.  There was no one
to help him, even if they could, to beat back the
blind despair that threatened him with mental
and with moral death.

One day he ordered out the hounds and rode
across country until the fields and trees and
fences became blurred together by the touch of
twilight.  He returned mud stained and
mortally weary and stalked into the dining room
and over to the sideboard, where he locked his
table wines.  He took out a decanter and
hunted around for a glass, and carried both
into the library, and sat down.  Then he
poured some of the wine and swallowed it at a
mouthful.  He filled the glass again and drank
the liquor leisurely, lounging back in his chair
with a sigh of content.  After all, he declared,
there was nothing like a bracer when a chap
was fagged out.

By and by, he slipped down a little in his
chair and stretched his legs, still encased in
their mud-stained boots, straight out in front
of him and went to sleep.  When he awoke it
was quite dark, and he sat still, staring through
the uncurtained window into the night, and
conscious of a delicious languor.  Then as his
faculties became more acute and the old spectre
returned to haunt him, he instinctively stretched
forth his hand in the blackness and fumbled for
the decanter and the glass.  He drunk deeply
once, twice, three times—and when he raised
the glass for the fourth time his hand shook
and there was an odd rushing sound in his head.

Suddenly he sat forward in his chair, pushed
the glass and decanter from him roughly and
flung out his arms across the table.  The odd
rushing sound subsided, and he became aware
that the wine was dripping from the table to
the floor, where he had overturned the decanter.

He did not refill it, and the sideboard
remained unlocked—and empty.

So the days passed.  He would climb up into
the eyrie, as he had done as a child and listen
to the beating sea below.  Once the sea had
sung to him of undiscovered lands, whose
shores it touched, bearing the message back to
him; it had sung of wealth and fame gained by
the sword—it was by the sword always—and
it had beaten and beaten, and sung of all that
he would one day like to be; and of what some
day he would be and achieve.  Once it had
sung of love—of its mystery and the essence of
its life—

Now—

He would crawl to the edge of the crag and
peer over into the white foam, holding on to the
edge until the old boyish dizziness came back;
but unlike in the old days, there was never a
woman's face in the foam now.  What right
had he to look for a woman's face in the foam!

.. _`"*What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam?*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-222.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "*What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam?*"

   "*What right had he to look for a woman's face in the foam?*"

And the song of the sea was the song of
death and dishonor.  He might climb the crag
to-day, and to-morrow, and every to-morrow of
his life, and the song would not change.  The
sea was a vast organ; he could not change its
tunes back to the old ones; he could not control
it, and it went on, rolling out its fierce, deep
music of dishonor.

And then he would leave the sea and the
crags and go back into the empty house.  The
house was only a shade less bad; with its
deserted rooms and its long gallery of dead and
gone Campbells and Trevelyans.

He had wandered into the gallery once or
twice.  The faces on the canvases, grown
indistinct with the years, seemed to look back at him
without recognition that he was of their race
and line.  What claim had they on him or he
on them?  The men had been brave and the
women fair—so the history and traditions of
the house had said, even if the stiff painted
figures and the severe painted faces often said
otherwise—the men had always been in the
front wherever they were needed for the
defense of Scotland and her rights, and later they
had defended England too.  If they had not
fought for her with the sword, they had with
tongue or pen—if they had not been soldiers,
they had been powers in the government or in
the pulpit.  Even the solemn-faced preacher
near the big window at the furthest end of the
gallery, when eloquence had failed, had left the
old kirk to strike a blow for King Charlie.
The women, too, had been brave—brave in the
sacrifice of beauty and wealth for the upholding
of Scottish rights, and the renouncing of
husbands and lovers and sons for Scotland.

At the other side of the gallery hung his
father's race—the Trevelyans; and opposite
the solemn-faced preacher, near to the window
where the sun struck it in the morning, was the
picture of his mother.  It had been taken of
her in the first years of her marriage, soon
after he had been born.  People had said that,
as a child, he had held his head proudly, like hers.

The grave, smiling eyes seemed to follow
him as he turned hastily from the portrait.
She had gloried in the traditions of her race;
she had been proud—justly—of her line.  He
thanked God she was dead—that he might
remember her as the portrait had painted her to
be—on the flood tide of her love and her
beauty and her strength.

There was the picture of his father, in his
full regimentals.  He had been years older
than his wife, but how they had loved each
other; how proud they had been of each other's
race, and how proud they had been of him.
He was glad that his father was traveling in
the Far East and had not seen him or
demanded explanations since his return.  He
would have been obliged to meet the questionings
with silence.  It was better so.

Between the two portraits hung one of
himself as a child.  How his father and mother
had watched the growing of the portrait under
the master's brush, waiting for its completion,
that it might be hung in the gallery.  It had
been painted the year his mother had died—a
year before he went to America.  The artist
had taken something of the grace and alertness
of the great hound that had rested at the boy's
feet and put it into the supple limbs of the boy
himself.  He had painted into the boy's eyes
the reflection of the gray stormy sea, and had
lent them something of the gray sea's strength.

And he had been like that as a child, with all
the promise of a ripe manhood!  And now
that he had grown to be a man——

There was a long stretch of empty wall
space next to the portrait of his father, and his
father had once laughingly told him that his
portrait should hang there, painted in uniform,
when he had left Woolwich and won his spurs
and returned after seeing service.

And he had returned from service without
the uniform!

He had used to come and dream here after
the Woolwich years, whenever he could get off
from duty or was not with Cary.  He had
come here often in that winter when Cary was
away in France.  And he had planned his
portrait hanging so, in uniform, with hers near
his—even as his mother's was near his father's.
And sometimes when the sun had gone and the
darkness had crept in, the shadows had taken
other forms—the forms of children—who
would troop up and take their places on the
empty spaces waiting for them on the wall.

He had dreamed of her—-of Cary—as a
strong passionate nature dreams of its best
beloved.  He had fancied her in a hundred
different guises—at the head of his table, moving
around the house, as its mistress, talking to
old Mactier and his tenantry, as the master's
wife; he had dreamed of her, after he and she
had lived together alone for a period of
ineffable bliss, as the mother of his children;
strong sons and fair daughters, that would
reflect her sweetness and his strength—the
completion of their love.  He had dreamed of the
time when the house would ring with their
voices, and then of the days when the house
had lapsed into silence again, when learning
love's mystery they had gone to homes of
their own; when he and she would live on in
a love that time could not change, nor age
wither; how later she would lay him in the
tomb of his ancestors, and later still they would
put her close beside him and his people.  He
had never dreamed of her dying first, or of
his life without her.

And now, she had gone from his life, and
the dreams had gone; and he had shattered the
hopes with his own hand.  He would never
feel her in his arms, or lean down and rest the
hollow of his cheek against her hair; he would
never see her moving around the house, or
watch her shadow as she passed.  She would
never rest beside him in the vault.

The house would remain silent in the years
that stretched ahead, as it had remained silent
in the years that lay behind.  There would
never be again even the dream echoes of the
children's voices.  His portrait—in
uniform—would never hang upon the wall; the space
where he had dreamed her pictured face would
look down into his living one, would be left
empty; and the shadows would never take the
forms of little children, and only the grim
shadow-curtain of darkness would stretch
across the barren wall.

And he would leave the gallery and go into
the desolate library, where he and she had stood
that day of the storm, and he would sit down
and bow his face on the big, carved table,
wondering what was the answer to the twisted
riddle of his life.

He had told himself he would pick up the
broken pieces and remould them for England
and the Service, and he had thought to learn
the answer here—at home, in Scotland, by the
crags and sea.

But Scotland had not answered him.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-VII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VII.

.. vspace:: 2

Trevelyan let the hand that held
Mackenzie's letter fall between his
sprawling legs.

He had been sitting on the front steps of the
house when Mactier had brought him his mail
and he had opened it there.

There were the papers, and a half dozen bills,
a wedding invitation, two sets of reception
cards, the announcement of a club meeting, and
a letter from his aunt in eastern Scotland,
begging him to come to them, if only for a week,
and telling him that Cary was with them,
and—Mackenzie's letter.

He had laid it aside to open last.  It might
have been he wanted to take his time reading it;
or a dread of hearing from any of the old mess.
At any rate, he hesitated before opening it, even
when he had disposed of the rest of the mail.

He read it after awhile, and then he raised
his head and looked hard at the group of trees
near the house.

And so Mackenzie had been transferred to a
distant regiment soon after he, Trevelyan, had
resigned.  There were a good many pages
given to the description of the new Station and
the new set of officers and men, that Trevelyan
skipped over hastily.  It was only the last part
that had struck him suddenly, like a heavy blow
in the face, and that made him, after awhile,
pick up the letter and re-read the part.

"We had a cholera scare this season, but we
managed to strangle it, so that it never became
more than local, but it kept Clarke—he's my
assistant, and a good chap he is—and me, on
the jump for a time.  The natives won't look
out for the water, and I don't believe the entire
medical and military force of the United
Kingdom combined would be able to make them do
so!  And of course it's damnation in this
special spot where there is more or less cholera
every year.  I sometimes feel inclined to say if
they're such fools let them drink and bathe and
drown themselves in the water, for they're not
worth saving.  But you see, unless the scourge
is stamped out among them it goes on spreading
and threatens the barracks.  We can't
spare one of our dandy men.  We need 'em all
in the Service—every last mother's son of 'em,
bless their stout old British hearts!

"You saw a case or two at the old Station,
and you know something of what it means.
But you haven't any idea of an army surgeon's
dread of an epidemic—that is a surgeon who
has been through the cholera mill.  I know, for
I've spent most of my term in India, and years
ago I was in the midst of a howling time of
it—men dropping off by the score!  I never
want to go through such a thing again.  The
horror of it is enough to last a man a good
deal longer than his natural life—and the chaps
who helped me!  Well, most of the men who
could—and they were brave men, too—took to
heels, and the handful that buckled to, to nurse,
kept getting sick from fatigue and the vile
water—and then when the men died—the fires—

"There, you know it, I suppose, or you've
heard of it before.  No one *knows* it, until
one's been through it.

"The natives were pretty good on the whole
a few months ago and so we stamped it out
then.  Jove! some of them were sick, though—sicker
than the sickest dog you ever saw—.
There was one fellow—he was worth saving—and
I never worked so hard over a man in my
life, except Stewart when he was hurt at the
old Station.  He died, though.  All the while
I kept thinking of that time with Stewart, and
how you brought him back from death.  I've
never understood that, and I never learned
anything like it in my *Materia Médica*.  It was
kind of uncanny, but it did the work.  I
wondered if you could have done something for
that fellow.  I couldn't.  He was a Scotchman,
by the way, of the rank and file."

Here the letter stopped.  On a fresh sheet
was a postscript.

"Just came across this in my desk—two
months old.  I must have thought I had sent
it and didn't.  Guess I'll let it go though.
Now that the immediate cholera scare is over
the natives are playing the dickens again with
the water—as they always do.  It begins to
look like trouble.  When the spring rains come
it'll play the devil with the Service this time.
Well!"

Trevelyan put down the letter.  There was
an odd fullness in his throat.

He got up and began to walk to and fro.
Once he stopped and kicked at the gravel of
the drive with his heel.  The odd fullness in
his throat grew, and it seemed to him as though
an invisible force was impelling him to India.

Then he gripped at his self-control, and
quieted his throbbing brain by his will.  There
should be no impetuous passion to lead him
wrongly here.  He would weigh the risks; he
would force himself to think of all it meant—of
all the horror of the details—the horrors that
were unspeakable, almost unthinkable.  He
had seen something of them when he was at the
Station.  Whatever his decision there should
be no regrets.

All day he wandered around the place—preoccupied.
He did not touch his lunch, and he
scarcely touched his dinner.

In the evening he went into the great library
and thought it out—alone.

Had the dreams come to this?  Was this the
answer?

*Was it the answer?*

He sat rigid and mute questioning the
silence, but the silence gave back no answer.

Outside the stars appeared one by one, only
to hide themselves behind the mist that slowly
had arisen, and the cold chill of midnight crept
in through the closed windows.  The fire on
the hearth faded from its steady glow of gold
to the red of the dying embers, and the student
lamp on the table flickered and went out.  And
still Trevelyan sat rigid and mute, with his
wide eyes questioning the silence.

By and by the silence became alive, and was
peopled with the visions of his thoughts.  He
remembered what those cholera cases were, he
had seen in India—the unutterableness of it
all—and there swept over him not so much the
abhorrence of death as of its manifestation.
After all, was it not wholly the close contact
with the disease itself he shrank from?
Death——

Why, death was not so bad.

And Trevelyan's tense features relaxed a little.

After all, he would not go to court death.
He had lived through that desire and conquered
it the night he had lain wounded by his
own hand in the military hospital.  Foolhardiness
was not courage, so he had told himself
then, and so he believed now.

Then, it was not likely that he would catch
the plague and die.  He had always laughed at
disease; he who had never been ill; and had
not Mackenzie lived through one of the worst
epidemics on record—this promised to be mild,
as compared to it.  It was not so much the fear
of death and disease, but was he willing to
accept both if they came?

The old passionate love of life he had felt
years ago when a boy, fighting the storm and
the sea and death, shot through him and thrilled
him from his throbbing head to his feet.  He
rose and flung out his arms and bent them
backwards and forwards.  He could feel the flow
of the blood and the *life* that was there.

Then he thought of Mackenzie's letter and
he pictured the oncoming of the cholera, and
Mackenzie and his little band fighting the
scourge unaided.  What was the strength of
his life for if not to serve these; if not to serve
the men who served England!  Might he not
so serve England, too, and help to save,
perhaps, the lives of those who fought in her
defense and for her honor?

It would be service, but it would not be the
service he had dreamed of as a child, and
striven for as a boy and a youth.  He had
thought to serve with the sword, and perhaps—so
he had dreamed—meet death in a charge like
the charge his father had made.  His blood
had thrilled at the thought of the rally, and the
command he would send down the line!

Trevelyan fumbled in the dark for his chair,
and sat down.

It would never be that.  If he should die
serving Mackenzie and England what he had
done would die with him.  He might be
mentioned in the Reports, but Reports—

Well; why not?  What had he done for
England that England should remember him?
He had only served England in dishonor.

"When the men died—the fires—"

It would not even mean that he could be
brought back here—to Scotland, to his crags
and sea—to rest in the old vault.  That last
dream would have to fade even as the other
dreams had faded.

He might not serve England gloriously; he
might help the Service only indirectly, but
would not the service and the help be there?
Might he not so pick up the broken pieces?

Still the silence gave back no answer.

The wan gray dawn stole in through the lifting
mist and found him wide-eyed and sleepless
still.

After awhile he rose again and stretched his
stiff legs and went down the hall to the front
door and opened it.  The chill of the early
dawn struck him and he shivered.  He walked
down to the sea and stood there, looking out
over the gray, cold waste of waters, and then he
climbed to the eyrie, and looked out over the
waters again.  They seemed colder and grayer
than before, and from force of habit he crawled
to the ledge and leaned over.  The *swish*,
s-w-i-s-h, of the breakers below reached him,
and through the faint mist he could see the
white foam.  The toss of the spray touched
his face in friendly greeting as it had done so
often—so often before.

The faintest touch of shell-like pink crept
into the gray sky and deepened, and was
reflected on the sea, and still Trevelyan lingered.
The old passionate strength of the boy-child
came back to him then, as he hung, listening to
the beat of the sea.  The self-assurance had
gone from the courage, and had been crushed
beyond restoration when he had broken the
clay; but the courage was there—born
afresh—unyielding and enduring and deep as the
sea.

He rose to his feet and he flung out his arms
toward the sea as he had done when he had
beaten it and the storm and death, in Cary's
home, as a child; but he said nothing, for the
odd fullness in his throat.  Let death come so,
his heart cried.  Death, even when it strikes,
does not always conquer, and Death was not all.

Then he climbed down and went back to the
house, and up-stairs and flung himself on his
bed.

The sea had answered his questionings.

*Thus* would he serve the Service.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-VIII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \VIII.

.. vspace:: 2

It was late in the forenoon when Trevelyan
awoke.  He lay still awhile listening
to the beat of the sea on the crags.
The music of the waters had been his reveille
since a child, when he had used to get up with
the break of the day.  The old triumphant note
that had been missing in the sea's song so long
was in it to-day.  He did not define it, but he
was acutely conscious of its presence, and it
haunted him while dressing and all during his
lonely breakfast.

Then he went up-stairs and got his
Gladstone and rummaged through his bureau
drawers and closets, preparing for a short journey.
Later, he sent for Mactier.

The old man came at once and stood in the
doorway respectful and silent, watching his
master pack.

"Is that you, Mactier?  Well, I'm off again.
I'm going to run over to Mr. John's.  I'll be
back day after to-morrow or the next—sure."

Mactier twirled his cap around and around
with his hands, and looked down at it hard.

"Ay, sir."

"I'll come right back from there," Trevelyan
went on, sorting collars, as he spoke, "and
then I'll go over the accounts with you and see
what the tenants want.  I'm going back to
India as soon as I can get there."

Mactier's stoic Scotch features showed no
surprise.

"Ay, sir," he said again, in a low voice,
"'Tis what I've expected this lang time."

Trevelyan looked up from his packing, amused.

"You have—have you?"

"Is it the army, sir?" asked Mactier, doubtfully.

Trevelyan sat back on his heels.

"No," he said, briefly, not meeting
Mactier's eyes, "it's the cholera."

The cap Mactier had been twirling dropped
suddenly from his hand and he came a step
forward.  The long years in which Trevelyan
had grown to be a man faded from Mactier's
consciousness; the big retired officer of the
Queen's service, was a boy again—the boy
whom he had flung across his shoulder when he
was wounded and brought home through the
darkness of that long moorland night.

"Not the cholera, laddie!  O, not the cholera!"

"That's just what it's going to be," said
Trevelyan, wheeling around suddenly on his
heel.  "Where in thunder is that shirt?"

The old impetuous decision brought Mactier
back to his surroundings at once.  He was
again the old retainer with the respectful
manner and the stoic Scotch face.  He stooped and
picked from the floor the shirt that had fallen
from the bed.

"Here it is, sir," he said.

"That's it.  Thanks."  Trevelyan gave the
shirt a shake and laid it in the Gladstone.
"I'm just going to look around out there—you
know I never could stay long in one place
at a time, Mactier—and perhaps help the soldiers
a little.  I'll be back before you know it!"

Mactier continued to hand him slowly one
by one the articles on the bed, which Trevelyan
put into the Gladstone.  The old man was
silent.

Trevelyan closed the Gladstone with a snap
and looked up, a quizzical smile in his eyes.

"You're not afraid I'm going to get the
cholera and die—are you?"

Mactier looked down at him adoringly.

"Ay, sir, I fear just that."

Trevelyan laughed.

"Nonsense!  Nothing has ever killed me
yet."  He rose and pushed the Gladstone to
one side with his foot.  "When I get back from
Aberdeen, we'll fix everything up for the year.
If anything goes wrong or you want any
advice, you can refer to Mr. Granger as usual.
He'll come up from Edinburgh if necessary."

"Veera gude, sir."

"I guess that's about all for the present.
You'd better tell James to have the trap around
in plenty of time to get me to that afternoon
train."

Trevelyan reached the Stewarts' the next
morning.  They were not expecting him, and
the little country station was deserted.  He
hired a carriage and a man, and was driven the
seven miles that lay between him and the house.
He looked out over the long stretch of familiar
road with indifferent eyes, and the liveryman
who had known him ever since the year his
aunt had brought him to Aberdeen county,
when his mother had died, wondered at his
silence.  Trevelyan's heart throbs kept time to the
revolving of the carriage wheels.

"We are taking you to her," they cried again
and again—maddeningly.  "You are to see
her again," they cried, and his heart was in
his throat as the carriage turned in at the big
twisted iron gates.

He caught sight of her a long distance off,
and before the noise of the approaching wheels
had attracted attention.  She was a little apart
from the group that was gathered on the side
piazza Malcolm Stewart had added years ago
to the rambling old house.  She was seated on
a step, her big shade hat covered with wild
flowers, lying at her feet, and adding a touch of
color to the pale effect of her gray dress.  Her
hands were resting in her lap and she was looking
off absent-mindedly toward the stretch of
sunlit beach.

Mrs. Stewart was reading aloud, now and
then putting out her hand to stroke John's, that
rested on the arm of the big garden chair drawn
close to hers.  He was looking steadily up at the
white clouds sailing overhead and smiling to
himself—not listening to the reading.  Tom
Cameron was teasing Maggie's collie because
he did not dare tease Maggie.

And all about the group the noonday sun of
autumn lay as warm and bright as it might
have done in summer.

It was Maggie who first heard the carriage
and who caught sight of its approach around
the curve in the long drive.  She scrambled to
her feet, and gathering up her skirts tore down
the steps and drive to meet it, Tom Cameron
at her heels and the collie bringing up the rear.

"It's Rob," she shouted, breathlessly, and
tripped suddenly and lay sprawling on the
ground, the collie barking frantically and
whirling around her in the dust of the gravel.

Trevelyan flung the reins to the liveryman
and jumped down.

"Hello, Maggie," he cried, picking her up
before Cameron could reach her.  "Hello,
Tom!  There, don't bark yourself mad, Bruce!
Hello, everybody!"

They gathered around him, and his aunt
kissed him affectionately.

"You're a good boy," she said, the charm of
a rare smile lighting up her eyes.  "But why
did you not wire you were coming so that we
could have met you?  Your boxes are coming later?"

"Thought I'd surprise you all.  Here's my
box now."  He motioned to the liveryman,
who was lifting his Gladstone out of the trap.

"*That?*" said Maggie scornfully.

Trevelyan laughed, conscious the while that
Cary was coming toward him.

"It's good to see you again," she said simply,
putting her hand in his and looking straight
into his eyes, "But I said you wouldn't come!"

"Did you?" he asked, forgetting the group
around him as he looked at her.  "Why?"

She smiled slowly.

"Oh, I hardly know.  I suppose because I
thought you wouldn't leave home and your old
crags and your big thunder storms.  We're so
much quieter here."

Trevelyan turned sharply and beat his big
hand softly against John's shoulder.

"How are you, old man?" he asked, not
raising his eyes from his own hand.

"Fine.  I'm getting on my feet again.  I
drive myself now, and ride a little and walk."

"Good.  Hello, Maggie—going on breaking
Tom's heart?" he pulled disrespectfully at
one of Maggie's stray curls, while Cameron
fumed inwardly.

Maggie nodded cheerfully and beckoned
Cameron to come and wipe the dust from her
dress with his handkerchief.

They bore Trevelyan back with them to the
piazza, and Mrs. Stewart sent for some lunch,
which he ate out there in the midst of them.
Stewart flung himself back in his big garden
chair a little distance away and shaded his eyes
with his hand, studying Trevelyan's face.
There was something in it he could not
understand and it haunted him.  He continued to
watch it all the morning, and when Trevelyan
was playing tennis with Cameron.  And later
his eyes would wander from Trevelyan to Cary,
sitting over with his sister at the tea table.  He
noticed with a great pain at his heart that Cary
was watching Trevelyan too, and that there
rested over her face an expression that he, who
had studied her every mood, had never seen
before, and he wondered suddenly if he had
been a fool—living in a fool's paradise of late.
Perhaps it was Trevelyan after all—perhaps—

Perhaps, too, the light that had sometimes
crept shyly into her eyes during these last
days—as shyly as a sunbeam creeps into gray wells
of beauty—had not dawned for him.  And all
their walks upon the beach; and all their drives
together; and all their watching of the rising
moon had been nothing to her after all.  And
they had been *his* life!

All night he lay awake, suffering dumbly,
not knowing that Trevelyan in the adjoining
room lay stretched across the bed, his face
buried in the pillow, wondering passionately
how he was to say "good-bye" to her to-morrow—without
her knowing!  Without her knowing!





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   \IX.

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At dawn Trevelyan got up and waited
at the window for the sunrise.  By and
by he could hear the servants moving
below stairs.  The long minutes passed.
From a turn in the drive he could see Martin
returning with the mail that had come in late the
night before.  He watched him curiously as he
paused to speak with McGuire, the gardener,
and he wondered in an indifferent sort of way
what he was saying that caused the latter to
suddenly grow so excited.  He rose and went
down stairs, meeting Martin at the door.

"Anything the matter?"

Martin jerked off his cap awkwardly, and
handed him the mail and the papers.

"It's them Gordon 'Ighlanders, sir," he said.
"If you'll look at the paper—"

Trevelyan opened the sheet.

Martin watched him from a respectful
distance.  He saw Trevelyan crush the paper
suddenly in his hand and turn sharply on his
heel, and go into the library and close the door.
"I thought that there would stir Master
Robert up," he muttered.  "Law! that was awful
fine, an' won't Betty stare an' hollow!"

An hour later the family assembled in the
breakfast room.

"Where is Robert?" asked Mrs. Stewart,
sitting down.

John shook his head.

"His room's empty.  Must be taking a walk.
What has become of the morning paper?"

Trevelyan appeared suddenly in the doorway.
He held the paper in his hand, and his
face was as white as the sheet.  His uncle rose
hastily.

"Great heavens, boy!  What's the matter?"

"*Matter?*"  Trevelyan's voice rang out
excitedly.  "Read that!"

Half a dozen hands reached out for the
paper.  Trevelyan snatched it hungrily back.

"Let me read it to you!  It's the Gordon
Highlanders."  Trevelyan's words stumbled
over each other.  "They've assaulted the
Dargai Hill!  The Gurkhas, Dorsets and
Derbys couldn't take it!  Then General
Kempster ordered the Gordon Highlanders and the
Third Sikhs to reinforce the fighting line.  The
pipers played the 'Cock of the North,' and then
the mixed troops—the Highlanders and the
Dorsets and Gurkhas and Derbys and Sikhs
swept across!  God!  Look at the list of the
dead!"

Trevelyan tossed the paper to John and
turned away and leaned against the sideboard,
his elbows on it, his head in his hands.

Young Stewart caught the paper and sat
down at the table and spread it out in front of
him with nervous fingers, and began to read,
the rest gathering around him.  The
Highlanders of Aberdeen!

The breakfast stood untouched, growing
colder every minute, but no one thought of it.

Young Stewart's voice got husky now and
then, and when he was half way through the
sheet, he pushed it over to Cameron and rose.

"I guess you'd better finish it," he said.

It was hard to forget that if it had not been
for that India transfer, he would have been
with the Highlanders!

Trevelyan came forward suddenly, and
leaned over Cary's chair.

"Isn't it splendid," he said.  "That's the way
we Scotch fight—" he broke off abruptly,
recoiling before the consciousness that he had not
fought so.

"It's grand," cried the American girl, her
breath coming quickly.

The elder Stewart looked up for a moment
from the paper he was reading over Cameron's
shoulder.

"You ought to have been there, Robert!
That's just your kind of work!"

"I wish to God I had!"

Mrs. Stewart crossed the room and went
over to where John was sitting at the furthest
end of the table, his chin in his hand.  She
sat down by him and leaned forward to speak to
him.

"I know it's hard," she said, "but think how
I would have felt!"

Stewart drew outlines on the cloth with the
breakfast knife he had picked up.

"We won't talk of it," he answered, and he
turned his face away.

His mother said nothing, and by and by she
rose and went back to the group.  Something
in her face as she came up to them attracted
Trevelyan and he stopped short in his excited
talk and looked toward the solitary figure at the
end of the table.  His grasp suddenly relaxed
on Cary's chair and he went up to Stewart and
sat down on the arm of his chair and gripped
hard at his shoulder.

"I'm a brute," he said in a low voice, and he
kept his grip on Stewart's arm, and it was he
who by and by led the others to calm down and
eat their breakfast after some sort of a fashion.

He was to leave at midnight, and he had
come especially to see Cary, but he scarcely
saw her throughout the length of the long day.
After that he devoted himself to Stewart,
forcing him to think and speak of other things
besides the great excitement of the hour.  He
laughed with him; he talked to him, and they
went over their boyhood again.  It was as it
had once been between them, before they had
grown to men.  Once in the twilight
Trevelyan spoke of Cary.

"Things are all going to pull straight
between you," he said.

But Stewart, remembering the look on
Cary's face, when she had been watching
Trevelyan the day before, shook his head.

It was not until Trevelyan went to dress for
dinner that he realized that the real hardness of
the task lay undone.  He would leave at
midnight, and only God knew when he would
come to Aberdeen again—and God was silent.
To-night would mean "good-bye."

After dinner he went up to Cary as she was
sitting at the piano in the music room.

"Won't you come for a walk on the beach?"

She looked up, flushed, and her hands fell
back upon the keys discordantly.

"Why—I don't know.  Isn't it too cold?"

"It isn't cold," he said, picking up a white
cashmere shawl and flinging it across her bare
shoulders.  "Come."

A tone in his voice caught and held her
wavering and turned it to decision.  She rose.

They passed Stewart in the hall, on his way
to the music room, his flute in his hand.

"We're going down to the shore for a little
while," said Trevelyan, pausing before moving on.

Stewart nodded.

"Oh, all right.  Don't get cold, Cary."

And he went on to the deserted music room.

Trevelyan led her down the little path to
the beach.  He talked in a matter of fact way
on indifferent subjects, as though to set her at
her ease.  He smiled grimly to the darkness.

"She's afraid I'll forget myself," he kept
thinking.

They came from out of the strip of woods
and its shadows to the beach, stretching away
on either hand in the distance, and sloping
ahead of them into the sea that kissed it and
then receded, holding it at arm's length before
it embraced it again, as a lover does his
sweetheart.  The slow creeping up and retreating of
the waters came faintly and soothingly to their
ears.  Far off a faint light appeared in the
heavens, marking the rising moon.  The burden
of the day and the excitement of the battle crept
off and were lost in the shadows.

"I haven't seen the moon rise on the beach
since I was a youngster," said Trevelyan.

"It's beautiful," said Cary.  "I always get
near the moonlight when I can."

"Do you?  Well, it pays one.  It is beautiful.
I don't believe I ever quite appreciated
the moon and the beach here when I was a
little chap."

"Your aunt once told me how unhappy you
were when they brought you here—to Aberdeen county."

"I fancy that's pretty straight.  I never took
kindly to the level beach.  I wanted my crags
and my breakers and old Mactier.  Mactier
and the crags and the breakers were always
associated together in my small mind."

He laughed.

"I suppose so; but it's so peaceful here—"  Cary
broke off.

"Yes; but do you know I've a notion that
some day or other, you'll come often to the old
place in Argyll and you'll love it as I love it
now."

Cary looked up at him quickly.  Could it be
that he still hoped that some day—

She shook her head.

"It's beautiful," she said, "but it's terrible!
The beat of the sea on the crags always seems
to be chanting something that I can't
understand.  It's a foolish idea, isn't it?"

Trevelyan walked down to the water's edge.

"It's been chanting to me ever since I was
born," he replied.

He looked out over the quiet waters.

"The sea here don't talk to me," he went
on.  "It never did.  It isn't like my Scotland!
Come, we'd better walk a little; you'll get cold
standing."

She gathered the cashmere that had slipped
from her shoulders around her, and brought it
up, covering her head.  Her face white as the
white moonlight looked out from its folds.
Once a wave bolder than its fellows, crept up
and wet her feet and the edge of the long skirt
she was holding with one hand.  She scarcely
noticed it.  Once she turned her face away
from Trevelyan's and looked out across the
shining sea, to where it lay dark against the
horizon.  A great pity and a great awe, of
something she could not define, lay heavy upon
her and made her silent.  It was as if this
"good-bye" was to be the longest she had ever
said.  From the house, showing through the
trees, came a stream of light.  It was from
the music room and it mingled with the
white radiance that lay across the sea.  And
then through the quiet, there stole the first,
faint notes of John's flute.  The music began
softly and caressingly, and rose and filled the
spaces all around them.  It sobbed and moaned
and called entreatingly to her, and then it sank
into a marvelous crescendo; only to throb again
against the silence—still entreating her to
return, before it faded slowly and died away altogether.

The sobbing and the moaning of it pulsed
in Trevelyan's brain.  This was good-bye.  It
was good-bye as he had never dreamed it.  He
could have fallen down before that white
moon-touched face and cried the good-bye out,
clinging to her feet.  He could have cried it
out, his head upon her breast; he could have
cried it out, with her resting in his arms, but
silence laid its seal on him instead.

Out in India, with Mackenzie, in the awful
shadow of the plague, he would remember her
so, with her white moon-touched face.

What had he done to hope for such a
good-bye?  Only a man who has won a woman
could cry out his heart's fullness so; and he had
lost her!  What right had he to tell her that
he was going away, hoping so to wrest from
her some word of approbation or of pity?
Might she not say something that she would
regret afterwards?  He could go back home,
and he could write her briefly.  Then she
would remember this night.  Then, whatever
he had said or left unsaid to-night or in the
note, she would understand.

As for him—out in India with Mackenzie,
in the awful shadow of the plague, he would
remember her so, with her white moon-kissed
face.  He would hear again, louder than the
moans of sufferings, the wondrous love music
of Stewart's flute and the song of the sea.  It
seemed to him he would hear it and see her so,
if he were dying.  And yet, he told himself,
he would have given up his life right there
before she should think that he had done this
thing because of her approbation or her pity.

If he could only have been with the Highlanders
at the assault!  If—well, death would
never come to him so.  He had fought that out
in the hospital and again the other night at
home.

The music sobbed itself into silence.

"The old beach is a good deal prettier by
night than I ever used to fancy it could be, as
a little chap," he said after awhile.  "I'll
remember it when I'm back in—Argyll."

"Why in the world are you in such a hurry
to get back?" asked Cary.

"Oh, there are some things to be looked out
for, and accounts to be gone over with
Mactier.  I couldn't do without him."

"No, indeed.  You're going to stay there
during the winter, I suppose.  You'll go back
to London for the season?"

"I guess not this year," he said.  "I'm not
much on the society act."

"You'll be lonely—won't you?"

Trevelyan stopped and beat his foot against
the sand and looked down at it.

"Oh, I've been a lonely kind of a chap all
my life," he said in a matter of fact tone.

Cary caught her breath quickly, turning
away that he might not see her face.

"It's all my own doing," he went on.  "I
know it.  I never was very sociable.  I fancy
I was born cross and horrid and crooked."

He laughed a little.

Cary turned to him and she put out her
hand and for a moment it rested on his sleeve.
He looked down at her upturned face, on which
the moon was shining.  A faint smile was
folded around her mouth, hiding the pity
beneath.  She shook her head.

"Oh, no, you're not!" she said.  "You're
brave and you're strong, and some day—"

He looked into her eyes.

"Yes—and 'some day'?"

"You're going to do something fine!"

He shook his head in denial.

"I lost my chance," he said slowly.

"You will have another," she said, the hope
of all the world in her voice.  "We all have
our second chance."

"Not like that—not like those Highlanders—" he
broke off and his hands came up swiftly
to either side of the lifted, moon-lit face.  He
could have crushed it, white and radiant as it
was, between his hands; he could have kissed
and kissed and kissed it!

And then his hands came up slowly, and he
held her face as gently as the Captain would
have done.

"I am going to take you back to the house,"
he said, looking down at her.  "You are
shivering.  I might have known you would
take cold."

She shrank back, trembling from the dumb
anguish in his eyes, and covered her own with
her hands.

Why couldn't he have been with the Highlanders?

He drew one of her hands slowly down.

"Don't," he said; "Don't act so.  Did I
hurt you?"

She shook her head.

He raised the hand he held to his lips and
he kissed it passionately, holding it close
against his mouth for a moment, as though to
seal the kiss there.

"I'm awfully glad you believe in me," he
said, "I'm awfully glad for that 'some day'
you think of.  Shall I tell you about a 'some
day,' too?"

She nodded in silence.

"Well, then, 'some day' you'll marry just
like all the girls do, but you'll marry some out
of sight fellow—" he broke off, and retraced his
steps to the house, adjusting his military walk
to her slower one.

She pulled at the edge of her shawl.  She
was thinking if it had not been for Trevelyan,
Stewart would have been at the Dargai Hill.

She bent her head as she entered the strip of
wood, and the twigs felt out caressingly and
touched her dress as she passed.  The breath
of the one red rose on her bosom came up to her
like the voice of love, and over her white face
there stole the faintest color of the rose, and
she breathed quicker, remembering the music of
the flute.

Stewart turned from the long window.  He
could see them emerging from the darkness of
the wood into the moon-lit open.  Trevelyan
had spoken to him of Cary but what if Cary
cared for Trevelyan after all!  And he laid the
silent flute away.





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   \X.

.. vspace:: 2

At midnight Trevelyan stumbled blindly
into the railway carriage, without a
backward glance at Stewart, who had
insisted on taking the long, dark drive to the
station to see him off.  Once in the darkness
Trevelyan had put his hand heavily on Stewart's
knee, and leaned back and stared into the
blackness ahead.  All that Stewart had ever
been to him—all that they had ever been to
each other, swept across him.

Out there with the plague and Mackenzie,
his eyes would ache for a sight of Stewart's
strong, kind face, but Stewart would not know.
Out there, in the shadow of death, he would
remember Stewart, and his heart would cry out
passionately for him, but Stewart would not
know.  And he would think of Cary—how he
would think of her—of her and Stewart.  He
would think of them together.

If he might only tell Stewart what this
parting meant—that it was longer than he
dreamed—and that he was not merely seeing
him off to Argyll.

But what right had he to speak?  Stewart
could not change his decision now; nor his
uncle, nor his aunt, nor his father, were he
home, nor all London, nor—Cary.  They
would grieve when the letters came to them,
but they would be spared the pain of parting.
It was better so.

It was toward the evening of the next day
when he reached home, and after he had
finished his dinner he went into the big library,
walked over to his desk and unlocked it.

"Now for it," he said briefly, and he sat
down and began sorting papers, preparatory to
going over them the next day with Mactier and
his barrister, Mr. Granger, whom he had wired
to come from Edinburgh and meet him at home
the next morning.

He worked far into the night, and the next
day it was the same.  Literally he set his house
in order.  Granger returned to Edinburgh on
the evening train, and Mactier received his
instructions—in silence, shifting his old cap
between his fingers, but not looking up to meet
Trevelyan's eyes.

Then Trevelyan had dinner.  After the meal
was over he tried to rest but he could not, and
he went out into the hall and began to walk
up and down—swiftly.  There was no other
sound in all the house but his rapid walking.
Solitude enveloped him and the home of his
people.  Once he stopped and looked at the
armor on the wall; once he opened the front
door and stood on the steps staring into the
night.  The Pleiades were brighter and further
off he remembered, thinking afterwards, than
he had ever seen them; but the rest—the stretch
of winding drive and lawn and trees lay
wrapped in profound shadow and appeared
unreal; only the Pleiades and the beating of the
surf against the crags, seemed the things that
existed.

The night air was cold and he went in and
back to the library, and put another log upon
the flickering blaze, and as the wood caught
fire warmed his hands with the heat.  After
awhile he lighted his candle and went upstairs.

The next morning he said good-bye to the
tenantry; in the afternoon he packed his grip
and the few things needed for the coming
journey.  In the evening he wrote half a dozen
letters—brief notes telling his father and his
aunt and uncle of his intended return to India.
They were all worded much the same.  The
old spirit of restlessness was on him.  He
wanted excitement.  He was running out to
India for a time to watch Mackenzie fight the
cholera.  They were not to worry.  He expected
to have a great time of it.  His note to
John was even briefer, but it was more serious
in tone.

.. vspace:: 2

"DEAR OLD JOHNNY:—" it ran:

"Good-bye.  I'm off for India again.  You
see I can't keep away from it.  I suppose it's
on the order of a man wanting to return to the
scene of his murder.

"I'm a lucky dog, and of course I expect to
return, but the plague isn't always considerate
of persons, and there's the hundredth chance.
I expect to come back and live at home myself.
Still Granger has the will.  If I don't you're to
have the old place.  You'll come to it
sometimes—hey; and have an eye on Mactier?

"I guess you were about right about my
quitting the Service.  I wasn't fit.

"After all, if I hadn't turned coward and
lost my grip on myself, you'd have been with
the Highlanders at the Dargai Hill, and
Cary—

"Well, that don't excuse me.  I don't mean
it as an excuse.  I've never been worth a
shilling or made anything of my life, but I've
thought a lot of you—always.

.. vspace:: 1

"Good-bye,

.. vspace:: 1

"ROB."

.. vspace:: 2

And then Trevelyan drew forth a clean sheet
of paper and stared hard at it.  What was there
to say to Cary!

He dipped his pen in the ink.

"My Love," he wrote, and then stopped
short, and stared at the words.  Then he
crumpled the sheet fiercely in his fingers and
flung it into the fire.

"My dear Cary," he wrote, trying again,
and then he laid down his pen and laughed
harshly.  The black letters stared back at him
like small demons, grinning derisively.

The third time he started without a heading.

.. vspace:: 2

"I've written to the rest," it began, "and
they will tell you of my plans.  To you,
however, I want to say something more.  Now,
that I am writing, there seems little to say to
you, and yet, I'm human enough—if you will,
coward enough still—to have you, at least,
know that I have not been altogether candid
with the others.  I understand the danger.  It
is because of the danger that I am going.
There's no glory in it, and I don't want any
fuss, but there are our men in want—it's
something for the Service.  You understand—don't
you?

"I was afraid of making you sad that night
on the beach if I told you, and I selfishly, too,
wanted you to myself, as you always were, and
untouched by worry.  I shall think of that
walk with you, and the moonlight on your face,
and the music—!  After all, Johnny's the only
fellow fit for you.  You don't mind my saying
so—do you?

"The sea was quiet that night—as quiet as
you were, and my heart was the only tempestuous
thing on the beach; and your face, oh,
Cary,—your face!

"There's no telling, of course, but I've a
queer notion I'm not coming back—ever any
more, as we used to say as children; but the sea
will go on beating against the crags here—home
on the Scottish coast, and perhaps by and
by you'll be able to understand the song?

"I love you, but I don't love you as I did.
It's the Service, first, somehow.  Am I building
up the broken pieces, do you suppose?  It's
a job—isn't it?

"But my heart is breaking over this letter!

"There!  I don't want to make you sad.
There's nothing to be sad over.  The tangle
is just getting unsnarled; and you know there's
an end to every thread—

"There's a big empty space on the wall of
the gallery here.  If you would *let* Johnny
hang your picture there!  If you'd give him
the right!  And the sword—would you mind
keeping my sword?

"It's getting late.  I make an early start
to-morrow.  I enclose Mackenzie's letter.  I got
it less than a week ago.

"I shall never forget you.  I think that is all.

.. vspace:: 1

"ROBERT TREVELYAN."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XI.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XI.

.. vspace:: 2

After Trevelyan left, the household in
Aberdeen settled back again into its
usual state of placidity.

The second day after his departure was
threatening, and Cameron and Maggie killed
time by pretending to play billiards.  Malcolm
Stewart had driven into the village in the
morning to be gone all day; his wife was busy
writing to Kenneth, her youngest son, who was
tramping it through Normandy with a couple
of old classmates.  Cary was curled up in the
window seat in the library, absently watching
McGuire, the gardener, rake the path.

"Is the book so absorbing?"

Cary turned suddenly and met Stewart's
laughing eyes.

"Why, I didn't know you were there!"

"So it seems.  I've been sitting here for the
last quarter of an hour watching you—read!"

Cary flushed.

"It's a stupid old story, anyway," she
complained, tossing the book to him.  "What have
you been doing?"

"Offered to help Tom and Maggie with
billiards, but they were so deuced ungrateful
I left."

"You were a wise man," said Cary, and she
laughed.  Then she began to drum on the
window.  "If you could do anything you liked
what would you do, just at this minute?"

Stewart twirled the book he held indifferently.
"I'd kiss you," he thought, but aloud
he said meekly, "I'll watch you, please ma'am."

"Nonsense!" answered Cary, turning her
head uneasily and looking out of the window
at McGuire again.

She stifled a yawn.

"It's a lazy day, isn't it?"

"You're sure it's the day?"

"Of course!  What a suggestion.  Is it
near lunch time?"

Stewart nodded.

"How about a walk afterwards," he said.
"It's clearing and the sun's coming out.  We
might go to the Point and watch it set," he
added quickly, seeing her waver.

Cary clapped her hands.

"Truly?  You really mean it; you'll take
me to the Point at last?"

"You'll go then?"

"Of course I'll go!  I'll get on a short skirt
this minute.  See me run!"

She jumped down from the window seat like
a delighted child.

Stewart caught at her hand as she passed
and detained her.

"I haven't the right to ask," he said quickly,
looking up into her face with his grave Scotch
eyes, "but were you thinking of Robert when
I spoke to you?"

"Yes," said Cary, not looking at him.  "I've
been thinking of him all day."

Stewart let her hand drop suddenly, but Cary
made no movement to be gone.

"I—I can't just tell you why," she said,
pressing her hand tightly over the one Stewart
had held, and keeping her eyes fixed on a bust
of Burns, "but I feel—somehow, and I suppose
it's foolish—we—we won't see him again
for a long time."

Stewart leaned forward, looking up again at her.

"I haven't the right," he said, "and you
needn't answer me, but—*is* it Robert, Cary?"

A long shaft of breaking sunlight came
through the window and touched her shoulders
and her hair.  The quiet of the room was
absolute.  She still pressed the hand he had held
with the other.

"It isn't Robert," she said, and her voice
was lower than its wont, and she did not meet
Stewart's eyes, "I—" and then she ran swiftly
from the room.

She would not meet his eyes all during lunch,
and she insisted on devoting herself to
Cameron, much to Maggie's inward amusement.

"There's something in the air," Maggie
confided to Cameron after lunch; "I just feel it
pricking—like pins.  It's something to do with
John and Cary.  Now what *do* you suppose it is?"

She laughed, meeting Cameron's eyes.

"What *do* you suppose it is!" he repeated
banteringly.  "I'm *sure* I don't know!"

"Johnny's taking her to the Point this afternoon!"

Cameron sighed heavily.

"Well, that means 'good-bye' to Johnny!"

Maggie wheeled around suddenly on him.

"What a way to talk!"

Cameron pulled her to him gently by the
shoulders, until he could look down into her
face.

"Perhaps—that is—will you go with me to
the Point to-morrow, Maggie?" he asked.

.. vspace:: 2

"Is it not too late in the year to try the
Point?" asked John's mother anxiously, as
he and Cary started out.  "The days are
shorter now, and then there is the tide, and the
danger of a mist, you know!"

Stewart studied the skies critically.

"It seems straight enough, but, of course,
if you're going to worry, Little Madre—"

"Oh, of course not.  I'm just foolish.  Go
along with you both," and she pushed them
gently away from her with a laugh.

"We won't stay long on the Point," Stewart
said when they were well on their way.  "It
would be a nasty thing to be caught in a mist
out there."

Cary pushed a small stone along with the
toe of her walking boot, and was silent.
Indeed she scarcely spoke all during the walk to
the Point.

If he *had* been at the Dargai Hill, she kept
thinking, if—he—had!

She followed Stewart out to the extreme
end of the peninsula, and she stood quietly
listening as he pointed out to her, how in high
tide the waters met across the narrow neck and
isolated it from the mainland.  Sometimes, he
told her, the waters swept across the island so
left, and he showed her where they had come
up and left their mark upon the trunks of the
trees.

And then the spell of her silence fell upon
him and they stood quiet and motionless,
looking out to sea.

They waited so, for the sun to sink slowly
behind the distant line of the horizon, and they
watched the big white clouds change and
clothe themselves in the pink and purple of the
coming sunset, like air nymphs getting ready
for a ball.  The quietness of the day's death
was on them.  Once or twice they spoke.

"It reminds me of the Point, at home," said
Cary once.

He smiled.

"I knew it would," he answered.

She sat down on a big rock at the end of the
Point and looked up at the changing clouds.
He walked a little way down to the water's
edge and then he came back slowly.

The vision of the Highlanders and the
Dargai heights, that had haunted him since
Trevelyan had gone, faded.  There seemed to
be nothing in the world that mattered except
her sitting there on the big gray stone, with
the water lapping at her feet, and the glow of
the sunset on her face.

He watched her as she looked toward the
sinking sun, and after it had disappeared he
stole up behind her and stooped over her,
calling her by name, softly, as though afraid the
sea and pines would hear.

She looked up, and then her eyes went back
quickly to the afterglow.

The incoming tide lapped softly against the
rocks on the shore, and drew nearer.  The pink
and purple of the clouds changed to a delicate
gray, that deepened as the moments passed;
and from the sea there stole landward a thin
white vapor, as exquisite as a bride's veil, but
growing thicker and thicker as it came nearer.

Stewart, following the direction of her eyes,
straightened himself suddenly with the
alertness that comes with the consciousness of
danger.

"It's the mist," he said, briefly.  "Come."

He took her hand and held it, and when she
would have drawn it away, he tightened his hold.

"You need my help," he said sharply.
"We've got to get out of this just as quick as
we can!"

The white vapor, grown thicker, crept up
behind them, and Stewart changed their rapid
pace into a run, but the mist caught up with
them, and by and by surrounded them and hid
the sea behind them and on either side, and the
narrow neck in front.  He urged her on over
the two miles that lay between them and the
mainland.

After awhile he felt her hold on his arm relax.

"I—can't—go—so fast," she panted.  "I—I—"
and her voice trailed off and was lost in
the heaviness of the mist.

He stopped and began to talk rapidly, and
he rubbed her cold hands as he spoke.

"You must," he said sternly.  "We can't
stop here.  Don't you know the sea may cover
the peninsula, and that the tide is coming in,
and is cutting off the neck?"

She nodded.

"I'll try again, oh, I will try!"

She staggered on—blindly, clinging to him.
He could feel the cold, tense pressure of her
fingers, and it thrilled him.  She could feel the
strong touch of his hand, and it reassured her.
Neither could see the face of the other.

And still the tide crept in on either side of
the narrow peninsula.  It was the only thing
he was conscious of—except her presence and
her danger.

If he could lead her from out of this mist!
If he could save her!  If he could reach the
neck in time!  His heart burnt within him,
and cried out in passionate protest that he
seemed so powerless—he who loved her so!

He drew her hand closer and he bent over
her for a moment, his face near to her own.
They could see each other's faces so,—faintly.

"Dear," he whispered, and his heart was in
his voice.

She clung to his hands, trembling.

If he would only tell her that he loved her,
the waters might sweep over the narrow neck
before they two reached it!  But he did not
speak again.

The land tapered off, leading to the neck,
and he felt the ground grow moist beneath his
feet.  He went forward, keeping her at arm's
length, but afraid to let go her hand, lest he
should lose her in the mist.  He put down his
foot and he could feel the water creeping up
around his boot and filling it.

"The tide is covering the neck," he said
briefly, stooping down and unfastening his
boots, after which he stood upright, breathing
deeply, to gather all his strength.  Then he
came closer to her and stooped and raised her
in his arms and rose again, pressing forward.

She pressed her hands on his shoulders, and
struggling, tried to push herself free.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asked.

"Afraid of you!" and she laughed, but the
laugh was swallowed up in the mist.

"Then you must let me carry you across."

"What do you think I am?" she asked
fiercely.  "Let you carry me with that wound
in your back!  I am as strong as you!"

She struggled again to free herself.

"Oh, no, you're not," he cried gladly, "and
you'll be safer so!"

"What do I care for safety when your life
is in danger?  We'll face it together.  Let me
down and you—you—I'll let you lead me
through—" her voice broke in a sob.

The silence of the years was broken by her
sob.  He let her slip down, holding her closely
still, and then he drew her face to his, and
kissed her.

"I love you," he whispered, "I love you,"
and he laid his cheek against her own, cold with
the damp of the mist, and then he drew her
nearer to the waters.  "Come on, dear," he
said brokenly.

They could feel the tide creeping around
their feet, and it came up almost to the woman's
knees.  Still she clung, struggling, panting, to
his hand, as he led her into the deeper waters.
Once she brought his hand that was leading
her up to her face, and he felt her lips upon it.

"I love you," she said clearly, and the words
pierced the mist, reaching him.

"Come on, dear," he said again, and still
brokenly, leading her to where the tide ran
swiftest.

The waters were up to her waist, and she
was chilled and benumbed, and her clothes
dragged on her, and she was weary with the
weariness of death, but she did not know it.
She still clung to his hand.  And then as the
waters grew deeper:

"Will it hurt?" she asked, and when he
did not answer her, "There!  I am not afraid."

Her voice was stronger than he had ever
heard it, and sweeter; but the strength and the
sweetness of it, were like crushing weights
upon his heart and brain.  She could speak
so—when the waters were growing deeper!  Moisture
not of the mist or the sea sprang to his face
and bathed it.  And then the agony her words
had caused—lifted.  She did love him then;
loved him with a deathless courage.  Let the
waters cover them, and the mist draw the folds
of its mantle over the level sea!

Suddenly he stopped and lifted his head,
breathing quickly.

"The ground's higher," he cried.  "We've
reached it—the mainland!"

She did not call back to him, but she placed
her free hand over his that held hers, and he
could feel the added pressure of thanksgiving.

Little by little they could feel the waters
receding.  Now they were down to his knees
again; now they were at his feet—conquered.

He drew her into his arms and he called her
by name.  She did not answer.

"Aren't you going to speak to me?" he
asked, bending over her.

She stroked the shoulder of his coat slowly
with her cold, wet hand.

"I—I—what must I say?"

"What I have been waiting all these years
to hear—what you said a little while ago—that
you love me," he answered, looking into her face.

She bent her head and laid her cheek against
her hand on his shoulder.

"I do," she said.  "I love you—" her voice
broke.

He waited.

"I love you," she repeated, clinging to him.
"I have loved you for months.  I have been
foolish for you!  I have been frightened to
have you out of my sight; to have you do
anything when I was not along for fear you would
get hurt in some way!  I've imagined all kinds
of things that could happen to you—I am so
foolish—I love—"

The words came up to him, choked, and he
had to lean closer over her to hear.

She faltered, lifting her face from her hands.

"*Yes?*"

"I dreamed last night you were at the
Dargai Hill—that you were killed, and I awoke
sobbing in the darkness.  I am—so foolish.
I knew it wasn't true—" she turned her face
away and wiped her eyes.

"And you love me—like that?" he asked slowly.

Behind them the tide crept in, covering
portions of the peninsula and all of the narrow
neck.  Around them the mist lay heavy.

"But you were not frightened a little while
ago and you were in danger then."

She shook her head.

"No; I was with you—we were together,"
she answered him simply.

He stroked her damp hair, unconscious alike
of the tide and the mist, drinking in her words
thirstily.

"Then it isn't Robert!" he said more to
himself than to her.

"No," she said again.  "I think it has been
you always—and I didn't know it.  I think I
have been waiting for you always.  Robert
showed me that it was you!"

He was silent, waiting for her to go on.

"If it hadn't been for your danger when you
were ill from the wound, I mightn't have ever
known.  And if you'd been at the Dargai
Hill—" she stopped and stretched out her arms,
and put them around his neck, and looked into
his eyes.  "Oh!  I couldn't have borne that!
I'm selfish, but I couldn't have spared you even
for the Service!"

The vision of the desolate years he had
planned and thought of—the years devoid of
service—and the memory of the useless uniforms,
hidden away, and the sabres, useless too,
crossed on the wall at home, faded, and he laid
the dead memories at her feet.

"This compensates—" he broke off, kissing
her in silence.

After awhile he drew her arm through his
and started to walk slowly.

"You must get home and get on dry
clothes," he said.

And he helped her up the steep embankment
and into the road that led home.

The tide reached its flood and turned.  The
sea's low song came to them muffled by distance,
and was lost in the darkness behind them.
The heavy mist lifted slowly, and through the
rifts, one by one, the stars appeared, peeping
down at them like little children peeping from
the coverings of their cribs; and by and by the
moon stole from behind a cloud and moved
slowly between the twinkling stars, as a nurse
steals from behind a shadowy curtain and
moves softly from bed to bed, to see if the
children sleep.

He led her in silence through the great
wrought-iron gates and up the drive, toward
the lighted house, looking down into her
uplifted face with his grave eyes.

And he kept looking at her all during dinner.
Once she looked across at him—and smiled.

Later she complained of being tired, and she
rose to go to bed.  Stewart lighted her candle
and waited for her at the foot of the stairs,
after the fine old custom of his people.  Not
even Malcolm Stewart, as the elder host, ever
thought of lighting Cary's candle.

Stewart handed it to her as she came up to
the great stairway and stopped.  To-night he
did not offer to shake hands.

She took the candle and then slipped by him
quickly.  He called her back.

"Aren't you going to say 'good-night' to
me?" he asked, a smile creeping around his
mouth.

"Why—yes.  Good-night."

He leaned over her and kissed her.

"Good-night," he said, and his voice was
suddenly grave.  "I hope your dreams will
be sweet."

She sighed—a sigh of happiness, and she
looked down at the burning taper in her hand.

"Then they will have to be of you."

She did not speak for a moment; afterwards
she lifted her eyes from the burning
taper and looked into his.

"I love you," she said again, and she
repeated the words over and over as a master
plays over and over a bar of sweetest music,
and she put out her hand and pressed her
fingers against his cheek.  They rested
there—closely—for a minute.  "I love you so!"

Then she gathered up her long silk skirts
and began slowly to mount the stairs, the taper
lifted carefully before her.  She did not look
back, but he could see her face, even in the
shadow of the grim armor, by its light.  And
on her white face there rested a perfect peace.
Once a draught caught the flickering taper and
nearly extinguished it.  She stopped and,
dropping her long skirts that fell back upon the
oaken stairs with a silken rustle, she shielded
the taper with her hand.  So would she shield
the light of her pure life and her wifehood
from the world's breath, he thought.

He stood leaning against the bannister,
watching her until she vanished, and he stood
there after the soft silken rustle of her skirts
and her faint footfall were lost, staring at the
last turn in the stairs.

And in western Scotland, Trevelyan sat, his
head bowed upon the letter he had just
finished to Cary.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XII.

.. vspace:: 2

It was spring before Trevelyan could push
forward into the lowland section, and
on to the interior and Mackenzie.  The
reports of a threatened cholera scare had
reached down as far as Patna.  There were
Britons coming every day from farther inland
to Patna, grateful enough for the privilege of
having passed the government line of precaution,
and being allowed to stay there; but a
British subject, who was neither ordered there
by command of the War or Colonial Offices,
was another matter, and Trevelyan was
regarded with a blank curiosity by those who
knew his proposed destination.

There were a good many technicalities and
difficulties to be surmounted, too, in the
question of getting inward as far as the precaution
lines, that would have discouraged anyone less
determined than Trevelyan.  It had seemed
simple enough—to get there—after the journey
had once been begun, but the actual reaching
Mackenzie was another matter.

The delay, under which he fretted inexpressibly,
only brought more serious accounts of the
spread of the disease.  A score of natives had
sickened and died—traced directly to the
foulness of the water used—and later there were
contradictory reports as to the appearance of
the scourge within the barracks.  The waiting
days became a torture to Trevelyan, and it was
not until he had scaled the wall of obstacles,
and was well on the other side, pressing onward
to Mackenzie, that the torture lifted.  The
fear—half formed and never acknowledged—of
possibly not getting to Mackenzie, fell from
him as mile after mile took him further from
Patna and nearer to the garrison, and once or
twice he laughed a little as he kept picturing
to himself Mackenzie's surprise at this personal
answering of his letter.

There were other pictures that would force
themselves on him at this time, but he fought
them from him with a strength grown with
much usage.  There were pictures of Cary's
face—white with the whiteness of the moon upon it
and sweeter than the fairest flower—there were
pictures of home and old Mactier, mourning
for him, and visions of the sea beating against
the high, gray crags.  It seemed to him he
could hear and see it even then, inland as he
was, until he would force himself back to
present things and the desolate waste land through
which he was journeying; the stricken section
to which he was going; the cholera and
Mackenzie.  And he would hold his wandering
thoughts sternly in check, as years ago he had
held in check the stallion he had conquered and
was wont to ride.  And so the day would pass
in a desperate struggle against self, or his
desire to press onward to Mackenzie.

It had needed all his powers of eloquence;
all his strategy; all the hard discipline of
repression taught by the Woolwich years, to get him
so far on his journey, and he had thought with
a certain grim satisfaction that all the
Woolwich years were paying back their debt to him,
at last.

It was early in the morning when he reached
the small inland Station.  His presence caused
a good deal of comment among the troopers
he passed on his way to Mackenzie and the
improvised hospital that had been erected a
long distance from the barracks.  The whole
thing was strange; the new faces that he met;
the awful sense of a growing horror that
brooded like a bird of prey over the Station with
its handful of men—placed out here by order
of government officials far away and safe
enough in London—struggling against the
threatened devastation to the ranks.

He found Mackenzie in the small ill-constructed
apothecary shop and he stood still a
minute, studying his friend's haggard face and
heavy eyes, before the surgeon was aware of
his presence.  Mackenzie was weighing
morphia, and three times Trevelyan saw his hand
shake and spill the white powder before he was
able to divide it in correct proportions.

"Mackenzie," he said evenly, not wishing
to startle him.

The surgeon turned sharply and looked at
him.  Then he leaned against the table, his
back to it, his hands gripping its edge.  He
leaned forward a little, frowning.  He had had
a hard night of it, but—

"Mackenzie—it's I—Trevelyan.  Don't you
remember me?"

Trevelyan went forward.

Mackenzie's long, lean fingers suddenly
relaxed their grip on the edge, and he sat back
against the table.

"Good heavens!" he said, slowly.

Trevelyan went up and slapped him on the
shoulder.

"I got your letter and it just stirred up my
fighting blood.  I packed my grip—and,
presto! here I am."

Mackenzie was silent.

"Come; haven't you anything to say to a
chap who has been traveling thousands of miles
to get here?  Aren't you glad to see me?"

"*Glad to see you?*" Mackenzie lifted his
haggard eyes from the floor to Trevelyan's face,
"*Glad to see you*—in this pest house?  You're
the maddest fool God ever made!"

Trevelyan drew down the corners of his mouth.

"Perhaps I am," he said, "but I've come;
and I've come to stay."

Mackenzie laid a heavy hand on his shoulder
and Trevelyan could feel the pressure of the
long thin fingers through his coat.

"You are not going to stay one hour," he
said, in a low voice, "not—one—hour; do you
hear?  There're new cases breaking out every
day; it's going to play the devil!  If you're
thinking of suicide, go back to London and
blow your brains out, or throw yourself into
the Thames—that's more romantic, still.
There's nothing romantic about dying of
cholera.  It isn't a pretty way to die!"  Mackenzie
laughed, harshly.

Trevelyan put his hand up to his shoulder
and forced away Mackenzie's grip.

"I'm not hunting suicide or death either,"
he said briefly, "and I'm not mad.  I know
perfectly why I'm here—and what I'm here for,
and I'm going to stay."  He paused a moment
and then went on hurriedly, forcing back the
tension in his voice.  "Do you think I've been
traveling and squandering money for weeks,
and 'pulling strings' to get here, and being
delayed at Patna, to be turned back now like a
whipped boy turned out of school?"

"But you don't know what it's like—"

"I guess I'll find out quick enough.  Look
at you—ready to drop, and then refusing help!"

Mackenzie put his hand up wearily to his
forehead and pressed it there tightly.  The
lines cut by lack of sleep on his haggard face
relaxed a little.

"It's nothing.  I'll be all right when I've
gotten some sleep.  You're not needed.  There's
Clarke, and the orderlies—" he broke off.

"Yes?"

Mackenzie bit his cheek and brought down
his hand heavily on the table.

"I don't need you.  Will you go?"

"No."

Mackenzie turned and went back to the
morphia scales.  Something in the work he was
doing and the way he was doing it struck Trevelyan.

"Where's the apothecary?" he asked briefly.

Mackenzie balanced the scales carefully.

"Sick," he said.

"Where's Clarke?"

Mackenzie added a fraction of morphia to
the scales.

"Sick," he said.

"And the helpers—the orderlies?"

Mackenzie put down the scales, suddenly,
and stared at them.

"Half sick," he said.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XIII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XIII.

.. vspace:: 2

The long days crept slowly by at the
Station and through the infected district.
as horses driven by Death, mercilessly,
tired by their task, and yet urged on continually
to break through the breastwork of care
and precaution raised by Mackenzie and
Trevelyan, so that the course of their charioteer
might sweep onward to the outlying districts
and turn the scourge, local as yet, into a
devastating epidemic.

"Anything to keep the barracks clear of it,"
Trevelyan had thought and said, and Mackenzie,
grown silent with the effort of the fight,
nodded without speaking, forcing away from
him the remembrance of the epidemic he himself
had been through, and the stories once told
him by his father, who had helped beat back the
scourge on the Ganges in '63.

Each hour was freighted with unspeakable
horrors, and Trevelyan learned to know the
course of the disease almost as well as
Mackenzie himself.  He knew the first symptoms;
he knew with an instinct that rarely failed, just
the cases that were liable to pull through, and
those that were liable not to; he could foretell
the signs of the *collapse*, when the face would
become cold and gray, the finger tips and lips
and nose livid; the eyes deeply sunk and
bloodshot with the dark rings beneath; the breath
without any sensible warmth when caught on
the hand; the scarcely audible beating of the
heart;—the apathy that was itself a death.

The haunting shadow of his crime was
driven back and back by the absorbing matter
of the hour, and even Cary's face—moon-kissed—seemed
indistinct and far away, as he went
about his tasks.  It seemed developed on a
plate, hidden in the dark room—the innermost
recesses of his soul—to be produced and
worshipped now and then when courage weakened
and the heart languished and grew sick.

He would recall it, at night sometimes,
when he had flung himself down for a few
hours of rest, and he would press his fingers
over his eyes as though to hide from sight the
memories of the day's horrors and the day's
deaths, and the face would come to him then,
and his soul would look upon it as on some
dream of heaven.

And then the memory of her face would
fade, and he would let it slip away from him,
as though knowing it had no place here—midst
the cholera scourge, and he would fall
off to sleep and sleep exhaustedly.

The days held but one purpose, but one
thought—his service to the men, and he
sometimes wondered how even the service of the
hour had a power to hold him, stronger than
the memory of her face.

In those days, when each morning saw another
man added to the inmates of the hospital,
it was all reality—grim, terrible and as strong
as the death he fought; and he and Death kept
on the fight, and even when Death won, his
triumph seemed petty and incomplete because
of this man's courage, which he could neither
break nor bend.

It was when Death had seemingly withdrawn
his presence a little way that Mackenzie, one
morning motioned to Trevelyan to come outside
to the entrance of the hospital.  He spoke
to the point—a necessity taught him long ago
when he had first joined the army and helped
fight the Asiatic scourge for the men.

"Five cases have broken out ten miles
in-country.  You know what that means—a
general mowing down and spread of the disease
unless it is strangled right away!  I can't leave
the men here, or go any distance from the
barracks for fear—"

Trevelyan looked at him squarely and nodded.

"Of course not, and you want me to go?"

"Clarke isn't fit yet, and I couldn't let him
go anyway.  Could you go?"

"Sure."

"And take charge of things?  I'll send you
some helpers, and perhaps run over for an
afternoon later to see how you're getting on."

"All right.  When am I to start?"

"Could you go to-day—now?"

Trevelyan brought his hand up to his forehead
suddenly in the old salute, a shadow of a
smile in his eyes.

"Yes, sir."

Mackenzie looked away and stood silent a
moment.

"It hardly seems as though I could spare
you," and then quickly, "You understand
about the calomel and how to use it?"

"Yes."

"And Trevelyan—"

Trevelyan stopped suddenly as he was walking
away, and turned.

"Well?"

"And just when the morphia's needed, and
when it's judicious to give the opium, calomel
and white sugar—and about the salt
injections in the veins?"

"Yes."

"And Trevelyan—"

Trevelyan wheeled around, stopping short
again.  Mackenzie was still looking away.

"Well?"

"And, for God's sake, be careful!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XIV.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XIV.

.. vspace:: 2

It was one thing to help fight the scourge
with Mackenzie in the military hospital,
crude as it was, where things were
carried on with a certain nicety and regard to
military discipline that was stronger than even
the demoralizing dread of the hour; but it was
another matter to fight it, and crush it, and
stamp it out, alone, in the midst of half a
hundred panic stricken natives, who knew neither
military discipline nor paid proper attention
to the precautionary measures of the disease.

Trevelyan had never possessed the quality
of conciliation; it had been either one side of
the line or the other.  He had always reduced
things to their smallest denomination at once,
with no intermediate measures.  And the quality
became now a practical and living thing, as
he forced the natives to bow before him in
obedience, and brought order out of chaos.

It was not altogether the exact application
of the military organization learned at
Woolwich, or the inspiration of the rally he had
dreamed of, that would fire his men, he told
himself grimly, as he worked among these people,
but it answered for it, and it brought them
into subjection to his will.

He held them in control, as the pilot holds
in control the ship he steers, guiding it
through the madness of the gale, and they
never dreamed of mutiny, because they feared
him more than they feared the cholera.

And by and by when they saw that he held
the scourge in check, his hand upon its throat,
they fell down before him in all the pitifulness
of ignorance and superstition, as before a being
mightier than they had ever conceived of,
worshiping him.  But they were at his feet always.

Mackenzie, shrewd and silent-tongued, took
in the situation at a glance, when he rode over
for an afternoon, a fortnight later, to see how
Trevelyan was getting on.

"He's the biggest man I ever knew," he
said to himself as he followed the orderly who
was leading him to Trevelyan.

He found Trevelyan stooping over the small
rigid figure of a native baby, his hand still
resting on the tiny wrist where the pulse had just
stopped its slow beating.

Mackenzie came in and stood on the other
side of the child, and Trevelyan raised his head.
He showed no surprise at Mackenzie being
there.  In his face was all the unutterableness
of the horror; in his voice was all the passionate
protest, all the crushing dread, all the grief,
that he had never shown before.

"*It—is—awful!*"

Mackenzie nodded.

"Yes," he said.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XV.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XV.

.. vspace:: 2

Three weeks later, when it seemed as
though the battle had been won,
Trevelyan got a hasty scrawl from Mackenzie.

It had been carried by a man of the regiment,
who had ridden the ten miles on a dead
run, and now stood exhausted before Trevelyan,
his face twitching with the fright born
of the tidings he had brought.

Trevelyan took the note in silence and he
looked hard at the man's face before he opened
the message.  Then he bent his head and
forced the paper open, still without comment.

.. vspace:: 2

"Eight cases broken out in barracks.  If
you can leave—come.  Mackenzie."

.. vspace:: 2

He crushed the note in his hand.

"My respects to Dr. Mackenzie," he said
quietly, raising his head and meeting the eyes
of the trooper, "and I will be with him to-night."

He spent the morning in arranging matters
and leaving orders with his chief helper, who
was to remain for a time, more as a precautionary
measure than for anything else, and
then made his own scant preparations in haste
to get to Mackenzie before nightfall.

He had thought first of slipping away,
fearful of what the knowledge of his going might
bring, but the more he thought of it the more
he put the idea from him.  After all the truth
was the wisest.

He called all those of the half hundred
natives together who had been spared of the
scourge—most of whom he had fought death
for, and he addressed them in Hindostanee.
He spoke to them simply and briefly; he told
them what they must do—not why they must
do it, but simply because he ordered them to,
and expected their obedience—relying on the
worshipful fear with which they regarded him.

"If I hear of your disobeying me—and I
shall hear it, for my ears are long and sharp—I
shall come back and I will kill the dog who
dared to disobey my commands, and you are
to obey and do just what the *Sahib* I leave
here tells you to do—do you understand?"

A low murmuring of assent greeted him,
and one or two of the women held their babies
up that they might look upon the great *Sahib*
who was leaving them for a time; who was
wise enough to know ten miles off if anyone
disobeyed him; who was strong enough to kill
the dog who tried to disobey his great commands.

And the murmuring of their voices followed
him as he rode away from them later, and the
echo of their "*Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!*" haunted
him, not knowing that in the years that lay
ahead, the native mothers would tell their
babies of the greatness of the Sahib who once
had come to them.

The shadows, the children of the sunset, lay
thick upon the road, over which he journeyed
back to Mackenzie, and in the silence he began
to think of England and of Scotland, and of Cary.

He thought of them all then, in the pause
that came between the struggle he had just
passed through and the struggle that lay ahead,
as he had not had the time or peace to think of
them since he had left Patna.  Nor did he try to
force the thoughts from him as he had done
on leaving Patna, but he went in search of them
as a father goes in search of little truant
children hiding in the dark, and brings them back
and holds them close with caresses.

He brought the vision of Mactier forth so,
and he went over every familiar gesture, every
tone of Mactier's voice he knew; he called up
the mother-face of his aunt, the soft pressure
of her hand; and he thought of his uncle and
Maggie and Kenneth, and of Stewart—lingeringly—and
of his father.

And then he brought forth the picture plate,
buried in the dark room of his soul, and he
thought of her; and he thought, and thought
of her!  He held the dream picture up
between him and the light of the dying day, and
once he put out his hand slowly and it rested
lightly in the air, but in his dream it rested
on Cary's head.  Once he raised his head
suddenly and sharply, and he breathed quicker
than his wont.  The night shadows crept up
and peered into his thin, lined face with the
dark-circled eyes; and though he was alone
with only the air touching him, in his dream
his face was close to hers.

And back of the dreams was the echo of the
ocean on the crags.  But the dreams and the
echo faded as he came within sight of the
military hospital, and the thoughts receded back
and back into the darkness before the new
necessity of the hour; but the truant children were
not lost, only hiding from him, and peering at
him from the shadows and waiting for him to
come and look for them and take them home.

He dismounted, hardly conscious of the
greetings the men gave him as they crowded
around him, and he went at once to Mackenzie,
as an officer reporting for duty.

Mackenzie looked at him sharply as he
entered.  The full beard he had grown had
changed him, and would have hidden the loss
of flesh and the haggard lines to any other
than Mackenzie.

"You don't look fit to go on with the job,
boy," he said concisely.

Trevelyan laughed.

"That's absurd, don't you know?  I'm all right."

"It's more than you look—you're all pulled down!"

"You're dreaming!  Tell me about the barracks!"

And Mackenzie told him—briefly.

All night he and Mackenzie and Clarke
worked over the new cases, resting by turns,
and in the morning two other men were brought
in.  One was the trooper who had borne the
summons to Trevelyan.

The cases developed slowly, and with an
effort that had in it something of the
supernatural, they kept it from spreading into the
mow down of an epidemic.  But the men were
sick—sicker than any had yet been, and out of
the proportion stricken, the mortality was
frightful, and Death's twin brother, Fear, laid
his heavy hand upon the district.

The men were good, on the whole, as to
precautionary measures, for they held Mackenzie
and even Clarke in wholesome awe, but they
regarded Trevelyan with something greater
still.  They were ashamed before him—ashamed
to mention their fear, or even think it,
as he came and went among them, silent,
commanding, and unmoved by fear.

Mackenzie or Clarke could not have spoken
so to them—silently.  They were at their own
business.  They were supposed and expected
to meet disease and death, daily, hourly if
necessary, and not be afraid.  But Trevelyan was
not a surgeon; he had come out to them to serve
them in their extremity—voluntarily—without
military command, and they grew to think
of the scourge after a while as they would have
looked upon a hostile tribe to be conquered—as
an enemy to be vanquished for the Queen.

And as though the lessening of their panic
was the sign for the dying out of the scourge,
the cholera cases decreased as the days wore
themselves away.

It was toward the end of the desperate fight
that they had made that Mackenzie came in
one day at dawn, to relieve Trevelyan's watch
over the half dozen cases in his wing of the
hospital.  He noticed that Trevelyan looked
oddly white, and that there was a drawn
expression about his mouth and face.

"What is it," he asked.  "Aren't you feeling well?"

"Why, yes; what made you ask?"

"You look——"

"It's the daylight and the sickly candle,"
Trevelyan answered shortly as he rose to leave.
"McHennessy, here, has put in a night of it.
See you later."

Once outside in the narrow passage Trevelyan
leaned up stupidly against the wall.  His
head was hurting him violently and was colder
than the hand he pressed against it, and a
sudden deadly nausea seized him.  He stared hard
at the wall opposite and made a movement as
though to call Mackenzie.  Then he drew back
and waited.  A numbness crept into his legs,
and it seemed to him to deaden all his power.
After awhile the seizure passed and he
stumbled over to the apothecary's room, and he
began to measure out the old prescription of
the morphia and calomel and white sugar.
What was the good of calling Mackenzie when
Mackenzie could do nothing more for him
than he could do for himself?  Then he went
into an empty room kept for emergency cases
at the end of the building, and flung himself
down.

After awhile the deadly nausea returned and
he sat up and crawled to his feet, and went back
to the apothecary's room and measured out
the prescription again—three hours was the
limit between doses, and his watch said that
the three hours had passed.  He believed the
watch had lied, and that it was thirty hours
instead.

Mackenzie opened the door and stood transfixed
on the threshold.  Trevelyan conscious
of the movement turned and started violently.

"What are you doing?"  Mackenzie's
voice was terrible in its hardness.

Trevelyan held up the scales with a
trembling hand, and he made an odd sound in his
throat that was intended for a laugh.

"Measuring morphia!  What do you suppose?"

Mackenzie came up close to him, and his
horror-stricken eyes looked straight into
Trevelyan's sunken ones.

"Who for?"

Trevelyan was silent.

"Answer me!"

Trevelyan shook his head piteously, and a
ghastly pallor crept slowly up over his face
and into the hollows of his temples and his
cheeks.

"You're ill, and you didn't call me!"

"What was the good——"

Trevelyan swayed forward.  When he spoke
again there was an apology in his hoarse voice
because he was ill.

"It's the nausea," he said simply.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XVI.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XVI.

.. vspace:: 2

Mackenzie went in search of Clarke.

"Drop everything and come with
me," he said.  "It's Trevelyan—Trevelyan's
got the cholera."

Clarke took a long breath.  Then he called
to two passing orderlies.

Mackenzie led the three of them back to
the apothecary's shop, as a soldier would have
led a squad of men forward to meet an enemy,
his face hard with the control he had put upon
it, but it changed suddenly as they reached
Trevelyan and picked him up and bore him
down the hall.  He allowed them to do so
unresistingly, falling back into their arms a dead
weight.  They staggered under it.  He made
no comment until they reached the door of the
surgeons' room.  Then he shook his head.

"Not there," he said.  "Take me in with the men."

"But you'll be ever so much more
comfortable here," said Clarke, still breathing quickly
under the weight of his portion of the burden.

"You'd better let us take you in here, lad,"
said Mackenzie, bending over him.  "You'll
get well twice as quick and it's quieter, and the
nausea will pass——"

"It's the cholera," said Trevelyan, in a clear
calm voice.  "Take me in with the men."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XVII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XVII.

.. vspace:: 2

All day Mackenzie sat by Trevelyan,
scarcely leaving him, except to make
his rounds; Clarke and the orderlies
taking charge of the two small wards and the
needs of those there.  And all day Mackenzie
sat stoically looking off into space or turning
to feel Trevelyan's pulse or watch the change
of his face.  There was not a shadow of a
change he did not watch and note.  Trevelyan's
great form lay motionless—deadened by
morphia, the occasional twitching of the limbs and
the heavy breathing, the only signs of life.
Now and then, as the effect of the morphia
lifted, he would turn his head restlessly and
murmur incoherent things, or call for water,
and Mackenzie would force a teaspoonful at
a time of the cool liquid between the rigid lips.

Once Trevelyan's hand went up with a
spasmodic motion to his throat, and the
movement pulled and tore aside the covering across
his chest, and exposed to view the white scar
on his shoulder.  Mackenzie leaning over him
to replace the covering, was attracted by the
sight of the old wound, and he hesitated and
leaned a little nearer, examining it.

A sudden death-like quiet brooded over the
ward, and the minutes lengthened and still
Mackenzie leaned over the unconscious figure,
his eyes fixed on the scar.  By and by he
looked at Trevelyan's gray and sunken and
unconscious face, and a swift change passed over
his own impenetrable features, and he drew the
covering quickly over the scar, as though he
were ashamed.

Clarke came in and Mackenzie straightened
himself and turned to meet him, his hand upon
the covering that hid the scar.  There was
something defiant in the attitude.

Clarke came up and stood on the other side
of the bed.

"What do you think of it?" he asked.

"I don't want to think anything about it,"
Mackenzie answered shortly.

"But his chances?" asked Clarke after a
little.  "Has he got any show?"

"He's got a damned bad case," said
Mackenzie, "and no strength to fight it with.  I
knew it would be just this way if he ever got
it—he'd have it *bad*!  There's nothing half way
about him!"

Clarke tapped his foot against the floor and
looked down at it..

"How he could have loved some woman," he said.

Mackenzie turned his head slowly and
looked at Trevelyan.  Once he had seen a look
in Trevelyan's eyes—  When he spoke it was
as if he were thinking aloud.  "How he loved
some woman!"

Trevelyan moved restlessly and opened his
eyes, and looked at Mackenzie and Clarke and
then back to Mackenzie.  There was nothing
in his face that led them to suppose he had
heard.

Mackenzie leaned over him.

"How are you?"

"Deuced bad," Trevelyan said slowly, and
then the nausea returned.

The man in the next bed began to moan a
little.  Trevelyan turned to Mackenzie, a frown
upon his face, as though he was trying to place
the sound.

"What is it?" he asked.  "What's that noise?"

"It's McHennessy—you'd better let us
move you into our room."

Trevelyan shook his head.

"I suppose it's a blamed silly notion, but
I'd rather be with the men."  And then he
stretched out his cold hands suddenly and
grasped Mackenzie's convulsively, "The pain,"
he said.

Mackenzie looked up at Clarke and nodded
to the question in the other's eyes.

Mackenzie took out his handkerchief and
wiped the great beads off Trevelyan's forehead.
When Clarke returned with the morphia, the
nausea had come again.

Trevelyan waved Clarke aside.

"I don't want it," he whispered hoarsely.
"I couldn't keep it down anyway,
and—I—don't—want it!"

And when he was not to be persuaded
Mackenzie let him back slowly on the pillow.

All night the nausea lasted, but in the early
morning there came cessation for a time, and
Mackenzie left Clarke with him, and went to
snatch a bit of sleep.

Clarke watched by him in silence—dumb
with the terribleness of it all; dumb with his
own powerlessness to help—and Trevelyan
was grateful for the cessation and the silence.

When the cessation came his thoughts went
out to Cary, and they drew the memory of her
face to him.  It was in truth a dream of
heaven—and real, untouched by the thralldom of the
morphia.

He was growing weaker—he could feel the
ebbing of his strength—and he did not care.
In the morning he had fought against it, as he
had fought everything all his life—passionately,
but now with the cessation and the
coming of the dream face, he did not care.

He clung to the vision of the dream though,
fiercely, as though fearing it would escape him
and be lost forever.  He had loved her, and
he loved her still!

His love for her had been as a mountain
that has been stripped in a storm of its fairest
foliage; that has been wrecked by a great fire
which has swept it of all its rarest beauty,
leaving only the bareness of the boulders, but
withstanding the wreck of the storm and the fire.
So his love had stood and endured as a sample
of the Eternal Handiwork—a basis of his life,
as is love the basis of the life of the Everlasting.

He was conscious of the clasp of Clarke's
fingers on his wrist, and the sudden appearance
of a frightened orderly with the intelligence
that Burns, in the next ward, was worse,
and would he come at once; and he was dimly
conscious of Clarke's bending over him and of
his telling him to go to Burns, but he still
clung to the vision of the dream face.
Desperately he clung to it, even when the blessed
cessation suddenly ceased, and it seemed as
though he was being engulfed in a great abyss
of unspeakable agony, and he kept his thoughts
upon it as a crusader would have kept his
dying thoughts upon the unattainable quest.

And then he became dimly conscious of a
low moaning sound and he lay still trying, to
place it, because Mackenzie was not there to
tell him what it was, and he had forgotten
what Mackenzie had said it was, but he still
tried to concentrate his thoughts on the dream
face that was growing faint and fainter.  The
effort was a complete failure, and the low
moaning increased.  He fixed it slowly as
coming from the next bed.  He turned his head
toward it weakly.  The incoherent ravings
became a piteous and conscious cry for water.

The gray dawn crept in slowly and up to
the trooper's bed, and by its light Trevelyan
could see him turning his head restlessly from
side to side.  Still the cry for water reached
him.

It did not seem to affect him much at first,
or pierce the consciousness of pity, but it
annoyed him, and it kept coming between him
and the dream face he was struggling so
desperately to hold.  And then it struck on him
suddenly like a blow and he awoke to the man's
anguish and the man's need—how often he had
answered to that need and cry before!  He
looked toward the farthest corner of the room
where an orderly lay sleeping from exhaustion.
The man was half sick anyway, from
a recent attack of the scourge.  He did not
want to call him; but if he would only
awaken—if he only would.

He waited.  There was no sound from the
corner; there was no movement in the hall that
would tell of Clarke's return, and the low cry
went on.  Since the day he had joined
Mackenzie he had followed and responded to that
cry as the soldier follows and responds to the
first low notes of the bugle.  He pushed
himself over to the edge of the bed and tried to sit
up but the motion increased his agony and he
lay still.  He wondered blindly if he could do
it.  Then he let himself roll over the side of
the bed and his big frame fell with a dull thud
on the rough boards of the floor.  He lay there
a second, but there was no movement from the
corner.  He pulled himself up, took half a dozen
steps toward the water bucket in the near
corner, and then the cramp came back again
in his legs, and he fell forward, and began to
creep toward it on his hands and knees.  The
dream face was fading and being swallowed up
in a breaking crest of white sea foam, and there
seemed to be nothing in the world but the man's
cry and his own pain.

He reached the bucket and he dipped in the
glass that stood near and filled it, and then
began his slow journey to the man's bed.  By the
deepening light in the east the man could see
the great creeping figure approaching, and he
drew back, afraid.

"It's only I, McHennessy.  I've got some
water—" the voice trailed off, but the trooper
caught the word "water" and he struggled to
a reclining position and waited.  The figure
moved so slowly and his throat was a burning
sheet of flame!  Why didn't he come faster—what
was the matter that he didn't come faster;
and McHennessy's blood-shot eyes were
riveted on the slowly moving figure.

Trevelyan reached him at length and pulled
himself up with a supreme effort, with the glass
balanced very carefully in his hand.  He was
striving—striving too—after that elusive
dream face.

He leaned over McHennessy with the water,
and McHennessy with a sigh of ecstasy struggled
up in his bed and leaned forward to touch
his parched lips to the glass.

Trevelyan brought it up nearer and his hand
wavered.  He controlled it with a great effort
of will for a moment, and then the glass
trembled and its contents were spilt over
McHennessy, and the glass crashed into shivers
as it fell to the floor beside the bed.  Trevelyan
flung out his arms suddenly, groping for
the dream face that had gone.

The orderly, awakened by the crash, started
up and ran over to where Trevelyan lay on
the floor by the side of McHennessy, who was
swearing over the unexpected bath, and as he
staggered beneath Trevelyan's weight,
Mackenzie came quickly forward from the threshold
of the door.  Together they carried Trevelyan
back to bed and Mackenzie silently drew the
coverings over his rigid body and stood
looking down at the livid lips and listening to the
slow, feeble breathing.  Once he picked up the
hand that lay on the outside of the covering
and examined it, and then laid it back in its
resting place.

.. _`"*Trevelyan lay on the floor.*"`:

.. figure:: images/img-324.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: "*Trevelyan lay on the floor.*"

   "*Trevelyan lay on the floor.*"

Clarke who had heard the glass break,
hurried in from the adjoining ward.  Mackenzie
looked up as he entered.

"*Collapse?*" asked Clarke briefly.

Mackenzie did not seem to hear him.

"Bring the salt—it's just a chance," he said.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`3-XVIII.`:

.. class:: center large bold

   \XVIII.

.. vspace:: 2

The light deepened in the east and the
sunrise crept into the ward of the
hospital and turned its search light
curiously on the group in the furthest corner
of the ward, and on the still figure on the bed.
All morning the sunlight lingered around there
as though it wanted to help Mackenzie in his
fight, and impart into the chill of the rigid
figure, some of its own warmth, and when the
afternoon shadows came and drew it off, it
retreated lingeringly, loath to say "good-night."

The shadows deepened and the quietness of
midnight fell over the weary Station and the
outlying cholera hospital.  Mackenzie
continued to sit by the bed.

The quietness outside crept in to meet the
silence of the ward, and the night lamp cast
strange shadows on the wall, at which
Mackenzie stared.  Once or twice he got up and
visited the other beds and leaned over the men.
Most were pulling through and were sleeping.
McHennessy was drowsy with the morphia.
Then Mackenzie would go back and sit down
again by Trevelyan's bed.  At midnight,
Clarke, with eyes heavy with sleep, came in.
He did not speak but he looked down at
Trevelyan and then up questionally to Mackenzie,
and at the syringe and the salt lying near by.

"It didn't work," said Mackenzie.  "If
you'll listen to the lungs you'll know
why—pneumonia."

"You'd better go and rest a bit.  I'll
stay—I won't leave him," said Clarke, blinking
at the light and wondering at the quietness of
his own voice.

Mackenzie looked hard at the flickering
night lamp.

"No," he said slowly.  "I guess not."

After Clarke had gone back to their room, the
surgeon riveted his eyes on Trevelyan's sunken
face, and once he put his hand out quickly and
pressed it over the bloodshot eyes, but the lids
opened again and would not remain closed.
The slow labor of the feeble breathing went
on.  The almost imperceptible rise and fall of
the great chest fascinated Mackenzie, and he
found himself watching for it feverishly,
hoping and yet dreading for it to cease.

While it was still dark he rose and went
over to the window and looked out fixedly at
the impenetrable pall of blackness that lay over
the Station and the hospital.  It seemed as
though the heaviness of the blackness was over
all the world.

By and by the night pall lifted a little, and
a dull grayness crept into the heavens and
rested on the station.  He could dimly
distinguish the outline of some of the military
buildings.  He turned away and went over to
the lamp that was smoking and lowered it.
From the trooper's bed came a low moaning.

He paused to speak to him and then he went
back to Trevelyan, and looked down at him,
his eyes fixed on the great chest, watching for
its slow rise and fall.  Somehow he could not
see the rise and fall—they did not seem to be
there.  He bent over him quickly.

"Trevelyan!" he called sharply.

The trooper in the next bed ceased moaning
and raised himself on his arm painfully, and
looked over to where Mackenzie was standing.

Mackenzie knelt down suddenly on one knee,
and his hand passed rapidly from Trevelyan's
forehead to his pulse.  The trooper in the
next bed began to moan again.

Mackenzie laid his ear down quickly to the
heart, an expectant look upon his face.  Then
he raised it slowly and bit his lip and stared
hard through the window to where the
barracks were defined against the paling
grayness of the sky.





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The sunshine of the early summer lay
heavy like a cloth of gold across the
rolling Scottish country, and Stewart
turned away abruptly from its brightness and
stared down at the floor of the railway
carriage.

All night he had lain awake, grasping
fiercely at the bit of paper that had summoned
him to the office of the Secretary for India,
while his brain with equal fierceness refused to
accept the tidings which had met him there.

He was dumbly grateful, however, for the
friendship and the kindly interest that had
led the Secretary, for his father's sake, to send
for him, and for the time that busy man had
taken, and the consideration that had shielded
him from seeing the latest cholera reports
pasted up at the Office or in the columns of the
press.

Some day he would thank the Secretary as
he should.  Just now it seemed to him his
brain had become a burning blank, and that
the fire was as unquenchable as it was mighty,
forbidding thought.  Once, twice, a dozen
times he tried to picture Trevelyan as he had
known him, but Trevelyan's face would not
come.  He could not recall one line of it—he
could not recall his voice—his slightest
gesture; and he vaguely wondered if he were
going mad, and when the rumble of the iron
wheels would cease.

He was conscious of being grateful for the
stopping of the noise, when he descended
from the carriage, in the early light of the new
day, to make his last connection with the local.

The local was late some two hours—it
seemed to him twenty—and a feverish
impatience came upon him to reach home and have
it over with.  The new faces around him were
strange and looked at him curiously.  There
was a lean Scotch collie that sniffed at his heels
and tried to make friends with him, and a small
Scotch laddie, rosy-cheeked and freckled, who
regarded him wonderingly from a safe
distance, his forefinger in his mouth.  Stewart
noticed it was clean; he supposed it was too
early for it to be covered with the conventional
coat of dirt.  The boy looked a little sleepy
too.  He wondered why he felt so wide awake
himself.  The collie licked at his boot.  He
neither encouraged nor rejected the familiarity.
He simply ignored it.  The morning sun was
growing warm, and a bright patch of it
touched the dress of the child.  \* \* \*

The local came around the curve and he
got into the carriage, mechanically picking out
his usual seat near the window.  Force of
habit is strong.  There was a bit of rolling
hillside and an old kirk down by a little
stream he always looked out for.

He was alone and he was glad.  The train
jerked and backed a little and then fairly
started on its run.  It passed the hillside and
the old kirk at the foot of the slope, and the bit
of water that for a moment flashed the brightness
of its sunlit surface upon his vision, and
was gone.  For the first time the landscape
failed to please.  Beyond the old kirk was
another slope—a slope of heather, just putting
forth its early pink; and though he could not
see it he knew that just where the old road
curved up to the kirk, the bracken grew.

Then the reaction came and his inertia broke
and the burning blank became a sheet of
memory.  Trevelyan had loved the bracken and the
heather so.  As a laddie he had played among
them and hidden himself—short kilts and
all—beneath their bloom.  Once he had gotten lost,
and they had vainly searched for him, but
Stewart slipping away unnoticed, and led by
unerring instinct, had found him fast asleep
down there—his head pillowed on the bracken
and a faded scrap of heather in his small moist
hand.  And now the bracken might bloom on,
and the sun might shine upon it by day and the
stars smile down upon the heather slope by
night, and the mist rest upon it, turning it to a
mystical sheet of grayness and of silver—but
Trevelyan would never walk across the slope
again, and Stewart leaned his head against the
window and closed his eyes.

All night the train had moved so slowly and
he had dumbly longed that the iron wheels
would hasten that he might reach home soon;
and now that the home station in Aberdeen was
nearly in sight, a sudden sickness seized him
and he prayed for a delay.

He had wired ahead for Sandy to meet him
with the trap instead of the cart in which he
usually came for the mail.  He had sent the
message to Sandy instead of the family, and
had bidden the Scotchman be silent about his
unexpected return from London.

It was a comfort, he reflected, that Sandy
could be trusted to hold his tongue.  He felt
he could not bear to have them meet him at
the station.  He could not tell them there,
neither could he play a part so long—until they
should reach home.  He was trusting to that
seven mile drive to collect himself.  He hoped
Maggie would not come with Sandy—as she
sometimes did—to get the mail, especially when
Cameron was away.  Well, he would trust to
Cameron's being there, and to Sandy now—

He remembered the mail and the papers
would arrive with him—he was glad for that
in a dull way—if he could only reach home
before the papers, he had thought before
leaving Waterloo Station.

His father was in Glasgow with Kenneth.
He could not spare them.  There would be
the Little Madre to be told, and Maggie and
Tom Cameron, and Mactier—poor old
Mactier—and Cary—he wiped the moisture from
his mouth—and Trevelyan's father lately
returned from the far East—God help him.  God
help them all!

The local stopped.  Through the window
he could see Sandy waiting for him with the
trap on the other side of the track, quieting
the restless horses; Maggie had not come.

He got out—how he never afterwards
remembered—and he stored his Gladstone safely
away beneath the back seat, waited for the mail
bag to be put in, and then climbed up with a
nod to the red headed Scotchman and a "how
are they all?" mechanically asked.

The old Scotchman looked at him curiously,
as the child and the collie had done, and he was
distinctly annoyed at being stared at.

The blacks, with their heads turned homeward,
made good progress over the road—too
good, Stewart thought, and once he sharply
bade Sandy draw them in.  Then as if
ashamed of his impatience he inquired as to
Sandy's daughter, who had been ill.  Sandy
answered the question briefly, realizing that
talking came amiss to-day, and then gave his
attention to checking the rapid pace of the
blacks, who were eager to get home.

The morning sun beat down upon them,
but it seemed to Stewart that he was turned to
ice and that he would never feel any warmth
again.  The station lay five miles or more
beyond the point of home, and when he repassed
the slope of heather and the old kirk road
where the bracken grew, he turned his eyes
away.  It seemed to him he could never look
upon or touch either the bracken or the heather
again.

And the old road!  Once they used to
travel it together; they had traveled it in their
earliest babyhood and again that dark night
when Trevelyan had been brought from Argyll
to make his home with them—a little, lonely,
motherless lad of ten.  They had crossed the
old bridge so often; they had crossed it
together that last time—*the last time*—and he
had never known!  He held on fast to the
back of the seat in front, and moved his head a
little—restlessly—as though it hurt.
Henceforth there would be no more "togethers."

Sandy cleared his throat.

"There's naething wrong, I hope, sir?" he
asked a little timidly, but unable to bear the
silence longer.

There was no answer.  They were passing
the heather slope and speech was not.  And
then Sandy, with an instinct not unusual in his
race turned half around and blurted out:

"'Tis bad news ye've had from India, sir?"

Stewart looked past Sandy to the big fir that
marked the boundary line of home, and nodded;
and then he suddenly dropped his eyes and ran
his finger, shaking as though with palsy, along
the patent leather strip that bound back the
corduroy of the seat.

"Mr. Trevelyan's ill," asserted Sandy,
unwilling to acknowledge the thought that came
to him and which he knew was true.  "You're
going to bring him back to Aberdeen—"  Sandy
hesitated.

Stewart looked away.

"Mr. Trevelyan will not come back to
Aberdeen, Sandy—" he broke off.

The blacks trotted briskly over the road and
the warm sunshine rested on the meadows and
brightened everything but the big dark fir
ahead.  Somewhere in the copse near by a bird
was singing.

The long home avenue was deserted except
for McGuire, who was carefully clipping in his
precise way the border of the walks, and
McGuire leaned upon his shears, wondering why
the young master had passed him with no sign
of greeting.

There was no one else around.  The house
stood big and still in the sunshine, and the
deserted terraces sloped away—like a vast piece
of greenest velvet.  Some of the windows
were open, and from one of the upstairs
casements a white curtain was fluttering in the
breeze.  It was his mother's room.  A
restful quietness brooded over everything.

There was no one in the hall, flanked with
its weapons and armor and paintings, and no
sound from the breakfast room.  Breakfast, he
supposed, was long over.  He had had none
himself, but he was not conscious of the lack.

Someone was coming down the stairs.
Stewart paused, a sudden heat replacing the
chill that had possessed him until now.  The
sound came nearer and he recognized the
halting step of Trevelyan's father—Trevelyan's
father, who still bore that scar from Inkerman.





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   \XX.

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Trevelyan's father stopped when
he reached the foot of the stairs.

"Why, hello, boy, when did you
get back?  Thought you were in London for
a fortnight."

"I thought so, too, sir, but you see, I—"

"Ho-ho, that's it, is it?"  His uncle laughed.
"Well, I can't blame you.  She isn't here,
though—out with Maggie for a walk."  He
looked up quizzically into his nephew's face,
and then he looked away abruptly.  Robert,
too, loved the girl.

"Is she?" asked Stewart absently, and he
turned toward the library, conscious that in the
morning it was deserted, and that he could tell
him there without fear of interruption.  "The
fact is, sir—"

Trevelyan's father stopped short and looked
his nephew over.

"What is it?  What's the trouble?" he
asked concisely.

"Who—with me, sir?  Nonsense; I'm all right."

"Was it Sir Archibald or that bit of
diplomatic work?"  The old man smiled grimly.

"Sir Archibald!  I'm dismissed from his
books long ago, sir.  The diplomatic work
promises well.  By the way, have you heard
the latest from Essex—"  He sat down
easily on the arm of a big leather chair and
lounged across it; his face in shadow—.  "It's
reported that Davidson is going to raise that
dead and buried claim again."

"'A fool and his money—'" said the old
officer, and sat down.

"Where's the Little Madre?"

"Out listening to Margie's woes.  If her
rheumatism don't carry her off soon I'll be
inclined to do the job myself.  Your mother is
turning into her slave!" said his uncle testily.

"Margie's rheumatism isn't any worse than
Ann Grafton's stiff knee or Sam's lame back,"
replied Stewart, swinging one foot against the
side of the chair.  "Mother always has been at
the mercy of the tenants."

How was he to begin, he wondered.

He mechanically commenced to pull off his
gloves.

"See here, John—" he glanced up quickly
at Trevelyan's father sitting in a black walnut
chair carved a hundred years ago, his face
shining out weather-beaten and grim from the dark
background, and his voice more decided than
Stewart had ever heard it—"Why did Robert
leave the army?"

A glove dropped and lay at Stewart's feet
unnoticed.  He moved restlessly.

"Why shouldn't he?  He had served his
sub-lieutenancy.  He got his commission—"

"To resign it.  Exactly!  Why?"

"He never liked the Army, sir; it was
always the Navy with him from the first—"

"Is he with the Navy now?"  The old
officer tapped the floor impatiently with his
heavy stick.  "Why is he in India doing an
orderly's work instead of in the line?"

"Did you ever know Robert to stick to
anything very long, sir?"

"Only one," said the old Briton shortly, and
he thought of Cary.  "You haven't answered me."

Stewart rose, and his tone was final.

"Indeed, sir, it is not for me to say."

Trevelyan's father clasped his hands over the
knob of his stick, rested his chin on them and
looked up at Stewart from under his shaggy
brows—curiously.

"Well—well, since you won't, you won't, I
suppose!  I'll have to wait until Robert comes
back—"

Stewart wheeled abruptly and went over to
the east window.

"After all, the boy is his own master,"
Trevelyan's father said.  "He's whimsical and
headstrong, too—" he broke off—"Everything
was all straight, though—his getting out,
I mean?"  The deep eyes peered anxiously
from the old officer's weather-beaten face.

Stewart remained at the window, looking at
the stretch of lawn.  For the first time since
his interview at the Secretary's, his voice was
broken.

"You need not be ashamed of Rob."

The old Briton drew a deep breath and he
laughed a little—"After all, nothing else
matters!  I was sure of it!" and then again,
"I—was—sure—of—it!"

Stewart began mechanically to count the
number of rose bushes at the end of the
terrace, and he made a great effort to steady his
voice.

"By the way, this last idea of Robert's—this
cholera business—is a risky thing.  Do
you ever feel anxious, sir?"

"The boy's foolhardy, but he's got sense—"
the Briton frowned.

"But even sense sometimes——"

The room was still.  A bit of summer
sunlight sifted through the oriel window.  From
the distance crept in the murmur of water
breaking on the sand.  McGuire was busy at
the rose bushes near the terrace and the decided
"click" of his shears and the soft music of the
sea, were the only sounds that broke the quiet
of the room.

"*John!*"

Trevelyan's father rose and stood rigid by
the old carved chair.  Young Stewart turned
and leaned against the woodwork.  He grew
afraid and trembled.  He could not look upon
that face.

"*Robert!*  That is why you have come back?"

He nodded.

The sunlight still sifted through the
windows and played fitfully around the walnut
carvings of the room and touched for a brief
moment a bronze paper weight of the Dying
Gaul.  Someone standing in the open casement
window at the south, stirred a little, and
then Cary came swiftly down the length of
the long room.  A bit of heather from the
armful she had gathered on the slope slipped
from the bunch.  The rest she threw upon the
table as she passed it, and it lay there—its first,
faint pink shining out against the black walnut.
She went and stood by Trevelyan's father,
resting her hand upon his arm, and she looked up
into his face.

"I left Maggie—I came ahead—I overheard—"
she began disjointedly, "Robert—the
cholera—Robert—?" and then as neither
of the men spoke, she cried, "Oh, sir, indeed
it may be a mistake—sometimes, you know the
names—"

Trevelyan's father looked down at the girl,
and into her eyes full of unshed tears, and on
the small white hand on his arm he placed his
own—the one that had held the sabre at
Inkerman.  It was an old hand, thin and vividly
veined, and it trembled.

"The report was signed by Mackenzie,"
said Stewart at last.

"There is some mistake—there *must* be—the
letters—" cried Cary.

"We will have to wait for the letters,
child."  Trevelyan's father turned away.

Stewart came up to her.

"It was at the India Office yesterday—the
Secretary—after all—" he broke off.

She looked from one to the other, but she
still stood by Trevelyan's father.  Suddenly
she sat down in the high backed chair he had
occupied, clinging to his hand, her eyes on his
face.  Stewart went back to the window.

"But think what he did——"

Trevelyan's father looked down at her again
and his face twitched.

"He was always a brave laddie," he said,
and his face was wet with tears.

Cary raised the hand she was holding and
pressed it to her cheek, and she held it
there—brown and thin and heavily veined—against
the delicate texture, and caressed it in the way
that women have.

"He was a great soul.  I always knew
it!  I—always—knew—it—" she told them
brokenly.

"He was a Briton," said the old officer of
the Empire.  "I didn't always understand
him—I blamed him for doing an orderly's work.
I'm proud of him—but if it had been anything
but the cholera—I saw it once myself in
Bombay; I ran away from it—" he raised his head,
"anything but *that*!  But—I'm proud of him!"

Stewart still stood by the oriel window leaning
against his arm flung over his head, and he
was crying—hardly and bitterly as a man cries.
The stillness of the outside world increased.
The sun crept into the corner of the room.

"I can't quite take it in—" said the old man
slowly, looking past the girl to a far-off field of
thistle and staring at the purplish bloom.  "It's
hard to think of Robert—gone!"

And then:

"I can't think of the rest—the details—" he
clenched his hands fiercely, "the pain—the
thirst—" and his eyes came back to Cary.
"There!  There!  There's something about it
all that we can't understand, I fancy, but there
is the honor—that thing which does not perish
with the using!"

He turned abruptly, and when Cary, half
fearful for him, would have followed, he
motioned her away, and went out alone on the
back terrace.

Stewart had not moved from the window,
and Cary went and stood beside him, gravely
looking out at the sunlight shifting on the
lawn.  She did not say anything, but as though
conscious that they were alone, he spoke, his
face still hidden on his arm.

"I did it," he said at last in a broken voice
of confession.  "I *did* think to help him best by
making him get away from the old crowd and
the regiment—but it was because I thought of
the Service, too—and I judged *him*——!"

She waited, and she did not speak, but she
slipped one of her hands into the pocket of his
tweed coat and held on to it.

"I broke his life—he loved *me* better than
that—" he began.

"Do you call a life that ended *so*—broken?"

He raised his face from his arm and looked at her.

"No—no—I didn't mean that—but think of
my judging him!  All last night it came back
to me—I thought I was going stark mad."  And
he brushed away the tears clumsily.

"It all hurts *so*!  But, by and by—" she
looked straight out of the oriel window, and
she spoke disjointedly, and somehow she
thought of western Scotland, and his sword.
"I knew when we got those letters from
Argyll—when I got my letter—Rob wasn't coming
back to us."

Stewart drew her to him.

"Oh!  Cary, tell me that it doesn't mean to
you all—all that it might have done!
Lassie—tell me——"

She smiled a little.

"You are foolish," she told him.  "You
know I love you," and then looking into his
eyes—"It is only you."

He hid his mouth against the soft coil of her
hair.

"Last night, I was almost jealous of the
dead," he whispered, "and then when I passed
the heather fields to-day—and the bracken—"
his voice broke.

"I know," she said simply.  "It is always the
bracken and the heather—and Rob—isn't it?"

From the south window the sun poured into
the room and lighted up the heavy carvings of
black walnut.  The bit of heather still lay upon
the floor and withered there.  A silent linnet
perched itself upon the window sill.

Somewhere from beyond the turn in the
wooded drive, Maggie was coming home, singing:

   |  "Some talk of Alexander,
   |    And some of Hercules,
   |  Of Hector and Lysander,
   |    And such great names as these!"
   |

A man's heavy halting step came from the
back terrace.  In the stillness they could hear
him mount the stairs.

   |  "But of all the world's great heroes—
   |    There's none that—"
   |

Somewhere upstairs a door closed.

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   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

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   *Selections from*

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   LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY'S

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   *List of Books*

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   D'ri and I

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A Tale of Daring Deeds in the Second
War with the British; being
the Memoirs of Colonel
Ramon Bell, U.S.A.

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By IRVING BACHELLER, author of "Eben
Holden."  With six illustrations by F. C. YOHN.  12mo,
cloth, rough edges, gilt top, decorated cover, $1.50

.. vspace:: 2

Following the marvellous success of "Eben
Holden," Mr. Bacheller gives to the public
another stirring and delightful story of the North
Country he loves so well.  It is a tale of the days
when the French *emigrés*, fleeing from the Reign of
Terror, built their chateaux and mansions in the
northern counties of New York; the days when England
tried issue again with the young republic, and when
Darius Olin, "quaint, rugged, wise, and truthful," with
young Ramon Bell, two types of the men who have
helped to make America, rode into the Lake Champlain
region to adventure, love, and danger.  It is a
rare story of Yankee valor, Yankee humor, and Yankee
pluck.

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Eben Holden

.. class:: center large

A Tale of the North Country

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By IRVING BACHELLER.  Bound in red silk cloth,
decorative cover, gilt top, rough edges.  Size, 5x7¾.
Price, $1.50

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The most popular book in America.

Within eight months after publication
it had reached its two hundred and fiftieth
thousand.  The most American of recent
novels, it has indeed been hailed as the
long looked for "American novel."

William Dean Howells *says of it*: "I have
read 'Eben Holden' with a great joy in
its truth and freshness.  You have got
into your book a kind of life not in
literature before, and you have got it
there simply and frankly.  It is 'as pure
as water and as good as bread.'"

Edmund Clarence Stedman *says of it*: "It is
a forest-scented, fresh-aired, bracing, and
wholly American story of country and
town life."

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When the Land was Young

.. class:: center large white-space-pre-line

Being the True Romance of Mistress Antoinette
Huguenin and Captain Jack Middleton

.. vspace:: 1

By EMILY LAFAYETTE McLAWS.  Bound in green
cloth, illustrated cover, gilt top, rough edges.  Seven
drawings by Will Crawford.  Size, 5x7¾.  Price, $1.50

.. vspace:: 2

Among the entertaining romances that are
based upon the colonial days of American
history this novel will take rank as one of the
most notable.  It is picturesque in location,
environment, and action; charming in detail and
motive; dramatic in method; virile in
characteristics; and altogether absorbing in plot and
surprises.  The hero, Captain Middleton, of
Charleston in the Carolinas, is a real man; the
heroine, Antoinette Huguenin, a beauty of King
Louis' Court, is one of the most attractive figures
in romance; while Lumulgee, the great war
chief of the Choctaws, and Sir Henry Morgan,
the Buccaneer Knight and terror of the Spanish
Main, divide the honors with hero and heroine.
The time was full of border wars between the
Spaniards of Florida and the English colonists,
and against this historical background Miss
McLaws has thrown a story that is absorbing,
dramatic, and brilliant.

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A Carolina Cavalier

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A Romance of the Carolinas

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By GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

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Bound in red silk cloth, Illustrated cover, gilt top, rough edges.
Six drawings by C. D. Williams.  Size, 5 x 7¾.  Price $1.50

.. vspace:: 2

A strong, delightful romance of Revolutionary
days, most characteristic of its
vigorous author, George Cary Eggleston.
The story is founded on absolute happenings
and certain old papers of the historic
Rutledges of Carolina.  As a love story, it is
sweet and true; and as a patriotic novel it is
grand and inspiring.  The historic setting,
and the fact that it is distinctively and
enthusiastically American, have combined to win
instant success for the book.

Louisville Courier Journal: "A fine story of
adventure, teeming with life and aglow
with color."

Cleveland World: "There is action, plot, and
fire.  Love and valor and loyalty play a
part that enhances one's respect for
human nature."

Baltimore Sun: "The story is full of movement.
It is replete with adventure.  It is
saturated with love."

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\J. Devlin—Boss

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A Romance of American Politics

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By FRANCIS CHURCHILL WILLIAMS.  12mo, $1.50

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This is a story of the typical figure in the shaping of
American life.  "Jimmy," shrewd, strong, resourceful,
clean-hearted, is vital; and the double love story
which is woven about him gives an absolutely true and
near view of the American boss.  The revelations of political
intrigue—from the governing of a ward to the upsetting
of the most sensational Presidential Convention which
this country has seen—are, as sketched in this romance,
of intense interest; the scenes and characters in them are
almost photographic.  But above all of these stands Jimmy
himself, unscrupulous as a politician, honorable as a
man—Jimmy, the playmate, the counselor, and the lover
of the winsome, clear-eyed Kate, the stanch friend of
herself and of her son—Jimmy, with a straight word
always for those who are true to him, a helping hand
for all who need it, and a philosophy which is irresistible.

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A Princess of the Hills

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A Story of Italy

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By MRS. BURTON HARRISON.  Bound in Green
Cloth, Decorative Cover, Gilt Top, Rough Edges.  Four
Drawings by ORSON LOWELL.  Size, 7¾ x 5.  $1.50.

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Mrs. Burton Harrison is a charming story-teller.
Unlike her other novels, "A Princess
of the Hills" is not a romance of New York society,
nor of Colonial times, but is a story of Italian life.
An American tourist retreats from a broken engagement
at Venice to that section of the North Italian
Alps known as the Dolomites.  Here he encounters
a daughter of the soil, the last of a noble race, but
now a humble peasant girl,—a real princess of the
hills.  The complications of the situation; the aroused
interest of the American; the rival lovers, English,
American, and Italian; the fierceness of the feud
this love engenders; the struggle for possession and
its unexpected outcome and denouement,—are told
with masterly skill and with an interest that remains
unflagging to the end.

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The Kidnapped Millionaires

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A Story of Wall Street and Mexico

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By FREDERICK U. ADAMS.  12mo, cloth, $1.50

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One of the most timely and startling stories
of the day.  A plan to form a great
Newspaper Trust, evolved in the brain of an
enterprising special correspondent, leads to the
kidnapping of certain leading Metropolitan
millionaires and marooning them luxuriously on
a Mexican headland; the results—the panic
in Wall Street, the search for the kidnapped
millionaires, their discovery and rescue are the
chief motives of the story, which has to do also
with trusts, syndicates, newspaper methods, and
all the great monetary problems and financial
methods of the day.  The story is full of
adventure, full of humor, and full of action and
surprises, while the romance that develops in its
progress is altogether charming and delightful.

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The Famous Pepper Books

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By MARGARET SIDNEY

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   The Adventures of Joel Pepper

Bound in green cloth, decorative cover.  Thirteen
drawings by Sears Gallagher.  Size, 5 x 7¾.  Price,
$1.50

As all the world knows, the Peppers grew up long ago,
but some of the
deeds of Joel are not recorded in the Pepper books,
and hence this
new one.

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   The Stories Polly Pepper Told

One volume, 12mo.  Illustrated by Jessie McDermott
and Etheldred B. Barry, $1.50

A charming "addenda" to the famous "Five Little Pepper Stories."

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   Five Little Peppers and How They Grew

12mo, illustrated, $1.50

"A genuine child classic."

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   Five Little Peppers Midway

12mo, illustrated, $1.50

"Every page is full of sunshine."—*Detroit Free Press*.

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   Five Little Peppers Grown Up

12mo, fully illustrated, cloth, $1.50

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   Phronsie Pepper

Illustrated by Jessie McDermott.  12mo, cloth, $1.50

This closing book of the now world-famous series
of the "Five Little
Pepper Books" has been enthusiastically welcomed
by all the boys
and girls of America to whom the
Five Little Peppers have been dear ever
since they first appeared in the "Little Brown House."

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   Lothrop Publishing Company - - Boston

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.. pgfooter::