The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Crucible, by Mark Lee Luther

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Title: The Crucible

Author: Mark Lee Luther

Illustrator: Rose Cecil O'Neill

Release Date: August 20, 2022 [eBook #68775]

Language: English

Produced by: Carlos Colon, Mary Meehan, the University of California and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRUCIBLE ***

# THE CRUCIBLE

## BY MARK LEE LUTHER

Author of "The Henchman," "The Mastery,"
etc., etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ROSE CECIL O'NEILL

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1907,
By INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY.

Copyright, 1907,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1907.

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

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO
ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON - BOMBAY - CALCUTTA - MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

To
E. M. R.
AN OPTIMIST

## ILLUSTRATIONS

"'A dimple will be a great handicap in my life.'"
"And, among them, Jean."
"'Do you know each other?'"
"Her knight of the forest stood before her."
"She was scoring."
"From that dear shelter she, too, foresaw a kindlier future."

## THE CRUCIBLE

I

The girl heard the key rasp in the lock and the door open, but she did not turn.

"When I enter the room, rise," directed an even voice.

The new inmate obeyed disdainfully. The superintendent, a middle-aged woman of precise bearing and crisp accent, took possession of the one chair, and flattened a note-book across an angular knee.

"Is Jean Fanshaw your full name?" she began.

"I'm called Jack."

"Jack!" The descending pencil paused disapprovingly in mid-air. "You were committed to the refuge as Jean."

"Everybody calls me Jack," persisted the girl shortly—"everybody."

"Does your mother?"

Her face clouded. "No," she admitted; "but my father did. He began it, and I like it. Why isn't it as good as Jean? Both come from John."

"It is not womanly," said Miss Blair, as one having authority. "Women of refinement don't adopt men's names."

"How about George Eliot?" Jean promptly countered. "And that other George—the French woman?"

The superintendent battled to mask her astonishment. Case-hardened by a dozen years' close contact with moral perverts, budding criminals, and the half-insane, she plumed herself that she was not easily taken off her guard. But the unexpected had befallen. The newcomer had given her a sensation, and moreover she knew it. Jean Fanshaw's dark eyes exulted insolently in her victory.

Miss Blair took formal refuge in her notes. "Birthplace?" she continued.

"Shawnee Springs."

"Age?"

"Seventeen, two months ago—September tenth."

The official jotted "American" under the heading of nationality, and said,—

"Where were your parents born?"

"Father hailed from the South—from Virginia." Her face lighted curiously. "His people once owned slaves."

"And your mother?"

The girl's interest in her ancestry flagged. "Pure Shawnee Springs." She flung off the characterization with scorn. "Pure, unadulterated Shawnee Springs."

But the superintendent was now on the alert for the unexpected. "I want plain answers," she admonished. "What has been your religious training?"

"Mixed. Father was an Episcopalian, I think, but he wasn't much of a churchgoer; he preferred the woods. Mother's a Baptist."

"And you?"

"I don't know what I am. I guess God isn't interested in my case."

The official retreated upon her final routine question.

"Education?"

"I was in my last year at high school when"—her cheek flamed—"when this happened."

Miss Blair construed the flush as a hopeful sign. "You may sit down, Jean," she said, indicating the narrow iron bed. "Let me see your knitting."

The girl handed over the task work which had made isolation doubly odious.

The superintendent pursed her thin lips.

"Have you never set up a stocking before?" she asked.

"No."

"Can you sew?"

"No."

"Or cook?"

"No."

"'No, Miss Blair,' would be more courteous. Have you been taught any form of housework whatsoever?"

Jean looked her fathomless contempt. "We kept help for such drudgery," she explained briefly.

"You must learn, then. They are things which every woman should know."

"I don't care to learn the things every woman should know. I hate women's work. I hate women, too, and their namby-pamby ways. I'd give ten years of my life to be a man."

Her listener contrasted Jean Fanshaw's person with her ideas. Even the flesh-mortifying, blue-and-white-check uniform of the refuge became the girl. Immature in outline, she was opulent in promise. Her features held no hint of masculinity; the mouth, chin, eyes—above all, the defiant eyes—were hopelessly feminine. Miss Blair's own pale glance returned again and again upon those eyes. They made her think of pools which forest leaves have dyed. The brows were brown, too, and delicately lined, but the thick rope of hair, which fell quite to the girl's hips, was fair. The other woman touched the splendid braid covetously.

"You can't escape your sex," she said. "Don't try."

"But I wasn't meant for a girl. They didn't want one when I was born. They'd had one girl, my sister Amelia, and they counted on a boy. They felt sure of it. Why, they'd even picked out his name. It was to be John, after my father. Then I came."

"Nature knew best."

Jean gave a mirthless laugh. "Nature made a botch," she retorted. "What business has a boy with the body of a girl?"

The superintendent lost patience. "You must rid yourself of this nonsense," she declared firmly, and said again, "You can't escape your sex."

"I will if I can."

"But why?"

"Because this is a man's world. Because I mean to do the things men do."

"For some little time to come you'll occupy yourself with the things women do."

Jean's long fingers clenched at the reminder. The hot color flooded back. "Oh, the shame of it!" she cried passionately. "The wicked injustice of it!"

"You did wrong. This is your punishment."

"My punishment!" flashed the girl. "My punishment! Could they punish me in no other way than this? Am I a Stella Wilkes, a common creature of the streets, who—"

The superintendent raised her hand. "Don't go into that," she warned peremptorily. "If you knew Stella Wilkes in Shawnee Springs—"

"I know her!"

"Don't interrupt me. I repeat, if you know anything of Stella's record, keep it to yourself. A girl turns over a new leaf when she enters here. Her past is behind her. And let me caution you personally not to speak of your life to any one but myself. Remember that. Make confidences to no one—not even the matrons—to no one except me."

Jean searched the enigmatic face hungrily. "I doubt if you'd care to listen," she stated simply; "or whether, if you did listen, you'd believe!"

Something in her tone penetrated Miss Blair's official crust. "My dear!" she protested.

The girl was silent a moment. Then, point-blank, "Do you think a mother can hate her child?" she asked.

The superintendent, by virtue of her office, felt constrained to take up the cudgels for humanity. "Of course not," she responded.

"My mother hates me sometimes."

"Nonsense!"

"At other times it's only dislike," Jean went on impassively. "It's always been so. Dad got over the fact that I was a girl. He said he would call me his boy, anyhow. That's where the 'Jack' came from. But mother—she was different. I dare say if I'd been all girl, like Amelia, she could have stood me. She was forever holding up Amelia as a pattern. Amelia would get a hundred per cent. in that quiz you put me through. Amelia can sew; Amelia can embroider; Amelia can make tea-biscuit and angel-cake."

"And what were you doing while your sister was improving her opportunities?"

"Improving mine," came back Jean, with conviction. "Why didn't you ask me if I could swim, and box, and shoot, and hold my own with a gamy pickerel or trout?"

"Did your father teach you those things?"

"Some of them."

"And to affect mannish clothes, and smoke cigarettes with your feet on the table?"

Jean flaunted an unregenerate grin. "You've heard more than you let on, I guess. But you wouldn't have asked that last question if you'd known him. He wasn't that sort. I did those things after—after he went. I didn't really care for the cigarettes; I mainly wanted to shock that sheep, Amelia. Besides, I only smoked in my own room. I had a bully room—all posters and foils and guns. That reminds me," she added, with a quick change of tone. "That woman who comes in here—the matron—took something of mine. I want it back."

"What was it?"

"A little clay bust my father made."

"Was he a sculptor?"

"No, a druggist; but he could model. You'll make her give it back?"

"Is it the likeness of a man?"

"Yes, of dad."

"The matron was right. We allow no men's pictures in the girls' rooms, and the rule would apply here."

Incredulity, resentment, impotent anger drove in rapid sequence across the too mobile face. "But it's dad!" she cried. "Why, he did it for me! I never had a picture. Don't keep it from me; it's only dad."

The official shook her head in stanch conviction of the sacredness of red tape. "The rule is for everybody. Furthermore, you must not refer to men in your letters home. If you make such references, they will be erased. Nor will they be permitted in any letter you may receive from your family."

"You'll read my letters?"

"Certainly."

Jean silently digested this fresh indignity. "Then I'll never write," she declared.

Miss Blair waived discussion. "Never mind about the rules now, my girl," she returned, not unkindly. "You will appreciate the reasons for them in time. Go on with your story. Tell me more of your home life."

"It wasn't a home—at least, not for me. I didn't fit into it anywhere after dad went. Mother couldn't understand me. She said I took after the Fanshaws, not her folks, the Tuttles. Thank heaven for that! I never understood her, it's certain. When she wasn't flint, she was mush. Her softness was all for Amelia, though. They were hand and glove in everything, and always lined up together in our family rows. I think that was at the bottom of half the trouble. If mother'd only let us girls scrap things out by ourselves, we'd have rubbed along somehow, and probably been better friends. But she couldn't do it. She had to take a hand for Saint Amelia, as a matter of course. I can't remember when it wasn't so, from the days when we fought over our toys till the last big rumpus of all."

"And that last affair?" prompted her inquisitor. "What led to it?"

"A box social."

"A box social!"

"Never heard of one? You're not country-bred, I guess. Shawnee Springs pretends to be awfully citified when the summer cottagers are in town, but it's rural enough the rest of the year. Box socials are all the rage. You see, the girls all bring boxes, packed with supper for two, which are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The fellows aren't supposed to know whose box they're buying. Anyhow, that's the theory. I thought it ought to be the practice, too, and when I found that Amelia had fixed things beforehand with Harry Fargo, I planned a little surprise by changing the wrapper. Harry bid in the box she signalled him to buy, and drew his own little sister for a partner. The man who bought Amelia's was a bald-headed old widower she couldn't bear. It wasn't much of a joke, I dare say, and Amelia couldn't see the point of it at all. She told me she hated me, right before Harry Fargo himself, and after we came home she followed me up to my room to say it again."

An unofficial smile tempered Miss Blair's austerity. "But go on," she said, with an access of formality by way of atonement for her lapse.

Jean's own quick-changing eyes gleamed over the memory of Amelia's undoing, but it was for an instant only. "It was a dear joke for me," she continued soberly. "Amelia was sore. She had a nasty way of saying things, for all her angel-food, and she hadn't lost her voice that night, I can assure you. I said I was sorry for playing her the trick, but she kept harping on it like a phonograph, and one of our regular shindies followed. It would have ended in talk, like all the rest, if mother hadn't chimed in, but when they both tuned up with the same old song about my being a hoiden and a family disgrace, why, I got mad myself, and told them to clear out. When they didn't budge, I grabbed a Cuban machete that a Rough Rider friend had given me, and went for them."

"What did you mean to do?"

"Only frighten them. I never knew till afterward that I'd really pinked Amelia's arm. Of course, I didn't mean to do anything like that. I swear it."

"And then?"

"Then mother lost her head completely. She tore shrieking downstairs, Amelia after her, and both of them took to the street. First I knew, in came the officer. The rest seems a kind of nightmare to me—the arrest, the station-house cell, the blundering old fool of a magistrate who sent me here. He said he'd had his eye on me for a long time, and that I was incorrigible. Incorrigible! What did he know about it? He couldn't even pronounce the word! What business has such a man with power to spoil a girl's life! He was only a seedy failure as a lawyer, and got his job through politics. That's what sent me here—politics! Mother never intended matters to go this far. I know she didn't, though she doesn't admit it. She wanted to frighten me, but things slipped out of her hands. Think of it! Three years among the Stella Wilkeses for a joke! My God, I can't believe it! I must be dreaming still."

The superintendent ransacked her stock of homilies for an adequate response, but nothing suggested itself. Jean Fanshaw's case refused to fit the routine pigeonholes. She could only remind the girl that it lay with herself to decide whether she would serve out her full term.

"It is possible to earn your parole in a year and a half, remember," she charged, rising. "Bear that constantly in mind."

Jean seemed not to hear. "The shame of it!" she repeated numbly. "The disgrace of it! I shall never live it down."

She brooded long at her window when her visitor had gone, her wrongs rankling afresh from their rehearsal. The two weeks' isolation had begun to tell upon the nerves which she had prided herself were of stoic fibre. Human companionship she did not want. She had not welcomed the superintendent's coming, nor the physician's before her; and, if contempt might slay, the drear files of her fellow-inmates which traversed the snow-bound paths below would have withered in their tracks. It was the open she craved, and the daily walks under the close surveillance of a taciturn matron had but whetted her great desire.

She had conned the desolate prospect till she felt she knew its every hateful inch. Yonder, at the head of the long quadrangle, was the administration building, whither Miss Blair had taken her precise way. Flanking the court, ran the red brick cottages—each a replica of its unlovely neighbor, offspring all of a single architectural indiscretion—one of which she supposed incuriously would house her in the lost years of her durance. Quite at the end, closing the group, loomed the prison, gaunt, iron-barred, sinister in the gathering dusk.

This last structure had come almost to seem a sensate creature, a grotesque, sprawling monster, with half-human lineaments which nightfall blurred and modelled. Now, as she watched, the central door, that formed its mouth, gaped wide and emitted one of the double files of erring femininity which were continually passing and repassing. She knew that there were degrees of badness here, and reasoned that these from the monster's jaws must be the more refractory, but they appeared to her no worse than the others. Indeed, as looks went, they were, on the whole, superior. She felt no pity for them, only measureless disgust—disgust for the brazen and the dispirited alike; all were despicable. Her pity was for herself that she must breathe the common air.

Hitherto she had not separated them one from the other. This time, however, she passed them in review—the hard, the vicious, the frankly animal, the merely weak; till, coming last of all upon a brunette face of garish good looks, she shrank abruptly from the window. For the first time since her arrival she glimpsed the girl whose name had been a byword in Shawnee Springs, the being who at once symbolized and made concrete to Jean the bald, terrible fact of her degradation. Till now she had gone through all things dry-eyed—manfully, as she would have chosen to say—but the sight of Stella Wilkes plumbed emotional deeps in the womanhood she would have forsworn, and she flung herself, sobbing, upon her bed.

II

So the little secretary found her. Miss Archer was born under a more benignant star than her superior, and habitually tried in such quiet ways as a wise grand vizier may to leaven the ruling autocracy with kindness. She told Jean that she had come to transfer her to the regular routine, bade her bathe her eyes, and made cheerful talk while she collected her few possessions. They crossed the quadrangle in the wintry dusk, turning in at a cottage near the prison just as Jean was gripped by the fear that the monster itself would engulf her.

At the door-sill she felt a hand slip into hers.

"Be willing, dearie, and seem as cheerful as you can," counseled her guide. "I'm anxious to have you make a good first impression here in Cottage No. 6. It's immensely important that you stand well with your matron. Everything depends upon it."

Jean melted before her friendliness.

"I wish I could be under you," she said impulsively. "This place wouldn't seem—what it is."

She framed this wish anew when she faced the matron herself in the bleak cleanliness of the hall. This person was a variant of the superintendent's impersonal type and a slavish plagiarist of her mannerisms. A bundle of prejudices, she believed herself dowered with superhuman impartiality; and now, in muddle-headed pursuit of this notion, she promptly decided that an offender so plainly superior to the average ought in the fitness of things to receive less consideration than the average. Jean accordingly went smarting to her room.

Happily she was given little time to think about it. The incessant round which, day in and day out, was to fill her waking hours, caught her into its mechanism. A querulous bell tapped somewhere, her door, in common with every one in the corridor, was unlocked, and she merged with a uniformed file which, without words, shuffled down two flights of stairs and ranged itself about the tables of a desolate dining-hall. Whereupon the matron, who had taken her station at a small table laid for herself and another black-garbed official, raised her thin voice and repeated,

"The eyes of all wait upon Thee, O Lord!"

An unintelligible mumbling followed, which by dint of strained listening at many ensuing meals Jean finally translated,

"And Thou givest them their meat in due season."

Thirty odd chairs forthwith scraped the bare floor. Thirty odd appetites attacked the food heaped in coarse earthenware upon the oilcloth. Jean fasted. Hash she despised; macaroni stood scarcely higher in her regard; while tea was an essentially feminine beverage which of principle she had long eschewed. This eliminated everything save bread, and it chanced that her share of this staple was of the maiden baking of a young person whose talents till lately had been exclusively devoted to picking pockets.

Jean surveyed the room. It shared the naked dreariness of the corridors; not a picture enlivened its terra-cotta wastes of wall. Another long table, twin in all respects to her own, occupied with hers the greater part of the floor space; but there remained room near the door for two smaller tables, the matron's, which she had remarked on entering, and one occupied by five favorites of fortune, whose uniform, though similar to the general in color, resembled a trained nurse's in its striping, and was further distinguished by white collars and cuffs. This table, like the matron's, was covered with a white cloth and boasted a small jardinière of ferns.

The matron's voice was again heard.

"You may talk now, girls," she announced. "Quietly, remember."

A score of tongues were instantly loosed. The newcomer was astounded. How had they the heart to speak? It was strange table-talk, curiously limited in range, straying little beyond the narrow confines of the reformatory world. A girl opposite said: "One year and five months more!" and set afoot a spirited comparison which crisscrossed the board from end to end and reached its climax in the enviable lot of her whose release was due in thirty-seven days. Jean observed that the head of the first speaker was lop-sided; its neighbor was narrow in the forehead; a third, two places beyond, had peculiar teeth. Nearly all, in fact, were stamped with some queerness, either natural or artificially imposed by an institutional régime wherein the graces of the toilet had no function.

The gossip took another tack, originating this time in some trivial happening in the gymnasium. Jean listened closely at a mention of basket-ball, but lost all interest when the talk veered fitfully to the sewing-school.

"Ain't you hungry?" said a voice at her side.

Jean rounded upon a girl perhaps a year her senior. Her tones were gentle, with a certain lisping appeal, and her face, if not strong, was neither abnormal nor coarse. Outside a refuge uniform she would readily pass as pretty.

"I couldn't stomach it myself, at the start," she went on, without waiting for an answer, "but I got used to it. We all do. Why, the days I work in the laundry I'm half starved."

Jean stared.

"They make you do laundry work!"

"Sure. We all take a turn. Everything on the place is done by the girls, you know—washing, cooking, tailoring, gardening, and a lot besides."

Her auditor relapsed into gloomy silence, a new horror added to her plight. At home, even the factotum they styled the hired girl had been exempt from washing. A strapping negress had come in Mondays for that.

"I'm next door to you upstairs," pursued the new acquaintance, in her deprecating way. "My name is Amy Jeffries. What's yours?"

She gave it after a moment's debate. The old beloved "Jack" was at the tip of her tongue, but she suddenly thought better of it. After all, "Jean" would answer for this place. She regretted that in lieu of Fanshaw she could not use Jones, or Smith, or—master stroke of irony—the abominated Tuttle.

"Jean Fanshaw's a nice name," commented Amy sociably.

Dreading further catechising, Jean struck in with a question of her own.

"Why have those girls over there a better uniform and a table to themselves?" she demanded.

"They're high grade."

"What does that mean?"

"Six months without a mark." Amy Jeffries cast a look of envy upon the group at the side table. "I'd like awfully to be high grade. It must seem like living again to sit down to a tablecloth. I should like the cuffs and collars, too. I just love dress. When I leave here I think I'll go into a dressmaking establishment, or a milliner's."

Jean was reminded of something.

"Tell me how I can get out of here in a year and a half," she requested. "Somebody said it could be done."

Amy smiled wanly.

"I wanted to know, too, when I was green. I could just see the guard holding the gate open as I sailed off the grounds! It was a beautiful dream."

"Why couldn't you do it?"

"Marks," said Amy sententiously. "Parole in eighteen months means a perfect record right from the beginning. I thought I'd try for it, but, mercy, I've never even made high grade! Once I came within six weeks of it, but I let a dress go down to the laundry with a pin in it."

"They mark for a little thing like that?"

"My stars, yes! For less than that—buttons off, wrong apron in the recreation-room, and so on. I got my first mark for wearing my hair 'pomp.' They won't stand for it here. They want to make us as hideous as they can."

A lull threw the remarks of the girl with peculiar teeth into unsought prominence.

"Jim was a swell-looker," she was saying, "and a good spender when he was flush, but I used to tell him—"

"Delia!" The matron was on her feet leveling a rebuking finger at Jim's biographer. "You know better. Leave the room at once. All talking will cease."

The culprit scuffed sulkily out, and no further word was uttered till the end of the meal, when at a signal all rose and the matron observed in pontifical tones,

"Thou openest Thy hand!"

On this occasion Jean caught the response without difficulty. The words, "And Thou fillest all things living with plenteousness," seemed to emanate chiefly from the high-grade table, with a faint echo on the part of Amy Jeffries, in whom the ambition to eat from a cloth still persisted. At "plenteousness" one bold spirit snickered.

The file tramped up the two flights by which it had come, and scattered to its rooms. For twenty minutes Jean sat in darkness and dejection. Then the fretful bell clamored again, the doors yawned as before, the silent ranks re-formed, and the march below stairs was repeated. Their destination proved to be the recreation-room. In a dwelling this chamber would have been shunned. Here, compared with such other parts of the cottage as Jean had seen, it seemed blithesome. Potted geraniums made grateful oases of the window-sills. An innocuous print or two hung upon the walls.

As the girls found seats, the matron handed Jean a letter.

"You will be allowed to answer it next week," she said. "All letter-writing is done upon the third Friday of the month."

The girl took the missive with burning face. The envelope was already slit. The letter itself had undergone inspection, and five whole lines had been expunged. But her anger at this tampering lost itself in the unspeakable bitterness which jaundiced her to the soul as she read. Better that they had blotted every syllable.

Jean: I hope this will find you reconciled to your cross, and resolved to lead a different life. After talking over this great affliction with our pastor, and taking it to the Throne of Grace in prayer, I have come to feel that His hand guides us in this, as in all things. I cannot understand why I have been so chastened, but I bow to the rod. If your father were alive, I should consider it a judgment upon him for his lax principles in religious matters. I never could comprehend his frivolous indifference. I am sure I spared no effort to bring him to a realizing sense of his impiety.

Amelia takes the same view that I do of all that has happened. She has not felt like going out, poor sensitive child, but.... (The hand of the censor lay heavy here. Jean readily inferred, however, that Amelia's retirement had its solace.) The first storm of the winter came yesterday. Snow is six inches deep on a level, and eggs are high.

Your devoted mother,
Marcia Fanshaw.

The matron was reading aloud from a novel which her audience found absorbing. Jean could give it no heed. What were the imaginary woes of Oliver Twist beside her actualities!

The hands of a bland-faced clock crept round to bedtime. The reader marked her place, and, after a moment's pause, began the first line of a familiar hymn. Jean hated hymn-singing out of church. It had depressed her even as a child, while later it evoked choking memories of her father's funeral. So she set her teeth till they made an end of it.

Suggestive also of her father and of vesper services to which they had sometimes gone together, after a Sunday in the fields, were the words presently repeated by the forlorn figures kneeling about her; but she heard them with mute lips and in passionate protest against their personal application. These tawdry creatures might confess that they had erred and strayed like lost sheep, if they would. She was not of their flock. The things she had left undone did not prick her conscience. The things which she ought not to have done were dwarfed to peccadillos by the vast disproportion of their punishment.

III

Life in a reformatory is an ordeal at its doubtful best. It approximated its noxious worst under the martinet whom Cottage No. 6 styled "the Holy Terror." The absolutism of the superintendent was at least founded on a sense of duty; her imitator's was based upon whim. Jean's chimera of parole after eighteen months was promptly dissipated. Disciplined at the outset for breaking a rule of which she was not aware, her obedience became thenceforth a captive's. Scrubwoman, laundress, seamstress, kitchen-drudge—all rôles in which fate, as embodied in the matron, cast her—were one in their odiousness. She slurred their doing where she could, and scorned all such meek spirits as curried favor by trying their best. At times only the fear of the prison deterred her from open mutiny.

She learned presently that there was an inferno lower even than the prison. One day, while clearing paths after a heavy snowfall, she saw a girl dragged past, handcuffed and struggling, her head muffled in the brown refuge shawl, but audibly and fluently blasphemous notwithstanding. Jean recognized Stella Wilkes.

Amy, who was working near, said in furtive undertone:

"I heard she'd cut loose again. She'll get all that's coming to her this time."

Jean eyed the nearest black-clad watcher before replying.

"But she's in prison, anyhow," she commented, with Amy's trick of the motionless lips. "She can't get much worse than she has already."

"Can't she, though! It's the guardhouse this trip."

Jean questioned and Amy answered till the matron's approach stopped communication. It was a lurid saga of the days before the state abolished corporal punishment, handed down with fresh embellishments from girl to girl. The air was full of such bizarre folk-lore, she discovered—tales of superintendents who failed to govern; of matrons, wise and foolish; of delirious riots and hairbreadth escapes. Amy Jeffries was always the channel which conveyed these legends to Jean's willing ears.

From all others Jean held herself aloof. Amy alone seemed a victim of injustice like herself. Jean invited no confidences, and made none; but bit by bit, as the winter passed, the story of this pretty moth, whose world, more than her pleasure-loving self, seemed out of joint, pieced itself together. It was a common story, too hackneyed to detail, though it signified the quintessence of tragedy to its narrator. Of itself, it struck no kindred chord in Jean. Its passions, its temptations, its sin were without glamour or reason; but she divined that nature, rather than Amy, had wrought this coil, and that, after the fashion of a topsy-turvy universe, one was again expiating the lapse of two.

The coming of spring at once brightened and embittered Jean's lot. Outdoor work was no hardship. She knew the times and seasons of all growing things; which soil was fattest; when plowshare, harrow, spade, and hoe should do their appointed parts; when the strawberry-beds should be stripped of their winter coverlets; when potatoes, shorn of their pallid cellar sprouts, should be quartered and dropped; when peas and green corn should be sown; when the drooping tomato plants should be set out and fostered; and she entered upon this dear toil with a zest which nothing indoors had inspired. But she knew also—and here was the pang—precisely what was transpiring out there in the forest which all but touched the refuge boundary. With a heartache she visualized the stir of shy life in pond and field and tree-top; caught in memory the scent of the first arbutus; spied out the earliest violet; beheld jack-in-the-pulpit unbar his shutter; saw the mandrake bear its apple, the ferns uncurl, the dogwood bloom.

The call of the woods rang most insistent when she lay in her iron cot at twilight, for bedtime still came as in the early nights of winter, at an hour when the play of the outside world had just begun. She could see the bit of forest from her narrow window, and in fancy made innumerable forays into its captivating depths with rod or gun. It was these imaginary outings, ending always behind locks and bars, which first set her thoughts coursing upon the idea of escape.

There were precedents galore. The undercurrent of reformatory gossip was rich in these picaresque adventures. But cleverly planned as some of them had been, daringly executed as were others, all save one ended in commonplace recapture. The exception enchained Jean's interest. Amy Jeffries had rehearsed the tale one day when the gardener, concerned with the ravages of an insect invasion of the distant currant bushes, left the lettuce-weeding squad to itself.

"I never knew Sophie Powell," Amy prefaced; "she skipped before I came. But they say she was something on your style—haughty-like and good at throwing a bluff. I heard that the men down at the gatehouse nicknamed her the 'Empress-out-of-a-job.' What she was sent here for, I can't say. She was as close-mouthed as you. Mind you, I'm not criticising. It's risky business, swapping life histories here. You're the only girl that's heard my story. If you never feel like telling me yours, all right. If you do, why, all right, too. I didn't mention names, and you needn't either. I wonder if he would do as much for me!"

Jean checkmated Amy's maneuver without ceremony.

"I've no man's name to hide," she returned bluntly. "But never mind that. It's Sophie Powell I want to hear about."

Amy took no offense.

"My," she laughed admiringly; "you are a riddle! Well, as I say, Sophie had a way with her, and knew how to play her cards. She got high grade within a year, and worked her matron for special privileges. The matron let her have the run of her room a good deal, for Sophie knew to a T just how she liked everything kept; and she wasn't over particular about locking Sophie's door, which was handy to her own. One spring night, earlier than this, I guess, for it was still dark at supper, she played up sick. She timed her spasm for an hour when the doctor was generally busy at the hospital, and let the matron fuss round with hot-water bags till the supper bell rang. Then the matron went downstairs, leaving the door open to give poor Sophie more air. As soon as she heard the dishes rattle, the invalid got busy. She hopped in next door, pinched the matron's best black skirt and a swell white silk shirt-waist she kept for special, grabbed a hat and veil and a long cloak out of the wardrobe and the big bunch of house-keys from a hiding-place she'd spotted, tip-toed downstairs and let herself out of the front door."

Jean drew a long breath.

"But the guards?" she put in.

"She only ran into one—the easy mark at the gate."

"The gate!"

"Sure. Sophie didn't propose to muss her new clothes climbing a ten-foot fence. She marched over to the gatehouse, bold as brass, handed in her keys as she'd seen the matrons do, and was out in no time. Why, the guard even tipped his hat—so he said before they fired him. That was the most comical thing about it all."

Jean threw a glance over her shoulder. The gardener was still beyond earshot.

"Go on," she said eagerly. "How did she manage outside? That's the part I want to hear."

"Then came smoother work still. Sophie hadn't a cent—she missed the matron's purse in her hurry—but she had her nerve along. She streaked it over into town, and asked her way to the priest who comes out here twice a month for confession. She banked on his not remembering her, for she wasn't one of his girls; and he didn't. His sight was poor, anyhow. Well, she told him she was a Catholic and a stranger in town, looking for work, and that she'd just had a telegram from home saying her mother was dying. She pumped up the tears in good style, and put it up to him to ante the car fare if he didn't want her heart to break. It didn't break."

Jean absently fashioned the moist earth beneath her fingers into the semblance of a priest's face, which she instantly obliterated when it stirred Amy's interest.

"Why couldn't they trace her?" she asked.

"Because she was too cute to stick to her train. She must have jumped the express when they slowed up for their first stop."

The fugitive bulked large in Jean's meditations. It occurred to her that possibly the needless rigor of her own treatment in Cottage No. 6 might originate in her chance resemblance to Sophie Powell. She wondered how it fared with the girl; whether she had had to make her way unbefriended; to what she had turned her hand. Was she perhaps living a blameless life, respected, loved, in all ways another personality, yet forever hag-ridden with the fear of recapture? She did not debate whether such freedom were worth its cost, for just then the pungent invitation of the woods was borne to her across the lettuce-rows.

A bit of refuse crystallized her resolve. She spied it toward the end of her day's toil—a large rusty nail half protruding from the loam—and knew it instantly for the tool which should compass her release. Her mind acted on its hint with extraordinary lucidity, and her fingers were scarcely less nimble. Not even Amy at her side saw her slip the treasure trove into the concealing masses of her hair. From that moment till the bolts were shot upon her for the night she was absorbed in her plans.

To duplicate Sophie Powell's exploit was, of course, out of the question. Her own door was never left unlocked; the Holy Terror's graceless clothes, for all practical uses, might as well hang in another planet; while even were these impossibilities surmounted, she could scarcely hope to hoodwink the men at the gate. She must secure a disguise somehow, but she cheerfully left that detail to chance. To escape was the main thing, and if by a rusty nail she might cross that bridge, surely she need borrow no trouble lest her wits desert her afterward.

A tedious-toned clock over in the town struck twelve before she dared begin her attempt. The watchman had just gone beneath her window on his hourly round, and with the cessation of his slow pace upon the gravel the peace of midnight overlay everything. For almost two hours thereafter Jean labored with her rude implement at the staples which held the woven-wire barrier before her window. The first staple came hardest, but she had pried it loose by the time the watch repassed. In a half-hour more she had freed enough of the netting to serve her end, but she deferred the great moment till the man should again have come and gone. It was a difficult wait, centuries long, and anxiety began to cheat and befool her reason. She questioned whether she had not lost count of time. Suppose she had let him come upon her unheeded! Suppose he had caught some hint of her employment! Suppose he were even now lurking, spider-like, in the shadows!

Then the clock struck twice in its deliberative way, the measured footfall recurred, and her brain cleared. Five minutes later she bent back the netting and calculated the distance to the ground. She judged it some sixteen or eighteen feet, all told, or a sheer drop of more than half that space as she would hang by her finger-tips. There could be no leaving a telltale rope of bedclothes to dangle. Such folly would set the telephone wires humming within the hour. She must drop, and drop with good judgment; since the grass plot, which she counted upon to break her fall, gave place directly below to an area, grated over to be sure, but undesirable footing notwithstanding.

She tossed her brown shawl to the ground first, and noted, with some oddly detached segment of her mind, that it spread itself on the sward in the shape of a huge bat. A romping girlhood steadying her nerves, she let herself cautiously over the sill, and for an instant hung motionless, her eyes below. Then, gathering momentum from a double swing, she suddenly relaxed her hold, cleared the danger-point, and alighted, uninjured and almost without sound, upon the springing turf.

IV

For a moment Jean crouched listening where she fell. No sound issuing from within, she caught up her shawl and stole quickly toward the point where she planned to scale the high fence which still shut her from freedom. There was no moon, but the night was luminous with starshine, and she hugged the shadows of the cottages. These buildings shouldered one another closely in most part, but she came presently to a gap in the friendly obscurity where a site awaited a structure for which the state had vouchsafed no funds. It was bare of any sort of screen whatever, and lay in full range not only of the quadrangle, which it broke, but of the gatehouse beyond.

Nor was this all. Drifting round the last sheltering corner came the reek of a pipe. Jean's heart sank. After all, the trap! Then second thought told her that a foe in ambush would not smoke, and she gathered courage to reconnoiter. Across the quadrangle she made out the motionless figure of the watch. He was plainly without suspicion. He had completed his circuit and was lounging against a hydrant, his idle gaze upon the stars.

So for cycling ages he sat. Yet but a quarter of an hour had lapsed when the man knocked the ashes from his pipe, yawned audibly, and turned upon his heel. The instant the door of the gatehouse swallowed him, Jean sped like a phantom across the open ground, skirted the hospital, the tool-sheds, and the hotbeds, and plunged into the recesses of the garden. All else was simple. The high fence had no terrors; her scaling-ladder was a piece of board. The asperities of the barbed wire she softened with her shawl. When the town clock brought forth its next languid announcement she heard it without a tremor. She was resting on a mossy slope a mile or more away.

She made but a brief halt, for the East, toward which she set her face, was already paling. It was no blind flight. She struck for the hills deliberately, since behind the hills ran the boundary of another commonwealth. All fellow-runaways, whose stories she knew, had foolishly held to the railroad or other main-traveled ways, and, barring the brilliant Sophie, had for that very reason come early to disaster. Jean reasoned that they were in all likelihood city girls whom the woods terrified. Their stupidity was incredible. To fear what they should love! She took great breaths of the cool fragrance. She could not get her fill of it.

Nevertheless, it was not yet her purpose to quit the tilled countryside utterly. She hoped first to compel clothing from it somehow—clothing, and then food, of which she began to feel the need. The fact that she must probably come unlawfully by these necessaries gave her slight compunction. In some rose-colored, prosperous future she could make anonymous amends. She haunted the outskirts of three several farmhouses, but without success. At none of them had garments of any kind been left outdoors over night. Some impossible rags fluttered from a scarecrow in a field of young corn; that was all. Things edible, too, were as carefully housed. Near the last place she found a spring with a tin cup beside it. She drank long, and took the cup away with her.

It was too light now for foraging, and Jean took up her eastward march, avoiding the highways and resorting to hedgerows, stone walls, or briers where the woods failed. As the day grew she saw farmhands pass to their work, and once, in the far distance, she caught the seductive glitter of a dinner pail. She was ravenous from her long fast, and nibbled at one or two palatable wild roots which she knew of old. They seemed savorless to-day, almost sickening in fact; and her fancy dwelt covetously upon the resources of orchard, garden, and field, that the next month but one would lavish. Nevertheless, she harbored no regret that she had taken time somewhat too eagerly by the forelock.

Noon found her beside a lake well up among the hills. She knew the region by hearsay. People came here in hot weather, she remembered. Somewhere alongshore should stand log-camps of a species which urban souls fondly thought pioneer, but which snugly neighbored a summer hotel where ice, newspapers, scandal, and like benefits of civilization could be had. These play houses were as yet tenantless, of course—and foodless; but the chance of finding some cast-off garment, possibly too antiquated for a departing summer girl, but precious beyond cloth of gold to a fugitive in blue-and-white check, buoyed Jean's spirits and lent fresh energy to her muscles. Equipped with another dress, be its style and color what they might, she felt that she could cope fearlessly with fate.

She had followed the vagrant shore-line for perhaps a mile when two things, assailing her senses simultaneously, brought her to an abrupt halt. One was the smell of frying bacon; the other was a baritone voice which broke suddenly into the chorus of a rollicking popular air. Jean wheeled for flight, but, beguiled by the bacon which just then wafted a fresh appeal, she turned, cautiously parted the undergrowth, and beheld a young man swaying in a hammock slung between two birch trees. He held in his lap a book into which he dipped infrequently, singing meanwhile; and his attention was further divided between the crackling spider and a fishing-rod propped in a forked stick at the water's edge. Jean viewed his methods with disapproval. It was neither the way to read, sing, fry bacon, nor yet fish.

Possibly some such idea suggested itself to this over versatile person, for he presently rolled out of the hammock and centered his talents upon the line, which he began to reel in as if the mechanism were an amusing novelty. The stern critic in the background perceived the hand of an amateur in the rebaiting, and predicted sorrier bungling still when he should essay the cast. Her gloomiest forebodings, however, fell far short of the amazing event. She expected the recklessly whirling lead to shoot somewhere into the foliage, but nothing prepared her for its sure descent upon herself. There was no disentangling that outlandish collection of hooks at short notice, and she did not try. But neither could she break the line. The bushes separated while she struggled, and a vast silence befell.

Jean straightened slowly.

"You're a prize angler," she said.

The young fellow's bewilderment gave way to an expansive smile.

"I quite agree with you," he admitted. "I ought to have a blue ribbon, or a pewter mug, or whatever they give the duffer who lands the biggest catch. Let me help you with those hooks. I hope they haven't torn your dress?"

Then the blue-and-white check drew him. The girl's eyes had held him first; next, her brows; afterward, her contrasting hair. The uniform compelled his gaze to significant details—the shawl, the coarse shoes, the fallen cup.

Jean flushed under his scrutiny, and brusquely declined his help.

"No, but let me," he urged, and so humbly that she relented.

"I know more about these things than you do," she said. "Do you know you're trying several kinds of fishing with one line?"

"Oh, yes," he smiled. "You see I haven't a notion what sort of fish frequent these waters, and fish vary a lot in their tastes. Some prefer worms, some have a cannibal appetite for minnows, and some, I believe, like a little bunch of colored feathers, which can't be very nourishing, I must say. I couldn't make up my mind which bait to use, and so I spread a kind of lunch-counter for all comers."

This was too much for Jean's gravity. The fisherman was unruffled by her laughter. In fact, he laughed with her.

"Is it so preposterous as all that?" he asked. "I didn't know but I'd hit on something new. This tackle doesn't belong to me; it's the other fellow's."

Jean's glance shot past him. The man saw and understood.

"We planned to camp together," he explained, "but a telegram overtook him on the train. It was highly inconsiderate in a mere great-grandmother to pick out just this time for her funeral. I look for him to-morrow or the day after."

Jean freed her dress at length and searched for her belongings. The young man stooped also. He was too late for the shawl, but gravely restored the tin cup. She thanked him, as gravely, and after a little pause added:—

"The least you can do is to say nothing."

"About seeing you?"

"Yes."

"You're from the other side of the county?"

"Yes."

"From the—" he hesitated.

"From the House of Refuge," stated Jean, looking him squarely in the face.

His own gaze was as direct.

"But not that sort," he commented softly, as if thinking aloud—"not that sort."

Jean, boy-like, offered her hand.

"Thank you," she said simply. "You're quite right. That's exactly why I'm running away. Good-by."

"Don't go!" He detained her hand, his face full of sympathy and perplexity. "I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am. It would be hard lines for a fellow, but when I see a girl"—his eyes added: "And such a girl!"—"roaming the country like a—a homeless—"

"Hobo?" supplied Jean.

He reddened guiltily.

"Hang it all!" he ended, "I can't stand it. You hit the nail on the head when you told me that the least I can do is to say nothing. But I trust that isn't all I can do. I want to help."

The girl's eyes misted.

"You have helped, you believe in me."

"Who wouldn't!" His bearing challenged the world.

"Several people. My family, for instance; most of the officials back there at the refuge. But never mind that."

"No," agreed her new champion. "Never mind that. Let's face the future, the practicalities."

Jean complied with despatch.

"Your bacon is burning," she announced.

He led the way to his camp, and together they surveyed the charred ruin in the spider. Jean could have devoured it as it lay.

"And it's my first warm meal," lamented the camper tragically—"my first warm meal after five days of canned stuff! The other fellow was to be cook as well as fisherman."

Jean promptly mastered the situation.

"Clean that spider while I slice more bacon," she directed, rolling up her sleeves. "If you have potatoes, wash about a dozen."

The victim of a canned diet flung himself blithely into the work, but halted suddenly, halfway to the water, and brandished the spider in air.

"Not a mouthful unless you'll eat too?" he stipulated.

Jean gave a happy laugh.

"Perhaps I can be pressed," she conceded.

With a facility which would have amazed the refuge, and with a secret pride in her new knowledge which she had little dreamed she could come to feel, Jean set the bacon and potatoes frying, evolved a plate of sandwiches from soda crackers and a tin of sardines, discovered a jar of olives which their owner had forgotten, and arranged the whole upon a box-cover laid with a napkin. Nor was this the sum of the miracle. She even garnished the meat with a handful of watercress which she spied and bade her admiring host gather in a neighboring brook.

They said little during the meal, for both were famished; but while they washed the dishes together by the shore Jean, under questioning, sketched the story of her flight. Her listener's ejaculations gained steadily in vigor, till ultimately, moved by a startling thought, he dropped the plate he was polishing.

"Look here!" he cried. "Have you had a wink of sleep?"

"I got in an hour about the middle of the forenoon."

"One hour out of thirty!"

"It was enough."

"I'll sling the hammock anywhere you say."

"I was never more wide awake. There are too many things to think out and plan."

"Take the hammock, anyhow," he urged. "You can plan and rest, too."

She let herself be so far persuaded, and he brought pillows from the tent. As she let herself relax, she first realized how weary she had become, and closed her eyes that she might taste the full luxury of rest. The rhythmic chuckle of the little brook where the watercress grew was ineffably soothing. It seemed almost articulate, an elfish voice to which the small waves, lapping the shore, played a delicate accompaniment. She dreamily fitted words to its chant, and presently, still smiling at the conceit, strayed quite into the delectable land where water-sprites are real, and beautiful impossibilities matter of fact.

The shadows had lengthened when she woke. Her companion sat with his back to a tree trunk as before, but she perceived that he had stretched a bit of canvas to screen her from the slanting sun.

"It was best all round," he said, as she sprang up reproachfully. "It did you good and gave me leisure to think. I felt sorrier than ever while you lay there, smiling and dimpling in your sleep, like a child."

"I despise that dimple," avowed Jean, disgustedly.

"You despise it!"

"It's so—so feminine."

"Of course it is; that is no reason for abusing it."

"I think it's a mighty good reason. A dimple will be a great handicap in my life."

"A dimple will be a great handicap in my life."

"Great Jupiter!" said the young man softly. "Why, some girls I know would give—But we can't discuss dimples, just now, can we? What I began to say, before you took my breath away, was that I think I've solved the clothes problem. You know there's a town about ten miles to the north—the county seat—and it occurs to me that if I set out to-night, I can be back here early in the morning with everything you'll need. I don't believe they'll suspect me, even if they have happened to read that a refuge girl has escaped. I can buy the skirt in one store, the hat in another, and so on, pretending they're for my sister—or my wife."

Jean's refractory dimple deepened.

"Make it your mother," she advised. "Wives and sisters prefer to do their own shopping."

"Very well, then. If you will jot down the measurements and other technicalities, I'll manage it somehow. As for money," he added, perceiving her falter, "I will take care of that, too, if you'll allow me. You will naturally need a loan."

Jean swallowed a lump.

"You're a brick," she said huskily. "I'll pay you back with the first money I earn."

The brick received her praise with a change of color appropriate to his title.

"Any fellow would be—be glad to help, you know," he stammered. "And you needn't feel that you must hurry to pay up, either. Wait until you're well settled among your friends."

"My friends! I have none."

"No friends!" He stared blankly. "Of course I realized that you could hardly go back home, but I took it for granted that there must be some place—somebody—"

"There isn't."

He sat down abruptly, bewildered with the complexities which beset an apparently simple situation. Jean herself began to entertain some misgiving. For the moment his opinion epitomized the world's.

"Where do you mean to go?" he asked.

"Across the state line first; then to New York."

"New York!"

"Yes; to find work. Why do you stare as if I'd said Timbuctoo?"

"I'm from New York."

"Are you?" She brightened wonderfully. "Then you can tell me where to find work. I'm willing to do anything at the start, but by and by I want to get into some good business. Women are succeeding in business on all sides nowadays. Why do you look so hopeless? Don't you think I can get on?"

"How can I answer you! If there were only some woman to whom I might take you. I've a sister, but—"

"But she wouldn't understand?"

"No, she wouldn't understand. Neither do you understand," he went on anxiously. "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps; with you what you are—trustful, unsuspicious, open as sunlight—Oh, I daren't advise you. I don't dare."

Jean was awed, but not downcast.

"I'll risk it," she replied stoutly.

Twice he opened his lips to speak, but rose instead and paced among the trees. Finally he confronted her.

"Why not go back?" he asked.

Jean widened her eyes upon him.

"Go back! Go back to the refuge?"

"Yes. Why not go back and see it through? No, no," he entreated, as her lip curled. "Don't think I'm trying to squirm out of my offer. That stands. It's you I'm considering. Remember that no matter how much you may make of yourself those people over there will have the power to take it from you. Should you marry—"

"I shall never marry."

"Should you marry—ah! you will—they can shame you and the man whose name you bear. Could you stand that? After all, isn't the other way better? Wouldn't a clean slate be worth its price?"

She shook her head.

"You don't realize what you ask. I can't go back. I can't. You don't know."

"I suppose I don't," he admitted.

"I'd rather run the risk—the risk of their finding me, the risk, whatever it is, of New York. As for friends—" she smiled upon him radiantly—"well, I'll have you."

"Yes," he promised. "You'll have me."

He accepted her decision, and at once made ready for his tramp across the hills. At parting he reminded her that to him she was still nameless.

"I'm not sure myself," she laughed. "I'll need a new name in New York!"

"But now?"

"Well, then—Jack."

"To offset the dimple, I suppose. Is it short for Jacqueline?"

"No; just Jack."

Jean's knight errant looked back once before the tree-boles shut her wholly away. She had dropped upon a log and was facing the blue reach of the lake. This was about six o'clock in the evening. At nine she had not shifted her position. It was perhaps an hour later when she sprang up abruptly, lit a candle which he had shown her in arranging for the night, and hunting out a pencil and paper, wrote a hurried note which she pinned to the tent-flap.

There were but two lines in all. The first thanked him. The second ran:—

"I've gone back to see it through."

V

The refuge, considered officially, was impressed. That any fugitive, let alone one who had outwitted pursuit, should freely present herself at the gatehouse, spiced its drab annals with originality. Jean Fanshaw, no less than Sophie Powell, had achieved distinction. The refuge dissembled its emotion, however. An escape was an escape, with draconic penalties no more to be stayed than the march of a glacier or the changes of the moon.

But even the refuge—from the vantage-point of a supposed ventilator reached by a secret stair—discerned that the prisoner of the guardhouse was unaccountably not the rebel of Cottage No. 6. The girl who dropped from the window would have found this duress maddening. Four brick walls were its horizon; its furnishing was a mattress thrust through a grudging door at night and withdrawn when the dim glow, filtering through a ground-glass disk in the ceiling, heralded the return of another day. It was always twilight within, for the occupations of a guardhouse require little light. Text-books, no other print, were sometimes permitted, but even these arid pastimes were not for Jean; the school taught nothing she had not mastered. Her resources were two: she might knit or she might think. She usually chose the latter.

Another thing puzzled the refuge—still considered officially. It was no novelty for a song to rise to the pseudo-ventilator (inmates so punished often sang out of bravado when first confined), but it was quite unprecedented for a girl with no couch but the floor, no outlook save the walls, no employment except knitting, companioned solely by her thoughts, to croon the words of a rollicking popular air as if she were content.

Jean, too, wondered unceasingly. Why had her old ideas of life cheapened? Save one chance stranger, men had met her on the footing of boyish good-fellowship which she required of them: why should this no longer seem wholly desirable? Why had she relished a chivalrous insistence on her sex? Why had she taken pride in the practice of a menial feminine art? Why had all things womanly shifted value? Why, above all, did she feel no regret that these things should be? Yet content was scarcely the word for her frame of mind. Her thoughts were a yeasty ferment out of which the unknown youth of the forest, whose very name was a mystery, began presently to emerge as an ideal figure. And this ideal man had on his part a conception of ideal womanhood! Here was the germinal truth at last.

While she pondered, two solitary weeks which by popular account should have been unspeakable, slipped magically away. She dreaded their end, for she knew that in the adamantine scheme of things six months of prison life, at very least, awaited her. Even to the average refuge girl the prison signified degradation; to Jean it also spelled Stella Wilkes. The abhorred contact did not begin at once, however, since it fell out that in runaway cases the powers were wont to decree yet another fortnight of isolation following the transfer from the guardhouse. But isolation in the prison was a relative term. The building's sights could be shut away; its sounds penetrated every cranny.

Such sounds! One of them broke Jean's light slumber her first night under the prison roof. It was a strand in the woof of her dreams at first, a monotonous, tuneless plaint, strangely exotic, like nothing earthly except the wailing of savage women who mourn their dead. She lay half awake for an interval, the weird chant clutching at her heart. Then, as it rose, waxing shriller with each repetition, she sat bolt upright with hair prickling and flesh acreep. It was a menace to the living, not a requiem; a virulent explicit curse.

"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"

The prison stirred.

"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"

Here a woman laughed; there one began softly to echo the cry; cell warily hailed cell.

"The matron to hell! The matron to hell! The matron to hell!"

The pulsing hate of it now filled the corridors. A door opened somewhere, and a metallic footfall began to echo briskly from iron stairs.

"Is it mesilf ye're wantin', darlin'?" called a fat-throated voice. "I'll not keep ye waitin'. With ye in a jiffy!"

There was a sound of shooting bolts, a brief scuffle, the click of handcuffs, and a ragged retreat. Presently a door slammed, and the matron's steps alone retraced the lower corridors. Far in the distance, muffled by intervening walls, its two emphatic words only audible, the eerie defiance still rose and untiringly persisted until it again entered the fabric of Jean Fanshaw's dreams.

That cry somehow struck the dominant note of the prison. Its bitterness, its mental squalor, its agonizing repression, its smouldering revolt, all focussed in that hysterical out-burst against constituted authority. Jean heard it again and again in the ensuing months, and in each instance it broke the stillness of night. The second time it startled, but did not frighten. The third she thrilled to its message, knowing it at last for her own fiery heartache made articulate. But this was afterward.

In the beginning Stella Wilkes overshadowed their background. She and Jean had had a grammar-school acquaintance in the days before respectability and the Wilkes girl—as Shawnee Springs knew her—parted company; and it was to this period of democratic equality and relative innocence to which Stella chose sentimentally to revert when she first found a chance to speak.

"Can't say I feel a day older than I did then," she went on, sociably. "Do I look it?"

Jean made some answer. Stella indeed seemed no different; looking a mature woman at sixteen, she had simply marked time since. A mole, oddly placed near one corner of her mouth where another girl would dimple, still fascinated by its unexpectedness. Stella noticed this and laughed.

"Remember how all you little kids used to rubber at my mole?" she said. "It made me mad. I don't care now when people stare, but I wish it was on my neck. 'Moles on the neck, money by the peck,' you know. Queer, ain't it, that two of us from the old West Street school should strike this joint together? It's just the same as if we'd gone away to college—I don't think! Any Shawnee Springs news to tell?"

"No," Jean answered, stonily.

Stella saw that her advances were unwelcome, and her mood veered.

"That's your game, is it?" She thrust her hard face closer. "So I ain't in your class, my lady—you that was so keen for the boys! You give me a pain. As if near the whole kit of us wasn't pinched for the same reason. Go tell the marines you're any better than the rest!"

It was Jean's first sharp conception of the brutal truth that the stigma of the reformatory was all-embracing. The world presently emphasized the stern lesson. True to her word on learning of the censorship, she had never written home; but her mother's letters, formal and mutilated as they were, had nevertheless meant more to her than she realized until her degradation to the prison lopped this privilege too away. The cumulative effect of Mrs. Fanshaw's correspondence, when finally read, was not tonic. Despite the censor, Jean gathered that Shawnee Springs now linked her name with Stella Wilkes's. A refuge girl was a refuge girl; degrees and shadings of misconduct lost themselves in the murky sameness of the stain. Her grateful wonder grew that her champion of the forest had had the insight to distinguish. His quixotic young faith and a heartening word now and then from Miss Archer, when some infrequent errand brought the little secretary near, between them redeemed humanity.

A torrid summer dragged into an autumn scarcely less enervating. The kitchen-gardens were arid; the grass-plots sere; the scant wisps of ivy wherewith Miss Archer, unsanctioned by the state, had attempted to soften the more glaring shortcomings of the architect, hung dead beyond all hope of resurrection; and the endless reaches of brick wall, soaked in sunshine by day, reeked like huge ovens the live-long night. The officials' tempers grew short, their decisions arbitrary beyond common; obedience became daily more difficult; riot, full-charged, awaited only its galvanizing spark.

This the prison contributed. Conditions were always hardest here, and the rage they fostered had gathered itself into an ominous hatred of the matron. Nor was this wholly due to her chance embodiment of law. That carried weight, of course, but the prime factor in her unpopularity was a stolid cynicism implanted by some years' prior service in a metropolitan police station. Joined to a temperament like the superintendent's, this could have been endured, though detested; but the former matron of a "sunrise court" mixed her doubt with a lumbering joviality against which sincerity beat itself in vain. Her smile was a goad; her laugh a stinging blow.

The revolt turned upon an old grievance. Breakfast was a scant meal in the prison, and the laundry squad, upon which the severest toil fell, had for months clamored for a mid-forenoon luncheon. This request was reasonable, but an intricate knot of red tape, understood clearly by nobody, had balked its granting, and the matron accordingly reaped a whirlwind which others had sown. All the week it threatened. On Monday perhaps half the workers in the laundry, headed by Stella Wilkes, repeated the old demand, and were sent about their business with heavy sarcasm.

"Lunch, is it!" drawled the matron, with her maddening grin. "Sure it's Vassar College, or Bryn Mawr maybe, these swells think they're attendin'! How triggynomtry, an' dead languidges, an' the pianoforty do tire the brain! Wouldn't you find a club sandwich tasty, young ladies? Or a paddy-de-foy-grass, now? Back to your tubs!"

Jean took no part in the demonstration, and as the Wilkes girl returned to her work she cursed her for a chicken-hearted coward. Since the day of her rebuff she had worn her enmity like a chip upon her shoulder. Jean met this, as she now met everything, with apathy. Stella, her unlovely associates bending over the steaming tubs, the nagging matron—one and all had their being in an unreal world, a nightmare country, which must be stoically endured until the awakening. The tomboy had become a mystic.

With this detachment she incuriously watched the rising storm. From Tuesday to Thursday the unrest spent itself in note-writing, a diversion, following Rabelaisian models in style, which was, of course, forbidden. The contraband pencils found ingenious hiding-places, however, and the notes themselves a lively circulation. One of these missives, written by Stella and mailed with a scuttleful of fresh coal in the laundry stove, fell under Jean's eye Thursday afternoon. It was intended for another, but some delay had bungled its delivery, and the flames unfolded it and betrayed its secret. Stella saw and pressed close.

"If you blab, I'll kill you," she threatened hoarsely. "That's straight."

Jean shrugged her away. She attached no weight to the scrawl's ungrammatical hints of violence. Such vaporings were as common as they were idle. Nor was she moved when, on Friday, during recreation, the matron's alertness checked, though it failed truly to appraise, a catlike dart of Stella's to the rear. She did not escape, however, a certain sympathetic share in the tension which set the last day of the week apart from other days. The nerves of a reformatory are high-pitched. To be always dumb unless bidden to speak, forever aware of a spying eye, eternally the slave of Yea and Nay—such is the common lot. Double the feeling of repression, and you get the prison and hysteria. From the rising-bell, Saturday, till she slept again, Jean's senses were played upon by vague malign influences. All felt them. If sleeve brushed sleeve, a scowl followed; muttered curses sped the passing of every dish at meals; and in the stifling night some one raised the heart-clutching chant against the matron. This was the time Jean hailed it for her own.

Sunday brought no relief. The piping heat held unabated; hard work, the week-day safety-valve, was lacking. Only the matron could muster a smile. That smile! The prison file, passing, chapel bound, in Sunday review, felt the heat hotter and life more bitter because of it. The eyes of one girl blinked nervously; the fingers of a second spread clawlike, then clenched; the jaws of another set. If that woman laughed! The quadrangle peopled rapidly. Every building spun its blue-gray thread into the paths. The earliest comers were quite at the chapel steps when the prison girls, issuing from their frowning archway last, swung reluctantly into the treeless glare. Their smiling matron stood just within the shadow, looking exasperatingly cool in her white linen, and outrageously at peace with herself and her smug, well-ordered world. Then, abruptly, some trifle—perhaps a missing button, possibly a curl where should be puritanic simplicity, nothing more significant—loosed her sarcasm, her laugh and revolt.

A cry, different from the midnight defiance, yet as terrible, burst from one of the prison girls. Shrill, bird-like, prolonged, it was such a sound as the tortured captive at the stake may have heard from the encircling squaws. It was well known in the refuge; decade had bequeathed it to decade; and it was always the signal of mutiny. As throat after throat took it up, the commands of the matrons became mere angry pantomime. Rank upon rank melted in confusion, and the mob, lusting for violence, awaited only its directing fury.

A leader rose. Stella had secretly fomented this outbreak; it was her storm to ride openly if she dared. Yet it was scarcely a question of daring. This was her supreme hour, hers by right of might; and had another seized the lead she would have crushed her. With black locks tumbled, eyes kindled, cheeks afire, wanting only the scarlet gear of anarchy to cap her likeness to those women of other speech who braved barricades like men, she rallied disorder about her as the fiercer flame draws the less. Her following flocked from every quarter of the quadrangle—high-grade girls, girls but just clear of the guardhouse; the mature in years, the tender; the froward, the meek; spawn of the tenements, wayward from the farm; beggars, vagrants, drunkards, felons, wantons, thieves. Hysteria answering to hysteria, madness to madness, like filings to the magnet they came, and, among them, Jean.

And, among them, Jean.

VI

Stella hailed the recruit with shrill satisfaction, clutched her by the arm lest her allegiance falter, and beckoned on her amazons.

"Smash the prison first," she screamed. "We'll show 'em."

Back into the grim archway they swept, a frenzied, yelling horde, and flung themselves into a fury of destruction. The window-panes crashed first; then followed fusillades of crockery from dining-room and kitchen. Nothing breakable survived; where glass failed, they demolished furniture; lacking wood, they fell upon the plumbing.

Treading close in Stella's vandal wake, Jean laid waste right and left with hands which she hazily perceived were but mere automata under another unknown self's control. She was a dual being, thinking one thing, doing its opposite. The active personality disquieted yet fascinated the critical real self, and she realized, half dismayed, that if Stella Wilkes should waver in her leadership, the mad, alien Jean Fanshaw would in all likelihood leap to replace her.

But Stella harbored no thought of abdication. Her reign had just begun. What was the too brief interval which had sufficed to wreck the hated prison! There was as good pillage in the cottages, she reminded them; better still in the administration buildings and the chapel. The chapel now! What splendid atrocities they could wreak upon the big organ! And after the chapel, why not storm the gatehouse? What were a handful of guards! The gatehouse and liberty! Fired with this dream of conquest, the mob armed itself with scraps of wreckage and trooped back to the entrance to confront a thorough surprise. Bolted doors blocked their triumphal progress—bolted doors and the matron, calm, resolute, unarmed, and absolutely alone.

The quadrangle, too, had had its happenings. With the superintendent absent, her assistant ill, and the few male guards at the gatehouse but mere creatures of routine, wholly incapable of the generalship which the crisis demanded, the outbreak could scarcely have been more effectively timed; yet order somehow issued from confusion. Officials acting separately bundled such of their charges as had not yielded to hysteria into the cottages, and hurried back to cope with the open mutiny. With this the prison matron demanded the right to deal. It had flamed out in her special province; it was hers to quench if her authority was to mean anything thereafter; and she stubbornly declined aid. Not even the guards might enter with her; she would meet the situation single-handed.

The rioters faced the lonely figure stupidly. Their clamor sank to whispers, then silence. Their eyes blinked and shifted under the cold survey which passed deliberately from girl to girl, missing none, condemning all.

Suddenly the matron levelled a finger at a weak-jawed offender in the van.

"Drop that stick!" she commanded.

The culprit sheepishly complied.

"You too!" She indicated the next, and was again obeyed. In the rear some one whispered.

"Stella Wilkes, come here."

Habit swayed the girl a step forward before she realized that she was tamely submitting, but she caught herself up with an oath, and returned stare for stare.

The matron's voice sharpened.

"Stella," she repeated, "come here."

The rebel's grip upon her cudgel tightened.

"Come yourself," she retorted. "Come if you dast!"

The matron dared. Force rather than psychology had ruled the police station of her schooling, and with the loss of her temper she reverted instinctively to its crude argument. A rush, a glint of handcuffs hitherto concealed, a violent brief struggle, a blow, a heavy fall—such were the kaleidoscopic details of a battle whose whole nobody saw perfectly, but from which Stella, the mob incarnate, emerged unmistakably a victor. Moblike, she was also merciless, and continued to rain blows which the half-stunned woman at her feet had power neither to return nor fend. One of them drew blood, a scarlet thread, which by fantastic approaches and doublings traversed the matron's now pallid cheek and stained the whiteness of her dress.

It was then Jean woke. She was no longer among the foremost. Separated from Stella in the sack of the upper floors, she had fallen late upon a mirror of the matron's, miraculously preserved till her coming, and had busied herself with its joyous ruin till the others had surged below and the rencounter at the door had begun. With her first idle moment apart from the common folly she experienced reaction; one glimpse of the scene below effected a cure. She loved the vanquished as little as the victor, but her every instinct for fair play and decency cried out against the wanton blows, and drove her hotly through the press to the dazed woman's side.

The surprise of the attack, more than its strength, disconcerted Stella, and Jean had pulled the matron to her feet before retaliation was possible. Nimble wits likewise counted most in the immediate sequel. Quite in the moment of her charge Jean spied a coil of fire-hose, which, used not half an hour ago for the sake of coolness, lay still connected with its hydrant, and its possibilities flashed instantly upon her. Before the ringleader's slow brain could divine her purpose she had thrust the nozzle into the matron's fingers and sprung to release the flood. Stella saw the advantages of this neglected weapon now, and plunged to capture it, but a stream as thick as a man's wrist took her squarely in the face with the pent energy of a long descent from the hills, and brought her gasping to her knees. Before she fairly caught her breath she was handcuffed and helpless, and the matron, all bustle and resource with the turning of the tide, was issuing crisp orders to as drenched, frightened, and abjectly obedient a band of rebels as ever made unconditional surrender.

To her real conqueror Stella at least made full and volcanic acknowledgment. The guardhouse alone stemmed the sulphurous eruption which she poured out upon Jean's past, present, and future; and the girls who heard shivered thankfully that another than themselves must drag out existence under the blighting fear of such a requital. The official attitude was more dispassionate. Barring now and again a puzzled glance, as at some insoluble riddle, the matron in no wise singled her preserver from the common run of mutineers to whom she meted out added rigors and penalties for their offence. Far from hastening her return to cottage life by her service in the cause of law and order, Jean learned that she had narrowly escaped doubling her prison term, and that the fact that the good in her conduct had been allowed to weigh over against the evil was deemed a piece of extraordinary clemency.

Yet even if that brief reign of unreason had added a half-year of prison to the six months which a brief interval would round, its lesson would not have been dear-bought; for, as she had returned richer by a new conception of her womanhood from the flight of which the prison was the price, so now she wrung sanity from her yielding to madness. It terrified her that she could for one moment have become like these weak pawns in an incomprehensible game, and the recoil intrenched her in a fastness of self-control such as her girlhood had never conceived. Happily there came also at this time another influence no less wholesome and far-reaching.

One morning of early winter she quitted the prison in charge of a clerk from the superintendent's office, who led the way to Cottage No. 6. Jean's heart sank as they crossed the threshold. In the optimism born of new resolutions she had hoped for a different lot. What availed new resolutions here! But she was no sooner within than she was conscious of a changed atmosphere. Bare as they were, the corridors seemed less institutional; the recreation hall, glimpsed in passing, smiled an almost animate greeting; while the room in which she was told to await the cottage matron's leisure resembled the room it had been in nothing save its four walls. Amy Jeffries, dusting the window-seat as if she enjoyed it, was actually humming.

"Howdy!" she called. "Welcome home."

Jean lifted a warning finger.

"Somebody will hear," she cautioned. "Where will be your high grade then?"

Amy grinned broadly.

"Noticed it, did you?" She pivoted complacently before a mirror. "Don't I look for all the world like a trained nurse? Can't you just see me doing the wedding march with the grateful millionaire I've pulled through typhoid! Glory, but I am tickled to get out of checks!"

Jean was vexed at her folly.

"You'll get into them again mighty quick if she hears," she whispered. "Don't be a fool."

"She!" Amy turned to stare. "Well, if you're not in from the backwoods! You don't mean to say you haven't heard that the Holy Terror is gone?"

"Gone? You mean—"

"I mean g-o-n-e, gone—cleared out, skipped, skedaddled. Can't you understand plain English? I thought everybody knew. She left a week ago to be married."

"Married!"

"Ain't it the limit? Fancy that with a husband!"

Jean tried, but failed. Stupendous as it was, this marvel paled in interest beside the fact that Cottage No. 6 had lost its martinet. Small wonder the house beamed.

"And the new matron is different?" she said.

"Different! Dif—" Amy became incoherent with amusement. "Say, but you folks in the jug have been exclusive since the riot! You shouldn't be, really you shouldn't. You miss so many things, you know. There was the Astor ball, and the Vanderbilt dinner, and the swellest little supper at Sherry's I've gone to this seas—"

All Amy's members were pinchable. Jean nipped the nearest.

"Has something happened, or hasn't there?" she demanded.

"Would I be talking here like a human being, not a jailbird, if something corking hadn't happened?" She had a table between them now. "Why, I wouldn't be high grade at all. There's been a new deal in No. 6 with a vengeance. You couldn't guess who's matron if I gave you all day."

Jean's face went suddenly radiant.

"Not Miss Archer!"

"You smart thing," said Amy, crestfallen.

"Then it's true! It's really true?" The news was too wonderful for credence. "I can't make it out."

"Neither can I. Why, she's even come over here at a smaller salary. Ain't that a puzzler? I know because I heard her talking it over with the Supe—the Terror had chased me up to the offices on an errand; and you can bet I listened when I caught on that there was something coming for No. 6. As near as I can figure it out, the riot's at the bottom of it, but just why that should make Miss Archer throw up a better job and better pay to camp down here beats little Amy. I'm no rapping medium."

Where Amy failed, Jean, with the clairvoyance of a finer nature, presently divined the truth. It flashed upon her at the end of an hour alone with the little matron, a wonderful, inspiring hour which she came to look back upon as crucial—a forking of the ways where to have chosen wrongly would have meant to miss life's best. Yet she could never take it apart; its texture was gossamer. It helped nothing to recall that the talk had sprung first from one or another of the room's inanimate objects—some cast, book, picture, or bit of pottery—whose sum mirrored Miss Archer's personality; yet one of them had surely been the key to a Garden of the Spirit where common things underwent magical transformations. The vague longings and aspirations which the forest meeting had sown, seemed rank, uncertain growths no longer; precious, rather, and infinitely desirable.

Jean drew a long breath when they separated.

"At first I could not understand why you came," she said; "but it's plain now. It was to help—to help girls like me."

VII

It was during the second spring that Mrs. Fanshaw came. Because of the little matron Jean had finally broken her resolve to write no letters home, whereupon her mother accepted the change as a sign of repentance which, after a seemly interval, she decided to encourage with her presence. Jean was keenly expectant of the promised visit. With the shifting of her whole point of view she now blamed herself for many of the things, so petty taken one by one, so serious in gross, which had made her home life what it was; and out of the reaction there welled an unguessed tenderness for her mother, shy of written expression, but eager to confess itself in deed.

The official who brought Jean to the waiting-room and remained near during the interview need not have turned a tactful back upon their meeting for Mrs. Fanshaw's sake. That lady was as composed as the best usage of Shawnee Springs's truly genteel could dictate under circumstances so untoward. Her features reflected the most decorous blend of pious resignation and parental compassion when the slender blue-and-white figure flung itself from the doorway into her arms, and she permitted the penitent to remain upon the bosom of her best alpaca for an appreciable space of time with full knowledge that a waterfall of lace, divers silken bows, and a long gold chain were lamentably crushed by the impact.

"Concentrate, child," she admonished firmly. "How often I've told you to aim at self-control at all times!"

Jean clung to her in a passion of homesickness, hearing nothing.

"Mother! Mother!" she repeated.

Mrs. Fanshaw detached herself, repaired the ravages, and turned a critical eye upon her daughter.

"What a fright they've made of you!" she sighed. "The color of that dress is becoming enough, but the pattern! What have you been doing to your hair?"

"My hair?" Jean fingered her braid vaguely. "Oh! You mean at the front? It must be plain, you know."

"And your hands! You never kept them like Amelia's, but now—why, they might be a day-laborer's."

"They are," said Jean.

But Mrs. Fanshaw's interest had fluttered elsewhere.

"I can't be too thankful that I spared Amelia this ordeal," she went on. "Amelia was anxious to come. She said she felt it was her duty, but I refused. She is so sensitive she could not have borne it. To see her own sister in such clothes and in such surroundings would have made an indelible impression."

Jean now had herself only too well in hand.

"I dare say the refuge might tarnish Amelia's girlish bloom," she retorted dryly. "I hope you'll feel no bad effects yourself, mother."

"I'm positive I shall," replied Mrs. Fanshaw, seriously. "My nerves are in a state already. But let that pass. Whatever the cost, I should have come long ago if your behavior had been always what it should. I could not come while you hardened your heart against God's will. Your stubbornness in the beginning—they wrote me fully, Jean; your unwomanly attempt to run away; that shocking riot, all showed—"

"That's past, mother."

"Past, yes; but not forgotten. Shawnee Springs never forgets anything. Your escape was in the papers. I wrote you all that."

"They never let me know. Not in the home papers, the county papers?"

"No." Mrs. Fanshaw drew herself up. "Consideration for me prevented that outrage. The editors preserved the same delicate silence that they kept when you were arrested. But you don't seem to remember that city dailies are read in Shawnee Springs. One vile sheet even printed your picture."

The girl's face crimsoned painfully.

"Oh!" she cried sharply. "How could they! Where could they get it?"

Her mother hesitated.

"Amelia was in a way responsible," she admitted. "She was naturally anxious at your disappearance, and when a nice-mannered young man called and said that if he had your description he could help in the search, the dear girl received him with open arms. How could she know he was a reporter!"

"She gave that man my picture!"

"Like a trusting child. Amelia has felt all our trouble so keenly. For weeks after you were sent away she could scarcely look one of her set in the face. She said she felt like a refuge girl herself. I had to appeal to our pastor to make her see that neither of us was to blame. She shrank from the world even then, but the world came to her."

"Meaning Harry Fargo?" queried Jean, emerging suddenly from the gloom induced by Amelia's imbecility.

"Harry was particularly sweet," admitted Mrs. Fanshaw, archly. "In fact, he has become a son to me in everything but name. If Amelia would only—but I mustn't gossip."

Jean smiled without mirth.

"I think she'll land him," she encouraged.

Her mother frowned.

"What a common expression!" she rebuked. "I thought at first I noticed an improvement in your language. Your voice is certainly better—much lower. It's the prison discipline, I presume. But speaking of Harry, I really think we may regard it as, well, reasonably sure. I must say I'm pleased. Harry is so eligible."

Jean silently reviewed young Mr. Fargo's points; athlete second to none in the gymnasium of the local Y.M.C.A.; gifted with a tenor voice particularly effective at church festivals in ballads of tee-total sentiment; heir presumptive to a mineral spring, a retail coal business, and a seat in the directorate of the First National Bank; clearly destined, in fine, to bloom one of the solid men of his community. Joined to these virtues, present and prospective, he seemed sincerely, if not ardently, fond of Amelia, and Jean with her whole heart wished her sister's long-drawn-out wooing godspeed.

Perhaps she couched this less happily than she might. At all events, Mrs. Fanshaw took warm-offence at some allusion to the suitor's leisured siege.

"Under the circumstances," she remarked severely, "it's a wonder his attentions have continued at all. No eligible young man in Shawnee Springs can be expected to want a sister-in-law whose name everybody mentions in the same breath with Stella Wilkes's, and you know the Fargo family is as proud as Lucifer. I don't see that they have any call to set themselves up as they do—the Tuttles were landowners in the county twenty years before a Fargo was heard of; but there is certainly some excuse for their standing off about Amelia. You don't seem to appreciate how painful her situation has been. People were only just pitching on something else to talk about after you went, when you stirred the scandal up again by running away. That nearly spoiled everything. I had it on the best of authority—Mrs. Fargo's dressmaker is mine now—that Harry and his father actually came to words. Then, to cap the climax, we'd no sooner settled down in peace than the vulgar riot happened. Nobody knew positively whether you were implicated, but they naturally judged you were, and of course I couldn't conscientiously deny it when they asked me point-blank. It has been terrible—terrible."

Jean was swept away upon the flood of egotism. She forgot that she too had a point of view. Their wrongs were the great wrongs.

"I'm sorry," she said humbly. "It's true I didn't realize. I don't want to stand in Amelia's way. You won't have reason to complain again while I am here."

"I don't expect I shall. I can't conceive of another thing you could be up to, even if your disposition to consider our feelings a little should change. If they'll only marry before your term expires!"

Jean's lips tightened.

"There's almost a year and a half yet," she said grimly. "Surely that's time enough."

"It would be for anybody but a Fargo," sighed her mother. "They're slow at everything. We can only hope and wait. It's been very hard."

"I'll try not to make it more so afterward," Jean returned. "I suppose I must go back to the Springs at first. When a girl goes out they take her—home. But I'll not stay. I'll go away at once."

"Go away! There are none of the relatives you can visit. The Tuttles all feel the disgrace as if it were their own. As for your father's folks—"

"I don't mean to visit. I mean to work—to live."

Mrs. Fanshaw focussed her parochial mind upon this outlandish suggestion, assuming, as was her habit with novel impressions, an air of truculent disapproval.

"Perhaps you still think you can gallivant about the country like a man?" she remarked.

"No. I've got over that. I shall find some woman's work."

"You mean you'll cook, scrub, do the servant's drudgery you've learned here? That would be a nice tale to go the rounds of the Springs!"

"I would cook or scrub if I had to, but I've been taught other things. One of the girls who's leaving this fall—her name is Amy Jeffries—knew no more about earning a living than I when she came here, but she has an eight-dollar-a-week place waiting for her in New York. She's going with a ready-made cloak firm. It was Miss Archer who got her the place, and she says when the time comes she can probably do as well by me."

"New York!" Mrs. Fanshaw shied with rural timidity from the fascinating name. "You in New York! I must get Amelia's opinion. What if it should prove a way out!"

During the remainder of the call the talk strayed mainly in a maze of Shawnee Springs gossip which Jean followed in a lethargy beneath which throbbed an ache. She had grown to value her home, not for what it had been, but for what it might be, and to realize that it was beyond doubt the more a home without her, cut deep. Mrs. Fanshaw had amputated an ideal.

It in no way eased the smart to feel that her mother intended no downright brutality. Indeed, as Jean did her the justice to perceive, she tried in her clumsy way to be kind. She reverted again to the agreeable change in the girl's voice, approved her quieter manner, and, looking closer, even discerned a neatness in general upon which she bestowed measured praise. It was in the midst of these final note-takings that she detected her daughter in a vain attempt to conceal some object in the folds of a pocketless dress.

"What are you doing?" she demanded in abrupt suspicion. "What are you hiding from me?"

The girl started.

"Nothing," she said evasively.

"Nothing! You were always truthful at least."

"I mean nothing important."

Mrs. Fanshaw laid a firm grasp upon the shrinking hand, and dragged its secret to light.

"Embroidery!" she exclaimed.

Jean's cheeks were poppies.

"Yes," she faltered.

"Whose is it?"

"Mine."

The reluctant monosyllables whipped Mrs. Fanshaw's curiosity wide awake.

"No more nonsense," she charged. "Tell me at once who gave you this."

"Nobody," confessed Jean faintly. "I—I made it."

"You!" A pair of glasses, black-rimmed and formidable, bore instantly upon the marvel and searched it stitch by stitch.

Jean waited breathless. Wrought with infinite labor not of the hands alone, the little piece of needlework was absurdly freighted with meaning. In the old days she had loathed such employment as ardently as her sister loved it, but of late she had set herself doggedly to learn the art, since it seemed to her that this more than anything else would typify her new outlook, her return to sex. As such a symbol she had brought her handiwork into the visitors' room. As such, before their meeting, she had hoped her mother might interpret it. Even now, bereft of illusions as she was, she still hoped something, she knew not what.

In fairness to Mrs. Fanshaw it should be recorded that she apparently grasped some hint of this. Relatively speaking, her smile was encouraging. Viewed from her own standpoint, she all but scaled the top note of praise when, extending the embroidery at last, she said,—

"It is almost as good as Amelia's."

The new Jean was still no candidate for sainthood. White to the lips with anger, she caught the emblem of her regeneration from Mrs. Fanshaw's profaning hand and tore it to little strips.

VIII

Thenceforward Jean dreaded nothing so much as any return to Shawnee Springs whatsoever. Here, for once, she found herself in perfect accord with her mother, for, as the time of her release drew near, young Mr. Fargo's sauntering courtship took a sudden spurt, not clearly explicable to himself, whose prime and bewildering result was the fixing of his wedding day.

Dear Amelia naturally longed for her sister's presence at the culmination of her happiness (so Mrs. Fanshaw put it), but there were the Fargos to consider—they were not cordial, by the way—and if the refuge authorities made no objection, would it not perhaps be better if she met the official having Jean in charge at some intermediate point, from which she could proceed at once to her new calling? Jean, she was convinced, would understand.

Jean understood very well, but was thankful. She would rather serve another month in the refuge than be an unwelcome guest at Amelia's marriage. In truth, had she been put to a choice, she would have elected further confinement to her mother's roof in any case. She thought of the reformatory, not Shawnee Springs, as home, and this in a sense which embraced more than Miss Archer and the transformed Cottage No. 6. She loathed the life no less than in the beginning, but time had knit her to its every phase. The cowed, drab ranks had long since ceased to seem alien. Their deprivations, their meager privileges, their rights, their wrongs, their sorrows, their spectral gayeties, all were hers. She had thought to dart from the gatehouse like a wild thing from a trap. In reality she paused to look back with a lump in her throat.

Yet it was a blithe world outside, the fog and gloom of a November rain notwithstanding. Even the wet glisten of the mire seemed cheery. A hundred trivialities, unheeded by her companion, absorbed her unjaded eyes. The red and green liquids of a druggist's window lured her as in childhood; then the glitter of a toy-shop enticed, or the ruddy invitation of a forge. Station and train were each a mine of entertainment. The ticket-buying was an event of the first magnitude; the slot-machines, the time-tables, the news-stands, the advertisements, all the prosaic human spectacle had the freshness of novelty. She noted that women's sleeves had a fullness of which the little tailor-shop in the refuge was but dimly aware; that men's hats curled closer at the brim; that the trainmen wore a different uniform; that one rural depot or another had received a coat of paint.

Mrs. Fanshaw was in waiting.

"There's a train back to the Springs in twenty minutes," she announced briskly, after a preoccupied dab at Jean's cheek, "and under the circumstances"—she was always under circumstances—"I know you won't mind if I take it instead of waiting till your own goes out. What with presents arriving, the dressmaker, and the snobbish behavior of Harry's family, I expect as it is to find Amelia on the edge of nervous prostration. Every minute is precious, we're so rushed. In fact, I could not find time to pack a single stitch for you to take to New York. Anyhow, I understood from your last letter that the refuge would fit you out with the necessaries, which is certainly a help at this time when I'm paying out right and left for Amelia. Why," she wound up suddenly, "your suit is actually tailor-made!"

"Yes," said Jean.

"Excellent material, too," commented Mrs. Fanshaw, fingering the texture. "Does every girl fare as well?"

"The low-grade girls get no jackets, only capes; and their material isn't so good."

"Then you're high grade! You never wrote me."

"I did not think it would interest Shawnee Springs."

Mrs. Fanshaw looked aggrieved.

"You are a strange child," she complained; "so secretive, so self-centered. I suppose your suit was made in the refuge?"

"Yes."

"By one of the inmates?"

"By one of the inmates—myself."

"Strange child!" said her mother again. "Strange child!"

Linked by nothing save a distasteful past, they sat together for an interval in constrained silence. Even at their friendliest, mother and daughter had lacked conversational small change. Presently Mrs. Fanshaw's roving eye encountered the dial of a train-indicator and brightened.

"The Shawnee Springs accommodation is on time for once," she announced.

Jean responded with sincerity that she was glad. That her own train was as plainly registered an hour late, with the equally obvious consequence that she must arrive after nightfall in a strange city, was unimportant.

Mrs. Fanshaw opened her hand-bag.

"Here is the price of your ticket to New York," she said, counting out the exact fare. "You had better buy it at once."

Jean did so. When she returned from the ticket-office her mother was smoothing the creases from a bank-note.

"Did they supply you with any money?" she asked cautiously.

"With two dollars."

"Is that all?"

"They paid my fare here."

"How niggardly in a great state! I can spare you so little myself. But you will begin work at once?"

"To-morrow morning."

"Then ten dollars ought to answer until you draw your first earnings, if you are not extravagant."

"I shan't stop at the Waldorf," promised Jean, grimly. She took the bill, as she had taken the money for the ticket, without thanks, saying only, "I will pay it back."

Another blank silence fell. Mrs. Fanshaw stirred restively.

"I hope that Jeffries girl can be depended on to meet you," she presently remarked.

"I think she can."

"It's certainly a convenience to know somebody at the start, but I don't feel that she is a very desirable associate, whatever Miss Archer thinks. You can drop her later, of course, whenever it seems best."

"Drop her!"

Mrs. Fanshaw jumped at the vehemence of the exclamation.

"How abrupt you are! What I mean to say is that you will hardly want to keep up these reformatory acquaintances. If I were you I should make it a rule to recognize none of them you can by hook or crook avoid. Possibly this girl is superior to most of her class. I don't think you ever mentioned just why she was sent to the refuge?"

Jean's eyes discharged an angry spark.

"You're quite right," she retorted. "I never have."

Mrs. Fanshaw was still waiting in becoming patience for Jean to repair this omission when her train was announced. They rose and faced each other awkwardly.

"Well, good-by," said the elder woman, presenting her cheek.

"Well, good-by," said Jean.

She watched her mother into a car, and through successive windows traced her bustling progress to a seat. Mrs. Fanshaw found no leisure for a last glance outward, and Jean, by aid of certain sharply etched memories, divined that she was absorbed in repelling seat-mates. So occupied, she vanished. Jean could have cried with ease, but sternly denied herself the luxury. She yet retained something of her old boy-like intolerance of the tear-duct, though the refuge, acquainting her with nerves, had dulled the confident edge of her scorn. Tears, she now perceived, like tea, had uses for women other than purely physical.

Happily life's common things still wore a bloom of surpassing freshness for her cloistered eye. This second station, like yet unlike the first; the tardy train, thundering importantly in at last; the stirring flight into the unknown, each served its diverting turn. As dusk settled, the landscape became increasingly littered with signs trumpeting the virtues of breakfast foods, women's wear, or plays current in the metropolitan theatres; while the villages grew smarter in pavement and lighting till she mistook one or two for near suburbs of the great city itself. Then the open spaces grew rare. Did the semblance of a field survive, it was gridironed by streets of the future or sprawled upon by huge factories, formless leviathans of a thousand gleaming eyes. Town linked itself to town.

When they had run for a long time within what she knew must be the limits of the city itself, a brakeman mouthed some unintelligible remark from the door, and the train came to a stop. Jean caught up her bag, but observing that a drummer of flirtatious propensities, who for an hour past had shared her seat, made no move, was left in doubt.

"Isn't this New York?" she asked.

Her seatmate surveyed her facetiously.

"Some of it," he said. "Want any particular part of the village?"

"The main station," blushed the provincial.

"You mean the Grand Central. Sit tight then. This is only a Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street—Harlem, you know, where the goat joke flourishes. Never saw a billy there myself, and I boarded a year on Lenox Avenue, too."

Jean turned from a disquisition on boarding-houses to the car-window. In its night-time glitter of electricity the street which he dismissed with a careless numeral quite fulfilled her rural notion of Broadway. If these were but the outposts, what was the thing itself!

They shot a tunnel presently, which the drummer berated in terms long since made familiar by the newspapers, threaded a maze of block-signals and switch-lights, and halted at last in an enormous cavern of a place which she needed no hint from her now too friendly neighbor to assure her was truly New York.

The drummer urged his escort, but she eluded him in leaving the car and hurried on in the press. Nearing the gate, however, her pace slackened. The bigness of the train-shed confused her, and she was daunted by the clamor of hackmen and street-cars which penetrated from without. Amy had written that she would meet her if she could leave her work, but Jean could spy her nowhere in the waiting crowd banked in the white glare of the arc-lights beyond the barrier. They were unfamiliar to the last pallid urban face.

She had gone slowly down the human aisle and was wavering on the outskirts, uncertain whether to wait longer or adventure for herself, when the drummer reappeared at her elbow.

"Didn't your party show up?" he said. "I call that a mean trick. You had better let me help you out, after all. You look like a girl with sand. What say we give 'em a lesson? We can have supper at a nice, quiet little place I know up the street, take in a show afterward, and then when we're good and ready hunt up your slow-coach friends. Is it a go?"

She looked every way but toward him, saw a policeman, and aimed forthwith for the shelter of his uniform. Halfway she felt her hand seized, turned hotly, expecting the drummer, and plumped joyfully into the arms of a young person of fashion who greeted her with an ecstatic hug.

"Amy! I was never so glad to see you!"

The girl emerged from the embrace, panting.

"I really think you are," she said. "Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a block on the 'L.' What was that fellow saying to you?"

When Jean had told her she peered eagerly into the crowd.

"I find blond hair lets you in for a lot of that," she commented. "He was a traveling man, you say?"

"I think so."

"Sort of sandy, with a reddish mustache? I could only see his back."

"Sandy? I'm not sure. I avoided looking at him."

Amy was silent while they passed to the street, and continued to scan the faces about her. When they had wormed into a street-car packed with standing women and seated men she spoke again of Jean's adventure.

"Did he say what line of goods he was carrying?" she asked.

"No," Jean answered indifferently. The spectacle of the pavement without had already ousted the drummer from her thoughts.

"Or where he lived?"

"Where he lived?" She turned now and saw that the girl's eyes were very bright. "He mentioned that he had boarded here somewhere—Harlem, was it?"

"Harlem!" Amy's pink cheeks turned rose-red. "And did he have a scar, a little white scar, near his eyebrow?"

"I didn't notice."

"I wish you had."

Jean eyed her narrowly.

"I wish I had, too, if it matters so much," she returned.

Amy donned a mask of transparent indifference.

"Of course it doesn't matter," she said. "At first I thought it might be somebody I used to know."

IX

They alighted at a kind of wooded island, girt by trolley lines and crisscrossed by many paths, along one of which they struck. Although it was November, the benches by the way frequently held slouching forms, sodden men or unkempt women, at whom none glanced save a fat policeman. Neighboring electric signs lit the lower end of the little park brilliantly, and here, cheek by jowl with restaurant, vaudeville, and saloon, Jean suddenly spied an august figure with which school-history woodcuts had made her familiar from pinafores.

"Why, this is Union Square!" she cried triumphantly. "I know it by Washington's statue over there. And this street we're coming to must be Broadway."

"You're not so slow," said Amy, halting at the curb. "Here's another chance to show your speed. Mind you step lively when I see a chance." In the same breath she dragged her charge into a narrowing gap between two street-cars, dodged a truck, circled a push-cart, and issued miraculously, safe and sound, upon the farther side.

They traversed now a street of entrancing shop-windows over which Jean exclaimed, but which Amy in her sophistication dismissed with the brief comment that the real thing was elsewhere. With the same careless unconcern she dropped, "This is Fifth Avenue," at their next crossing; but she immediately discounted Jean's awe by adding, "Not the swell section, you know," and hurried from its unworthy precincts toward an avenue which the elevated railroad bestrode. This, too, was wonderfully curious, with its countless little shops and stalls, but Amy allowed her a mere taste of it only and whipped round a corner into a dimly lit street of dwellings, each with a scrap of a dooryard tucked behind an iron fence.

As they mounted the high steps of one of these houses, Jean remarked with due respect that it was unmistakably a brownstone front—a species of metropolitan grandeur upon which untravelled Shawnee Springs often speculated vaguely; though its dilapidation, obvious even by night, helped to put her at her ease. A placard inscribed, "Furnished Rooms and Board," held a prominent station in one of the basement windows, which was further adorned with a strange symbol upon red pasteboard, explained by Amy, while they waited, as a mute appeal to a certain haughty city official whose business was the collection of garbage.

"The landlady's name is St. Aubyn," Amy further imparted; "or at any rate that's what she goes by. She's the grass-widow of an actor. Some people say her real name is Haggerty, but that needn't bother us. We can't afford to be finicky, or at least I can't."

"Nor I," agreed Jean.

Mrs. St. Aubyn, who at this juncture opened the door in person, looked a weary-eyed woman of fifty-odd, in whose face still lingered some melancholy vestiges of charm. She greeted, without enthusiasm, Amy's buoyant announcement that she had brought her a new boarder, saying that, although she had no complaint to make of Miss Jeffries and supposed she should get on equally well with her friend, on the whole she preferred men.

"They all do," cried Amy, in mock dudgeon. "Every blessed boarding-house in New York prefers men."

The actor's grass-widow did not question this sweeping statement, evidently deeming it a truism which needed neither explanation nor defence, but went on to say that inasmuch as Miss Jeffries already knew the rooms and prices, and since she herself was dog-tired, and the turnips were burning, and the cream-puffs had not come, and one could not trust the best of servants beyond one's nose, she would leave them to themselves, all of which she delivered with dwindling breath, backing meanwhile toward the basement stair, till voice and speaker vanished together.

"Don't mind her little ways," consoled Amy, leading the way upward. "She is really tickled to death to see you. The elevator's out of order," she added facetiously, "but I'm on the first floor—counting from the roof down. A good place it is, too, on hot summer nights when breezes are scarce."

She showed the narrow rear hall-bedroom she now occupied; a rather bigger cell, deriving its ventilation solely from a skylight, which Jean might have at the same price; and, finally, in enviable contrast, a really spacious chamber at the front, possessing no less than three windows,—dormers, it was true, yet windows,—a generous closet, and a steam-radiator, all within their united means did they care to room together. Amy tried to state the case dispassionately, but she could not weigh the advantages of three dormers, a full-grown closet, and a steam-radiator with perfect calm, and after one glance, not at these persuasive features, but Amy's, Jean promptly voted for the joint arrangement.

Amy hugged her rapturously.

"If you only knew how I've wanted it!" she exclaimed. "You can't possibly do better for your money than here. Take my word for it, I've tramped everywhere to see. It has a lot of good points. For one thing, you'll be within walking distance of a warm lunch that won't cost extra, and that's a big item, I can tell you. Besides, you'll meet nice people. A dentist has the second floor front who's a regular swell, but real sociable, and in the hall-bedroom, third floor back, there's an old man who works in the Astor Library. He knows so much, I'm almost afraid to talk to him. Why, they say he had a college education! Then, there's a girl who typewrites for a law firm down in Nassau Street—she's on our floor; another who's a manicure; and a quiet old couple that used to have money, but lost it in Wall Street. All those are permanents. There are two others, a man and his wife, who may go any time because they belong to the profession."

"Which?" asked Jean, innocently.

"Why, the stage. Mrs. St. Aubyn always calls it 'the profession.' She gets actors off and on who are waiting for engagements. She must have known a stack of them once."

Jean shrank from the thought of dining with this array of fashion, learning, and talent, particularly when she discovered that one long table held them all; but nothing could have been less formal than the meal. The prodigy of learning from the Astor, who, by virtue of intellect or seniority, sat at the head of the board in pleasing domestic balance to Mrs. St. Aubyn at the foot, chatted amiably with Jean and Amy, quite like a person of ordinary attainments. The stenographer exchanged ideas upon winter styles with the wife of the shorn lamb of Wall Street, who, on his part, forgot his losses in a four-sided discussion, with the manicure and the professional birds of passage, of the President's latest speech, a document which it tardily developed none of them had read.

Mrs. St. Aubyn's conversation dealt mainly with the food, and was aimed at the maid, whose blunders were apparently legion, but even she found leisure, as did every person in the room, for a quip with the jocund ruling spirit of the feast, Dr. Paul Bartlett. Coming last, the dentist instantly leavened the whole lump. He drew gems of dramatic criticism from the players, got the bookworm's opinion of a popular novel, inquired the day's happenings on 'Change' from the shorn lamb, discussed a murder trial with the legal stenographer, the outrageous rise in price of coal with Mrs. St. Aubyn, and the growing extravagance of women's sleeves with Amy and the manicure, all between the soup and fish. In fine, as Mrs. St. Aubyn loudly whispered to Jean in leaving the dining room, he was the life of the occasion. Whether he heard this or not, Doctor Bartlett redoubled his efforts, if they were efforts, when after eddying uncertainly about the newel post of the main hall the company finally drifted into the drawing-room.

This was not a blithesome apartment. It ran extraordinarily to length and height, Jean thought, rather to the scamping of its third dimension, and was decorated after the dreary fashion of the decade immediately succeeding the Civil War. Its woodwork was black walnut, its chandelier a writhing mass of tortured metal, its mantelpiece a marble sepulchre. A bedizened family Bible of some thirty pounds avoirdupois, lying upon a stand ill designed to bear its weight, blocked one window, while a Rogers group, similarly supported, filled the other. The pictures were sadly allegorical save one, a large engraving entitled "The Trial of Effie Deans." Yet, despite these handicaps, the dentist contrived to give the room an air of cheer. Spying a deck of cards upon the entablature of the mausoleum, he performed a mystifying trick, which he followed with fortunes, told as cleverly as a gypsy's, and with feats of sleight of hand. Then, dropping to the piano-stool, he coaxed from the venerable instrument a two-step which set everybody's feet beating time; passed from this to a "coon song" one could easily imagine was sung by a negro; and, finally, chief marvel of all, he succeeded in luring everybody except Jean into joining the chorus of the latest popular air. In the midst of all these things he narrated most amusing little stories, mainly of dentists' offices, punctuated with dental oaths and imprecations like "Holy Molars" and "Suffering Bicuspid," which sounded comically profane without being so.

The girls discussed him animatedly from their pillows in the wonderful room of three dormers.

"Didn't I tell you he was sociable?" Amy demanded. "Can't he sing simply dandy? And isn't he good-looking?"

Jean gave a general assent. She liked the young fellow's breeziness. She liked his cleanliness, too, and remarked upon it.

"I noticed it first of all," she said.

"Yes, and what's better," added Amy, "you'll never see him look any different. He says soap and water mean dollars in his business. That's one reason why he's so run after at the parlors. None of the other dentists there seem to care."

"Then he hasn't an office of his own?"

"Not yet. He works in a Painless Dental Parlor over on Sixth Avenue. You'll know the place by a tall darky in uniform they keep at the foot of the stairs to hand out circulars."

"Do you suppose he thought it strange that I didn't sing with the rest?" Jean asked anxiously. "He looked round twice."

"I shouldn't wonder. He couldn't guess, naturally, that you've had a steady diet of hymns for three years. Still, that song is only just out, and half of us didn't know the words."

"Did I do anything else queer?"

"Well, you tried hard to pass dishes down the line, instead of letting the maid do it, and you looked sideways a good deal without turning your head. I don't think of anything else just now unless it's that you're as nervous as a cat. Miss Archer did her best to make us girls act like other human beings, but she didn't run the whole refuge, more's the pity. I've got a stack of things to thank her for. Do you notice I don't say 'ain't' any more?"

"Yes."

"She broke me of that. She said I'd find it paid to speak good English, and I have. Already it's meant dollars to me, just like the doctor's soap and water."

Jean wondered how grammatical accuracy could further the making of cloaks, but Amy had suddenly become too drowsy to explain. Rest came less easily to the newcomer. The muffled roar of the elevated railroad, heeded by the urban ear no more than the beat of surf, teased her excited senses to insomnia. Oblivion came abruptly when she despaired of sleep at all, and then, as quickly, morning, with Amy shaking her awake. The light from the three dormers was still uncertain and the air chill, for though the prized radiator clanked and whistled prodigiously, it emitted no warmth.

Jean sprang up hurriedly.

"Am I late?"

"No; early. I thought you'd better get down to Meyer & Schwarzschild's a little before time the first day. You'll have to wear your street-suit there, of course, but you need another skirt and a big apron for work. Just use these I've laid out as long as you like."

"But you'll need them yourself."

Amy smiled mysteriously.

"No, I shan't," she returned, shaking down a smart black skirt over a petticoat which gave forth the unmistakable rustle of silk. "In fact, this is my work-dress—or one of them." She revolved slowly before the glass a moment, relishing Jean's astonishment, then went on: "I'll have to own up now. The cat was almost out of the bag last night. I didn't want to tell you till this morning. I thought it might discourage you. I'm not with Meyer & Schwarzschild any more."

"You've left the cloak firm!" Jean was taken aback, but tried to hide her disappointment. "I'm glad you've done better," glancing again at Amy's magnificence; "it's easy to see you have."

"Well, I guess! I'm a cloak-model in one of the biggest department stores in the United States."

"A cloak-model!" The term suggested only a wax-faced dummy to Jean. "What do you do?"

"Walk up and down before the millionaires' wives, and make the pudgy old things think they'll look as well as I do if they buy the garment. But they never do look as well. I got the place through a buyer who came to Meyer & Schwarzschild's once in a while. He saw that I have style and a good figure, and don't say 'ain't'—he really mentioned that!—and told the cloak department that I was the girl they were looking for. Sounds easy, doesn't it?"

It sounded anything but easy to Jean.

"And you like it?" she said. "But I needn't ask you that."

"Don't I! Maybe it doesn't give you thrills to parade up and down with a three-hundred-dollar evening wrap on your back! But cheer up," she added quickly, reading Jean's face. "I'm going down to Meyer & Schwarzschild's with you this morning and give you a rousing send-off."

X

The section of Broadway to which Amy piloted Jean, showing her all the short cuts which would save precious time at lunch hour, seemed wholly given over to wholesale establishments with signs bearing Hebrew names.

"Yes; this is Main Street of the New Jerusalem, all right," she assented to Jean's comment; "but you'll find there are Jews and Jews in the clothing trade. I'd hate to work for some of the chosen people I've seen, but you'd have to hunt a long time to find a more well-meaning man than old Mr. Meyer. I only hope he'll be down this morning."

Other workers, chiefly women and girls, crowded into the rough freight elevator by which they ascended, and one or two who got off with them at Meyer & Schwarzschild's loft greeted Amy by name. They inventoried her finery minutely, Jean saw, and nudging one another, arched significant brows when her back was turned. On her part, Amy took little notice of them, and, without introducing Jean, swept by toward the flimsy partition of wood and ground glass which shut the workrooms from the counting-room, brushed aside an office boy, who demanded her business, and knocked at a half-open door lettered, "Jacob Meyer, Sr."

The head of the firm, who bade them enter, was a very old man with a patriarchal beard. He smiled benignantly, recognized Amy after a moment's hesitation, asked about her new position, and patted her on the shoulder when she told him he must be as good to Miss Fanshaw as he had been to her. Turning to Jean, he said that Miss Archer had never sent them a poor worker.

"I have the highest opinion of Miss Archer," he added, with the air of a presiding officer who relished the taste of his own periods. "Her charity knows neither Jew nor Gentile. I met her first here in New York when some of us were trying a philanthropic experiment in the so-called Ghetto. It presented grave difficulties, very grave difficulties, and it is hardly too much to say,—in fact, I have no hesitation in saying,—that Miss Archer saved the day. I recall one most signal instance of her tact—"

He would have rambled on willingly, but Amy cut in with the statement that she must be off, squeezed Jean's hand encouragingly, and whisked out forthwith. Her abrupt exit seemed to disorder the deliberate clockwork of old Mr. Meyer's thoughts, for he sat some little time staring at a letter-file with his mouth ajar, till, recollecting himself at last, he brought forth, "As I was saying, my dear, I trust you'll like our ways,"—which Jean was certain he had not said at all,—and thereupon led her to the door of one of the workrooms and turned her over to its forewoman, a stout Jewess with oily black hair combed low to disguise her too prominent ears.

Work had begun, and the place was deafening with the whir of some thirty-odd close-ranked machines which, their ends almost touching, filled all the floor save the narrowest of aisles, where stood the chairs of the operators. To one of these sewing-machines and a huge pile of unstitched sleeves Jean was assigned. The task itself was simple, after the sound training of the refuge school, but the conditions under which she worked told heavily against her efficiency. The din was incessant, the light poor, the low-ceiled room crowded beyond its air-space, and the floor none too clean. As the morning drew on, the atmosphere became steadily worse. Now and then the forewoman would open a window,—she stood mainly by a door herself, turning and turning a showy ring upon her fat index finger,—but the relatively purer air thus admitted reached only the girls who worked nearest, of whom Jean was not one, and these soon shivered and complained of drafts.

By the time the hands of a dingy clock marked ten, her head was throbbing violently and her spine seemed one prolonged ache. Her neighbors, except a thin-cheeked woman who stopped now and again to cough, turned off their stints with the regularity of long habit, straightening only to seize fresh supplies for their insatiable machines. At twelve o'clock, when whistles blew from all quarters and the other employees, dropping work as it stood, scrambled for lunch-boxes or wraps, Jean relaxed in her chair, too jaded to rise. Food was out of the question,—even the look of the pickle-scented luncheons which some of the cloak-makers opened made her ill,—but she presently dragged herself outdoors, and striking down a cross street, at whose farther end she could see trees, came to a little park distinguished by a marble arch, where she wandered aimlessly till she judged it time to return.

The streets she retraced were now thronged with masculine wage-earners lounging and smoking in the doorways of their various places of employment. All paid her the tribute of a stare, and some made audible comments on her hair or eyes, or what they termed her shape. Her own doorway was also crowded. These idlers were, for the most part, girls from the many garment-manufactories of one sort and another which the great building housed; but a man stood here and there, either the leader or the butt of some horse-play. One of the young women who had scrutinized Amy in the elevator nodded to her and seemed about to speak, but Jean felt too heart-sick for words, and returned at once to her appointed corner in the hive, where, although it still lacked something of one o'clock, she again sat down to her machine. The air was better, for the windows had been thrown open during the noon-hour, but the room was in consequence very chill, and her fellow-workers, now drifting back in twos and threes, grumbled as they came. Among them was the girl who had greeted her below, and looking at her with more interest Jean read kindness in her freckled face. Their eyes met again, with a half-smile, and the girl edged down the narrow lane for a moment's gossip.

"You'll find it better to take a bite of lunch, even if you don't hanker for it," she observed.

"How do you know I haven't?" Jean asked.

"That's easy. For one reason, I seen you walkin' in Washington Square. For another, a green hand here don't never want lunch. Not used to this kind of thing, are you?"

"To the work, yes; not the noise, the bad air."

"Where'd you work last?"

"In a small town," she eluded.

"That's different. You don't have the sweat-shop in the country, I guess."

"Sweat-shop!" Jean had heard that sinister term before. "Is that what they call Meyer & Schwarzschild's?"

The girl laughed at her simplicity.

"I call it one," she rejoined, "even if it is on Broadway. Don't low wages and dirt and bad air and disease make a sweat-shop?"

"Disease! What do you mean?"

"Well, consumption, for instance. It isn't bronchitis, as she thinks, that ails the woman next machine to you. I could tell you other things, but what's the use! You won't stop here any longer than I will, and that's just long enough to find a better job."

The afternoon lapsed somehow. Once, a youngish, overdressed man with blustering manners and thick, bright-red lips came into their workroom and told the forewoman that a certain order must be rushed. He idled near Jean's machine for an interval, under pretence of examining her work, but he mainly looked her in the face. As he passed down the aisles, he touched this girl and that familiarly. Those so favored were without exception pretty, and they usually simpered under his attentions, though one or two grimaced afterward. When he had gone, Jean's thin-cheeked neighbor told her between coughs that this was the younger Meyer.

She met him again when she passed the offices in leaving for the night, and he again stared fixedly, wearing his repulsive, scarlet smile. She jumped at the conclusion that old Mr. Meyer had mentioned that she came from a reformatory, and hurried by with burning cheeks. The night air refreshed her a little, but the way home seemed endless, and the three flights from Mrs. St. Aubyn's door to the dormered bedroom were appalling in prospect. She entered faint with hunger and fagged with a thoroughness she had not known since the earlier days in the refuge laundry.

Amy sprang up from a novel.

"Don't say a word," she charged. "I suspicioned how it would be when you didn't show up for lunch. Not that I expected you, though. I'd have bet a pound of chocolates you wouldn't come."

Jean was content to say nothing and let herself be mothered. Amy showed no trace of fatigue. She had changed her black blouse for a white one of some soft fabric, and looked as fresh and pink-cheeked as if she had idled the live-long day.

"Now for the pick-me-up," she said briskly, after making Jean snug among the pillows; and what with a tiny kettle and a spirit-lamp, some sugar which she rummaged from a bureau drawer, and a little milk from the natural refrigerator of the window-sill, she concocted in no time a really savory cup of tea.

Then, only, Jean found voice.

"Did you know all the time," she demanded, "that Meyer & Schwarzschild's is no better than a sweat-shop?"

"I worked there a year," Amy returned sententiously. "I'm not saying it was as bad all along as now. It was as decent as any at first, and I hear that even now the room where the cutters work is pretty fair."

"Does Miss Archer know? But that's impossible."

"Of course she doesn't. And, though you mayn't believe it, old Mr. Meyer doesn't know either. You saw what he is! It's only hospitals and orphan asylums he thinks about. He totters down to business for about an hour a week, and if he ever pokes his dear old nose into one of the workrooms, it's early in the morning before the air gets so thick you could slice it."

"But his partner—Schwarzschild? Where is he?"

"Dead. They keep the name because the firm is an old one. It's all Meyer now, and that doesn't mean Jacob Meyer, Sr., but Jake. You probably saw Jake. He has tomato-colored lips and an affectionate disposition."

Jean shivered.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"How could I? Everything was settled before I knew you were going there. Anyhow, it's a living while you are hunting something better. I'm in hopes to get you in where I am. I spoke to a floor-walker I know to-day. My department is full, but they'll probably need more help downstairs for the Christmas rush."

"That would be merely temporary."

"Most every place is temporary till they size you up. If you're what they want, they'll keep you on after the holidays, never fear. You may have to take less money to begin with than you get now, but it will be easier earned. Any old thing is better than Jake Meyer's joint, I think."

This hope carried Jean through the three ensuing days. The conditions at the cloak-factory were at no time better—in fact, once or twice, when it rained and the girls came with damp clothing, they were worse; but she omitted no more meals, and after the second day accustomed herself to the steady treadmill of the machine.

At luncheon, Friday, Amy had news.

"Come up to the store after you stop work to-night," she directed. "Beginning to-day, we keep open longer. Take the elevator to the fourth floor."

"There's a place for me?"

"I'm not saying that. I spoke to my friend, the floor-walker, again—he's in the toy department—and he told me to bring you round."

Jean found the vast establishment easily. The difficulty would have been to miss it. Pushing her way through the holiday shoppers crowding the immense ground-floor, she wormed into an elevator, got out as Amy bade, and, after devious wanderings in a wonderful garden of millinery, came finally upon her friend's special province and Amy herself.

Or was it Amy? She looked twice before deciding. It was not so much the costly garment, a thing of silks, embroideries, and laces, which effected the transformation,—Jean expected something of the kind,—as it was the actress in Amy herself, which impelled her to play the part the costume implied. With eyes sparkling, cheeks flushed, shoulders erect, she was not Amy Jeffries, cloak-model, but a child of luxury apparelled for the opera or the ball.

"Did she buy it?" Jean asked, when, free at last, Amy perceived her waiting and came to her.

Amy sighed dolefully.

"Yes; it's gone," she said. "You can't imagine how I hate to lose it. It had come to seem like my very own."

Jean could not conceive Amy in an occupation more congenial, and wished heartily that as enviable a fortune might fall to her.

"It seems easy work," she said. "What do they require of a cloak-model?"

"A thirty-six inch bust, at least, for a starter. Did I ever tell you that they call us by our bust measures? We never hear our own names. I'm Thirty-six; that big girl with the red hair is Thirty-eight; and so it goes. Then you must have good proportions and a stylish carriage, and be attractive generally," she added, naïvely regarding her trim reflection in the nearest pier-glass.

At this point "Thirty-eight" approached, and Amy introduced her, saying:—

"My friend here thinks she'd like to be a cloak-model. 'Tisn't all roses, is it?"

The red-haired girl gave the indulgent smile of experience.

"Wholesale or retail, it's harder than it looks," she declared. "I don't mean displaying gowns so much as the side issues. Why, the amount of dieting, lacing, and French heels some models put up with to keep in form is something awful. Give me the retail trade, though. I'd rather deal with shopping cranks than buyers."

"I suppose some of the buyers are fresh," Amy demurely remarked.

"Some! Better say one out of every two," retorted Thirty-eight, tersely. "I know what I'm talking about. I was a display model in wholesale houses for three years—showing evening costumes, too! Oh, I know buyers! A decent girl simply has to make herself a dummy, that's all. She can't afford to have eyes and ears and feelings."

It was now quite the closing hour, and Amy conducted Jean to a lower floor which looked like Kriss Kringle's own kingdom. They came upon the floor-walker, frowning portentously at an atom of a cash-girl who had stopped to play with a toy which she should have had wrapped immediately for a suburban customer; but he smoothed his wrinkled front at sight of Amy, with whom he seemed on excellent terms. Jean looked for a rigid inquiry into her qualifications, but after some mention of a reference, which Amy forestalled by glibly offering her own, Mr. Rose merely told her to report for trial Monday, at six dollars a week, remarking in the same breath that she had a heart-breaking pair of eyes.

Jean was puzzled.

"Do they take on everybody with no more ceremony than that?" she asked, as they made their way out. "It seems a slack way of doing things."

Amy laughed gayly.

"Not much! In some stores—most, I guess—the superintendent does the hiring. I had to face the manager of my department. You would have had to see the manager down here, probably, if he wasn't sick. I knew this when I struck Rosey-posy for the place. He took you as a personal favor to me, or that's what he said, for he's rushing me a bit. For my part, I think your heart-breaking eyes did it. You don't seem to realize it, but you're a mighty handsome girl. I didn't half appreciate it when you wore the refuge uniform. Don't blush! You'll get used to it. Trust the men to tell you. Anyhow, you've got your chance and can snap your fingers at Meyer & Schwarzschild."

"I'll tell them to-morrow morning."

"Better wait till to-morrow night after you've drawn your pay," counselled Amy, sagely. "Then you needn't listen to any more back talk than you please."

Jean followed this advice, giving the forewoman notice only when she turned from the cashier's window with her hard-earned wage safe in her grasp.

The Jewess bridled, her fat shoulders quivering.

"Place not good enough?" she queried tartly.

"I've a better one."

"With another cloak firm?"

"No; with a department store."

The forewoman smiled sarcastically.

"Don't you fool yourself that you'll be better off. Mr. Meyer! Mr. Meyer!" she called, raising her voice as the son of the house made his appearance in a doorway. "Here's another girl what's got the department-store fever."

Jean shrank from further explanations, particularly with young Meyer, but he bustled up at once and put the same questions as the forewoman.

"Which store is it?" he continued.

She told him, and wondered why he smirked.

"Does Amy Jeffries work there still?" he said.

"Yes."

"Seems to be prospering? Wears good clothes?"

"Yes."

Young Meyer leered again.

"Come round when you're sick of it," he invited. "Tell Amy, too. You're both good cloak-makers."

She turned from his satyr-face, vaguely disquieted. His whole manner was an evil innuendo. The girl with the freckles, who had called the place a sweat-shop, went down with her in the freight-elevator and walked beside her for a block, when they gained the street.

"I heard Jake chewin' the rag up there," she said. "Why didn't you cuff his ears? Anybody'd know to look at you that no buyer got you your position."

"What are you talking about?"

"You didn't catch on to what he was hintin'?"

"No."

The girl gave an incredulous exclamation.

"And maybe you don't know either how Amy Jeffries got her place?" she added.

"She said a buyer for the firm saw her at Meyer & Schwarzschild's and liked her looks."

"That's straight," grinned the sceptic.

Jean shook her impatiently by the arm.

"What isn't straight?" she demanded. "You are the one hinting now. What do you mean? Out with it!"

But the girl squirmed out of her grasp and darted laughing away.

"Ask Amy," she called.

XI

Jean meant to probe the mystery at the first possible moment, but her resolve weakened in Amy's presence. If the girl's light-heartedness did not of itself quiet suspicion, it at least disarmed it, while her unselfish joy at Jean's release from the thraldom of Meyer & Schwarzschild alone made the questions Jean had thought to put seem churlish and ungrateful. Moreover, Amy was full of a plan for the evening.

"I knew it was coming," she exulted. "Anybody with a pair of eyes could see by the way he's picked you out to talk to every night that you've got him going. He came to me first to ask if I thought you'd come, and when I accepted for both, he hustled right out to get the tickets."

"What tickets?" She did not ask who was the purchaser; she, too, had eyes.

"Tickets for the theatre—a vaudeville show."

Jean's face lit.

"Vaudeville! I've often wondered what it was like."

"You're not telling me you've never seen a vaudeville show?"

"Never. Nothing worth seeing ever came to Shawnee Springs. Ought we to go?"

"Do you mean, is it respectable? Sure! One of the best in the city."

"I don't mean that. Ought we to go in this way? I don't know him."

"Well, I do," rejoined Amy, decisively; "and if there's a nicer fellow between High Bridge and the Battery, I'll miss my guess. Of course, if you want to scare up a headache and back out, why, you can. I'm going, anyway, and I reckon the extra ticket won't go a-begging. The stenographer or the manicure would jump at the chance."

"Would he be offended?"

"Awfully. Why, he only asked me because he wanted you! Next time it will be you alone."

Jean needed little coaxing. She wanted exceedingly to see a New York theater, and she really liked the breezy young dentist. It had surprised her in their evening talks to find how much they had in common. He, too, had spent his youth in a country town, and, though he had migrated first to a smaller city to study for his profession, his early impressions of New York coincided very closely with her own. She later discovered the same community of interest with nearly every one so reared, but it now chanced that none other of Mrs. St. Aubyn's boarders—or, as she preferred to call them, guests—were country-bred, and Paul Bartlett got the credit of a readier sympathy accordingly. Thus, to-night, he did not share Amy's rather too frequently expressed wonder that Jean had never witnessed a vaudeville performance.

"Never saw anything nearer to it than a minstrel show myself, up to the time I went away to dental college," he confessed frankly, as they set out. "We only got 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and 'East Lynne' troupes in our burg. Say, but they were a rocky aggregation! I could see that even then."

This also struck Jean as a notable coincidence.

"It seems as if you were describing the Springs," she said. "But we did get a circus or two."

"Then your town beat mine," Paul laughed. "We had to jog over to the county seat for Barnum's. Otherwise they seem to have been cut off the same piece of homespun. I'll bet you even had box socials?"

Jean's face suddenly lost its animation.

"Yes," she answered.

"Just about the limit, weren't they? I wonder Newport doesn't take 'em up. They're foolish enough. Yet I thought they were great sport once. I used to try to change the boxes when I suspected that some love-sick pair were scheming to beat the game. Maybe you've done that, too?"

"Yes," Jean assented again unsteadily.

She was infuriated with herself for her involuntary change of manner and burning face, neither of which, she feared, had escaped his quick eye. It galled her thoroughgoing honesty to be forever on her guard against disclosing her refuge history, yet there seemed no help for it. Unjust though it was, the stigma was as actual for her as for the guiltiest, and cloak it she must.

If the dentist noticed anything amiss, he was tactful and launched into an exchange of nonsense with Amy which lasted quite to the theater's garish door. Once within, Jean forgot that she had a past which might not be fearlessly bared for any eye. Amy squeezed her arm happily as they passed directly into the body of the house instead of mounting the stairs familiar to her feet when she paid her own way; and to the squeeze she added a look of transport and awe when, following the usher, they skirted the orchestra and entered a narrow passage near the stage.

"We've got box seats!" she whispered huskily. "They couldn't have cost him less than a dollar apiece!"

Jean had a moment of timidity begotten of a vivid recollection of two cramped pigeon-roosts, always untenanted, which flanked the advertisement-littered drop-curtain of the Shawnee Springs Grand Opera House, but was speedily reassured to find that she need endure no such lonely distinction here. These boxes were many, and they held many, their own being shared by half a dozen persons besides themselves, while the hangings were so disposed that she could be as secluded as she pleased, yet miss nothing of the play.

The play! It was a series of plays, with endless other wonderful things, too. Nothing that she had conceived resembled this ever-shifting spectacle of laughter and tears. For there were tears—real ones! Jean had often jeered at girls who cried over novels, while those whom a play, or at least the Shawnee Springs brand of drama, could move to tears, were even less comprehensible; yet to-night, when a simple little piece dealing merely with an unhappy man and wife who, resolved to go their separate ways, callously divided their poor belongings until they reached a dead baby's shoes, ran its course, she found her breath short and her cheeks wet. She was at first rather ashamed of this weakness, attributing it to her refuge nerves, but she presently heard Amy sob, and, looking round, perceived handkerchiefs fluttering throughout the darkened house. Paul, on her other side, hemmed once or twice, and she supposed him disgusted with all this ado over a baby who never existed, but when the lights went up suddenly she discovered that his eyes were moist, too.

She liked this trait in Paul. She was glad, furthermore, that he did not scoff afterward, as did some men whom the acting had moved. It seemed to her a wholesome sign that he had the courage of his sympathies; one could probably rely upon that type of man. His mental alertness also impressed her anew. For him none of the quips of the Irish or German comedians were recondite, and he could explain in a nutshell the most bewildering feats of the Japanese adepts at sleight of hand. She wondered not a little at this special knowledge, and when they left the theatre he told her that it had been his chief boyish ambition to become a magician.

"I drummed up subscriptions, collected bones, old iron, and rubber for the tinman, peddled anything under the canopy that folks would buy, all for the sake of a little cash to get books and apparatus," he confessed. "Once, when I was about smart sixteen, I gave an exhibition, part magic lantern, part magic tommyrot. I hired the village hall, mind you. What cheek I had those days!"

Jean was keenly interested. This, too, reminded her of the Springs and her own irrevocable playtime.

"Did people turn out?" she asked.

"Did they! I cleared twelve dollars."

"My!" jeered Amy. "I suppose you bought an automobile?"

"No; they hadn't been invented yet." He turned again to Jean. "Guess what I did buy!"

"More apparatus."

"Just as quick as I could get a money-order," he laughed. "You're something of a wizard yourself. You must have been a boy once upon a time."

"Yes," said Jean; "I was."

When they reached the street Paul suggested oysters, and after a faint demurrer from Jean, which a secret pinch from Amy abruptly quenched, he led the way to a restaurant. The establishment he chose had a German name, and was fitted up in a manner which Jean took to be German also. The chairs and tables were of a heavy medieval design, and matched the high paneling which surrounded the room and terminated in a shelf bearing a curious array of mugs and flagons. From a small dais in one corner an orchestra, made up of a zither, two mandolins, and a guitar, discoursed a wiry yet not unpleasant music which seemed, on the whole, less Teuton than American, of a most unclassical bounce and joyousness. Paul apologized for this flaw in an otherwise harmonious scheme, explaining that the American patrons outnumbered the German, but Amy patriotically declared that ragtime was better than foreign music any day, and pronounced the entire place as cute as it could be, which really left nothing else to be said.

Everybody was drinking beer with his food, or, speaking more accurately, eating a little food with his beer, and Paul ordered two or three bottles of the exceedingly dark variety most in vogue, which he and Amy consumed. Amy rallied Jean upon her abstinence, and asked if she had signed the pledge; but Paul seemed to respect her scruples.

"Felt the same way myself once," he said. "Whenever the good old scandal specialists up our way saw a fellow slide into the hotel on a hot day for a glass of lager, they thought he was piking straight for the eternal bonfire. Naturally the boys punished a lot of stuff they didn't want, just to live up to their reputations. It's some different down here."

"I should say so," agreed Amy, boisterously. "Why, my stepfather began to send me out for beer almost as soon as I could walk. The idea of its hurting anybody! I don't believe I'd feel it if I drank a keg."

Paul did not seem as impressed by this statement as were an after-theater party at an adjoining table, and embraced a quiet opportunity to move an unfinished bottle out of her enthusiastic reach. Jean glowed under the scrutiny of the supper-party opposite, and, exchanging a look with Paul, rose presently to go. Amy objected eloquently, pointing out that it still wanted half an hour of midnight and that department stores did no business Sundays, together with sundry arguments as trenchant, which plainly carried weight with the attentive tables roundabout, but failed to convince her companions. Near the door she fell in with an unexpected ally in the person of Mr. Rose, who listened to her protests quite as sympathetically as if they had not already reached him across the room, and promptly invited them all to what he termed a nightcap with himself. Jean declined civilly, and Amy, though sore tempted, followed her example. Once outside, however, she asserted her perfect independence by walking off with Mr. Rose on his remarking easily that he would stroll their way.

"Aching incisors!" ejaculated the dentist, grimly watching them forge ahead. "Where did I get the foolish idea that I was her escort? Who is that flower, anyhow?"

"An employee in our store."

"Oh!" said Paul. "Clerk?"

"No; a floor-walker."

"Oh!" he said again, with a change of intonation which Jean detected. "In her department?"

"No; in mine."

"Oh!"

Amy's laugh came back shrilly through the now sparsely frequented street.

"I shouldn't have ordered so much beer," admitted the man. "It was too heavy for her, even if her stepfather—but let's cut that out!"

Jean herself thought that this passage from the Jeffries family history might better be left undiscussed. She quickened their pace till they were close upon Amy's too buoyant heels, and so continued to their door.

Amy was full of regrets that she could not at this hour with propriety ask Mr. Rose into Mrs. St. Aubyn's drawing-room, and as Paul inhospitably neglected to offer his quarters, the floor-walker, with unflagging cordiality and self-possession, took himself off.

"I don't cotton to Mr. Rose," said the dentist, in a voice too low for Amy, who was already mounting the stairs. "I hope you don't."

"I don't know him."

"You don't want to know him, take my word for it. This isn't sour grapes because he butted in, mind you. If you knew the city, I wouldn't say a word."

Jean bent a frank gaze upon him under the dim hall light. Paul met it to her satisfaction.

"Thank you for to-night," she said, giving him her hand. "Thank you for all of it; for the theater and the supper and for—this."

Explanations with Amy were impossible now, but the following morning, which the girls spent luxuriously in bed, proved auspicious. Amy's waking mood was contrite. She owned of her own engaging accord that she had made a goose of herself in the restaurant, suggesting by way of defence that her stepfather must have favored quite another kind of beer. She as frankly conceded that the Rose episode was indefensible, and promised ample apologies to the dentist.

"He'll understand how it was," she said. "Paul's not a Jake Meyer."

"Will Mr. Rose understand?" asked Jean, pointedly.

Amy shot her a sidelong glance.

"Why not?"

"He's not—well, a Paul Bartlett."

"He isn't a Jake Meyer, either, if that's what you mean," retorted Amy, rising on her elbow. "I like Rosey and make no bones of telling you. What have you got at the back of your big brown eyes there? Somebody has been stuffing you, I guess. Was it some kind friend at Meyer & Schwarzschild's? What did they say about Rosey and me?"

"Nothing," answered Jean, suspicious of her warmth; but now told her plainly whom and what they had mentioned.

Amy listened without surprise.

"There was bound to be some gossip," she commented, at length. "I counted on it."

"You counted on it!"

"Certainly. Jake knew the buyer's record from A to Z, and there were others."

Jean had a moment's giddiness, and shrank from her explorations.

"Did you?" she faltered.

"Of course. Do you suppose I couldn't read him like a book after all I've been through?"

"Yet you went just the same! You—"

"I trusted to luck, and for once luck was with me. He had a big offer from a Chicago firm, and left town the very day I went into the cloak department. Oh, you needn't stare," she added, with a touch of passion. "The world hasn't been any too kind to me, and I'm learning to beat it at its own selfish game. Don't let it worry you."

"I can't help it."

"Then you're silly. I'm not as soft as I look. Besides, you'll find yourself pretty busy paddling your own canoe."

Jean fell into a brooding silence. The new life was incredibly complex. It held possibilities before which imagination flinched. A picture, recalled again and again with extraordinary vividness, flashed once more before her. She saw a camp among birches bordering a pellucid lake; a boyish, pacing figure; a straightforward, troubled face confronting her own. She evoked a voice, "To be a stranger in New York, homeless, friendless, without work, the shadow of that place over there dogging your steps...." Every syllable, every intonation, was ineffaceable. Where was he now, that flawless young knight of the enchanted forest, who had stayed her folly and changed the current of her life? He had promised to befriend her when, against his counsel, she had thought to dare this unknown world. Would he still have faith, should they meet?

Amy's laugh caught her back to the room of three dormers.

"You looked a million miles away," she said. "If you were another sort of girl, I'd say you were dreaming of your best fellow. What! Blushes! Then you were? Was it Paul?"

"Paul!" Jean repelled the suggestion with a pillow. "Take that!"

They said no more of the buyer—he was luckily out of the reckoning; and although Jean deemed the dentist a wiser judge of men in general, and of floor-walkers in particular, than Amy, she decided for the present to side with neither, but try to weigh Mr. Rose for herself. If Amy was skimming thin ice, she was at least a practiced skater, with the chastening memory of a serious splash. Moreover, to recur to Amy's metaphor, she had a canoe of her own to paddle, as she was roughly reminded that same afternoon.

XII

It happened at dusk while they were returning from Central Park, which Amy had selected as a primary lesson in Jean's civic education. They were homing by way of Broadway, and were well back into the theatrical section, when Jean's guide gripped her abruptly by the arm, dragged her into the nearest doorway, and hurried her half up the dark flight of stairs to which it led. Even here she enjoined silence, pointing for explanation to the square of pavement framed by the doorway, into which an instant later loitered the bedizened key to the riddle—Stella Wilkes.

There was no mistaking her. For an interminable interval she lingered, watchful of the street, so distinct under the electrics that they could even make out her mole. Then, aimlessly as she had come, she drifted out again and away.

"Thank my stars I saw her first that time!" gasped Amy, still fearfully intent upon the lighted square.

"You knew she was in New York?"

"Yes. I've seen her before. She came up to me one night looking even worse than now. She was more painted, and her eyes were like burned holes. She said she was broke, but had the promise of a place. It was to sing in some gin-mill, I think. She can sing, you know. Remember how she'd let her voice go in chapel, just to show off? I loaned her a dollar to get rid of her. I was afraid somebody I knew might see us together. I think she saw I was afraid."

"You shouldn't have let her see; it gives her a hold on you. I shan't dodge."

Jean began consistently to descend, but Amy caught her back.

"Wait," she pleaded. "Do wait a little longer. Wait for my sake, if you don't care yourself. But you'd better fight shy of her, too, I can tell you. She hasn't forgotten the prison riot. She mentioned it the night I saw her, and said she'd get plenty square with you yet."

Tricked by her uncertain nerves, Jean came under the sway of Amy's panic. They lurked cowering in the hallway till sure of a clear coast; then, darting forth, hurried round the first corner to a quieter thoroughfare which Stella would be less apt to haunt. Here, too, they continually saw her in imagination, and sought other doorways and rounded other corners for safety. Fear tracked them home, plucked at them in their own street, mounted their own steps, entered their own door, and abode with them thereafter.

Nor, for one of them at least, did the crowded weeks next following bring forgetfulness or reassurance. Jean was ever expecting the dreaded face to leer at her from the blurred horde which swam daily by the little island in the toy department, where she sold children's games. While she elucidated the mysteries of parchesi or dissected maps to some distraught mother of six, another part of the restless mechanism of her brain was painting Stella to the life. She pictured the outcast's vindictive joy at running her down, heard her mouth the unspeakable for all who would lend an ear. And who would not! She quailed in fancy before the gaping audience—the curious shoppers, the round-eyed cash-girls, the smirking clerks, Mr. Rose, the floor-walker.

Once, issuing from such a dream, she found herself face to face with Mr. Rose, who had come unnoticed to her counter, and so clear-cut was the vision, she merged the unreal with the real and blenched at his voice.

"Not taking morphine lunches, are you?" he asked, leaning solicitously over the counter.

She stared hazily till he repeated his question.

"Morphine lunches! What are they?"

The man enacted the pantomime of applying a hypodermic syringe to his arm.

"So," he said. "Some of the girls who can't lunch at home get into the way of it. Bad thing—very."

"Why should you suspect me of such a thing?" demanded Jean, indignantly. "Do I look like a morphine-fiend?"

"No offence intended. Noticed a queer look in your eyes, that's all. Stunning eyes! I'd hate to see 'em full of dope. Perfectly friendly interest, understand."

She welcomed the fretful interruption of a customer, but the woman was only returning some article, not buying, and the transaction required the floor-walker's sanction. When the shopper had gone her way, he leaned to Jean again.

"If it's worry about holding your place after the holidays," he said, "why, you can't quit it too soon. We've watched your work, and it's all right. The forelady says you've learned the stock quicker than any green clerk she's had in a dog's age, and you know she's particular. Whoever else goes, you stick."

Jean gave a long breath of thankfulness, but she was not too happy to be practical.

"And the pay?" she asked.

"The same for the present. You're still a beginner, you know."

"It is very little. The girl who had my place left because she could not live on it, I hear."

Mr. Rose tapped his prominent teeth with a pencil.

"She said something of the kind to me," he admitted. "She was unreasonable—very. What could she expect of six dollars?"

The handsome saleswoman at the dolls' furniture counter was intoning, "Oh, Mr. Rose! Oh, Mr. Rose!" with increasing petulance, and the floor-walker sped to her, leaving his cryptic utterance unexplained. Jean asked a fellow-clerk more about her predecessor, and learned that as she lived somewhere in the Bronx, both carfare and lunches had been serious items. These, fortunately, she herself need not consider. It was half the battle to feel permanent. She could shift somehow on her present wage till promotion came.

There was, moreover, a certain compensation in feeling herself a factor in this great establishment which everybody knew who had heard of New York at all. It was a show place of the metropolis, one of the seventy times seven wonders of the New World. Its floor space was reckoned in acres, its roof housed a whole city block, its capital represented millions, its wares the habitable globe. Nothing essential to human life seemed to be lacking. There were scales for your exalted babyship's earthly advent; patent foods, healing drugs, mechanical playthings for your childish wants or ills; text-books for your growing mind; fine feathers for your expanding social wings; the trousseau for your marriage; furnishings from cellar to attic for your first housekeeping; a bank for your savings; fittings for your office; the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, lest business suffer while you shop; bronzes, carvings, automobiles, steam yachts, old wines, old books, old masters for your topping prosperity; comforts innumerable—oculists, dentists, discreet photographers, what not—for your lean and slippered decline; and, yes, even the sad few vanities you may take with you to your quiet grave.

It drew rich and poor alike these days, and sooner or later the toy department gathered them in. Though Stella came not, there were many of familiar aspect who did. Hardly a day passed without its greeting from some one Jean knew. Mrs. St. Aubyn came shopping on account of an incredible grandchild she must remember; the bookworm for the cogent reason that a cherubic niece brought him; the birds of passage to celebrate an engagement obtained at last; the shorn lambs of Wall Street to revive fading memories of a full pocketbook; the stenographer and the manicure since they were women; the dentist because of Jean.

It was impossible to mistake Paul's reason. Her fellow-clerks hinted it, Mr. Rose reënforced their opinion with his own, Amy added embroidered comment, and finally Paul told her explicitly himself. On the first evening, when he appeared at her counter near the closing hour, he bought a game. At his second call, a week later, he examined at length, but did not purchase. The third time he said that he had happened by; the fourth he cast subterfuge to the winds and avowed frankly that he came to walk home with her.

"Fact is, I'm lonesome," he explained, when they reached the street. "Till you came I never got a chance to talk to the right sort of girl except in the operating-chair, and that didn't cut much ice, for it was always about teeth. Hope you don't mind my dropping round for you once in a while after office hours? It will keep these street-corner mashers away from you and do a lot toward civilizing me."

Jean accepted his companionship as frankly as it was tendered. There was nothing loverlike about Paul's attitude. He was precisely the same whether they walked alone or whether, as frequently happened, Amy came down with her to the employees' entrance, where Jean had suggested that they meet. His escort was doubly welcome during the last week before Christmas when the great store kept open evenings, and the shopping quarter held its nightly jam. Then, perhaps a fortnight after the holidays, she overheard a conversation.

It was not about herself, nor among girls she knew, nor indeed in her department; merely a scrap of waspish dispute between two young persons of free speech who supposed themselves in sole possession of the cloak-room. Black Eyes remarked that she knew very well what Blue Eyes was. She didn't belong there; her place was the East Side. Whereupon Blue Eyes elegantly retorted that unless Black Eyes shut her mouth, she would smash her ugly face in. This was evidently purely rhetorical, for when Black Eyes waxed yet more personal, pointing out the inconsistent relation of fifteen-dollar picture hats to six dollars a week, with pertinent reference to a bald floor-walker from the carpet department who waited for Blue Eyes every night, the only act of violence was the slamming of a door which covered Blue Eyes's swift retreat.

That evening Jean told the dentist he must come no more.

"Suffering bicuspid!" he gasped. "What have I done?" This despite her tactful best to assure him that he had done nothing at all.

It seemed enormously difficult of explanation at first, but when she suggested that she found the department store not unlike a small town for gossip, he comprehended instantly.

"Who has been talking?" he demanded. "If it was that pup of a floor-walker—"

"It wasn't. So far as I know, not a soul has mentioned my name. It's because they mustn't talk, that I've spoken."

Paul squared a by no means puny pair of shoulders.

"Let me catch 'em at it!" he said.

She was more watchful of her fellow-clerks thereafter. A few girls she doubted, but striking an average, they seemed as a class honest, hard-working, and monotonously commonplace, with their loftiest ambitions centered upon tawdry and impracticable clothes. If a girl dressed better than her wage warranted, as many did, it usually developed that she lived with her parents or with other relations who gave her cheap board. These lucky beings had also a social existence denied to the wholly self-supporting, of which Jean obtained a perhaps typical glimpse through a vivacious little rattlepate at the adjoining mechanical-toy counter, with whom friendly overtures between customers led to the discovery that they were neighbors, and to a call at the three dormers. This courtesy Jean in due course returned one evening, at the paternal flat over an Eighth Avenue grocery, where "Flo," as she petitioned to be called, rejoiced in the exclusive possession of a small bedroom ventilated, though scarcely illumined, by an air-shaft.

"Mother gave me this room to myself when I began to bring in money," she explained. "I only have to hand over two dollars a week. What's left I spend just as I please. Father says I buy more clothes than the rest of the family put together, and he nearly threw a fit once when I paid twelve dollars for a lace hat trimmed with imported flowers; but all the same he doesn't like to see any of the girls I go with look better than I do. Our crowd is great for dress. How do you like my cozy corner? I think these wire racks for photographs are sweet, don't you? I have such a stack of fellows' pictures! I wonder if you know any of them. The man in the dress suit is Willy Larkin—he's in the gents' furnishing department. I put him next to Dan Evans—you know Dan, don't you?—because they're so tearing jealous of each other. If Dan takes me to a Sousa concert one night, Willy can't rest till he has spread himself on vaudeville or some exciting play. They almost came to blows over a two-step I promised both of them at the subscription hop our dancing club gave New Year's. That tintype you're looking at is one Charlie Simmons and I had taken at Glen Island last year. Goodness! Don't hold my face to the light. I'm a fright in a bathing-suit. I do love bathing, though, but I think salt water is packs more fun. Last summer I had enough saved for a whole week at a dandy beach near Far Rock-away. There was a grand dancing pavilion, and sometimes you could hear the waves above the band. I just love the sea!"

Jean was not envious, but the girl's chatter made her own existence outside the store seem humdrum. Mrs. St. Aubyn's circle was more narrow than had at first appeared. After a few dinners, it was obvious that the landlady's talk was nearly always confined to the food and servants, as the librarian's was limited to the weather, the shorn lambs' to things financial, and the stenographer's, the manicure's, and Amy's to feminine styles, while the birds of passage, whose side-lights upon the Profession had been diverting, were now lamentably displaced by an insurance agent who dwelt overmuch upon the uncertainty of human life. It had to be admitted, also, that Paul himself talked shop with frequency. His stories, like his droll ejaculations, were apt to smack of the office; and he had a habit of carrying gold crowns or specimens of bridgework in his pockets, which, though no doubt works of art of their kind, were yet often disconcerting when shown in mixed company. At such times especially, Jean would evoke that knightlier figure, who shone so faultless in perspective, and in fancy put him in Paul's place.

She perceived the dentist's foibles, however, without liking the essential man one whit the less, and, in the absence of the Ideal, frequently took Sunday trolley trips with him in lieu of the tabooed walks from the store; but the fear of meeting Stella made her decline his invitations to the theater and kept her from the streets at night. Paul took these self-denials for maiden scruples beyond his masculine comprehension, and was edified rather than offended; but he was at first puzzled and then hurt, when, as spring drew on, the outings also ceased. Jean was evasive when questioned, while Amy looked knowing, but was too loyal to explain. The stenographer or the manicure or, for that matter, any normal woman could, if asked, have told him that Jean was merely ashamed of her clothes.

It was largely because Paul misunderstood that Jean resolved no longer to wait passively for promotion. Six dollars a week had their limitations, since five went always to Mrs. St. Aubyn for board. Yet, out of that scant margin of a sixth, she had somehow scraped together enough to replace what she had used of Mrs. Fanshaw's grudging contribution, the whole of which she despatched to Shawnee Springs in a glow of wrathful satisfaction that cheered her for many days. Nevertheless, the want of it pinched her shrewdly. Those ten dollars would have helped spare the refuge suit, which, fortunately black, did duty seven days in the week and looked it, too, now that the mild days began to outnumber the raw, and other girls bloomed in premature spring finery. Many of the bargains which the great store was forever advertising would have aided in little ways, but the management was opposed to its employees' profiting by these chances.

During the continued ill health of the department manager, Mr. Rose still wielded an extended authority, and to him, accordingly, Jean made her appeal, overtaking him on his way to the offices one evening when the immense staff was everywhere hurrying from the building. The carpet and upholstery department, where they talked, was ever a place of muffled quiet, even with business at high tide, and, save for an occasional night-watchman, they seemed isolated now. Rose heard her out, lounging with feline complacency upon a soft-hued heap of Oriental rugs, while his eyes roamed her eager face with candid approval.

Jean saw with anger that he no longer attended.

"You are not listening," she reproached. "Can't you appreciate what this means to me? Look at my shoes! They're all I have. Look at this suit! It's my only one. I've saved no money to buy other clothes—it's impossible. You say I'm efficient—pay me living wages, then. I can't live on what you give me. I've tried and I've failed—failed like the girl before me."

The floor-walker slid smiling from the rug pile.

"She was inconceivably plain," he said; "but you—" He spread his white hands in futile search of adjectives.

"Never mind my looks, Mr. Rose," Jean struck in curtly. "I am talking business."

"So am I, my dear. I'm pointing out your resources."

She did not take his meaning fully, his leer notwithstanding, and he drew his own interpretation of her silence.

"You know we don't lack for applicants here," he continued. "There are a dozen girls waiting to jump into your shoes. We expect our low-paid girls to have additional means of support. Some of them have families; others—but you're no fool. There are plenty of men who'd be glad to help you out. Why don't you arrange things with that young dentist? Or"—his smile grew more saccharine—"if that affair is off, perhaps I—"

Then something transpired which he never clearly understood. It was plain enough to Jean. In the twinkling of an eye she was again an athletic boxing tomboy, answering to the name of Jack, before whose scientific "right" Mr. Rose dropped with crumpled petals to the floor.

XIII

Jean stood over him an instant, her anger still at white heat, but the floor-walker had had enough of argument and only groveled cursing where he fell. Leaving him without a word, she swept by a grinning night-watchman and turned in at the adjacent offices, whither Rose himself was bound. She had learned the ways of the place sufficiently by now to know that members of the firm often lingered here after the army which served them had gone, and she was determined that her own story should reach them first. But the office of the head of the firm was dark, and the consequential voice which answered her knock at the door of a junior partner, where a light still shone, proved to be that of a belated stenographer.

As she turned uncertainly away, Rose, nursing a swelling eye, again confronted her.

"Thought you'd take it to headquarters, did you?" he said. "I advise you to drop it right here."

He recoiled as she advanced, and warded an imaginary blow, but she only passed him by contemptuously.

"Are you going to drop it?" he asked, following to the stairs. "I don't want to see you get into trouble, for all your nasty temper. I'm willing to overlook your striking me."

His persistence only fixed her resolution to expose him, and she hurried on without reply.

"Two can play at that game," he warned over the rail.

In the street she paused irresolutely. The man would, of course, protect himself if he could, and her own story should reach some member of the firm to-night. If she waited till morning, Rose could easily forestall her. Yet she had become too sophisticated not to shrink from the idea of trying to take her grievance into one of those men's homes. Only the other day she had picked up a trashy paper containing a shop-girl story, warmly praised by Amy, which narrated an incident of the kind. The son and heir of a merchant prince—so the author styled him—had cruelly wronged the beautiful shop-girl, who, after harrowing sorrows, took her courage in her hands and braved the ancestral hall. She gained an entrance somehow (details were scanty here) and confronted the base son and heir at the climax of a grand ball at which the upper ten and other numerals were assembled to do honor to his chosen bride. Jean had seen the absurdity of the picture as Amy could not. Things did not fall out this wise in real life. The beautiful shop-girl would never have gotten by the merchant prince's presumably well-trained servants, even if she had eluded the specially detailed policeman at the awning, and Jean judged that her own chances would be as slender.

Nevertheless, there seemed to be nothing left her but to try. She consulted a directory in the next drugstore and copied out the home addresses of the several members of the firm. One of the junior partners seemed to live nearest, though not within walking distance, and at this address she finally arrived at an hour when, judging Fifth Avenue by Mrs. St. Aubyn's, she feared she would find her employer at dinner. She recognized the house as one which Amy had pointed out with an air of proprietorship on their first Sunday walk, and she reflected with misgiving that it was a really plausible setting for the drama of the beautiful shop-girl, did such things exist.

An elderly butler convinced her that this was her own drama. He was not unbearably haughty, a vast quantity of polite fiction to the contrary; and if he scorned her clothes, he did not let the fact appear. His manner even suggested decorous regret that the master of the house was not at home. Jean went down the steps, wondering whether this were an artistic lie, but, happily for the servant's reputation, an electric cab at this moment drew up at the curb and dropped the man she sought. She recognized him at once, for of all the firm he had the most striking presence, looking very like the more jovial portraits of Henry VIII. Unlike the Tudor king, however, he was said to be happily married and of domestic tastes. He paused, giving her a keen look, when he perceived that she meant to accost him.

"I just asked for you." Jean said. "I wanted to speak to you about something at the store."

"You are one of our employees?"

"Yes. I am a sales girl in the toy department. I wish to make a serious complaint."

"A complaint? Your own department is the proper channel for that."

"I cannot ask the man to judge himself," returned Jean, simply.

He gave her another sharp look.

"Oh," he said, with a change of tone. "Come in." Then, to the elderly butler, who during this interval had held the door ajar with an air of not listening, "The Study."

Jean seemed to recall that the beautiful shop-girl had encountered a "study," which could have been no more luxurious than this. She queried, while she waited, what the library and more pretentious apartments could be like. The room seemed to her of regal splendor. It was paneled and cross-beamed, and a fireplace in keeping with the architecture well-nigh filled one end wall. The light fell from a wonderful affair of opalescent glass which gave new tones to the oriental fabrics underfoot and added richness to the lavishly employed mahogany. No other wood had been permitted here. It glowed dully from beam, panel, and cornice; from the mantel, the bookshelves, the carved cabinet concealing a safe; from the massive griffin-legged desk at which the owner of it all, as florid as his taste, presently took his seat.

"Now, then," he said, "tell me explicitly what you charge."

She omitted nothing. Her listener followed her closely and once, when she gave Rose's version of the firm's policy, he shook his head dissentingly, but whether in disbelief of herself or in condemnation of the floor-walker, she could not guess.

"This is a grave accusation," he said, when she had done. "It involves not only Mr. Rose,—who, let me say, has always been most efficient,—but the good name of the whole establishment."

"That is one reason why I came."

"Of the whole establishment," repeated the junior partner, as if she had not spoken. "Was there a third party present?"

"There was a watchman near by, but he couldn't have heard what was said."

"You are quite sure you did not misunderstand Mr. Rose?"

"Quite."

"And were not prejudiced against him in advance? Floor-walkers as a class have often been maligned."

Jean reflected carefully.

"I can't say no to that," she owned frankly. "A friend had a poor opinion of him and said so before I began work, but I tried not to let that influence me."

"But it did?"

"A little, perhaps. I admit I've never liked him."

For a time the big man under the drop-light trifled absently with a paper-knife.

"We'll take this matter up, of course," he said presently. "If we need a housecleaning, we'll have it; but I can't believe that things are radically at fault. No department store in the city is more considerate of its people. We were among the first to close Saturday afternoons in midsummer; we offer liberal inducements for special energy during the holidays; we have provided exceedingly attractive lunch-rooms; we even hope, when trade conditions permit, to introduce a form of profit sharing. What more can we do?"

Jean supposed his rhetorical query personal.

"You might pay better wages," she suggested. "Then things like this wouldn't happen."

For the fraction of a second King Henry wore one of his less amiable expressions. It suggested beheading or long confinement in the Tower. Then, immediately, it was glossed by modernity.

"There you trench upon economic grounds," he rejoined heavily. "I wish we might inaugurate a lecture course for our employees, to elucidate the principles which govern a great business. The law of supply and demand, the press of competition, the necessity for costly advertising, these and countless other considerations, which we at the helm appreciate, never enter the shop-girl's head."

Jean was overborne by these impressive phrases. They had never entered her head, certainly, and she was not altogether sure why they should.

"We only ask a living," she said.

"But you shouldn't. We want the girl who asks pin-money, the girl who lives with her family. Have you no family yourself, by the way?"

"My mother is living."

"Is she dependent upon you in any way?"

"No."

"Is she able to provide for you?"

"Perfectly."

"Then why doesn't she?"

Jean's eyes snapped.

"Because I won't let her."

Her listener shrugged.

"The modern woman!" he lamented. "But this is beside the question. We pay as others pay. If a girl thinks it insufficient, let her find other work. So far, I uphold Mr. Rose. His further advice—as you report it—is another matter. As I have said, we will take it up."

He touched a bell and rose, and Jean followed the elderly servant to the door. The impetus which had brought her here had subsided into great weariness of body and spirit, but she went down the avenue not ill satisfied. She had had her hearing. She had spoken, not for herself alone, but in a measure for others. Moreover, the man's bluff candor seemed an earnest that justice would be done. Precisely what form justice would take, she did not speculate.

Near her own door she met Paul on anxious lookout for her.

"I was beginning to imagine a fine bunch of horrors," he said. "Amy hadn't a ghost of a notion what was up."

"I did not tell Amy I should be late," Jean replied. She offered no explanations, but Paul's concern was grateful after what she had undergone, and she added, "I'm sorry you worried."

He eyed her narrowly, pausing an instant at the steps.

"Any need for a man of my build?" he inquired.

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because I think you're in trouble. If I can help—"

"No, no," she returned hastily. "But thank you."

"Something has happened?"

"Yes; at the store. I can't very well explain it."

"Oh," said Paul, as if explanations were needless. "I'm not so sure I couldn't be useful."

She felt that he divined something of what had transpired, his knowledge of the floor-walker being perhaps fuller than her own, but he said no more. Jean was singularly comforted by his attitude, especially since Amy's, as presently defined, left much to be desired. She seemed less amazed at Rose's behavior than at Jean's active resentment.

"I wouldn't have struck him," she said.

"What would you have done?"

"I—I don't know. At any rate, not that. A girl has to put up with a lot."

"I presume you wouldn't have reported him, either?" Jean flung out bitterly.

"No; I didn't—I mean I wouldn't."

Jean started.

"I think you meant just what you said first, Amy," she cried. "Has he told you the same thing?"

Amy writhed.

"N-no," she began; "that is—"

"Almost, then?"

"Yes."

"And you did nothing?"

"I didn't dare do anything. I don't see how you dared. It's too big a risk."

"I would have risked more in keeping quiet. I simply had to take it higher up."

"But you said Mr. Rose offered to let it drop," Amy timidly reminded. "You could have done that."

"That!" She had no words to voice her scorn.

They went to bed and rose again in an atmosphere of constraint, and Jean walked to her day's work alone. She dreaded meeting Rose, and apprehended another interview with the junior partner, an ordeal which wore a more forbidding aspect by day. But neither happened. The floor-walker did not appear in the toy department at all, though some one had seen him enter the building. It was rumored that he was ill.

Toward the end of the afternoon Jean noticed that she had become an object of some interest to the forewoman, and wondered hopefully if this influential personage had marked her for promotion. Her pay-envelope, for it was Saturday, shortly furnished a clew to the mystery in the shape of a neat slip informing her that her services were no longer required.

"I'm to answer questions if you have any," the forewoman told her, shortly; "but I guess you understand."

The girl turned a chalky face upon her.

"But I don't—"

"Then you're slower than I thought. The firm has looked you up, that's all."

Jean realized the monstrous injustice of it but slowly.

"I don't see," she faltered.

"Bosh!" cut in the woman, impatiently. "Don't try to flimflam me. Lord knows what kind of game you were working, but you had more nerve than sense. You might have guessed when you tried to put your bare word against Mr. Rose's that they'd make it their business to find out just what your word was worth. Your last employer told them."

"Told them what?" blazed Jean.

"What do you suppose? That you'd done time in a reformatory, of course."

XIV

In her dark hour came Paul.

"I know," he said, hunting her out in the corner of the melancholy drawing-room where she sat Sunday afternoon with absent eyes upon "The Trial of Effie Deans." "Some of it I guessed, and a little more filtered from Amy via Mrs. St. Aubyn, but I got the finishing touch from a man in the store."

"The store!" Jean had a moment of acute dismay; she would fain leave Paul his illusions. "What man?"

"A chap in the drug department I do work for now and then. He turned up at the parlors this morning. We're open Sundays from 'leven to one, you know."

Then, the refuge spectre had followed here! She could not look him in the face. But Paul's next words reassured.

"He didn't mention names, but I put two and two together quick enough when he told me that one of their new girls knocked out a fresh floor-walker the other night. I was proud I knew you."

"Did he know of my—my discharge?"

"No."

"You didn't mention it yourself?" Jean faltered. "Or my name?"

Paul's look was sad.

"That's a shade lower down than I think I've got," he observed loftily. "A man who'd lug in a lady friend's name under such circumstances wouldn't stop at the few trifles that still faze me. He—why, he'd even gold-crown an anterior tooth!"

She hastened to mollify him, relieved beyond measure that his chance informant knew nothing of the real reason for her dismissal. Amy could be trusted to conceal it for her own sake. Then Paul stirred her anxiety afresh with a request.

"I want to polish off Mr. Rose," he said, doubling his fist suggestively. "You made a good beginning, but the pup needs a thorough job. I know where he boards—he told me that night he butted in; and if you'll just let me call round as a friend of yours—"

"No, no. Promise me you won't!"

"But he needs it," argued the dentist, plaintively. "I'd also like, if it could be managed, to say a few things to the head of the firm."

"Indeed you mustn't," cried Jean. "Promise me you'll say nothing about it in any way!"

"Can't I even tell Rose what I think?"

"Never. I've got to accept this thing and make a new start. I must forget it, not brood over it. You mustn't thrash him, you mustn't tell him what you think—above all, you mustn't go to the firm. Promise me you won't!"

"All right," he assented, manifestly puzzled. "A girl looks at things differently. I've got another proposition, though, which I hope you won't veto. Any prejudice against dentists, present company excepted?"

"No," smiled Jean.

"Some folks have, you know. Can't understand it myself. Why isn't it as high-toned to doctor teeth as it is to specialize an inch higher up, say, on the nose? Yet socially the nose-specialist gets the glad hand in places where the dentist couldn't break in with a Krupp gun. It makes me hot. But enough said along that line just now. What I started in to tell you is that there's an opening at the parlors."

"For me—a girl?"

"For a girl?" Paul pretended to weigh this handicap gravely. "Of course, a lady assistant is generally a man, but still—"

Jean was unfamiliar with this adjunct of modern dentistry.

"What must she do?" she asked.

"Be a lady and assist. That sums it all up. Some old fogies would specify thirty summers and a homely face, but I believe in a cheery office straight through. We've been looking round for the right party lately—the girl who has the berth now is going to be married; but it never occurred to me to offer it to you until to-day. It would mean eight dollars a week right at the start, and a raise just as soon as they appreciate what an air you give the whole place. There'd be more still in it if you liked the work well enough to branch out."

"Branch out? In what way?"

"Operating-room. At first you'll act as secretary and cashier, receive patients, and see that the hulk of a janitor keeps the parlors neat. Then, if you get on as I think you will, you'll very likely have an assistant yourself, and put in most of your time elsewhere. A clever girl can be no end of help in the operating-room. Say, for instance, I'm doing a contour filling, which, let me tell you, needs an eagle-eye and the patience of a mule. Well, while I pack and figure how to do an artistic job, you anneal gold and pass it to me in the cavity. See what I mean? One bright little woman we had for a while drew thirty-five a week, but she was a trained nurse, too."

Jean had doubts of her usefulness amid these technicalities, but the office work sounded simple, and she caught thankfully at the chance.

The dentist waved aside her gratitude.

"I'm simply doing a good stroke of business for the Acme Painless Dental Company," he said. "I'll tell Grimes in the morning that I've located the right party,—Grimes is the company, by the way, the whole painless ranch,—and you can drop in later and cinch the deal."

Jean's thoughts took a leap ahead to ways and means, and she drew a worn shoe farther beneath her skirt.

"You're sure I'll do?" she hesitated.

"You! I only wish you could see some of the procession who've answered our ad." Then, almost as if he read her mind, he added with unwonted bashfulness: "If I were in your place, I'd borrow Amy's black feather boa for your first call. It suits you right down to the ground."

She took the hint laughingly. There were more things than the boa to be borrowed for the conquest of Grimes. She was touched by Paul's transparent diplomacy, and glad that in his slow man's way he had at last perceived why their outings had ceased. So, by grace of Paul and Amy, it fell out before another week elapsed that the affianced lady assistant of the Acme Painless Dental Company left to prepare for her bridal, and Jean reigned in her stead.

The company's outworks on Sixth Avenue were a resplendent negro and a monumental show-case, both filled with glittering specimens of the painless marvels accomplished within. The African wore a uniform of green and gold, and all day forced advertisements into the unwilling hands of passers-by, chanting meanwhile the full style and title of the establishment in a voice which soared easily above the roar of the elevated trains overhead. Passing this personage, you mounted a staircase whose every step besought you to remember the precise whereabouts of the parlors, while yet other placards of like import made clear the way at the top and throughout the unmistakable corridor leading to the true and only Acme Painless Dental Company's door.

Entering here to the trill of an electric bell, you came full upon the central office, or, as the leaflets read, the elegant parlor, from which the operating-rooms led on every hand. In character this apartment was broadly eclectic. Jean's special nook, with its telephone, cash-register, and smart roll-top desk, was contemporary to the minute; yet in the corner diagonally opposed, a suit of stage armor jauntily bade the waiting patient think upon knights, jousts, and the swashbuckling Middle Ages. In still another quarter a languorous slave girl of scanty raiment, but abundant bangles, postured upon a teak-wood tabouret, backed by way of further realism with Bagdad hangings and a palm of the convenient species which no frost blights and an occasional whisk of the duster always rejuvenates. The chairs were frankly Grand Rapids and built for wear, though the proprietor's avowed taste ran to a style he called "Lewis Quince"; and the gilt he might not employ here he lavished upon the frames of his pictures, which, nearly without exception, were night-scenes wherein shimmering castle windows or the gibbous moon were cunningly inlaid in mother-of-pearl. In the midst of all this, now pacifying the waiting with vain promises of speedy relief, now pottering off into this room or that in as futile attempts to make each of several sufferers believe his blundering services exclusive—big, easy-going, slovenly, yet popular—moved Grimes.

Of the operating-rooms, which by no means approached the splendor of the parlor, the next best to Grimes's own was Paul Bartlett's, for Paul was a person of importance here. Of the four assistant dentists, he was at once the best equipped and the best paid, receiving a commission over and above his regular thirty-five dollars a week. The more discriminating of the place's queer constituency coolly passed Grimes by in Paul's favor, but the elder man was not offended. A month or so after Jean's coming he even offered his clever helper a partnership, which Paul unhesitatingly declined. He was ambitious for an office of his own, when his capital should permit, and he planned it along lines which would have fatigued his slipshod employer to conceive.

"It's all too beastly bad," he told Jean, in answer to her query why he did not accept Grimes's offer and insist on reform. "You'd simply have to burn the shop from laboratory to door-mat. To advertise as he does is against the code of dental ethics, and his practice ought to be jumped on by the board of health. Look at this junk!" he added, shaking an indignant fist under the nose of the slave girl. "Lord knows how many good dollars it cost, and yet we haven't got more than one decent set of instruments in the whole shebang. I reach for a spatula or a plugger that I've laid down two minutes before, and I find it's been packed off by old Grimes to use on another patient. As for sterilizing—faugh! You could catch anything here. How he's shaved through so far without a damage suit euchres me."

"Yet I like him," said Jean.

"So do I. So does everybody. And he's getting rich on the strength of it."

"I'm getting rich on the strength of it, too," Jean laughed. "Next week I shall really be able to put money in the bank."

Better paid, better dressed, with easy work and not infrequent leisure to read, she felt that at last she had begun to live. Her position long retained a flavor of novelty, for the dental company's patrons were infinitely various and furnished endless topics of interest to herself and Paul. They usually went to and from Mrs. St. Aubyn's together, and as the summer excursion season drew on, their Sunday pleasurings began to flourish afresh. Sometimes Amy joined them, but more often she made labored excuses, and they went alone. Jean thought her more secretive and reserved than of old, and Paul, too, remarked a change.

"How did you two get chummy?" he asked abruptly, after one of Amy's declinations. "You're not at all alike."

"Chums are usually different, aren't they?" Jean said, her skin beginning to prickle.

"Not so much as you two. You're a lady and she—well, she isn't. Known her some time?"

"Yes."

"Where did you meet? You were certainly green to the city when you struck our house. Amy's an East Sider Simon-pure."

"It was in the country. Amy stayed in the country once."

"Shawnee Springs?"

"No, no. Another place."

"Was that where you knew Miss Archer?"

Jean turned a sick face upon him, but Paul's own countenance was without guile.

"I've overheard you and Amy mention her once or twice," he explained.

"Yes," she stammered. "We both knew her there."

"Out of breath?" he said, still too observant. "I thought we were taking our usual gait."

She blamed the heat and led him to speak of other things, but the day was spoiled. She debated seriously whether it were not wise to make a clean breast of her refuge history, but Paul's belief in her unworldliness had its sweetness, and the fit chance to dispel his illusion somehow had not come when Stella, for weeks almost forgotten, so involved the coil that frankness was impossible.

XV

Motley as were the dental company's patrons, Jean never entertained the possibility of Stella's crossing the threshold, till her coming was an accomplished fact. Luckily she happened to be elsewhere in the office when the bell warned her that some one had entered, and she was able, accordingly, to sight the caller with her admiring gaze fixed upon the slave girl. Her own retreat was instant and blind, and by a spiteful chance took her full tilt into the arms of Paul.

"What's up?" he demanded, holding her fast. "What's happened to you?"

She was dumb before his questions. He noticed her pallor and helped her into the nearest operating-chair.

"There is a patient waiting," she got out at last.

"You're the first patient," he said; and brought smelling-salts, which he administered with a liberal hand. "You girls eat a roll for breakfast and a chocolate caramel for lunch, and then wonder why you faint."

She finally persuaded him to leave her on her promising that she would not stir till his return, and he went in her stead to receive Stella, whom he brought to a room so near that almost every word was audible. Stella had evidently visited the parlors before. She addressed Paul familiarly as "Doc," spoke of other work he had done for her, and lingered to make conversation after he had fixed an appointment. The dentist's responses were cool and perfunctory, and in leaving she chaffed him on having lost his old-time sociability.

He returned with a red face to find Jean outwardly herself.

"Better?" he said awkwardly.

"Much better."

Paul fidgeted with the mechanism of the chair.

"As long as you're O.K. now," he went on, "I'm not sorry you missed that party. That's the worst of Grimes. He caters to all sorts. You heard her talk, I suppose?"

"Yes."

He furtively studied her face. "I hope you don't think we're as friendly as she made out?"

"Oh, no."

Paul looked greatly relieved.

"I bank a lot on what you think," he said. "You're the kind of girl who makes a fellow want to toe the mark."

"Don't," she entreated, writhing under his praise. "You rate me too high."

"Too high!" He laughed excitedly and caught her hand when she moved to go. "You didn't mind my telling you?" Then, without awaiting a reply, he blurted: "There's a heap more to say. I want to take you out of all this—away from such riffraff as the girl you didn't see; I want—I want you, Jean."

She tried to speak, but he read refusal in her troubled eyes and cut her short.

"Don't answer now," he begged. "I didn't expect to tell you this so soon. I don't expect you to say yes straight off. I'm not good enough for you, Lord knows, but nobody could care more. Promise me you'll think it over. Promise me that, anyhow."

She would have promised anything to escape. Again at her desk, she strove to think things out, but from the whirl of her thoughts only one fixed purpose emerged: she must know the day and hour of Stella's intended return, for this detail had escaped her. Making some excuse, therefore, when Paul came for her at closing time, she watched him to the street and then hurried to search his operating-room for the little red-covered book in which his personal appointments were kept. It was not in its usual place, however, nor in his office-coat behind the door, nor in any possible drawer of the cabinet. He had evidently slipped it into some pocket of the suit he wore.

She dragged home in miserable anxiety, pinning all her hopes on obtaining a glance at the book while the dentist was at dinner; but this plan failed her, too, since that night, contrary to his custom, Paul made no change in his dress. The book was in his possession. Of this she was certain, for a corner of its red binding gleamed evilly at her from beneath his coat. Once, in an after-dinner comparison of biceps, which the insurance agent inaugurated in the hall, the thing actually fell to the floor at her feet, only to be noted by a watchful chorus before she might even think of advancing a casual ruffle. She devised a score of pretexts for asking Paul to let her see it, any one of which would have passed muster before his enamored eyes, but she dismissed each as too flimsy and open to suspicion; and so, before a safe course suggested itself, the evening was gone, and she climbed her three flights to spend hours in horrid wakefulness succeeded by even more merciless dreams.

Fate was kinder on the morrow. Paul laid the appointment-book upon an open shelf of his cabinet in the course of the forenoon, and she seized a moment when he was scouring the establishment for one of his ever-vagrant instruments, to wrest its secret at last. She found the record easily. It was among the engagements for that very day: "Miss Wilkes, 11-11.30." The little clock on the cabinet indicated ten minutes of eleven now!

She evaded Paul, who was returning, caught up her hat, and telling Grimes that she was too ill to work that day—which the big incompetent sympathetically assured her he could see for himself—fled in panic to the stairs only to behold Stella's nodding plumes already rounding the sample show-case below. Fortunately she was mounting with head down, and it took Jean but an instant to dart for the staircase to the floor above, from whose landing, breathless, lax-muscled, yet safe, she followed Stella's rustling progress to the dental company's door. When she cautiously descended, the hall reeked with a musky perfume from which she recoiled as from a physical nearness to the woman herself.

Luncheon brought Paul and questions which she answered, as she could, from behind her closed door. He had no suspicion of the real cause of her sudden leaving, ascribing her indisposition, as yesterday, to insufficient nourishment, and joined his imagination to Mrs. St. Aubyn's, and that of the proprietor of a neighboring delicatessen shop, in the heaping of a tray whose every mouthful choked. It tortured her to brazen out this deception, but unaided she could see no other way, and advisers there were none. She might have confided in Amy, had the need arisen earlier; but Amy was become a creature of strange reserves and silences.

She left her room at evening and braved the galling solicitude of the dining room. Mrs. St. Aubyn was for extracting her precise symptoms, and led a discussion of favorite remedies, to which nearly all contributed some special lore, from the librarian, who swore by a newspaper cholera mixture, to the bankrupt, whose panacea was Adirondack air. Paul refrained from the talk, perceiving that Jean wished nothing so much as to be let alone. He was more silent than she had ever known him at table, and she twice surprised him in a brown study, of which Amy was seemingly the subject. Dinner over, he brought about a tête-à-tête in an upper hall, a meeting made easy by the boarders' summer custom of blocking the front steps in a domestic group, of which Mrs. St. Aubyn, watchful of other clusters obviously less presentable, was the complacent apex.

"I didn't trot out a remedy downstairs," he said, "but I've got one all the same. It's a vacation."

"But—" Jean began.

"No 'buts' in order. I've got the floor. It's a vacation you need, and it's a vacation you'll have. Grimes has arranged everything. You're to have a week off, beginning to-morrow, and your pay will go on same as ever."

"This is your doing."

"No," he disclaimed; "it's Grimes's. I only told him it would do you more good now than in August. It was due you anyhow."

"But I'm not sick," she protested. "I can't let you think I am. It's not right to deceive—"

"The question now before the house," Paul calmly interposed, "is, Where do you want to spend it? How about Shawnee Springs?"

"No."

"Thought not. You never mention the Springs as though you pined to get back. Ever try Ocean Grove, where the Methodists round up?"

"No."

"Then why don't you? There's more fun in the place than you'd think. They can't spoil the ocean, and Asbury Park is just a stone's throw away whenever the hymns get on your nerves. I mention Ocean Grove, because Mrs. St. Aubyn's sister has a boarding-house there—Marlborough Villa, she calls it—where she'll take you cheap, coming now before the rush. I'll run down Sunday and see how you're making out."

He had an answer for every objection, and in the end Jean let herself be persuaded, although to yield here seemed to imply a tacit assent to other things she was wofully unready to meet. The future stretched away, a jungle of complexity. Perhaps the sea, the real sea she had never beheld, for Coney Island did not count, would help her think it out.

Early the following morning the dentist saw her aboard the boat.

"You'll not mind if I come down?" he asked.

She smiled "No" a little wanly, but he went away content. Sunday would be crucial, she foresaw. He would press for his answer then, and she——Perhaps the salt breeze would shred these mists.

But neither the breeze, full of the odor of sanctity, which cooled encamped Methodism, nor the secular, yet not flagrantly sinful, atmosphere of the twin watering-place, had aided much when the week-end brought Paul to solve the riddle for himself.

Many things allied in his favor. In the first place, Jean was unfeignedly glad to see him, as the agitated veranda rockers of Marlborough Villa bore witness. In a world which she had too often found callous, Paul Bartlett, for one, had proved himself a practical friend. She felt a distinct pride in him, too, as he withstood the brunt of the veranda fire; a pardonable elation that, in a social scheme overwhelmingly feminine, she led captive so presentable a male.

Again, Paul was tactful in following up his welcome. His only concern Saturday evening, and throughout Sunday till almost the end, was seemingly to give her pleasure. Sometimes she played the cicerone to her own discoveries: now a model of Jerusalem, its Lilliputian streets littered with the peanut shucks of appreciative childhood; the pavilion where free concerts were best; the bathing-beach where the discreetly clothed crowd was most diverting; or a little lake, remote from the merry-go-rounds and catch-penny shows, which she secretly preferred to all. Or Paul would display the results of his past researches. He knew an alley in one of the great hotels, where she had from him her first lesson in the ancient game of bowls; a catering establishment whose list of creams and ices exceeded imagination; and a drive—Sunday morning this—past opulent dwellings, whose tenants they commiserated, to an old riverside tavern overhung by noble trees.

Sundown found them watching the trampling surf from the ramparts of their own sand-castle, which Paul, guided by her superior knowledge of things mediæval, had reared. The transition from sandcastles to air-castles was easy, and presently the man was mapping his future.

"Grimes wants me to renew our contract," he said. "It runs out October first, you know. But I think it's up to me to be my own boss. I've got what I needed from the dental company—practical experience. If I stay on, I may pick up some things I don't need, just as the other fellows finally drop into old Grimey's shiftless ways. I don't want to take any of his smudge into my office. He can keep his gilt gimcracks and his slave girl and his bogus armor. A plain reception-room, but cheerful, I say; and an operating-room that's brighter still. Canary or two, maybe; plants—real plants—and fittings strictly up to date. Electricity everywhere, chair best in the market, instruments the finest money will buy, but out of sight. No chamber of horrors for me! As for location, give me Harlem. I know a stack of folks there, and I like Harlem ways. I've even looked up offices, and I know one on a 'Hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street that just fills the bill. Well, that's part of the programme."

Jean was roused from visions of her own.

"I know you'll succeed," she said.

"That's part of the programme," he repeated; then, less confidently: "The other part includes a snug little flat just round the corner, where a fellow can easily run in for lunch. I don't mean a bachelor's hall. I mean a bona-fide home, with a wife in it—a wife named Jean!"

He was a likable figure—clean-cut, earnest, manly—as he waited in the dusk, and the home he offered had its appeal. Marriage would solve many problems. She would be free of the grinding struggle for a livelihood, which the stigma of the refuge made dangerous. She would be free of the fear of such vengeance as Stella could wreak. If the need arose, it would be a simple matter, once they were married, to tell Paul the truth of things. His love would make light of it. As for her love——But what was love? Where in life did one meet the rose-colored dream of fiction? Love was intensified liking, and Paul, as has been recorded, was a likable figure—clean-cut, earnest, manly—as he waited in the dusk.

Yet, even then, recurred a still undimmed picture wherein, against a background of forest birches, there shone an indubitable hero of romance.

XVI

Jean shrank from the congratulations of the boarding-house and the office, and they decided at the outset to keep their engagement to themselves.

"Not barring your mother, of course," Paul amended. "To play strictly according to Hoyle, I expect I ought to drop her a line. What do you think?"

"It won't be necessary," Jean said.

The dentist sighed thankfully.

"Glad to hear it. The chances are she'd say no, straight off the bat, if I did. Letter-writing isn't my long suit. What will you say about a proposition like me, anyhow?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Least said the better, eh?"

"I mean I'm not going to write."

"Not at all?"

"Not till we are married. I will write home then."

Paul whistled meditatively.

"Mind telling why?" he queried. "Can't say that this play seems according to Hoyle, either."

Jean's real reason was rooted in a fear that Mrs. Fanshaw's erratic conscience might be capable of a motherly epistle to Paul, setting forth the refuge history. So she answered that she and her family were not in sympathy, and was overjoyed to find that Paul thought her excuse valid.

"I know just how you feel," he said. "My governor and I could never hit it off. But about writing your mother: we'll need her consent, you know. You're still under twenty-one."

"I come of age September tenth."

"But we want to be married the third week in August."

"We can't," said Jean; and that was the end of it.

This postponement notwithstanding, it seemed to her that she fairly tobogganed toward her marriage. Even before her return to work, Paul notified Grimes of his intention to shift for himself after October and leased the office of which he had told her. With the same energy, of which he gratefully assured her she was the dynamo, he promptly had her hunting Harlem for the little flat, just around the corner, of his imaginings. For so modest a thing, this proved singularly elusive, and it took a month of Sundays, besides unreckoned week-day explorations, before they lit finally upon what they wanted, in a building so new that the plumbers and paper-hangers still overran its upper floors.

The "Lorna Doone" was an apartment house. The prospectus said so; the elevator and the hall service proved it. Mere flats have stairs and ghostly front doors which unseen hands unlock. Mere flats have also at times an old-fashioned roominess which apartments usually lack; but as Paul, out of a now ripe experience with agents and janitors, justly remarked, they have no tone. This essential attribute—the agents and janitors agreed that it was essential—seemed to him to exhale from the Lorna Doone with a certainty not evident in many higher-priced buildings whose entrances boasted far less onyx paneling and mosaic. Besides tone or, more correctly perhaps, as a constituent of tone, this edifice had location, which Jean was surprised to learn was a thing to be considered even in this happily unfashionable section.

There was Harlem and Harlem, it appeared; and taught partly by Paul, partly by the real-estate brokers, she became adept in the subtle distinctions between streets which seemingly differed only in their numerals. For example, there was a quarter, the quarter to be accurate, once called Harlem Heights, which now in the full-blown pride of its cathedral, its university, and its hero's mausoleum, haughtily declared itself not Harlem at all. They had scaled this favored region in their quest, admired its parks, watched the Hudson from its airy windows, and hoped vainly to find some nook their purse might command; but they had to turn their steps from it at last. This glimpse of the unattainable was a strong, if not controlling, factor in their final choice.

"We can't be hermits and live in a hole," Paul argued. "I know a big bunch of people here already, and we'll soon know more. We've got to hold up our end. Nice name we'd get in our club if we didn't entertain once in a while like the rest."

"Our club!" she echoed. "We're to join a club?"

"Sure. Bowling club, I mean. Everybody bowls in Harlem. We must think about the office, too. It's the women who make or break a dentist's practice, and sooner or later they find out how he lives and the kind of company he keeps."

After a reflective silence he frightened her by asking abruptly whether she remembered a loud girl who had come to the dental parlors for an appointment the day of her first illness.

"The chatty party who thought I wasn't sociable," he particularized. "Her name's Wilkes."

Jean remembered.

"Well, she came back," pursued the dentist, slowly. "I filled a tooth for her the next morning. She had a good deal to say."

She brought herself to look at him. If the past must be faced now, she would meet it like the honest girl she was. But Paul's manner was not accusing, and when he spoke again, it was of neither Stella nor herself.

"How much does Amy get a week?" he asked.

She told him, and he nodded as over a point proved.

"Would it surprise you to hear that she draws five dollars less? That does surprise you, doesn't it?"

"How do you know?"

"My drug-department patient told me long ago. I didn't think much about it at the time, for some girls dress well on mighty little; but when—well, the long and short of it is, that Wilkes woman knows Amy!"

Jean pulled herself together somehow. Amy's defense was for the moment her own.

"Need that condemn Amy?" she said.

"Of course not," returned Paul judiciously. "It might happen to you, or anybody. Perhaps she says she knows me. It's the way she came to know her that counts. The Wilkes girl got very confidential when I left her mouth free. She had tanked up with firewater for the occasion, and it oiled her tongue. I didn't pay much attention until Amy Jeffries's name slipped out, but I listened after that. I thought it was due you."

"And she said—?"

"She said a lot I won't rehash, but it all boils down to the fact that they both graduated from the same reformatory."

She must tell him now! White-faced, miserable, she nerved herself to speak.

"Paul!" she appealed.

He was instantly all concern for her distress.

"Don't take it so hard," he begged. "She isn't worth it."

"You don't understand. I—I knew."

"You knew what?"

"About the—reformatory. I once told you I met Amy in the country."

"I remember."

"Well," the confession came haltingly, "it was the refuge I meant. I met her at the refuge."

She waited with eyes averted for the question which should bare all. Instead, she suddenly felt Paul's caress and faced him to meet a smile.

"You are a trump!" he ejaculated. "To know all the while and never give her away!"

He had not understood! Trembling like a reprieved criminal, she heard him go on to complete his self-deception.

"I was going to ask you to let Amy slide after we were married," he said, "but if you believe in her this much, I reckon she's worth helping. I don't suppose all refuge girls are of the Wilkes stripe."

The crisis past, she half regretted that she could not have screwed her courage to the point of a full confession, but this feeling was transitory. Paul rested content with his own explanations and talked of little else than their flat, and she, too, presently found their home-building absorbing.

A more minute inspection of the Lorna Doone, after the signing of the lease, revealed that the outer splendor had its inner penalties.

"Looks like a case of rob Paul to pay Peter, this trip," said the dentist. "Peter is the owner's first name, you know. The woodwork is cheap, the bathtubs are seconds, and the closets, as you say, aren't worth mentioning. I'll gamble the building laws have been dodged from subcellar to cornice. I hear he has run up a dozen like it, and every blessed one on spec. That's why we're getting six weeks' rent free. It's anything to fill the house and hook some sucker who hankers for an investment and never suspects the leases don't amount to shucks."

"Don't they?"

"Ours doesn't. Why, the man as much as told me to clear out when the building changes hands, if I like."

Jean looked round the bright little toy of a kitchen where they stood.

"I shan't want to leave," she said. "It already seems like home."

It seemed more and more a home as their preparations went forward. They were not supposed to enter into formal possession till late in August, but the complaisant owner gave Paul a key some weeks before and made no objection to their moving in anything they pleased. So it fell out that their modest six-rooms-and-bath in the Lorna Doone became in a way a sanctuary to which they went evenings when they could, and made beautiful according to their light.

It was a precious experience. Such wise planning it involved! Such ardent scanning of advertisements, such sweet toil of shopping, such rich rewards in midsummer bargains! They did not appreciate the magnitude of their needs till an out-of-the-way store, which fashion never patronized, put them concretely before their eyes in a window display. In successive show-windows, each as large as any of their rooms at the Lorna Doone, this enterprising firm had deployed a whole furnished flat. Furthermore, they had peopled it. In the parlor, which one saw first, a waxen lady in a yellow tea-gown sat embroidering by the gas-log, while over against her lounged a waxen gentleman in velvet smoking-jacket and slippers—a most inviting domestic picture, even though its atmosphere was somewhat cluttered with price-marks.

"That's you and me," said Paul, tenderly ungrammatical.

Jean was less romantically preoccupied.

"I'd quite forgotten curtains," she mused. "They'll take a pretty penny."

Thereupon the dentist discovered things which he had overlooked.

"We must have a bookcase," he said. "That combination case and desk certainly looks swell. What say to one like it?"

"Have you any books?"

"I should smile. I've got together the best little dental library you can buy."

"Then you'll keep it at your office," decided Jean, promptly. "When we have a library about something besides teeth, we'll think about a case."

The shopkeeper's imaginative realism extended also to the other rooms. Real fruit adorned the dining-room buffet; the neat kitchen was tenanted by a maid in uniform, whom they dubbed "Marie" and agreed that they could do without; while in one of the bedrooms they came upon a crib whose occupant they studiously refrained to classify.

"But for kitchenware," said Paul, abruptly, "the five-and-ten-cent stores have this place beaten to a pulp."

With this, then, as a working model, to which Paul was ever returning for inspiration, they made their purchases. It was, of course, his money in the main which they expended, but Jean also drew generously on her small hoard. They vied with each other in planning little surprises. Now the dentist would open some drawer and chance upon a kit of tools for the household carpentering, in which his mechanical genius reveled; or Jean would find her kitchen the richer for some new-fangled ice-cream freezer, coffee-machine, or dish-washer which, in Paul's unvarying phrase, "practically ran itself." They derived infinite amusement also from the placing and replacing of their belongings—a far knottier problem than any one save the initiate may conceive, since the wall spaces of flats, as all flat-dwellers know, are ingeniously designed to fit nothing which the upholsterer and the cabinet-maker produce. Luckily they discovered this profound law early in their buying, though not before Paul, adventuring alone among the "antique" shops of Fourth Avenue, fell victim to an irresistible bargain in the shape of a colonial sideboard which, joining forces with an equally ponderous bargain of a table, blockaded their little dining room almost to the exclusion of chairs.

Half the zest of all this lay in its secrecy; for although the boarding-house suspected a love affair,—and broadly hinted its suspicions,—it innocently supposed their frequent evenings out were spent at the theaters. Quite another theory prevailed at the Lorna Doone, however, as Jean learned to her dismay one Sunday when she was addressed as "Mrs. Bartlett" by the portly owner, whom they passed in the entrance hall.

"Oh, they've all along taken it for granted we're married," said Paul, carelessly. "I thought it was too good a joke to spoil."

Jean did not see its humor.

"We must explain," she said.

"And be grinned at for a bride and groom! What's the use? It will be true enough two weeks from now."

She privily decided that she would undeceive the owner at the first opportunity, but the chance to speak had not presented itself when far graver happenings brushed it from her thoughts as utterly as if it had never been.

XVII

Amy had, in fairness, to be told as August waned. To Jean's suggestion that very likely either the stenographer or the manicure would be glad to share the room of the three dormers, she replied that she could easily afford to keep it on by herself while she remained.

"It won't be for long," she vouchsafed airily. "In fact, I'm going to be married myself."

Jean's arms went round her instantly, the restraint of months forgotten.

"And you've never breathed a word!" she reproached.

"No more have you," retorted Amy, glacial under endearments.

"I know, I know. But you have seemed so different. You have kept to yourself, and I thought—"

"You thought I wasn't straight," Amy took her up bitterly as Jean hesitated. "I knew mighty well what was in your mind every time I got a new shirt-waist or a hat."

"You weren't frank with me."

"I couldn't be."

"I don't see why."

"Because," she wavered, melted now, "because you are you, so strait-laced and—and strong. I've always been afraid to tell you just how things stood."

"Afraid, Amy? Afraid of me!" Jean felt keenly self-reproachful. "I am horribly sorry. Heaven knows I haven't meant to be unkind. I've found my own way too hard to want to make things worse for anybody else, you above all. You believe me, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Then be your old self, the Amy who made friends with me in Cottage No. 6. Who is he? Any one I know?"

"You've met him."

"I have! Where?"

Amy's color rose.

"Remember the night you struck New York?"

"Perfectly."

"And the traveling man who jollied you?"

"Yes."

"Well," she faltered, "he's the one. His name is Chapman."

Jean was too staggered for a prompt response, but Amy was still toiling among her explanations.

"You mustn't think anything of his nonsense that night," she went on. "It was only Fred's way. He's a born flirt. You couldn't help liking him, Jean, if you knew him."

Jean met her wistful appeal for sympathy, woman-wise. Words were impossible at first. By and by, when she could trust herself to speak, she wished her happiness.

"Does he—know?" she added.

Amy's fair skin went a shade rosier.

"My record, you mean? Nobody knows it better. Don't you—don't you catch on, Jean? He was the—the man!"

"He! You've taken up with him again! The man who saw your stepfather send you to the refuge and never lifted a finger—"

"Don't!"

"Who let his child—"

"Stop, I tell you!" She barred Jean's lips passionately. "You see! Is it any wonder I couldn't bear to tell you? I wish to God I'd never said a word."

Jean stared blankly at this lamb turned lioness.

"Forgive me," she begged. "Perhaps I don't understand."

"Understand! You!" She laughed hysterically, "Yet you're going to be married! If you loved Paul Bartlett, you'd understand."

"You must not say that."

"Then don't say things that hurt me. Understand! If you did, you would know that it would make no difference if he was rotten clear through. But he's not. Fred never knew about the baby. He cried when he heard—cross my heart, he did. He said if he'd known—but what's the use of digging up the past! He is trying to make up for it now. He's been trying ever since we ran across each other again. It was in the cloak department he caught sight of me," she digressed with a pale smile. "I was wearing a white broadcloth, sable-trimmed evening wrap, and maybe he didn't stare! He couldn't do enough for me. That's where the new clothes came from. I could have had money if I'd wanted it—money to burn, for he makes a lot; but I wouldn't touch it. It would have looked—oh, you see for yourself I could not take money. You don't sell love, real love, and God knows mine is real! I've never stopped loving him. I never can."

She, too, it appeared when she grew more calm, aspired to be mistress of a flat.

"Though not at the start," she continued. "Fred wants to board at first. He says I've had work enough for one while. I said I shouldn't mind that kind of work, but he is dead set on boarding, till I've had a good long rest. Fred can be terrible firm. But by and by we're to keep house, and you'll be able to tell me just what to do and buy. You will, won't you, Jean?" she ended anxiously. "You'll stick by me?"

"Yes," Jean promised.

"And you'll come to see me—afterward? Say you'll come."

"Yes, I'll come."

"And you won't let Fred suspect that you've heard about—about everything? I want him to see that I know a girl like you. I've talked to him about you, but I've never let on that you're a refuge girl yourself. Promise me you will be nice to him!"

"I'll try."

Amy kissed her fervently.

"This makes me awful happy," she sighed. "I think a heap of you, Jean. Honest, I do. You come next to Fred."

As a proof of her affection she presently bought a wedding gift of a pair of silver candelabra which she could ill afford, and which Jean accepted only because she must. These went to flank Grimes's gift—for he was party to the secret now—a glittering timepiece for their mantel, densely infested with writhing yet cheerful Cupids, after the reputed manner of his admired "Lewis Quince." Mrs. St. Aubyn's contribution was a framed galaxy of American poets: Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and Walt Whitman, the last looking rakishly jocular at the Brahminical company in which he found himself thus canonized.

Everything was finally in place at the Lorna Doone, and with the actual beginning of their lease-hold Paul moved his personal chattels from Mrs. St. Aubyn's to the flat, and slept there nights. This was the twenty-fifth of August. A week later Jean climbed the Acme Painless Dental Company's sign-littered stairway for her last day's service. She was a little late, owing to a fire which had impeded traffic in a near-by block, and the morning's activity at the parlors was already under way. She busied herself first, as usual, at her desk, sorting the mail which the postman had just left. In addition to the office mail there were personal letters for Grimes and the various members of the staff, which she presently began to distribute, reaching Paul's operating-room last of all.

The dentist was at work, but he glanced up when she entered and sent her a loverlike look over his patient's head. No creature with eyes and a reasoning brain could have misread it, and the occupant of the chair, who had both, squirmed to view its object; but Paul threw in a strategic "Wider, please," and held the unwilling head firmly to the front.

"Chuck them anywhere, Jean," he directed, his glance dropping to her hand.

Her obedience was literal; the next instant the letters strewed the rug at his feet. With the enunciation of the name, the patient twisted suddenly from Paul's grasp, and Jean found herself staring full into the malignant eyes of Stella Wilkes.

Paul first found voice.

"We'll go on, Miss Wilkes," he said, his gaze still intent upon the tragic mask, which was Jean.

Stella waved him aside.

"Hold your horses, Doc," she rejoined coolly. "I've met an old friend."

"Do you know each other?" It was to Jean he put the question.

"Do you know each other?"

Stella answered for her.

"Do I know Jean Fanshaw!" Sure of how matters stood between these two, sure also of her own rôle in the drama, she sprang from the chair and bestowed a Judas kiss upon Jean's frozen cheek. "Do I know her! Why we're regular old pals!"

Freed somehow from that loathsome touch, Jean stumbled to her desk. Patients came and went, the routine of the office ran its course; her share in the mechanism got itself mechanically performed; yet, whether she sped or welcomed, plied the cash-register, receipted bills, or soothed a nervous child, some spiteful goblin at the back of her brain was ever whispering the shameful tale which Stella was pouring out in that inner room. Those lies would be past Paul's forgetting, perhaps even past his forgiving, say what she might in defense. His look at Stella's kiss had been ghastly. What was he thinking now!

Then, when her agony of suspense seemed bearable no longer, came Stella, her pretense of friendship abandoned, her real vengeful self to the fore.

"I guess we're square," she bent to whisper, her face almost touching Jean's. "I guess we're square."

She vanished like the creature of nightmare she was, but the nightmare remained. Paul would demand his reckoning now. He would come and stand over her with his accusing face and ask her what this horror meant. She could not go to him, she felt, or at least unless he sent. But throughout that endless forenoon the dentist kept to his office, though twice there were intervals when she knew him to be alone. Her lunch hour—and his—came at last. She lingered, but still Paul delayed. At last, driven by an imperative craving to be done with it, she hurried to his room and found it empty. Grimes told her that he had seen Paul leave the place by a side door. The news was a dagger-thrust in her pride. Of a surety, now, he must seek her.

Between five o'clock and six, a dull hour, he came, woebegone and conciliatory.

"For God's sake, clear this up," he begged. "Haven't you anything to say?"

"A great deal, Paul. But first tell me what that woman said about me."

"You heard."

"But what else?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing!" The thing was incredible.

"Only that you'd probably be glad to explain things yourself."

At that half her burden fell. Stella's cunning had overreached itself. She had thought to rack her victim most by forcing her to betray herself, but she had reasoned from the false premise that Jean had a truly shameful past to conceal.

"Glad," she repeated. "Yes, I am glad. I should have told you some day, Paul. It's a long story."

The door opened to admit a caller with a swollen jowl.

"To-night, then?" said the dentist, hurriedly.

"Yes," she assented. "I will tell you to-night."

"At the flat?"

"Yes; at the flat."

Spurred on by her unrest, she reached the Lorna Doone before Paul had returned from his evening meal, and found the flat in darkness. She was relieved that this was so. It would give her a quiet interval in which to turn over what she meant to say. She entered the little parlor and seated herself in an open window where a shy midsummer-night's breeze, astray from river or sound, stole gently in and out and fingered her hair. It was wonderfully peaceful for a city. The sounds from below—the footsteps on the pavement, the cries of children at play under the young elms lining the avenue, the jests of the cigar-store loungers, the chatter of the girls thronging the soda-fountain at the corner druggist's, the jingle of bicycle bells, the beat of hoofs, the honk of occasional automobiles, even the strains of a hurdy-gurdy out-Heroding Sousa—one and all ascended, mellowed by distance to something not unmusical and cheerily human. She realized, as she listened, that the city, not the country, this city, this very corner, this hearth which she and Paul had prepared, was at last and truly home.

Presently she heard Paul's latch-key in the lock and his step in the dark corridor.

"You here?" he called tonelessly. "Better have a light, hadn't we?"

"It is cooler without," she answered. Even though her explanations need not fear the light, she thought obscurity might ease their telling.

With no other greeting, the dentist passed to the window opposite hers, slouched wearily into a chair, and waited in silence for her to begin.

Jean told her story in its fullness: her tomboy girlhood, the hateful family jars, the last quarrel with Amelia, her sentence to the refuge, her escape, return, riot-madness, and release, and the inner significance of her late struggle for a living against too heavy odds. She told it so honestly, so plainly, that she thought no sane being could misunderstand; yet, vaguely at first, with fatal clearness as, ending, she strained her eyes toward the dour shadowy figure opposite, she perceived that she had to deal with doubt.

"Do you think I am holding something back?" she faltered, after a long silence. "Must I swear that I've told you the whole truth?"

The man stirred in his place at last.

"I guess an affidavit won't be necessary," he returned grimly.

She endured another silence impatiently, then rose proudly to her feet.

"I'll say it for you," she flashed. "This frees you of any promises to me, Paul. You are as free as if you had never made them. Go your own way: I'll go mine. It—it can't be harder than the one I've come. Good-by."

He roused himself as she made to leave.

"Hold on, Jean," he said, coming closer. "I guess we can compromise this thing somehow."

"Compromise! I have nothing to compromise."

"Haven't you?" He laughed harshly. "I should say—but let that pass. Of course, after what's turned up, you can't expect a fellow to be so keen to marry—"

"I've told you that you are free," she interrupted.

"But I don't want to be free—altogether. We could be pretty snug here, Jean. The parson's rigmarole doesn't cut much ice with me, and I don't see that it need with you. They think downstairs we're married. That part's dead easy. As for Grimes and the rest—"

She had no impulse to strike him as she had the floor-walker. Waiting in his folly for an answer, the man heard only her stumbling flight along the corridor and the jar of a closing door.

XVIII

Yet, an hour later, Paul came seeking her at Mrs. St. Aubyn's, and, failing, returned in the morning before she breakfasted. Unsuccessful a second time, and then a third, he wrote twice, imploring her not to judge him by a moment's madness.

Jean made no reply. Moved by the eloquent memory of Paul's many kindnesses and with the charity she hoped of others for herself, she did him the justice to believe him better than his lowest impulse. But while she was willing to grant that the Paul who, in the first shock of her revelation, thought all the world rotten, was not the real Paul, she would not have been the woman she was, had his offense failed to bar him from her life. Her decision was instinctive and instant, requiring no travail of spirit, though she could not escape subsequent heart-searchings whether she had unwittingly laid herself open to humiliation and a scorching shame that the dentist, or any man, could even for a moment have held her so cheap.

Necessity turned her thoughts outward. The marriage plans had all but devoured her savings, and while she was clothed better than ever before, she lacked ready money for even a fortnight's board. Immediate employment was essential, yet, when canvassed, the things to which she might turn her hand were alarmingly few. After her experience with Meyer & Schwarzschild, she was loath to go back to her refuge-taught trade except as a last resort, while department-store life, as she had found it, seemed scarcely less repellent. At the outset it was her hope to secure somewhere a position like her last, but the advertisements yielded the name of only one dentist in need of an assistant, and this man had filled his vacancy before she applied. Thereafter she roamed the high seas of "Help Wanted: Female" without chart or compass.

The newspapers teemed with offers of work for women's hands. The caption "Domestic Service" of course removed a host of them from consideration, and the demand for stenographers, manicures, and like specialized wage-earners disposed of many others; but, these aside, opportunity still seemed to beckon from infinite directions. Thus, the paper-box industry clamored for girls to seam, strip, glue, turn in, top-label, close, and tie; the milliners wanted trimmers, improvers, frame-makers, and workers in plumage and artificial flowers; the manufacturers of shirt-waists and infants' wear called for feminine fingers to hemstitch, shirr, tuck, and press; deft needles might turn their skill toward every conceivable object from theatrical spangles to gas-mantles; nimble hands might dip chocolates, stamp decorated tin, gold-lay books, sort corks, tip silk umbrellas, curl ostrich feathers, fold circulars, and pack everything from Bibles to Turkish cigarettes.

But this prodigious demand, at first sight so promising, proved on close inspection to be limited. Beginners were either not wanted at all or, if taken on trial, were expected to subsist on charity or air. Experience was the great requisite. Day after day Jean toiled up murky staircases to confront this stumbling-block; day after day her resources dwindled.

Amy was keenly sympathetic and pored over the eye-straining advertisement columns as persistently as Jean herself.

"How's this?" she inquired, glancing up hopefully from one of these quests. "'Wanted: Girl or woman to interest herself in caring for the feeble-minded.'"

"I tried that yesterday."

"No good?"

"They only offered a home."

"And with idiots! They must be dotty themselves."

Then Jean, ranging another column, thought that she detected a glimmer of hope.

"Listen," she said. "'Wanted: Girl to pose for society illustrations.' Do you think there is anything in this?"

"Too much," returned Amy, sententiously. "Don't answer model ads. It isn't models those fellows want any more than they are artists. Real artists don't need to advertise. They can get all the models they want without it. I never thought to mention posing. Why don't you try it? You have got the looks, and it's perfectly respectable."

"Is it?" rejoined Jean, dubiously. "I thought this advertisement sounded all right because it says 'society illustrations.'"

"It's just as proper to pose nude, if that's what you're thinking about. I know the nicest kind of a girl who does. Her mother is paralyzed. But that's only one branch of the business, and it's all respectable. Why, you'll find art students themselves doing it to help along with their expenses. I know what I'm talking about, because I've posed."

"You!"

"Just a little. It was for an artist who boarded here a while before you came. He moved uptown when he began to get on, and now you see his pictures in all the magazines. I was a senator's daughter in one set of drawings and a golf-girl in a poster. It's easy work as soon as your muscles get broken in, and it stands you in fifty cents an hour at least. The girl I told you of sometimes makes twenty-five or thirty dollars a week, but she poses for life classes; they're in the schools, you know. I made up my mind to go into it once."

"Why didn't you?"

Amy laid a derisive finger on her tip-tilted nose.

"Here's why," she laughed. "It was this way: The artist who used to board here told me of another man who paid three or four models regular salaries. He did pictures about Greeks and Romans, and all those girls had to do, I heard, was to loaf round in pretty clothes, and once in awhile be painted. I went up there one day and it certainly was a lovely place, just like a house in a novel I'd read called 'The Last Days of Pompey-eye.' A girl was posing when I came, and, if you'll believe me, that man had rigged up a wind-machine that blew her clothes about just as though she was running a race. Well, I didn't stay long. The artist—he was seventy-five or eighty, I should say, and grumpy—turned me sideways, took one look at my nose, and said I was too old, nineteen hundred years too old! He thought he was funny. Somebody told me afterward that he was a has-been and couldn't sell his pictures any more."

With the idea that posing might answer as a stop-gap until she found some other means of support, Jean forthwith visited an agency whose address Amy furnished. She found the proprietor of this enterprise a jerky little man with a disquieting pair of black eyes which thoroughly inventoried her every feature, movement, and detail of dress.

"Chorus, front row, show-girl, or church choir?" he demanded briskly.

"I thought this was a model agency," Jean said; "I wish to try posing if—"

"Right shop. What line, please?"

"In costume."

"You don't follow me. Fashion-plate, illustrating, lithography, or commercial photography."

"I'm not sure," she hesitated, bewildered by this unexpected broadening of the field. "What can I earn?"

The little man waved his arms spasmodically.

"Might as well ask me what the weather'll be next Fourth of July," he sputtered. "See that horse there?" pointing out of his window at a much-blanketed thoroughbred on its way to the smith's. "How fast can he trot? You don't know! Of course you don't. How much can you earn? I don't know. Of course I don't. You see my point? Same case exactly. Illustrators pay all the way from half a dollar to a dollar and a half an hour. Camera-models make from one dollar to three. And there you are."

"I've had no experience."

"That's plain enough. Sticks out like a sore thumb. But you don't need any. Fact, you don't. That's the beauty of the business. Appearance and gumption, they're the cards to hold. You've got appearance. A girl has to have the looks, or I don't touch her fee. Fair all round, you see. If a girl's face or get-up is against her, I've no business taking her money. If an illustrator says, 'Send me up a model who looks so and so,' that's just the article he gets. First-class models, first-class illustrators, there's my system."

"I need work at once," Jean stated. "What is my chance?"

"Prime. You ought to fill the bill for a man who 'phoned not two minutes before you walked through the door. High-class artist, known everywhere, liberal pay. There needn't have been any delay whatever, if you'd thought to bring your father or mother along."

Jean's rising spirits dropped dismally at this remark.

"My father is dead," she explained. "My mother lives in the country."

"Then get her consent in writing. Means time, of course, and time's money, but it can't be helped."

"Is it absolutely necessary?"

"You'll have to have it to do business with me," replied the agent, beginning to shuffle among his papers.

"But my mother knows I am trying to earn a living," she argued. "Besides, I'm nearly of age. I shall be twenty-one next week."

"Drop in when you get your letter," directed the little man, inflexibly. "Minor or not, I make it a rule to have parents' consent. Troubles enough in my line without papa and mamma. Good day."

Outside the door Jean decided upon independent action. This last resource was at once too attractive and too near to be relinquished lightly. The idea of obtaining Mrs. Fanshaw's consent was preposterous, even if she could bring herself to ask it—the term "artist's model" conveyed only scandalous suggestions to Shawnee Springs; but there was nothing to prevent her hunting employment from studio to studio. Amy had mentioned the address of the illustrator whom success had translated from Mrs. St. Aubyn's world, and to him Jean determined to apply first.

Her errand brought her to one of the innumerable streets from which wealth and fashion are ever in retreat before a vanguard of the crafts of which wealth and fashion are the legitimate quarry, and to a commercialized brownstone dwelling with a modiste established in its basement, a picture-dealer tenanting its drawing-room, and a mixed population of artists, architects, and musicians tucked away elsewhere between first story and roof. She found the studio of Amy's acquaintance readily, and obeying a muffled call, which answered her knock, pushed open the door of an antechamber that had obviously once done service as a hall-bedroom. Here she hesitated. The one door other than that by which she entered led apparently into the intimacies of the artist's domestic life, for the counterpane of a white iron bed, distinctly visible from her station, outlined a woman's recumbent form.

"In here, please," called the voice. "I'm trying to finish while the light holds."

On the threshold Jean had to smile at her own unsophistication. The supposed bedroom was a detail of the studio proper, the supposed wife a model impersonating a hospital patient who held the centre of interest in a gouache drawing, to which the illustrator was adding a few last touches by way of accent.

"I see you don't need a model," Jean said, with a smile inclusive of the girl in the bed.

He scrutinized her impersonally, transferred a brush from mouth to hand, and caught up a bundle of galley-proofs.

"No," he decided, more to himself than Jean. "It's another petite heroine, drat her! But I'd be glad to have you leave your name and address," he added, indicating a paint-smeared memorandum book which lay amidst the brushes, ink-saucers, and color-tubes littering a small table at elbow. "I may need your type any day."

Jean complied, thanked him, and turned to go.

"Try MacGregor, top floor—Malcolm MacGregor," he suggested. "Tell him I said to have a look at your eyes."

Much encouraged, she mounted two more flights, knocked, and, as before, let herself in at an unceremonious hail. This time, however, she passed directly from hall to studio, coming at once into an atmosphere startling in its contrast to the life she left behind. MacGregor's Oasis, one of the illustrator's friends called it, and the phrase fitted happily. The rack of wonderfully chased small arms and long Arab flintlocks; the bright spot of color made upon the neutral background of the wall by some strange musical instrument or Tripolitan fan; the curious jugs, gourds, and leathern buckets of caravan housekeeping; the careless heaps of oriental stuffs and garments from which, among the soberer folds of a barracan or camel's-hair jellaba, one caught the red gleam of a fez or the yellow glow of a vest wrought with intricate embroideries; the tropical sun-helmet,—MacGregor's own,—its green lining bleached by the reflected light of Sahara sand; the antelope antlers above the lintel; the Soudanese leopard skins under foot—these and their like, in bewildering number and variety, recalled the charm and mystery of the African desert which this man knew, loved, and painted superlatively.

MacGregor himself, whom she found at his easel, was, despite his name, not Scotch, but American, with seven generations of New England ancestors behind him. Tall, thin-featured, alert, and apparently in his late thirties, he had the quizzical, shrewdly humorous eye which passes for and possibly does express the Connecticut Yankee's outlook upon life. In nothing did he suggest the artist.

"I'll be through here in no time, if you'll take a chair," he said, when Jean had repeated the other artist's message.

Her wait was fruitful, for it emphasized most graphically the dictum of the agent that gumption was fundamental in the successful model's equipment. The man now posing for MacGregor in the character of an aged Arab leading a caravan down a rocky defile, was mounted upon nothing more spirited than an ingenious arrangement of packing-cases, but he bestrode his saddle as if he rode in truth the barb which the canvas depicted. He dismounted presently and disappeared in an adjacent alcove from which he shortly issued a commonplace young man in commonplace occidental garb, who pocketed his day's wage and went whistling down the stairs.

MacGregor turned to Jean.

"I do want a model," he said. "I want one bad. By rights I should be painting over yonder,"—his gesture broadly signified Africa,—"but my market, the devil take it! is here. So I'm hunting a model. I have had plenty come who look the part (which you don't) even Arabs from a Wild West show; but I've yet to strike one who has any more imagination than a rabbit. I tell you this frankly because it's easy to see you're not the average model. That is why I asked you to wait. The model I'm looking for must work under certain of the Arab woman's restrictions. Out there"—his hand again swept the Dark Continent—"you never see her face, as you probably know. You glimpse her eyes, if they're not veiled; you try to read their story. If even the eyes are hidden, you find yourself attempting to read the draperies. Do you grasp my difficulty? I want some one who can express emotions not only with the eyes, but without them. Now you," he ended, with a note of enthusiasm, "you have the eyes. Don't tell me you haven't the rest."

Jean laughed.

"I won't if I can help it," she assured him.

He caught up a costume which lay upon a low divan, and ransacked a heap of unframed canvases that leaned backs outward against the wall.

"This sketch will give you a notion how the dress goes," he said, and carried his armful into the alcove.

When she reëntered the studio, MacGregor was arranging a screen of a pattern Jean had never seen.

"It was made from an old lattice," he explained, placing a chair for her behind it. "I picked it up in Kairwan. This little door swings in its original position. You are looking now from a window—a little more than ajar, so—from which generations of women, dressed as you are dressed, have watched an Arab street."

He passed round to the front of the screen and studied her intently.

"Eyes about there," he said, indicating a rose-water jar upon a low shelf. "Expression," he paused thoughtfully. "How shall I tell you what I want you to suggest from the lattice? Don't think of those women of the Orient. You can't truly conceive their life. Think of something nearer home. Imagine yourself in a convent—no, that won't do at all. Imagine yourself a prisoner, an innocent prisoner, peering through your grating at the world, longing—"

"Wait," said Jean.

She threw herself into his conception, closed her mental vision upon the studio and its trophies, erased the bustling city from her thoughts. She was again a resentful inmate of Cottage No. 6, lying in her cell-like room at twilight, while the woods called to her with a hundred tongues. There were flowers in the sheltered places; arbutus, violets—

"You've got it!" MacGregor's exultant voice brought her back. "You've got it! We'll go to work to-morrow at nine."

"No admission, Mac?" asked a man's voice from the doorway. "I gave the regulation knock, but you seemed—" He stopped and gazed hard into the eyes which met his with answering wonder from the lattice.

"I've found her, Atwood," MacGregor hailed him jubilantly. "I've found her at last."

The newcomer took an uncertain step forward, halted again, then strode suddenly toward the screen.

"I think I have, too," he said, at the little window now. "It's Jack, isn't it?"

XIX

And Jean?

It was as if she still dwelt in fancy in that unforgettable past. She had burst her bars; she had come, a fugitive, to the birch-edged shore of a lonely lake; her knight of the forest stood before her.

Her knight of the forest stood before her.

The astonished MacGregor, having waited a decent interval for some rational clew to the situation, recalled his own existence by the simple expedient of folding the screen.

"Step inside, won't you?" he invited with a dry grin. "You may take cold at the window."

Atwood turned an illumined face.

"It's been years since we met," he explained. "I was not sure at first—the costume, the place."

MacGregor's eye lingered upon him in humorous meditation.

"Perhaps you'll see your way in time to introduce me," he suggested. "This has been a business session, so far. We hadn't come to names."

The younger man floundered, glowing healthily, but Jean retained her wits.

"Miss Fanshaw," she supplied promptly. "I should have mentioned it before."

She vanished into the alcove, questioned her unfamiliar image in the little mirror, and began to resume her street-dress with fingers not under perfect control. There came an indistinct murmur of talk from the studio in which MacGregor's incisive tones predominated. His companion's responses were few and low. When she reëntered, Atwood stood waiting by the outer door.

"At nine, then," reminded MacGregor. "So-long, Craig, if you must go."

"So-long," answered the other, absently.

On the stair they faced each other with the wonder of their meeting still upon them.

"You are not a professional model," he said; "I should have come across you before, if you were."

"You have seen me get my first engagement."

"And with MacGregor! Was it chance?"

"Just chance."

"Jove!" he ejaculated. "It might have been myself. Yet it's strange enough as it is. MacGregor in there was the chap I was to camp with, you remember? The man whose grandmother—"

"Great-grandmother, wasn't it?" she smiled.

"You do remember!"

A silence fell upon them for a little moment and they assayed each other shyly, he keenly aware of the fuller curves which had made a woman of her, she searching rather for reminders of the youth whose image had gone back with her through the gatehouse into bondage. He was more grave, as became a man now looking back upon his golden twenties, with thoughtful lines about the eyes, and a clearer demarcation of the jaw, which was, as of old, shaven, and pale with the pallor of a dweller in cities. The mouth was the mouth of the youth, sensitive, unspoiled; and the direct eyes had lost nothing of their friendliness, though she divined that he weighed her, questioning what manner of woman she had become.

"You went back," he broke the pause, "you went back to that inferno because of what I said. You saw it through. Plucky Jack!"

"Jean," she corrected.

"Why?"

"Jack was another girl, a girl I hope I've outgrown."

"Don't say that," he protested. "I knew her. But this Jean of the staircase—"

"Well?" she challenged, avid for his mature opinion.

"Makes me wonder," he completed, "whether I've not been outgrown, too."

It was not a satisfying answer. She remembered that growth may be other than benign.

"You!" she said.

"Why not? I was young, preposterously young. Had I been older, I should never have dared meddle with your life."

"Meddle!" she repeated, his self-reproach rang so true; "you gave me the wisest advice such a girl could receive. That girl could not appreciate how wise it was, but this one does and thanks you from the bottom of her heart."

Atwood drew a long breath.

"You can say that!" he exclaimed. "You knew what it meant to return; I did not. Since I have realized the truth, the thought of my folly has given me no peace. I imagined—God knows what I haven't imagined! To see you here, as you are; to have you thank me, when I thought I deserved your undying hate, is like a reprieve."

Jean's face went radiant. "Yet you say you knew her!"

Their eyes met an instant; then they laughed together happily.

"You're right," he acknowledged. "It seems I don't know either of you. But we can't talk here, can we? We need—" He paused, then, "Give me this day," he entreated. "We're not strangers. Say you will!"

As they issued upon the pavement, the driver of a passing cab raised an interrogative whip. Atwood nodded, and a moment afterward they had edged into the traffic of one of the avenues and were rolling northward. To Jean, reveling silently in her first hansom, it seemed that they had scarcely started before they turned in at one of the entrances of Central Park, and for a time followed perforce the flashing afternoon parade before striking into a less frequented roadway, where they dismounted. Atwood, too, had said nothing amidst the jingling ostentation of the avenue and main-traveled drives, and he was silent now as they forsook the asphalt walks for quiet paths, where their feet trod the good earth, and the odor of leaf mold rose pungently.

Presently he halted.

"Will you shut your eyes for a little way?" he asked. "It's my whim."

She assented, and they went forward slowly, her hand upon his sleeve. She felt the path drop, by gentle slopes at first, then with sharp turns past jutting rocks, where there seemed no path at all. Her sense of direction failed her, and with it went her recollection of the city's nearness. The immediate sounds were all sylvan. She heard the call of a cat-bird, the bark of a squirrel, the laughing whimper of a brook among stones, which she guessed, if her ear had not lost its woodcraft, merged its peevish identity in some neighboring lake or pool.

"Now," said her guide, pausing.

She looked, started, and rounded swiftly upon Atwood to find him beaming at her instant comprehension.

"It might be the very same!" she exclaimed.

"Mightn't it? The birches, the shore-line—"

"And the stream, even the little stream! Could I find watercress there, I wonder?"

The man laughed.

"Ah, it is real to you! I, too, forgot New York when I first stumbled on it. I even looked for watercress. But it knows no such purity, poor little brook! I've had to pretend with it, as I've pretended with the lake. The landscape-gardener was a clever fellow. He makes you believe there are distances out there—winding channels, unplumbed depths; he cheats you into thinking you have a forest at your back. Sometimes he has almost persuaded me to cast a clumsy line into that thicket yonder."

Jean's look returned to him quickly. He was smiling, but with an undercurrent of gravity.

"You know it well," she said.

"I ought. It was here, the summer after we met, that I came to realize something of what I had asked you to do. I began to study refuges. I went to such as I could, boys' places, mainly; I even tried to get sight or word of you. Somehow, though, I never came at the right official, and it seemed that men weren't welcome. I learned a few things, however. I grubbed among reports; I found out what your daily life was like, what your companions must be, and once I saw a newspaper account of a riot. But of you I heard nothing. How could I? I did not even know your name—I, your judge!"

The girl moved toward the border of the lake and for a space stood looking dreamily into its tranquil counterfeit of changing foliage and September sky. To the miracle of their meeting was added the revelation that even as he had filled her thoughts in the dark days, so had she possessed his.

"Will you sit here?" he asked, again beside her. "I want to hear the whole story—the story which began back among the other birches."

"It began farther back than there."

"Not for me."

"But it should. If you thought about me at all, you must have wondered how I came to be in a refuge uniform."

"I wondered, yes; but I never really cared. I could see with my own eyes what you were."

She searched his face with the skepticism which the world had taught, then, with a swift intake of breath, looked believing away.

"We must begin at the beginning," she said.

She told him her story as she had told it to the dentist that hideous night of explanations at the Lorna Doone, but where Paul's black silence had stifled her, lamed her speech, made her almost doubt herself, this listener's faith leaped before her words, bridged the difficult places where she faltered, spread the cloak of chivalry in the miry way. Yet, with all his sympathy, it hurt her, so senseless always seemed the reckoning for her follies, so poignant were her regrets, and once, when she began to speak of Stella and the riot, he stopped her.

"Don't go on," he begged. "I see what it costs you."

"I'd rather you heard it all," she replied. "It's your due."

Nevertheless, she did not tell him all. She could speak of Stella, of Amy, of young Meyer, of the floor-walker, but no word of Paul passed her lips. She let Atwood infer that the stigma of the refuge had driven her from Grimes's employ, as it had thrust her from the department store. The whole chain of circumstances which the dentist's name connoted had become suddenly as inexplicable to herself as to this transcendent hero of a perfect day.

The sun was low when she made an end, and the long-drawn shadows of the birches in the lake turned their thoughts again to that other sundown.

"You were a lonely little figure as I looked back," he said. "I took that picture with me through the hills, and it remained my sharpest memory. It was a sad memory, a mute reproach, like the poor things I bought for you to wear."

"Then you did get them!" she cried, her dress instinct astir. "What were they like?"

"I will show them to you some day."

"You've kept them? I must pay my debt."

He shook his head. "They're not for sale. You shall see them when you come to my studio."

"You are an artist, too?"

"I paint," he replied simply. "When you are not busy with MacGregor, you will find work with me. We'll arrange that among us. Old Mac little dreams our secret."

"It is a secret?"

"With me, at any rate. I've never told. You see"—he looked away with a sudden diffidence almost boyish; then back again with a temerity that was boyish, too—"you see, I was jealous of my memories. I wanted to keep them wholly to myself. Our meeting was—how shall I say it?—a kind of idyl. And you—have you told?"

"Never."

"Was it partly for my reason?"

"Yes," she answered; "partly for your reason."

"But those clothes," he said, after a moment, "you'll smile when you see them. I've tried many a time to imagine you wearing them, braving the world as you planned so stoutly. Perhaps it would have been no harder than the other way. Perhaps—but that's over with, thank heaven! You've earned your freedom and have a brighter lot than a fugitive's to face. I don't mean a model's life. That will be temporary. There's something in you, something fine that only needs its chance. I can't tell you how I know this any more than I can tell you what it is, but I believe in it as I believe in my own existence. I know it's true, as true as the fact that we stand here face to face."

By some necromancy of the mind he mirrored back her own vague hopes.

"But I am a woman," she said, eager for more.

"So much the better. You live in woman's day. But don't forget that you have given me a part of it," he added, as she rose. "My own particular solar day isn't ended yet. When we first met, you had me to luncheon, or was it breakfast? I'm going to return the courtesy."

"But—"

"You couldn't be more appropriately dressed for a park restaurant," he cut in, pursuing her glance. "They'll serve us under an arbor where the wistaria blooms in May. We'll have to pretend about the wistaria, but it ought to be easy. The great pretense has come true."

XX

She learned from MacGregor what Atwood's modest "I paint" signified.

"He is an illustrator who illustrates," he told her their first day, while they worked. "I mean—left arm a trifle higher, please; you've shifted the pose—I mean he gets into the skin of a writer's characters, when they have any. If they're mere abstractions, he creates blood, bones, and epidermis for them outright. Rarer thing than you imagine, I dare say, in spite of the newspaper jokes. You can count the men on one hand who do it here in New York, and to my mind Craig deserves the index finger. He'd find a soul for a rag doll. But I'm only telling you what any top-notch magazine you pick up says more forcibly."

Jean cloaked her ignorance in silence and put her trust in MacGregor's enthusiasm for further light. After an industrious interval it came.

"But that isn't all," he added, tilting back to study his canvas through half-shut eyes. "The public doesn't know Atwood's true metier. He's bigger than they think. I'll show you something in a minute. It's time for rest."

He lingered for a brush stroke, which at one sweep filled a languid fold of drapery with action, and then crossed the studio to the stack of unfinished work beside the wall.

"Wait," he warned, placing a canvas in the trial frame and wheeling an easel tentatively. "It's in the rough, but we can give it light and a setting. Now look. That's what I call portraiture."

Even her unschooled eye perceived its strength. It was MacGregor who looked out at her, MacGregor as she herself had twice seen him that day with his working fit upon him, New York forgotten, Africa filling every thought.

"And Mr. Atwood did it?"

"Nobody else. He sat over there in that corner, while I worked in mine, and painted what he saw."

"It's a wonderful likeness."

"Likeness!" MacGregor shook the poor word contemptuously. "Likeness! Child, it's divination!"

He dismissed her early in the afternoon, for it was raining fitfully and the light was uncertain, and on leaving she turned her steps toward the Astor Library, intent on a purpose inspired by MacGregor's talk. She had some acquaintance with the lending libraries, but none with this sedate edifice whose size and gloom oppressed her as she looked vainly about for her elderly fellow-boarder who spent his life somewhere amidst its dinginess. In this quandary, she was spied by a mannered attendant whose young face, framed in obsolete side-whiskers, reminded her of certain middle-Victorian bucks of Thackeray's whom she had come to know during spare moments at the dental parlors. This guide led her into a large reading-room where he assured her ladies were welcome, despite the frowns of the predominant sex whose peace they ruffled, and found her the two or three illustrated periodicals she named.

Without exception these contained Atwood's work, a fact which impressed her tremendously; and without exception they bore testimony to his superiority as emphatically as MacGregor. She pored over these drawings one by one, weighing them much as she weighed his spoken thought, and judging them, no less than his speech, most candid mirrors of his personality. In what this personality's appeal consisted, she had neither the detachment nor the wish to define; she could only uncritically feel its sincerity, its romance, and its power.

She craved a fuller knowledge, however, than these mute witnesses could give, and the desire presently drew her back into the high-vaulted chamber where the library's activities seemed to focus; and here, bewildered by the riches of the card catalogue, she was luckily seen by the quiet old man who lent his dignity to the head of Mrs. St. Aubyn's table. He smiled gently upon her over his spectacles, pondering the motive behind her request as he had speculated about the motives of thousands before her, and instantly, out of a head whose store she felt that she had scantily appreciated, produced half a dozen likely references which he straightway bade a precocious small boy to track to their fastnesses in some mysterious region he called the stacks; himself, meanwhile, with a faded gallantry, escorting her to a desk in a scholarly retreat where only feminine glances questioned her coming.

So ensconced, she came upon the facts she sought in a bound volume of a journal devoted chiefly to the fine arts. She learned here that her knight errant's full name was Francis Craig Atwood, that New York claimed the honor of his birthplace, and that he was a trifle less than ten years older than herself. There followed a list of his schools, which ended with Julien's Academy in Paris, where it appeared he had gone the autumn after their meeting, and had exhibited canvases at the Salons of two successive years. His return to America and his instant recognition coincided closely with her own coming to New York. The concluding analysis of his work bristled with technicalities, but she read into it the qualities which she perceived or imagined in the man, and, staring into the dusty alcove over against her seat, lost herself in a brown study of what such success as this probably meant to him. Newspaper paragraphs about his comings and goings, she supposed, many sketches like this under her hand, social opportunities of course, the flattery of women, friendships with the clever and the rich. It rather daunted her to find him a celebrity, and at this pass nothing could have so routed her self-possession as to discover that a man, of whose nearness at an adjacent bookcase she had been vaguely aware, was no other than Atwood himself.

"Thank you," he laughed, with a wave of the hand toward the telltale page. "But there's better reading in the library."

Jean clapped to the offending volume and blushed her guiltiest.

"You must think me very silly," she stammered. "Mr. MacGregor praised your work, showed me the portrait—"

"Of course he did. You have discovered Mac's weakness and his dangerous charm. He believes all his friends are geniuses. You'll grow as conceited as the rest of us in time."

"And have the other conceited friends done work like yours and said nothing about it?" she asked.

"A thousand times better. You've no idea what a clever lot of men and women Mac knows." He rapidly instanced several artists, sculptors, and writers of prominence, adding: "But you will see them all at The Oasis sooner or later. You've probably noticed that Mac is one of those rareties who can talk while they work. What would hinder most people, only stimulates him. And it stimulates the other fellow, too. I always drop in on him for a tonic when my own stuff lags. I was there this afternoon, in fact, though for another reason. I wanted to see you. It must have been telepathy that brought me down here; I thought it was 'The Gadzooks'!"

"'The Gadzooks,'" she puzzled.

"Merely my slang for the Revolutionary romance," he explained. "I'm illustrating still another one, and ran in here to resolve my doubts about bag-wigs. My novelist seems to have invented a new variety. But about you: if you don't mind the weather, and have nothing better to do, I should like to take you over to a Fifth Avenue picture dealer's to see a so-called Velasquez that's come into the market."

Jean absorbed more than the true rank and value of Velasquez's portraiture. Wet or dry, the weather was irreproachable. Did it rain, there were yet other picture dealers' secluded galleries where one might loiter luxuriously; while for the intervals of sunshine the no less fascinating shop-windows awaited, each a glimpse into the wonderland of Europe, which her guide seemed to know so well. They even discussed going on to the Metropolitan to look in at a Frans Hals and a Rembrandt, which the talk of Velasquez suggested, but Atwood's absurd watch, corroborated by several equally ridiculous clocks of the neighborhood, said plainly that it was well past closing time at the museum and indeed quite the day's end here among the shops.

He was loath to let her go.

"It's been like a too short trip abroad," he said. "I hate to book for home just yet. Why can't we dine as we did last night?"

She shook her head.

"Yesterday was an occasion."

"Say Italy?" he persisted. "We've skimmed England, France, the Low Countries; why not Italy? I know a little place that's as Italian as Naples. You would never guess its existence. It looks like every other brownstone horror outside, with not a hint of its real business, for they say old Gaetano Sanfratello has no license. He looks you over through the basement grating, and, if you're found worthy, leads you through a tunnel of a hallway into the most wonderful kitchen you ever saw. It's as clean as clean and is a regular treasure-house of shining copper. Then you'll find yourself out in what prosaic New York calls a back yard, but which, in fact, is a trattoria in the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel, whose lithograph you will see above the door. There are clusters of ripening grapes in the trellis overhead, and Chianti or Capri antico—real Capri—on the cloth below; and they'll serve you such artichoke soups, cheese soufflés, and reincarnations of the chestnut, as the gods eat! And Gaetano's pretty daughter will wait upon us and sing 'Bella Napoli,' and perhaps, if we're in great luck, she'll let us have a peep at her bambino which she keeps swaddled precisely like the one in that copy of Luca della Robbia you are staring at this minute. Aren't you tempted?"

She was, but resisted successfully; and when he saw that she was inflexible, he walked with her to her own street, planning other holidays of a future which should know no shadows.

"You must forget that gray time you've left behind you," he declared. "Call this your real beginning—your rebirth, your renaissance."

So in truth it was. The weeks following were weeks of rapid growth and ripening, which, Atwood's influence admitted, yet found their compelling force in the girl's own will. The ambition to do her utmost for MacGregor, to learn what books could teach of the life he knew by living, took her back repeatedly to the library; then other suggestions of the studio, which, even at its narrowest, was a school of curious knowledge about common things that few, save the artist, seemed to see as they were. Who but he, for instance, stopped to consider that sunlight filtering through leaves fell in circles; that shadows were violet, not black; that tobacco smoke from the mouth was of another color than the graceful spiral which rose from the tip of a cigarette? But this field opened into innumerable others in the wide domain where her two friends plied their differing talents; while these, in turn, marched with the boundaries of others still, whose only limits were Humanity's. Life itself set the true horizon to MacGregor's Oasis.

Among MacGregor's intimates who shared the secret of a knock which admitted them at all hours, but who, busy men themselves, came oftenest after the north light failed, was a sculptor named Karl Richter. This man's specialty was the American Indian, but he also had known the Arab at first-hand, and Africa in one or another of its myriad phases was ever the topic when he and MacGregor foregathered. Listening to their talk, Jean came to visualize the bronze-skinned folk, the vivid market-places, the wild music of hautboys and tom-toms, the gardens of fig and olive and orange and palm, the waysides thicketed with bamboo, tamarisk, or scarlet geranium, and the desert,—above all, the mysterious, terrible, beautiful desert,—as things which her own senses had known. It chanced one day that they spoke of camels and, as often, began to argue; and that Richter, to prove his point, whipped from his pocket a lump of modeling wax, which, under his wonderful fingers, became in a twinkling a striking counterfeit of the beast itself. It could not have been more than an inch in height, but it was a very camel, stubborn, complaining, alive. MacGregor confuted, the sculptor annihilated the little animal with a careless pinch, tossed the wax aside, and soon after went his way.

Dissatisfied with his work, MacGregor presently caught his canvas from the easel, and, laying it prone upon the floor, began by shifting strips of card-board to hunt the truer composition. Jean, left to herself, took up the discarded wax, tried vainly to coax back the vanished camel, and then amused herself with a conception of her own. So absorbed did she become that MacGregor finished his experiments unheeded, and, receiving no answer to a question, still unregarded came and peered over her shoulder.

"Great Jupiter Pluvius!" he exclaimed.

Jean whirled about.

"How you startled me!" she said.

"It's nothing to the way you've startled me. Where did you see that head you've modeled?"

"Oh, this?" She tried to put the wax away. "It's nothing—only a baby in our block."

MacGregor pounced upon the model and bore it to the light.

"Nothing! Merely a study from life, that's all! Just a trifle thrown off in your odd moments!" He turned the little head round and round, showering exclamations. "Who taught you?" he demanded, striding back. "Somebody had a finger in it besides you. There are lines here that can't be purely intuitive."

"I used to watch my father."

"Was he a sculptor?"

"He might have been, if he'd had the chance. But he had to work at other things, and he married—"

"I know, I know," MacGregor groaned. "Love in a cottage and to hell with art! But he couldn't keep his thoughts or his hands from it. He modeled when he could?"

Jean nodded dreamily.

"Sundays, mainly," she answered. "We used to go into the country together. He found a bed of good clay near a creek where the mint grew. I can never smell mint without remembering. I couldn't go back there after he died."

MacGregor gave her a sidelong glance, hemmed, made an unnecessary trip across the studio, and kicked a fallen burnous violently.

"But you went on modeling?" he asked, returning.

"Yes—by and by. Then, later, I stopped."

"Why?"

"I—I hadn't the clay?" she evaded.

MacGregor brooded over her handiwork a moment longer, then squared his jaw.

"You'll have the 'clay' hereafter," he said.

XXI

At the outset she was rather skeptical of his faith in her. Had not Atwood said that MacGregor saw genius in all his friends? But the younger man now hailed him a most discerning judge.

"It's the something I divined," he declared jubilantly, "the gold-bearing vein I believed in, but hadn't the luck to unearth. Now to develop it! What does Mac advise?"

"One of the art schools," said Jean. "I can go evenings, it seems."

"And work days! It's a stiff programme you plan."

"But the school won't mean work," she declared. "Then, too, the posing comes far easier than it did. Mr. MacGregor says my muscles are almost as steady as a professional's."

"So he tells me. I'm going to insist on sharing your time. He has monopolized you long enough."

MacGregor's monopoly did not cease at once, however. His first step on discovering Jean's talent was to enlist Richter's expert criticism and counsel with the practical outcome that the sculptor's door swung open to her in the daylight hours when MacGregor worked with male models. The clay-modeling-room at the art school was a wonderful place. Its casts, its tools, its methods, were a revelation after the crude shifts with which her father had had to content himself; but Richter's studio transcended it as a university transcends a kindergarten. Here were conceived ideas which found perpetuity in bronze!

Studio and sculptor were each unique. A little man of crippled frame, Karl Richter delighted in the muscular and the colossal and walked a pigmy amidst his own creations. Michael Angelo was his god; but his manner was his own, and the Indians and cow-boys he loved best to express were remote enough from the great Florentine's subjects to acquit him of imitation. His frail physique notwithstanding, he had been at pains to see for himself the primitive life he adored, and the idler who coined "The Oasis" dubbed the sculptor's place "The Wigwam," and spread a facetious tale that Richter went about his work in blanket and moccasins, and habitually smoked a calumet which had once belonged to Sitting Bull. Richter never denied this myth, which by now had received the sanction of print, and took huge satisfaction in the crestfallen glances unknown callers gave his conventional dress. However, the studio itself, a transformed stable, was sufficiently picturesque. It overflowed with spoils from ranch and tepee, and, thanks to the Wild West show which furnished MacGregor occasional Arabs, sometimes sheltered genuine, if sophisticated, red men.

About this time Jean left Mrs. St. Aubyn's, whose neighborhood Paul, after dejected silence, had again begun to haunt. She had thus far eluded him, but meet they must, she felt, if she remained; and with Amy's abrupt departure, which now came to pass, she changed to a boarding-house of Atwood's recommending in Irving Place.

"There are no signs of the trade about it, fashionable or unfashionable," he said. "It's just a homelike place, neither too large nor too small, where you will see mainly art students. Many of them, like you, are making their own way, and all of them are dead in earnest. All the illustrators know Mrs. Saunders. Half of us have lived under her roof some time or other."

"You, too!"

He smiled at her tone.

"I wasn't born with a golden spoon, you know. Some New Yorkers aren't. I inherited a little money, but I'm not a plutocrat yet, even if editors do smile upon me. Julie and I thoroughly mastered the gentle art of scrimping at one time. Have I ever mentioned my sister, Mrs. Van Ostade?"

"You spoke of her the day I saw you first."

"At the birches?" he returned, surprised.

"You said she would not understand."

His eyes sobered.

"I remember," he said. "And it was true. Neither would she understand now, I fear. She has been both wedded and widowed since. You'll see her at the studio yet, if MacGregor ever lets us begin work together. She surprises me there when she thinks I am neglecting my duties as a social being. Julie has all the zeal of a proselyte in her missionary labors for society," he added laughingly. "She married into one of the old Dutch families."

Jean found that a tradition of Mrs. Van Ostade's residence in Irving Place still lingered there. She was spoken of as Craig Atwood's sister, the clever girl who had jockied for position, on nothing a year, by cultivating fashionable charities. Settlement work, it appeared, had been the fulcrum for her lever. No one here, however, had known her personally, save Mrs. Saunders, who was a paragon of reticence when gossip was afield. Indeed, a dearth of gossip, in the invidious sense of the word, was a negative virtue to which her whole establishment might lay claim. Mainly art students, as Atwood had predicted, the sharpest personalities of Jean's new acquaintances dealt with the vagaries of masters whom they furtively admired and not seldom aped. Thus the life-class girl would furrow her pretty forehead over the drawing of a beginner at antique with the precise "Ha!" and "Not half bad!" of the distinguished artist and critic who twice a week set her own heart palpitating with his crisp condemnation or praise.

Illustrating, painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative design, whatever their individual choice, life for each had its center in the particular school of his or her adhesion. Art—always Art—was the beginning and end of their table-talk, and even the two young men who had other interests, a lawyer and a playwright, both embryonic, spoke the language of the studios. To this community of interest was added the discovery that all derived from country stock. Half a dozen states had their nominal allegiance, and not even Mrs. Saunders, who seemed as metropolitan as the City Hall, could boast New York as her birthplace. They brimmed with a fine youthful confidence in their ability to wrest success from this alien land of promise, which charged their atmosphere electrically and spurred Jean's already abundant energy to tireless endeavor. Her days were all too short, and Atwood, whose invitations she repeatedly refused for her art's sake, began to caution her against overwork.

"Philosophic frivolity, as my sister calls it, has its uses," he said. "I usually agree with her social preachments, even if I don't observe them very faithfully. You must know Julie. I'll ask her to call."

Whether he did so or not, Jean was unaware. At all events, Mrs. Van Ostade did not renew her acquaintance with Irving Place, nor did Atwood broach the subject again. If the social columns might be believed, the lady was amply preoccupied with philosophic frivolity. MacGregor presently turned a searching light upon her personality.

"Notice that bit of impertinent detail, the unnecessary jewel?" he queried, stabbing with his pipe-stem at one of Atwood's drawings which a premature Christmas magazine had reproduced in color. "Craig never did it."

"Then who did?" Jean asked.

"His sister."

"Does she draw?"

"By proxy. I mean she suggested this as she has suggested every false, vitiating note that's crept into his work. Left to himself, Craig never paints the lily. But he defers to her as a younger brother often will to a sister who has mothered or stepmothered him. It was probably a good thing once—I admit she has brains and push; but now it's time the coddling stopped. It did let up for a while when she went over to the Dutch—she was too busy to bother with him; but with her husband underground and Craig coming on, it has begun again. Artistically she's his evil genius. Of course he can't see it, or won't. I've done my level best to beat it into him."

"You have told him!"

"Certainly; and her too. I have known them both for years. What are you grinning at?"

"Your candor. What did he say?"

MacGregor scowled.

"Same old rot I'm always hearing," he grumbled. "Called me a woman-hater. What do you think?" challenging her abruptly. "You've seen me at close quarters for some time. Do I strike you as that sort of man? I want your unvarnished opinion."

Jean answered him with his own frankness.

"A woman-hater?" she repeated. "Never. I think you are"—she searched for the word—"a woman-idolater."

MacGregor grimly assured himself that no sarcasm was intended.

"Expound," he directed.

"I mean it seems to me you rate Woman so high that mere women can't realize your ideal."

"Humph!" he commented ungraciously. "Where did you learn to turn cheap epigrams? Probably it's an echo of something you've read."

He addressed her variously as Miss Epigrams, Lady Blessington, and Madame de Staël as the work went forward, always with profound gravity, until finally, when he saw her color rise to his teasing, he gave his full-lunged laugh and confessed.

"All the same, you're right, Miss Epigrams. That's one reason why I'm still unattached. It's also why I haven't cared to see Craig take the only sure cure. A wife would teach his sister her place, if she had the right metal." He chuckled at the vision his words conjured. "But it would be a battle royal."

It was spring before Jean herself saw Mrs. Van Ostade. She had posed for Atwood frequently after Christmas, but had chanced always to be either with MacGregor or Richter when his sister visited the studio, until the April afternoon when Julie's knock interrupted an overdue illustration which Atwood was toiling mightily to finish. He frowned at the summons and answered it without putting down the maul-stick, palette, and brushes with which his hands were cumbered; but his "You, Julie!" at the door hinted no impatience, nor his returning step aught but infinite leisure as he issued with his dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned caller from behind the screen.

"Those stairs!" sighed the lady. Then, observing Jean, she subjected her to a drastic ordeal by lorgnon, which, raking her from face to gown,—where the inquisition lingered,—returned with added intensity upon her face.

Hot plowshares could have been no more fiery for poor Jean, who, sufficiently aglow with the knowledge that the dress upon her back was a piece of Mrs. Van Ostade's evening finery abandoned to the uses of the studio, found herself tormented by the certainty that somewhere in her vulnerable past she and this sister of Craig Atwood's had met before.

A sympathetic reflection of her embarrassment lit the man's face.

"This is Miss Fanshaw," he interposed, "herself an artist. You have heard me speak of her, Julie."

The lorgnon dropped and the two women exchanged a bow perceptible to the naked eye.

"I know the face," stated Mrs. Van Ostade, with an impersonal air of classifying scientific phenomena. "Where did I see it?"

Jean now recalled this elusive detail most vividly, but she kept her head.

"Probably in Mr. Atwood's work," she suggested coldly.

"Of course," seconded Atwood, keen to end the incident. "You will find Miss Fanshaw in half my recent stuff."

"The living face has no pictorial associations whatever," retorted his sister, with decision. "I shall remember in time. But go on with your work, Craig. I did not come to disturb you—merely to bring a piece of news which I'll tell you as soon as I get my breath."

Atwood placed a chair and, returning to his easel, made a show of work which Jean's trained eye knew for his usual polite pretense with visitors who assumed themselves no hindrance; while Mrs. Van Ostade, throwing back her furs, relegated the model to the ranks of the inanimate studio properties, of which her leisured survey now took stock.

"Those stairs!" she said again, pursuing her breath by the unique method of lavishing more. "Really, Craig, you couldn't have pitched on a more inconvenient rookery."

"We thought it a miracle for the money once," he reminded. "I dare say I could find a more convenient workshop in one of the new office-buildings, but then I shouldn't have my open fire."

"You could have it at the Copley Studios, and modern comforts, too."

"Up there!" he scoffed. "I don't belong in the pink-tea circle, Julie."

Mrs. Van Ostade refused to smile with him.

"The location counts," she insisted.

"With some people."

"With the helpful people. I've thought it over carefully; I've used my eyes and ears. The studio unquestionably carries weight. It ought to be something more than a workshop, as you call it. It should have atmosphere. Even our friend down the street has achieved that. Barbaric as it is, MacGregor's studio has a distinct artistic unity."

"Mac's place reflects his work. So does mine."

"Yours! It's a jumble of everything, a junk-shop."

"Of course it is," he laughed. "I've ransacked two-thirds of these treasures from the Ghetto. But even junk-shops have atmosphere—a musty one—and so, it logically follows, must my studio."

She indulged his trifling with a divine patience.

"Could you receive Mrs. Joyce-Reeves in such a place?" she queried sweetly.

"Certainly; if any possible errand could bring that high and mighty personage over the door-sill."

"There is a possible reason."

Her tone drew him round. Jean, forgotten by both, discerned that he also attached a significance to the hypothetical visit. She was at a loss to account for this, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's prominence in the social world of New York notwithstanding.

"Is this your news, Julie?" he demanded.

His sister savored his quickened interest a moment.

"Part of it," she replied. "She saw your dry-point of me at Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade's the other day."

"The dry-point!" he deprecated. "It was only an experiment."

"So I told her. She asked if you do anything in the way of portraiture in oil, and of course I answered yes."

"I say!"

"Well, haven't you?"

"Trash, yes; cart-loads of it."

"Perhaps you call your portrait of Malcolm MacGregor trash? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves did not."

"She saw it!"

"I dropped casually that it had been hung with the Fifth Avenue exhibition of MacGregor's African studies, and she took the address. That was day before yesterday. This afternoon I met her again—met her leaving the gallery."

"Well?" jogged Atwood, impatiently.

"She told me she had bought two of MacGregor's things," continued Mrs. Van Ostade, not to be hurried. "She took a desert nocturne and that queer veiled woman at a window—you remember?"

"Do I!" He spun about. "You heard that, Jean? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves has bought 'The Lattice'! Miss Fanshaw posed for it, Julie."

"Indeed!" The lorgnon, again unsheathed at the intimate "Jean," once more took cognizance of that young person's existence. "I don't care for it. But, what is more important, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves mentioned your portrait."

"Yes?"

"And this time asked for your address."

"Jove! You think—"

"I'm positive she'll give you a commission."

"Jove!" he exclaimed again, "what a chance!" and paced the studio. "Yet she may. It's her whim to pose as a discoverer. What a chance! What a colossal chance! It would mean—what wouldn't it mean?" He stopped excitedly before the escritoire where Jean sat waiting to resume her interrupted impersonation of a note-writing débutante. "It would take nerve, no end of it. She's been painted by Sargent, Chartran, Zorn—all the big guns. A fellow would have to find a phase they'd missed. But if he could! You can't conceive her influence, Jean. If she buys a man's pictures, all the little fish in her pond tumble over one another to buy them, too. That's not the main issue, however, though I don't blink its importance. The opportunity to paint her, to search out the woman behind—that's the big thing. I have a theory. I met her once—she'd bought an original of mine, thanks again to Julie—and something she let fall makes me think—but I'm talking as if I had the commission in my hands."

Jean scarcely heard. Sympathize with him as she might, Julie Van Ostade's face, from the moment Atwood's talk ceased to be hers exclusively, absorbed her more.

"Craig," broke in his sister, crisply, "my furs."

He touched earth blankly.

"Not going, Julie?"

"My furs," she repeated.

"But I haven't begun to thank you," he said, obeying.

"Is not that also premature?" She rustled majestically toward the door, which he sprang before her to open. The girl was but a lay figure in her path.

Then the door closed and Atwood, wearing a look of bewilderment, came slowly up the studio to meet still another problem in feminine psychology in the now thoroughly outraged Jean.

"Why did you introduce me?" she demanded bitterly. "Why couldn't you let me remain a common model to her? I am a common model in her eyes—common in every sense. I remember well enough where she saw me, and she'll remember, too, never fear."

"Jean! Jean!" He came to her in distress.

"It was a drinking-place, and the girl with me had drunk too much. We amused your sister's theater-party immensely. They were probably slumming—seeing low life!"

He drew a calmer account from her presently.

"I know the place," he said. "It had rather a vogue before people found out that it was only sham-German, after all. It's a perfectly respectable rathskeller. You went with some gentleman, of course?"

Jean's passion for confession flagged.

"With a friend of Amy's from the boarding-house," she answered briefly.

Atwood gave a relieved laugh.

"You have made a mountain of a mole-hill," he told her; "but I'm glad you mentioned the circumstances. I'll explain to Julie, if she ever thinks of it again. Don't misjudge her, Jean. I admit she's unsympathetic at first sight, even brusque; but there's another side, believe me. You saw how devoted she is to my interests."

She had indeed seen, and the knowledge rankled.

"You should not have introduced me, made me share your talk," she said. "You meant a kindness, but it was no kindness; it was a humiliation, a—" Then the tension snapped and her head went down between her arms.

"Kindness!" He swept her stormily to himself. "Kindness, Jean! Can't you see why I wanted you to share it with me? Can't you see that I want you to share everything? I love you, Jean."

For a long moment she yielded; the next she had slipped from him and the escritoire was between them.

"Don't," she forbade. "You must not say these things to me."

"Must not?"

"I can't marry you."

"Can't! Yet a moment ago—"

"I can't marry you," she repeated breathlessly.

"But your kiss—"

"Was a lie—pity—what you like. I was unstrung. I—I don't love you."

He searched her face for a perplexed instant.

"Jean," he commanded; "look at me!"

She faced him.

"Now tell me that again—straight in the eyes."

"Don't," she entreated.

"Say it!"

"You heard me."

"I want to hear it again—on your honor!" He waited.

"I—I refuse."

He strode toward her in triumph.

"You can't," he cried. "The kiss was no lie. It was the truth, the sacred truth! What unselfish madness made you try to deceive me?"

"Remember your career," she protested; "your sister's world, which is your world, too."

But the time for reasoning was past.

XXII

What passed forthwith between brother and sister Jean neither heard nor particularly conjectured. Ways, means, and motives were for the time being eclipsed by the tremendous fact that Julie called. That she acquitted herself of this formality at an hour when the slightest possible knowledge of the girl's habits would argue her absence from Irving Place, roused in Jean only a vast relief. The mute pasteboard was itself sufficiently formidable.

She was even more relieved that through some mischance, for which Atwood, who went with her, taxed himself, her return call found Julie out. Visiting-cards she had none, their urgent need having hitherto never presented itself; but Atwood helped her pretend before the rather overpowering servant that she had forgotten them, and, scribbling her name upon one of his own, bore her off for an evening at the play.

Here, for the space of a week, matters rested, only to hatch a fresh embarrassment in the end, beside which calls were trivialities. This was no less than an invitation to dine, and to dine, not with Mrs. Van Ostade and Atwood merely, but as one of a more or less formal company—so Craig enlightened her—of the clever or socially significant.

Jean heard these depressing explanations with a sick face.

"I can't go," she protested quickly. "Don't ask me."

"Can't!" he repeated. "Why not?"

"You know why. They're different, these people—as different from me as if I were Chinese."

"What rubbish!"

"It's the truth. Perhaps later, when I've studied more, seen more, I can meet them and not shame you—"

"Shame me, Jean! If you realized how proud I am—"

"Then don't put me in a position where you may feel anything but proud. Don't make me go."

He reasoned with her laughingly, but without real understanding of her reluctance.

"Besides," he concluded, "you can't decline. The dinner is really for you."

Her cup of misery brimmed over.

"For me!"

"In a way, it's in honor of our engagement, even though it isn't known."

"Your sister wrote nothing of this."

"But she told me. She said she wanted you to meet some of our friends. Don't be afraid of them, Jean. You're as clever as any of them, while in looks not a woman Julie knows can hold a candle to you."

"But their clothes! Don't you see it's impossible? I've absolutely nothing to wear."

The man flicked this thistle-down airily away.

"Dowds, half of 'em, Julie's crowd," he declared. "You don't need anything elaborate. Just wear some simple gown that doesn't hide your neck. Simple things tell."

"And cost," she added, smiling ruefully at his nebulous solution. "I have never owned a dinner-gown in my life."

Atwood had an inspiration.

"Why, the studio is full of them," he cried.

"Your sister's—every one. Could I wear one of her dresses to her dinner?"

"Hardly. What inferior intellects men have! But is there any objection to your wearing one of my gowns? None of the properties fit the scheme of illustrations I've planned for that last novel, and I've decided to have one or two things made. Now, if you'll choose the material and bother with the fittings—"

Jean's laugh riddled this improvisation.

"I'll go if I must," she promised, "but I'll wear my own clothes. After all, I know something about dressmaking."

Nevertheless, the dress problem was serious when she came to marshal her resources, and she still vacillated in a choice of evils, when Amy happened in with a fresh point of view and an authoritative knowledge of the latest mode, which cleared the muddle magically.

"Put those away," she ordered, dismissing with a glance the alternatives arrayed despairingly on the bed. "Wear white or a color, and you'll have every old cat there rubbering to see how it's made. Where's your black net?"

"Here," said Jean, producing it without enthusiasm. "It's hopeless."

"It is a sight by daylight," agreed Amy, candidly. "That cheap quality always gets brown and rusty. But under gas it will never show. Cut those sleeves off at the elbow and edge them with lace. The forty-nine-cent kind will do, and you'll only need two yards."

Jean's spirits rebounded under this practical encouragement.

"I might turn in the neck about so much," she suggested, indicating an angle by no means extravagant.

Amy snatched the garment away.

"Scissors!" she commanded decisively. "This yoke is coming out altogether. Can't you see, Jean Fanshaw, that if you give your shoulders a chance, people won't think twice about your dress? I'd just give millions for your shoulders. The black will set them off as nothing else could. If you want a dash of color, I don't know anything smarter than a spray of pink-satin roses. Fred thinks I twist them up almost like real."

Jean evaded the artificial flowers with tact, but otherwise let herself be guided by Amy, under whose fingers the transformation of the black net went forward rapidly.

"It's a treat to have something to do," Amy avowed, declining aid. "I get awful lonesome over at our boarding-place. You never have time any more to run in, and, excepting Saturday afternoon and Sunday, I don't see anything of Fred. This is his busiest time, he says. Fred's a crackerjack salesman. Last month he sent in more orders than any man the firm ever put on the road. He just seems to hypnotize customers, same as he did me. I know you would like him, too, Jean, if you would ever come over while he's home. He spoke about that very thing the other day. He said it looked as if you were trying to dodge him. He wanted me to ask you to go down to the Coney Island opening last Saturday, but I was afraid you'd say no and hurt his feelings, so I told him you were sure to be at your art school. I was glad afterward you didn't come, for we met Stella Wilkes."

The name failed to stir Jean as of old.

"I don't fear Stella now," she said.

"I do," Amy rejoined. "It gives me the creeps to be anywhere near her. Fred says he can't see why. Men are queer that way. She came up to us on the Iron Pier, where we were having beer and sandwiches, and in spite of all my hints, he asked her to have something, too. She told us she was singing in one of the music-halls down there, and nothing would do Fred but we must go that night and see what her voice was like. She spotted us down in the crowd and waved her hand at us as bold as you please. I was so mad! Fred didn't care. He thought she had a bully voice. It did sound first-rate in 'coon songs,' and I really had to laugh myself at some of her antics when she danced a cake-walk. Wouldn't it be a queer thing if she got to be well known? Fred says there's no reason why she shouldn't earn big money, and he's a dandy judge of acting. You ought to hear him spout some of the speeches from 'Monte Cristo.' We always go to a show Saturday nights, when he's home, and generally Sundays to sacred concerts and actors' benefits. I wouldn't go Sundays if the rest of the week wasn't so dull. If I only had a flat, it would help pass the time away. I tease Fred for one all the time. Maybe I can pretty soon. He's to have Long Island and North Jersey for his territory, and that will bring him home oftener nights. Haven't you a better drop-skirt than this?"

"Drop-skirt?" The transition caught Jean daydreaming over a contrast between Amy's drummer and an illustrator not unknown to fame.

"This one is so scant it spoils the whole dress," explained the critic. "I always said so."

"I know; but it's the best I have. Does it matter so much?"

"Matter!" Amy mourned over the offending detail with artistic concern. "There's nothing I'm so particular about. A drop-skirt like this would spoil a Paquin gown, or a Redfern, let alone a—a—"

"Rusty black net?" Jean prompted. "Aren't you forgetting my wonderful shoulders? Nobody is to look at anything else, you know!"

Amy ignored the implication.

"It won't be so funny if they do," she reproved. "I do wish I had something to lend you, but since I left the store, I never wear black. Fred likes lively colors. Isn't there anything at the studio you could borrow?"

There was, though Jean forbore to mention it. As certain as her need, was the knowledge that from the third right-hand hook of the studio wardrobe depended its easy satisfaction. She had told Atwood with almost rebuking emphasis that she must wear her own clothes, but in the befogging nervousness which the bugaboo of the dinner wrought, the temptation to make use of at least this discarded trifle of Mrs. Van Ostade's plenty assailed her with waxing strength, till success or failure seemed to hang on her decision. The garment had its individuality, like most things belonging to Julie, who, Atwood said, had her own notions of design; but Jean told herself that it need not be flaunted.

To assure herself whether, after all, she might not be overrating its importance, she wore the silken lure home under her street-dress the evening of the dinner. This candid course was most efficacious. In the light of the miracle it worked, consistency troubled her no more than Amy. Its influence transcended the material; it fortified her courage; and when at last the admiring maid brought word that a gentleman waited below, she gave a final glance mirrorward, which was almost optimistic, and went down for Craig's verdict with starry eyes.

No faintest premonition prepared her to confront in the dim-lit room, not Craig, but Paul.

The dentist took an uncertain step toward her.

"I had to come, Jean," he said defensively. "There hasn't been a more miserable cuss in the city. I—" Then, seeing her clearly under the flare of the gas-burner nearest the door, which her hand sought instantly, he stood a moment, wide-eyed and mute, in fascinated survey of her unwonted garb. No tribute to its effectiveness could be more sincere. As if it spoke for her like a symbol, answering a question he could no longer put, he made a simple gesture of renunciation, the pathos and dignity of which sounded the very well-springs of her pity. "Excuse me for butting in," he added. "I can see now it was no use."

Jean put out her hand. The mystery of her dead affection—she could not call it love—for this man was never more baffling. The woman she was seemed as far removed from her who pledged herself to Paul, as that girl in turn was remote from the mutinous rebel of Cottage No. 6; but the dentist's gesture, his words, his shabbiness—so different from the half-dandified neatness of old—touched her where a direct appeal to their common past would have found her flint.

"It was no use in the way you mean, Paul," she said gently. "But sit down. I am sorry if you have been unhappy."

Whereupon an inconceivably subdued Paul Bartlett sat down beside her and with a gush of mingled self-pity and remorse poured the tale of his manifold sorrows into an absorbed and—her wrongs, her sex considered—sympathetic ear. Life had fared ill with the dentist. He had not been able, he said, to swing the enterprise of the new office quite as he had hoped. The location was all right, the equipment was all right, but for some reason, perhaps the election-time flurry, perhaps because he himself may not have pushed things as he did when feeling quite up to par, patients had not flocked his way. The hell he had been through! To know there wasn't a more up-to-date office in Harlem, not one that paid a stiffer rent, and yet, for a month, six weeks, two months, to see almost nobody drift in except "shoppers"—Jean would remember their sort!—who haggled over dinkey little jobs such as amalgam fillings, or beat him down on a cheap plate to a figure that hardly paid a man to fire up his vulcanizer—well, he'd sooner handle a pick and shovel than go through that again.

"But it's better now?" she asked.

"Shouldn't have showed my face here if it wasn't," Paul retorted, with a flicker of his old spirit. "The luck changed just when I'd about decided to go back to Grimes. Yes, I'm doing so-so. Nothing record-breaking, but I'm out of debt."

"I'm very glad."

"Thanks," he said gratefully. "You've no call to be, God knows! When I think—but what's the good? I've thought till I'm half crazy. Just to look into the little place at the Lorna Doone queers a whole week for me. It stands about as it did, Jean. All the time the pinch was hardest, I had to carry the flat, too—empty. I couldn't live there, and nobody else wanted it. I missed my chance to clear out when the building changed hands—I tumbled just too late, not being on the spot. The new owners would make trouble, and I've had trouble enough. I just can't sell the things—leastways some of them—and I thought perhaps you—they're really yours, you know—perhaps you—No? Well, I don't blame you. If folks were only living there, I guess I'd feel different. I would sublet for a song."

Amy's consuming desire flashed into Jean's mind to relieve a situation too tense for long endurance, and Paul thankfully made note of the drummer's address. This mechanical act seemed to put a period to their meeting and both rose; but although they shook hands again, and exchanged commonplaces concerning neither knew what, the man continued to imprison her fingers in an awkward solemnity which, more sharply than words, conveyed his sense of a bitter, yet just, finality.

So occupied, Atwood's hurried entrance found them.

"I'm late, very late," he said from the hall, at first seeing only Jean; "but the cab-horse looks promising, and the driver says—I beg your pardon!"

Acutely conscious of a burning flush, which Paul's red-hot confusion answered like an afterglow, Jean made the presentation.

"Bartlett—not Barclay," Paul corrected Atwood's murmured greeting, with the footless particularity of the embarrassed.

"I beg your pardon," said Atwood again.

"Often mixed, those two names, Bartlett and Barclay," babbled the dentist, with desperate stage laughter. "Half the people who come to my office call me Barclay. Feel sometimes as if it must be Barclay after all. Dare say Barclay is as good a name—that is—"

Jean stilled the parrot cry with an apology for running off, and the trio passed down the steps together. Atwood glanced back curiously as they whipped away.

"Who is Mr. Bartlett—not Barclay?" he smiled.

"A dentist I knew when I worked for the Acme Company," she answered, and then, with a generous impulse added, "He was very kind to me once when I needed kindness."

"So?" Atwood's interest livened. "Then I have double reason not to forget his name. I don't dare picture what Julie's thinking," he went on, peering at a jeweller's street-clock. "We're undeniably late. But I have the best excuse in the world. Guess!"

Jean tried, but found her wits distraught between the scene just past and the trial to come.

"No; tell me," she entreated.

He drew a full exultant breath.

"It's the Joyce-Reeves commission," he said. "I received the order to-night."

XXIII

They were not unpardonably late, yet were tardy enough to render their coming conspicuous to what seemed to Jean an ultramodish company which peopled not only Mrs. Van Ostade's drawing-room, but the connecting music-room and library as well.

Julie, her dark good looks set off by yellow, met them with observant eyes, nodded "Yes, Craig; I know" to Atwood's great news, murmured a conventional word of regret to Jean that both their calls should have been fruitless, made two or three introductions to those who chanced nearest, and with the lift of an eyelid set in motion the mechanism of a statuesque butler; whereupon Jean found herself hazily translated to her place at table between a blond giant, who took her in, and a shadowy-eyed person with a pointed beard, who languidly quoted something resembling poetry about what he called the tinted symphony of Mrs. Van Ostade's candle-light.

"How clever!" said Jean, at a venture, and welcomed the voice of her less ethereal neighbor.

"Corking race," remarked the giant, beaming at her over the rim of his cocktail.

This was concrete, if indefinite.

"You mean—"

"Yesterday—France. Wonderful! Gummiest kind of course—two days' hard rainfall, you know. I've been saying 'I told you so' all day. Didn't surprise me in the least. I knew her, d'ye see, I knew her."

Jean looked as intelligent as she could, and hoped for a clew. The big man checked his elliptical remarks altogether, however, and, still beaming, awaited her profound response.

"Is she French?" she hazarded, jumping at an inference.

"But it was a man won. The sporting duchess, you mean, drew out."

"I'm speaking of the horse," Jean struggled.

"Horse! What horse?" ejaculated the giant. "I'm talking automobiles."

She judged frankness best.

"There is nothing for it but to confess," she said. "I know nothing about automobiles. I never set foot in one in my life."

Her companion wagged a large reproachful finger.

"Don't string me," he begged. "Didn't Julie Van Ostade put you up to this? I know I'm auto-mad and an easy mark, but—Jove! I believe you're serious. Why, it's—it's incredible! Just think a bit. You must have been in one of those piffling little runabouts?"

"Never."

"Well, then, a cab—an electric cab?"

"Not even a 'bus."

He shook his head solemnly and besought the attention of the petite guest in mauve on his left.

"What do you think?" Jean heard him begin. "Miss Fanshaw here—"

Then the shadowy-eyed seized his chance.

"I hail a kindred spirit," he confided softly. "To me the automobile is the most hideous, blatant fact of a prosaic age. Its coarsening pleasures are for the few; its brutal sins against life's meager poetry touch the unprivileged millions."

"Rot!" cut in the giant, whose hearing was excellent. "The motor is everybody's servant. As for poetry, man alive! you would never talk such drool again if you could see a road-race as the man in the car sees it. Poetry! It's an epic!" Wherewith he launched into terse description, jerky like the voice of his machine and bestrewn with weird technicalities, but stirring and roughly eloquent of a full-blooded joy in life.

While the battle raged over her—for the man with the pointed beard showed unexpected mettle—Jean evolved a working theory as to the uses of unfamiliar forks and crystal, and took stock of her other fellow-guests. It was now, with a start of pleasure, that she first met the eye of MacGregor, whom she had overlooked in the hurry of their late arrival. His smile was encouraging, as if he divined her difficulties, and she took a comfort in his presence, which Atwood's, for once, failed to inspire.

Craig seemed vastly remote. He was in high spirits and talking eagerly to an odd-looking girl with a remarkable pallor that brought out the vivid scarlet of her little mouth and the no less striking luster of her raven hair, which she wore low over the ears after a fashion Jean associated with something literary or theatrical. She caught a word or two of their conversation, and it overshot her head, though the talk at MacGregor's Oasis had acquainted her with certain labels for uncertain quantities known as Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. She perceived a sophisticated corner of Atwood's mind, hitherto unsuspected, so deceptive was his boyish manner; and the anæmic girl, juggling the Superman with offhand ease, became clothed with piquant interest. She wondered who she was, what Atwood saw in her, and whether they knew each other well.

Of his own accord her neighbor with the beard enlightened her.

"Pictorial, isn't she?" he said. "Pre-Raphaelite, almost, as to features; hair Cleo de Merode. I hope Mrs. Van Ostade pulls the match off. They're so well suited; clever, both of them, and in different ways. Then, her money. That is a consideration."

"Is it?" groped Jean.

"Rather! Wealthy in her own name, you know, and virtually sure of her uncle's fortune. They're very soundly invested, the Hepworth millions. But it's the psychological phase of it that interests me. I'm curious to see what effect she'll have upon his work. For the artistic temperament marriage is twice a lottery. I've never dared risk it myself."

His tone offered confidences, but Jean found his celibacy of slight interest beside Miss Hepworth's. She was conscious that he was permitting her glimpses into the lone sanctities of what he termed his priesthood, as she was aware of a whir and rush of motor-maniacal anecdote on her other side, and of a ceaseless coming and going of courses amidst the generally pervasive fog of conversation. She made the automatic responses which seemed all her immediate fellow-guests required of her, and masked her face with a smile, into which she threw more spontaneity after the bearded one said it suggested Mona Lisa's and belied her glorious youth.

"For she is 'older than the rocks among which she sits,'" he quoted. "You remember Pater's famous interpretation?"

Jean knew neither quotation nor writer, but she was familiar with Leonardo's picture and turned the personality with a neutral question, which served the man as a spring-board for fresh verbal acrobatics, amusing to him and restful for her. He was shrewder than she had thought. In truth, she felt both young and old; young, if this dismal futility could be the flower of much living; old, if by chance it should be, as she questioned, merely puerile.

She sighed for the dinner's end, but when it came and the women, following a custom she had read about without dreaming she should yet encounter it, left the men behind, she sighed to be back with her loquacious seat-mates, talk what jargon they would. Her sex imposed no conversational burden upon any one here. She fitted naturally into none of the little clusters into which the rustling file dissolved; and, after some aimless coasting among these groups where women to whom she had been presented smiled upon her vaguely and chattered of intimacies and happenings peculiarly their own, she cut adrift altogether and grounded with feigned absorption by a cabinet of Chinese lacquer. If Julie meant her kindness, she told a remarkable golden dragon, this was the time to show it, but her hostess remained invisible, and the dragon's gaze, though sympathetic, seemed presently to suggest that the social possibilities of lacquer had their limits. In this crisis, she made a lucky find of a portfolio of Craig's sketches, none of which she had ever seen.

While turning these drawings, she was approached by some one, and, looking up with the expectation of seeing Mrs. Van Ostade, met instead the gaze of a very old and excessively wrinkled lady, who, without tedious formalities, calmly possessed herself of the sketch Jean had in hand.

"They're amazingly deft," she said, after a moment. "Even the academic things have their charm. Take this charcoal, for instance," she went on, selecting another drawing. "It's not the stereotyped Julien study in the least. They couldn't extinguish the boy's individuality. Somewhere here there is another still better."

"You mean this, don't you?" Jean asked, delving into the portfolio for a bold rendering of a human back.

"Ha!" said the old lady, staring. "Of course I do. But what made you think so?"

"It was the only one of the Julien studies you could mean," returned Jean, promptly. "He did not draw like this till the year he exhibited."

The explosive "Ha!" was repeated, and the girl felt herself thoroughly assayed by the shrewd old eyes.

"You are a close student of Mr. Atwood, my dear," came dryly. "Perhaps you are a critic of contemporary art?"

Jean reddened, but, surprising the twinkle behind the sarcasm, laughed.

"Is it probable?" she asked.

"It's possible. Half the celebrities I meet seem young enough to be my grandchildren. But you are telling me nothing. Are you one of Julie Van Ostade's discoveries? She collects geniuses, you know. What is your name?"

Jean told her.

"It means nothing, you see," she smiled. "I am only a student."

"Of painting?"

"No; sculpture."

"Are you! But you look original. Where are you at work? I hope you don't mind my questions? I'm an inquisitive old person."

Jean named her school and mentioned Richter.

"But I have accomplished nothing yet," she added.

"Ha!" said the old lady. "Then it's time you did. I shall ask Richter about it. If I forget your name, I'll describe your eyes. There is something singularly familiar about your eyes."

The men and Mrs. Van Ostade made a simultaneous entrance, and the latter at once bore down on Jean's catechist.

"Peroni will sing," she announced with a note of triumph. "He volunteered as a mark of respect to you."

"Really!" The octogenarian's smile was extraordinarily expressive. "Yet they call him mercenary."

The opening bar of an accompaniment issued from the music-room, and Jean joined the drift toward the piano. She wondered who this sprightly personage might be for whom the spoiled tenor volunteered, and then, in the magic of his voice, forgot to wonder.

In the babel following the hush, MacGregor leaned over her chair.

"So the irrepressible conflict is on?" he greeted her.

Jean's welcome was whole-hearted.

"Craig has told you?" she said softly.

"Yesterday. I wish you both all the usual things. I ought to have seen it from the first, I suppose, but as a matter of fact I did not. Certainly I never figured you in the lists when I spoke of the battle royal. Any war news?"

"We have exchanged calls without meeting."

"Preliminary skirmishes."

"Next came the dinner-invitation. Not exactly a war measure, should you say?"

"Knowing Julie, yes. I should call it the first engagement."

Jean perceived his military metaphor was but a thin disguise for a serious opinion.

"And the victor?" she said.

"Apparently yourself."

"I don't feel especially victorious," she said, a little wistfully. "What makes you think the battle is on? Oh, but we must not talk this way here," she immediately added. "We've eaten her salt."

"What if the salt is an ambush?" queried MacGregor. "Besides, I never pretended to be a gentleman. Look over this menagerie carefully, guileless child! Do you suppose Julie usually selects her dinner-guests after this grab-bag fashion? Not to my knowledge. She loathes big dinners, so she has told me. It's her study and pride to bring together people of like tastes. The seating of a dinner-party is to her like a nice problem at chess. Do you think it a mere chance shuffle that settled your destiny at table? Do you know one automobile from another?"

"No."

"Of course not. And half the time you hadn't a glimmer of a notion what the decadent poet with the Vandyck beard was driving at?"

"More than half."

"Neither should I. A steady diet of the hash he serves up to women's clubs would land me in a padded cell. But perhaps the general talk amused you?"

"I could not make much of it," she admitted.

"Sensible girl! Neither could most of the talkers. But—here was where you scored a point—you looked as if you did. The minor poet and the motor-maniac couldn't wait their turns to bore you. Then, point number two, your gown. Logically, it's point number one, and a big point, too. I happened to be watching Julie when you arrived. Yes; you scored."

Jean caught gratefully at the tribute. She remembered that Craig had been too preoccupied with the Joyce-Reeves commission to notice her dress, and wondered whether the pictorial girl's æsthetic draperies had drawn his praise. She was shy of mentioning Miss Hepworth to MacGregor; he might think her jealous. Nor did he speak her name, though Craig and his dinner-partner, again in animated converse, were in plain view from their own station. Jean guessed that he trusted her instinct to light readily on the significance of this factor in Mrs. Van Ostade's strategy.

"Lastly," he enumerated, "you bagged Mrs. Joyce-Reeves."

"What! The woman who talked to me about Craig?"

"You're surprised to find her here? So was Julie. She invited herself. Julie met her somewhere this afternoon and mentioned that she was giving a dinner. Mrs. Joyce-Reeves asked questions—you discovered that trait of hers, probably—and said she'd be punctual. Quite royal, isn't she? She is strong enough to be as eccentric as she pleases. So Craig was your topic? Then she had your secret out of you, mark my word. How did you fall in with her?"

"She came to me while I was turning over some of Craig's sketches."

"Pretending to enjoy yourself, but really feeling as lonesome as Robinson Crusoe?"

"Almost."

"That is very likely why she spoke to you. She does that sort of thing, they say. It's one of her curious eccentricities. I think your motor-maniac is edging this way," he added. "Yes, and your poet, too. Can it be that you are going to score again!"

With the three men grouped about her chair, Jean had an intoxicating suspicion that she was scoring, provided MacGregor's embattled theory held; and when Mrs. Van Ostade herself entered the scene just as the blond giant, under fire from the Vandyck beard, was begging her to set a day for her initiation into the joys of motoring, a certain rigidity in Julie's smile convinced her that MacGregor was right. Atwood's opportune arrival in his sister's wake charged the situation, she felt, with the last requisite of drama. But Mrs. Van Ostade's eye was restless, however staccato her smile, and Jean, conscious, though no longer unhappy under its regard, reflected that even without its terrible lorgnon it had its power. Then, even as she framed the thought, she beheld its sudden concentration, tracked its cause, and caught its glittering rebound from the nether edge of her too tempestuous petticoat. For an instant the brown eyes braved the black, then struck their colors, conquered.

She was scoring.

Without a word Julie Van Ostade had shouted, "Cast-off clothes!" louder than the raucous dealers of the curb.

Luckily, the ghastly business was not prolonged. The leave-takings began at once, and Jean passed out among the first. Some hitch in the carriage arrangements delayed her a moment in the vestibule, however, and MacGregor came by.

"Did something happen back there?" he asked bluntly. "I don't think the others noticed anything; I didn't grasp anything tangible myself; but still—are the honors doubtful, after all?"

Jean shook her head.

"No," she answered grimly; "not doubtful in the least. She won."

Then Craig put her in the coupé, and asked if it had not been a jolly evening.

"It was a mixed crowd for Julie," he said, "but it seems she wanted to show you all sorts. You see how absurd it was to dread coming. Every time I laid eyes on you, you were holding your own. Virginia Hepworth asked who you were. Did you notice her? I want you to know her. You mightn't think it at first blush, but she's very stimulating; at least I always find her so. We had a famous powwow. I should like to paint her sometime against a sumptuous background. What did you think of her hair?"

Jean's response was incoherent. Then an illuminated turning brought her face sharply from the shadows.

"Jean!" he cried. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Myself. We had best face it—face it now; better now than later. I am only a drag upon you, a handicap—not the kind of woman you should marry. You must marry a stim—stim—stimulus."

Atwood drew her into his arms.

"And so I shall," he answered, "so I shall the first minute she'll let me. To-night even! Do you understand me, Jean? Why shouldn't it be to-night? What do you say?"

Jean said nothing. What folly she had uttered! Give him up! His mere touch exorcised that madness. All the primitive woman in her revolted from the sacrifice. He was hers—hers! Could that pale creature love him as she loved him? Could Julie love him as she loved him? Julie! A gust of passion shook her; part anger with herself for the weakness to which she had stooped, part hot resentment against this superior being who set traps for her inexperience. For it was a trap, that dinner! MacGregor was wholly right. There was war between them; the night had witnessed a battle. What was it all but a manœuvre to humble her before her lover, prove her unfitness, alienate his love?

Then Craig's words took on a meaning.

"I'm in earnest," he was saying. "It isn't a spur-of-the-moment idea. These three days I've had it in mind to ask you to slip off with me quietly and without fuss. We've never been conventional, you and I. Why should we begin now? Nothing could be simpler. It is early yet—little more than ten o'clock. I'll drop you in Irving Place long enough for you to change your dress and pack a bag. Meanwhile I can pick up my own and make sure of the clergyman. That part is easy, too. I'll ask a friend of mine who lives not five blocks off. His wife and sister will be our witnesses. Then the midnight train for Boston and a honeymoon in some coast village."

"But the portrait?" she wavered.

"The best of reasons. The sensible thing is to marry before I begin work. Don't hunt for reasons against it, dear. None of them count. It's our wedding, not Mrs. Grundy's. We'll let her know by one of the morning papers, if there's time to give notice on our way to the train. Julie I'll wire."

A blithe vision of Julie digesting her telegram flitted across Jean's imagination with an irresistible appeal.

"I'll need half an hour, Craig," she said, as the carriage halted.

XXIV

Julie's congratulations reached them three days later at the decayed seaport, an hour's run out of Boston, which they had chosen at laughing haphazard in their flight. It was a skillful piece of literature. Ostensibly for both, its real message was for the errant Craig. There were delicate allusions to their close companionship of years, so precious to her. To him, a man, it had of course meant less. A woman's devotion—but she would not weary him with protestations. What she had been, she would always be. She bore him no unkindness for shutting her out at the momentous hour; she knew marriage would raise no future barrier. That was all.

"Dear old Julie!" said Atwood. "It did cut her." He smoked for a pensive interval, gazing out from their balcony over the rotting hulks of a vanished trade. "She's been my right hand almost," he went on presently. "Not many endearments between us—surface tendernesses. Some people think her hard, but she's as stanch as stanch. Did I tell you how she nursed me through typhoid?"

"Yes."

"That showed! Or take our Irving Place days. Many a play or concert she gave up for me—and gowns! She believed in me from the first. I can't forget that. What nonsense to talk of marriage shutting her out! We must not let her feel that way, Jean."

"No," said the wife; for to such charity toward the beaten enemy had she already come.

Indeed, her happiness had softened her to a point where she questioned whether MacGregor did Julie complete justice. He was a man of strong prejudices, set, dogmatic; even, she suspected, a man with a grievance, for Craig now told her that something in the nature of an engagement had once existed between his sister and his friend. Might not Atwood's insight be the truer? She began to put herself in Julie's place, and then, without much difficulty, saw herself acting Julie's part. Ambitious for Craig, scheming for him always, self-sacrificing if need arose, why should she not resent his marriage to a nobody whom she knew only as a model?

This flooding charity likewise embraced Mrs. Fanshaw. Her mother's chronicles of the small beer of Shawnee Springs had continued with the punctuality of tides. The weekly letter seemed to present itself to her mind as an imperative duty, like the Wednesday prayer-meeting, Saturday's cleaning, or church-going Sunday. Duty bulked less prominently in Jean's view of it, but she had answered, desultorily at first, and then by habit, almost with her mother's regularity. Yet she had told little of her life. The changes from cloak-factory to department store, from store to the Acme Company, and from the dental office to the studio had been briefly announced, but despite questions, never lengthily explained. Now she felt the need for confidence. Feelings quickened in her which she supposed atrophied, and under their impulsion she wrote her mother for the first time the true history of her flight from the refuge and traced the romance there begun to its miraculous flower.

A second note from Mrs. Van Ostade, received two days later, voiced in the friendliest way her acceptance of things as they were. She wondered whether they had formulated any plans for living? Craig's bachelor quarters, she pointed out, were scarcely adaptable for housekeeping, and surely they would not care for hotel life or furnished apartments? What they did want, she assumed, was an apartment of their own; that is, eventually. But, again, did they at this time of such critical importance in Craig's work, want the exhausting labor of house-hunting? Her suggestion—she was diffident, but oh, not lukewarm, in broaching it—was that for the time being they make the freest use of her much too spacious home. Craig knew how burdensome the East Fifty-third Street place had seemed to her since Mr. Van Ostade's death; he would remember how often she had urged his sharing it. Well, why not now? It need be only temporary, if they wished; merely for the critical present. It could easily be arranged from a financial point of view. When had he and she ever quarreled over money! And the domestic problem was as simple. Wouldn't they consider it? She meant literally consider, not decide. They could decide on the spot, for come to her they must on their return. She claimed that of them at least. They should be her guests first; then—but no more of that now.

They read the letter shoulder to shoulder; and so, without speaking, sat for a long moment after they reached the end.

"Well?" he said at last, with a vain reading of the still face.

"Well, Craig?"

"Bully of her, isn't it?"

She assented.

"And practical," he added; "more practical than our air-castles, I dare say."

A quick fear caught at her throat.

"Could you give them up, Craig?"

"Give them up!" he exclaimed. "Give up the air-castles that we've planned while drifting in the bay, roaming the fields, watching the sunset from this dear window? Never! We'll have our own home yet. But it does mean time, as Julie says, and this is a critical period in my affairs. I feel it strongly."

"And I."

"It would be practical," he said again thoughtfully. "We must admit it, Jean. How Julie seems to set her heart upon it! We owe her some reparation, I suppose. We might—at least, till the portrait is under way? Oh, but you must decide this point."

"No," she answered. "Your work must decide. But need we worry over it now?"

"Indeed, we'll not," he declared. "When we reach town will be soon enough, as Julie says. Come out for a row."

The end of the honeymoon came sooner than they thought. A third missive from Julie, laid before them at breakfast, asked when she might look for them, and added that Mrs. Joyce-Reeves also wished enlightenment, as she should soon be leaving town. Jean herself had urged a prompt return for the portrait's sake, but it seemingly needed his sister's spur to prick Craig to action. Time-tables immediately absorbed him. Noon saw them in Boston and the evening in New York, where a week to a day, almost to an hour, from the fateful dinner, they passed again through Mrs. Van Ostade's door.

Throughout the homeward journey Jean had shrunk from this moment, and, though he said nothing, she divined that Craig himself dreaded facing Julie. But the actual meeting held no terrors. Mrs. Van Ostade greeted them cordially and at once led the way to the suite of rooms set apart for their use.

"This is your particular corner," she said at the threshold, "but the whole house, remember, is yours."

"My books!" exclaimed Atwood, bringing up in the little living-room, the charm of which won Jean instantly. "My old French prints! Have you moved me bag and baggage, Julie?"

"I did send to your rooms for a few things to make you comfortable. I think you'll find the essentials. Had I dared," she added, turning smilingly on Jean, "I should have laid hands on your belongings, too."

They came upon discovery after discovery as they traversed the successive rooms. Julie's deft touch showed itself everywhere. Flowers met them on every hand, and a great bowl of bride's roses lavished its fragrance from Jean's own dressing-table. Her face went down among their petals.

"You don't mind?" murmured Julie at her side. "I wanted to do something, belated as it seems."

Atwood caught up one of the dainty trifles with which the dressing-table was strewn.

"See, Jean!" he called. "They're yours. This is your monogram."

The remorseful lump in the girl's throat stifled speech.

"You don't mind?" Julie repeated.

Jean's response was mute, but convincing. Atwood went out precipitately and closed the door upon his retreat.

Nor did Mrs. Van Ostade's thoughtfulness stop at their welcome, or yet at the almost imperceptible point where, the portrait deciding, their status as guests changed to a relation less transient. It concerned itself with the revision of Jean's wardrobe, with the more effective dressing of her hair, with the minutiæ of calls and social usages, intricate beyond her previous conception, but not lacking rime and reason in her altered life.

Jean had no galling sense of pupilage—the thing was too delicately done. Often Julie's lessons took the sugar-coated form of a gentle conspiracy against Craig, who, his sister confided, had in some respects lapsed into a bohemianism which needed its corrective. A portrait-painter, she reasoned, must defer to society more than other artists. It was an essential part of his work to acquaint himself sympathetically with the ways of the leisured class who made his profession commercially possible. Mrs. Joyce-Reeves furnished a concrete illustration. Even if the studio stairs had not proved too great an obstacle for her years, how enormously more to Craig's advantage it was that he could paint her here! Coming to this house, his sitter entered no alien environment. She retained her atmosphere.

"I make it a point to serve tea at their afternoon sittings," she added. "And I try to chat with her whenever I can. It draws her out, lets Craig see her as she really is, makes up for his lack of knowledge of her individuality."

Plastic as she was under coaching, Jean nursed a healthy doubt of the wisdom of Mrs. Van Ostade's constant presence in the billiard-room over the extension, which Atwood had chosen for the work because of its excellent north light. When had he so changed that the chatter of a third person helped him to paint?

Moreover, Craig was openly dissatisfied.

"I'm only marking time," he fretted, as he and Jean sat together before the canvas after Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's third sitting. "All my preconceived notions were merely blind scents. I'm not getting at the woman behind."

"Yet it's wonderfully like her," she encouraged, studying the strong, mocking old face.

"So are her photographs! Is that portraiture? Look at their stuff," he cried, catching a handful of unmounted prints from a drawer. "See what Huntington did with her girlhood! See Millais's woman of thirty! Look at Zorn's great portrait! Take Sargent's!"

"But none of them have painted her old age," she reminded. "You have that advantage."

"And what have I got out of it? Wrinkles!"

Crossing Madison Square a day or two later, Jean met MacGregor. He had congratulated them promptly by letter and sent them one of his desert studies which he knew for a favorite; but she had not come face to face with him since her marriage. She wanted to speak to him, for an unfulfilled penance hung over her, and almost her first word was a confession of her feeling that she had done Julie an injustice.

He listened with a caustic stare.

"Buried the hatchet?" he remarked.

"If there ever was a hatchet. I'm not so sure there was. I think we both misjudged her."

"Both, eh!" snorted MacGregor, huffily. "I dare say. After all, I'm a raw young thing with no experience."

"No; seriously," Jean laughed.

He changed the topic.

"Is the portrait coming on?" he asked.

"Craig is despondent."

"Good thing!" he ejaculated. "Stimulates the gray matter." His face went awry, however, when she mentioned Julie's theory and practice. "So it's the tea-drinking Mrs. Joyce-Reeves our mighty painter thinks most important," he broke out acidly, after violent bottling of comment more pungent. "Fine! What insight! What originality!"

Jean's eyes snapped loyally.

"Don't be disagreeable," she retorted. "You know Craig doesn't think anything of the kind."

They separated with scant courtesy, but she had not quitted the park before MacGregor's tall figure again towered over her.

"Enlighten the brute a little further," he said with elaborate meekness. "What is to become of your work? Richter says you haven't darkened his door since your marriage."

"Four whole weeks!"

"Oh, jeer away," he grumbled. "Honeymoon or not, it's too long."

"I must think of Craig's interests first."

MacGregor lifted his hat.

"Your father also dabbled in clay—and matrimony, I believe," he said, and left her definitely to herself.

She admitted the justice of his reminder when her cheek cooled, and, turning into a cross-town street, set a straight course for Richter's. The swathed model of a colossal group called "Agriculture," which he had in hand for a Western exposition, hid the sculptor as she pushed open the door of the big studio, and when she finally came upon the little man it was to discover Mrs. Joyce-Reeves beside him in close examination of an uncovered bit of foreground where a child tumbled in joyous, intimate communion with the soil.

They broke out laughing at sight of Jean.

"I told you I should ask Richter," declared the old lady, briskly. "His answer was to show me this."

Jean flushed at this indirect praise from the master.

"Mr. Richter let me have a hand in it," she said.

"A hand! He told me he should have had to leave the figure out altogether if you had not experimented with the janitor's baby."

The sculptor was now blushing, too.

"He did not tell me," Jean laughed.

"Why didn't you?" demanded Mrs. Joyce-Reeves, abruptly. "Why didn't you encourage the girl?"

"I think praise should be handled gingerly," he explained.

"Is it such moral dynamite? I don't believe it."

She beamed her approval of Jean's physical endowments as well, lingering in particular upon her eyes. Suddenly she gave a little cluck of surprise, whipped out a handkerchief, and laid it unceremoniously across the girl's lower face.

"Do you know Malcolm MacGregor?" she demanded. "Yes? Then I'm the owner of your portrait. It's called 'The Lattice.' Atwood's wife, MacGregor's inspiration, Richter's collaborator—my dear, you are very wonderful. Shall I take you home? I've promised your husband a sitting."

Jean said she must remain and work. She had thought only to run in and appease Richter, but between his grudging praise and MacGregor's goad, she found her fingers itching for the neglected tools; and she was into her comprehensive studio-apron before Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's electric brougham had purred halfway down the block. The sculptor squandered no more compliments that day, however. Indeed, he swerved heavily to the opposite extreme, but Jean dreamed audacious dreams over the penitential copying of a battered antique, and the afternoon was far gone when she reluctantly stopped work.

Leaving Richter's door, she beheld her husband swinging gayly down the street. He waved to her boyishly and quickened his step.

"Good news?" she queried.

"The very best," he said, seizing both her hands, to the lively edification of two nursemaids, a policeman, and the driver of a passing dray. "I've got my interpretation, Jean! Got it at last! And it came through you!"

For some reason, he told her, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves had arrived earlier than her appointment. Julie was out, but luckily she caught him, and so an hour of vast significance tamely began. By and by his sitter mentioned Jean, her work, and Richter's opinions, and plied him with kindly inquisitive questions about their love affair and elopement, till—all in a lightning flash—it came to him that here, peeping from behind the worldly old mask which everybody knew, was another, unguessed Mrs. Joyce-Reeves with a schoolgirl's appetite for romance.

"And that is what I want to paint," he declared. "Cynic on the surface, romanticist at heart."

The way home was too ridiculously short, and they pieced it out with park and shop-window saunterings. The future was big with promise. Both should wear the bays.

"For something she dropped set me thinking," Atwood said. "She sees, like all of us, that children are your forte, and she thinks that in this day of child study, your talent can't fail to make its mark. The janitor's baby seems to have swept her off her feet. She said the janitors, proud race though they be, must not be allowed to monopolize your time. Then she spoke of her great-grandchild, and I think there's something in the wind."

Jean trifled with the intoxicating possibilities for a dozen paces.

"Oh," she said finally, as if shaking herself awake, "Richter would never consent to my trying such things yet."

They composed their frivolous faces under the solemn regard of Julie's butler, who told Jean that a caller awaited her in the library.

"A lady from out of town," he added.

Jean wondered, "Why the library?" and, then, advancing, wondered again as a silvery tinkle reached her ears; but the chief marvel of all was the spectacle of Julie Van Ostade and Mrs. Fanshaw in amicable, even intimate, converse over afternoon tea.

XXV

Surprise held her at the threshold an instant, whereupon a rare, beaming, even effusive, Mrs. Fanshaw, whom Jean's memories linked with calls from the minister, bore down on her, two steps to her one, and engulfed her in a prolonged embrace. Then, holding her daughter at arm's length in swift appraisement of her dress and urban air,—

"Death brought me," she explained.

"Death!"

"Your great-aunt Martha Tuttle died last Friday at brother Andrew's in Paterson," she announced in lugubrious tones with which her blithe visage could not instantly be brought in harmony. "I am on my way home from the funeral."

"I've been trying to persuade your mother to break her journey here for a few days," Julie contributed, with a fugitive smile; "but she says she must hurry away."

"Amelia expects her little stranger any time now," murmured Mrs. Fanshaw, chastely. "But I will stop overnight, perhaps part of to-morrow, thanking you kindly, Mrs. Van Ostade."

"Pray don't," deprecated Julie, moving toward the door. "This is Jean's home, you know. Unfortunately, I'm dining out this evening."

Jean learned of Mrs. Fanshaw's haste and Julie's engagement with equal relief. She felt no snobbish shame for her mother's rusticity, but she did fear her babbling tongue, and her first word on Julie's withdrawal was one of caution.

"Not a syllable about the refuge here," she charged. "Neither Craig nor I wish Mrs. Van Ostade to know. Remember, mother."

The visitor's eyes widened.

"Oh," she observed slowly, "I don't see—"

"We see," Jean cut her short. "You must respect my wishes in this."

"All right," assented Mrs. Fanshaw, with amazing meekness. "Is your husband on the premises?"

"You will meet him soon," she replied, thinking it expedient that Julie or herself should first give Atwood some hint of what lay in store.

"He is really quite well known, isn't he? I've taken more notice of magazine pictures since I heard I had another son-in-law. I hope he's not wild. They tell of such goings-on among artists and models. I seem to recollect, though, they were French."

"Craig is a gentleman."

"I'm bound to say his sister is a lady," Mrs. Fanshaw replied to this laconic statement. "Is she any connection of that Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade the papers mention so much?"

"Julie is her daughter-in-law."

"You don't tell me!" She was impressed to the verge of awe. "Why, that makes you sister-in-law to Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade's son!"

"He is dead."

"Dead!" Her face paid the late Mr. Van Ostade the fleeting tribute of a shadow. "What a pity! But I presume his mother still sees something of his widow?"

"Oh, yes."

"And comes here sometimes?"

"Frequently."

Mrs. Fanshaw resurveyed her surroundings as if they had taken on historic interest.

"You've seen her?"

"Yes."

"I mean, really met her—been introduced?"

"Yes," Jean admitted, without humility.

Her mother eyed her with respectful interest.

"I hope you'll keep your head, Jean," she admonished solemnly. "This is a great come-up in the world for you."

An impish impulse took shape in Jean's brain, and, under cover of showing the house, she guided Mrs. Fanshaw by edifying stages to Craig's temporary studio and the great work.

"A portrait he's doing!" she dropped carelessly.

Her mother as carelessly bestowed a brief glance upon the canvas.

"What a wrinkled old woman," she commented, turning away. "But I suppose it is the money your husband is thinking of?"

"Partly."

"What will he get for it?"

Jean pondered demurely.

"It is hard to say. Perhaps a thousand, perhaps two thousand dollars."

"What!" She wheeled upon the portrait. "Why, who is the woman?"

"Mrs. Joyce-Reeves."

The effect was as dramatic as Jean's unfilial fancy had hoped.

"The Mrs. Joyce-Reeves of Fifth Avenue and Newport?"

"And of Lenox, Aiken, and Ormond—yes."

Mrs. Fanshaw's attitude toward the portrait became reverential. Here was hallowed ground!

"Have you met her, too?" she asked finally, with the realization that even her child might share the sacerdotal mysteries.

"Yes."

"You have talked with her?"

"Only this afternoon."

"Here?"

"She was here to-day, for a sitting, but I ran across her at Mr. Richter's studio."

"That is where you go to—"

"To model; yes." Then, with great calm, "Mrs. Joyce-Reeves admires my work."

A chastened, pensive, almost deferential, being, who from time to time stole puzzled glances at her ugly duckling turned swan, let herself be shown to her room and smartened for dinner, to which she descended at what seemed to her robust appetite an unconscionably late hour. Here the fame of her son-in-law and the even more disconcerting attentions of the butler combined to make her subjugation complete.

Sweet as was her victory, however, Jean had no wish to see her mother ill at ease, and she rejoiced when Craig exerted himself to entertain this visitor whose subdued, almost shy, manner was so bewilderingly at variance with the forbidding image his fancy had set up. Moreover, he succeeded. If Mrs. Fanshaw's parochial outlook dulled the edge of his choicer quips and anecdotes, his boyish charm, at least, required no footnotes; and before the dinner ended she was bearing her gustful share in the conversation with such largess of detail that a far less imaginative listener than he might reconstruct therefrom the whole social and economic fabric of Shawnee Springs.

To Jean, who in dark moments had longed to forget it utterly, the narrow little town recurred with sharp, unlovely lines. Forget it! She could as easily forget that this was her mother. Flout it as she would, it yet stood closer to her than any spot on earth. Its censure and its respect were neither despicable; her rehabilitation in its purblind eyes was a thing desirable above all other ambitions. Then, presently, in this hour when she craved such justification deepest, its possibility, even its certainty, came to her. She had slipped away to answer one of the more imperative letters which Craig's detestation of affairs left to her, and as she mused a moment over her finished task, the drift of Mrs. Fanshaw's monologue in the room beyond penetrated her revery.

She was talking, as Jean had heard her talk times innumerable, with endless variations upon a single theme. But the burden of her laud was no longer Amelia! Now it was Jean—her childish spirit, her school-time precocity, her early love of shaping things in clay, her promise, her beauty, her future—Jean, always Jean! And as the girl at the desk drank it in thirstily, she foresaw the end. Signs there had been already that Amelia was wavering on her pedestal—her husband and her husband's family, the proud Fargos, had impaired her sainthood; and now in the tireless, fatuous, sweet refrain, Jean read her own elevation to the vacant niche. Hot tears blinded her. It might not be her noblest compensation; but it was the dearest.

If Mrs. Fanshaw's coming marked the dawn of another day in Jean's spirit, its effect on her external welfare was less happy. Her relations with Julie were beyond question altered, though precisely where the difference lay was not easy to detect. Intuition, rather than any overt act or word of Mrs. Van Ostade's, told her this, for their surface intercourse went on much as before; but, elusive and volatile as this changed atmosphere was, she nevertheless knew it for something real, alert, and vaguely hostile. Yet this aloofness, if aloofness it could be called, was so bound up in Julie's propaganda on behalf of Craig's career that Jean took it for a not unnatural jealousy.

Atwood fed the flame with repeated acknowledgments of his wife's share in solving his riddle, the fervor of which leaped from bud to bloom with tropic extravagance as the portrait went rapidly forward and the judgment of MacGregor and other experts assured him of its strength. His sister, Jean noted, always took these outbursts in silence. The portrait expressed a Mrs. Joyce-Reeves with whom she was unfamiliar, either over the tea-cups or elsewhere, but she had the breadth to recognize its bigness and set her restless energy to work to exploit it with all her might.

Of her methods Jean perhaps saw more than Mrs. Van Ostade supposed. For a fortnight Atwood let the nearly finished portrait cool, as he said, and busied himself at his regular studio with such illustrative work as he was still under contract to deliver. This was Julie's opportunity. That Atwood was painting Mrs. Joyce-Reeves was no secret—a discreet paragraph or two had sown the seed of publicity in fertile ground; and Julie furthermore let it leak out among those it might interest that the sittings took place beneath her roof. Skillful playing of influential callers who rose eagerly to allusions to the opinions of the critics—Mr. Malcolm MacGregor, for example—would lead usually, in strictest confidence, to a stolen view of the masterpiece. By such devices—and others—it came to pass that Atwood, happily ignorant of the wire-pulling which loosed the falling manna, found himself commissioned to paint three more persons of consequence so soon as his engagements to Mrs. Joyce-Reeves and the publishers would permit.

Craig ascribed it all to society's proneness to follow its bell-wethers.

"But I never gauged Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's true power, the magic of her mere name," he said repeatedly. "Three orders on the bare gossip that she has given me sittings!"

Julie begged Jean not to undeceive him.

"At least not yet," she qualified. "He is quixotic enough to throw his chance away, if he thought I used a little business common sense to make his art pay. I've never dared let him know the labor it cost to interest Mrs. Joyce-Reeves. Not that it was illegitimate or in any way underhanded. All this is as legitimate as the social pressure a clever architect brings to bear, and nobody thinks of censuring. But illusions are precious to Craig; they feed his inspiration. So I say, let him enjoy them while he can. Let him think commissions drop from the skies."

Jean doubted the truth of this estimate of Craig, but she did full justice to Mrs. Van Ostade's motives and to the signal success of her campaign which, for all she knew of such matters, might be, as Julie said, legitimate, and at this time even vitally important. The necessity for a change of studio, which now recurred, seemed logical, too.

"You now see for yourself, Craig, how unsuited to portrait work your old quarters are," Julie argued.

"Virginia Hepworth won't mind coming here—she is next, you know; but you can't go on this way indefinitely. Of course, it's possible that you may find it desirable to take a temporary studio at Newport for the summer; but in the fall people will expect a city studio worthy of your reputation."

Atwood was tractable.

"We must have a look around," he assented.

"I have looked around," announced his sister; "and I've found something you couldn't possibly better. It has every convenience—a splendid workroom, a large reception-room, a dressing-room, and an extra chamber which would be useful for the caterer when you receive. It will require very little redecorating, though they're willing to do it throughout, if we like."

"That sounds like the Copley Studios."

"It is."

Atwood laughed.

"Must it be the pink-tea district, after all, Julie? Boy in buttons at the door, velvet-coated poseur—Artist with a capital A—in the holy of holies. What will old Mac say! Jean, what do you think?"

She felt Julie's compelling eye upon her, and resented its domination; but she saw no choice of ways.

"The velvet jacket isn't compulsory, is it?" she said lightly. "Why not look at the studio?"

"I'll drop in the first time I am near," he agreed.

Julie coughed.

"I ventured to make an appointment," she said. "They only show it by special permission of the owners, the Peter Y. Satterlee Company. Mr. Satterlee himself offered to be at the building at twelve o'clock to-morrow, if that hour will suit. To deal with him in person would be an advantage."

"Would it?" responded Craig, hazily. "Very well. Can you go, Jean?"

"If you want me," she returned, feeling outside the discussion.

"Of course. I count on you and Julie to browbeat the real-estate shark into reducing the summer's rent. All I shall be good for is to tell you whether there is a practicable north light."

Jean came late. Richter had abruptly taken her off the spirit-mortifying antique to aid him with one of his lesser studies for the Western exposition, and the forenoon had been absorbing. To watch Richter model was much; to help him a heaven-sent boon to be exercised in fear and trembling and exceeding joy. The stroke of twelve, which should have found her with Craig, saw her but leaving Richter's door. The distance was short, however, and at a quarter past the hour the overupholstered elevator of the Copley Studios bore her without vulgar haste aloft.

It was all vastly different from Craig's unfashionable top-story back, a mile or more down-town. No shabby street confronted this temple of the fine arts; its benign façade overlooked a trim park and the vehicles of elegant leisure. No base odor of cabbage or garlic rose from the nether lair of its janitor; no plebeian tailor or dressmaker debased the tone of its lower floors. Its courts were of marble, and its flunkies had supple spines.

The door to which Jean was directed stood ajar, and she let herself in to encounter other mighty differences. The entrance to the down-town studio precipitated the caller squarely into the travail of artistic production, but the architect who planned the Copley Studios had interposed a little hall with a stained-glass window-nook and a reception-room of creamy empire fittings between genius and its interruptions.

From the studio proper issued Julie's level tones, presumably in discussion with Peter Y. Satterlee, for Jean heard Craig's meditative whistle in another direction. Following a small passage, she came upon him studying the convolutions of a nervous jet of steam which found vent among the myriad chimneys of the nearer outlook.

"Will it do?" she smiled.

"Splendidly—almost too splendidly. Julie and the magnificent Satterlee are settling terms, I believe. Behold your studio, sculptress mine!" he added with a grandiloquent gesture. "This is the extra chamber of Julie's rhapsodies, otherwise a bachelor's bedroom about to be dedicated to nobler ends. Notice your view, Jean! New York, the Hudson, Jersey's hills, and the promise of sunsets beyond compare! And look here"—descending to practicality—"running water handy and my workshop next. We shall virtually work side by side."

He pushed open the connecting door, and they entered the studio. Julie and a globular man in superfine raiment stood like ill-balanced caryatids in support of either end of the mantelpiece.

"I agree to everything," he was saying. "The leases shall be ready to-morrow."

The voice signaled some cell in Jean's brain. The face, which he turned immediately upon her, gave memory its instant clew, and she felt her skin go hot and cold under Peter Y. Satterlee's earnest gaze.

"Have you a double, Mrs. Atwood?" he asked, after a moment's idle discussion of the studio.

She tried to face him calmly.

"A double? I think not."

"Why?" demanded Julie.

Satterlee pursued his investigations with maddening care.

"It's a most extraordinary resemblance, particularly as to eyes," he said. "There was a young woman, a dentist's wife, living in a Harlem apartment of ours—the Lorna Doone, it was—who might be Mrs. Atwood's twin. You didn't marry a widow, sir?" he broke off jocularly.

Atwood laughingly shook his head.

"How curious!" he exclaimed. "What was her name?"

"There you have me," admitted the agent, after brain-fagging efforts. "I can't recollect. I sold the property very soon."

XXVI

Rid of them all, Jean was tormented by a host of replies and courses of action, any one of which, she believed, would have blunted the edge of Julie's suspicion. For she was suspicious! There could be no doubt of it. To Craig she longed to offer some explanation, but her love bade her reject anything short of the whole truth, even as it told her that the whole truth was impossible. Every hour of her wedded happiness heaped proof on proof of the joy he took in the belief that he alone had filled her heart. And was he not right? Had not his dear image persisted—canonized, enshrined, worshiped—since their forest meeting! Paul had never displaced it. In truth, it had shone the brighter because of Paul. But how put this holy mystery in words!

She took refuge in an opportunism not unlike Amy's. Did not time and chance rule the world! Yet her peace of mind was fitful, and she shunned the Copley Studios with a fear which hearkened to no argument. It was useless to remind herself that Satterlee was a man of many interests. Her imagination always figured him as haunting the room where she had come upon him. There he waited, a rotund bomb by the mantelpiece, with the explosive "Bartlett" in his subconsciousness ready to destroy her the instant her face should at last apply the fatal spark. So it fell out that, pleading her own work whenever Craig, himself absorbed in the Hepworth portrait, asked her opinion of his sister's ideas, the new studio's furnishing went forward without her and in unhampered accord with Julie's ambitious plans.

How far-reaching these plans were she first adequately perceived through MacGregor, whose card came up to her one evening when both Atwood and Mrs. Van Ostade were out.

"I counted on finding you alone," he owned with characteristic bluntness. "Craig has gone to the Salmagundi doings, of course,—I'm due there later; while I happen to know that Julie is dining with her mother-in-law. I met Julie this afternoon at the Copley Studios."

"Then you saw Craig's new quarters?"

"Yes. Have you seen them?"

"Why do you ask that question?"

"I gathered that you hadn't."

"I went there the day Craig took the place."

"And have not returned! Why?"

"I am working hard with Richter."

"So he tells me. Don't overwork. Art isn't everything."

"Aren't you inconsistent?" she laughed.

"Lord, yes! Consistently inconsistent. Life would lose half its sparkle, if I weren't. But the new studio; you should have a look in; it would interest you. I don't often trouble the pink-tea district, but an errand took me into the Copley building to-day just as Julie entered, and she offered to show me through."

His meditations became irksome.

"Well?" Jean prompted.

"Julie should have been a stage-manager," he said. "Her scenic instinct is remarkable. She sees Craig's place peopled with a fashionable portrait-painter's clientele, and has set her properties accordingly. His Italian finds,—his tapestries, his old furniture, his Pompeian bronzes,—the new grand piano, and the various other newnesses, all present themselves as background for society drama. I take off my hat to her. She, too, is an artist, an artist of imagination. It is all perfectly done. Nothing lacks but the fashionable portrait-painter."

"And the drama?" Jean suggested.

"Oh, that is being looked after. She plans a house-warming of some sort. You haven't been consulted?"

"No."

"Neither has Craig, I dare say. Perhaps the idea only took shape while she talked with me. I can't give you the technical name of the function, but it will be worthy of the manager's reputation. The scheme is to get Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's portrait, Miss Hepworth's, and mine—yes, mine!—before as many as possible of the opulent beings who itch to hand their empty faces down to posterity. By the way, I want to see the Hepworth portrait."

She took him to the billiard-room and brought the unfinished picture to the easel. MacGregor turned off a warring light, chose a view-point, bestrode a chair, and lapsed into a long silence. Jean tried to read his rugged face, but finding it inscrutable, herself studied the canvas. Fuller knowledge of Craig's sitter had failed to reveal the qualities of mind he found so stimulating; but now, confronting the immobile counterfeit, she hit with disturbing certainty upon the truth that Virginia Hepworth's appeal was physical, and to men as men.

A moment afterward MacGregor confirmed her intuition.

"I don't know her any better," he said. "Outwardly she is the same neurotic creature I've seen all along. Apathetic with other women, she stirs to life and takes her tints from the particular male with whom she chances to be. Craig has missed an opportunity to dissect a chameleon."

"You think it's a failure!"

"Psychologically, I do; technically, no. In color, texture, it is masterly. Don't distress yourself about its success; it will be only too successful. I think it will even have the bad luck to be popular."

Jean's loyalty rose to do battle.

"It's to Craig's credit that he could not see her truly," she retorted. "If she takes her tints from the man with whom she talks, then he has painted into her something of himself, something fine. But wasn't it hers for the moment? Why, then, shouldn't he show her at her best, not her worst?"

MacGregor laughed immoderately.

"That is stanch and wifely and nonsensical. It is not a portrait-painter's business to supply the virtues or the vices. His palette ought to contain neither mud nor whitewash. It is his duty to see things as they are."

"But how can you expect Craig to see Miss Hepworth as she is? He's not—"

"Middle-aged, like myself," suggested MacGregor, as she hesitated. "Say it! It makes your fling concrete, personal, feminine."

Jean's wrath cooled in a smile.

"I was going to add, cynical," she said. "Is that a personality?"

"It's wide of the mark, whatever we call it. I'm no cynic. If I were, I should merely stand by and laugh, not interfere."

"Don't put it that way."

"It amounts to interference. I can't cheat you, and I don't fool myself into thinking my talk about Craig's work is impersonal. Neither is what I say about Julie impersonal. Of course you've heard that she jilted me for Van Ostade? Eh? I thought so. Don't think you must say you're sorry," he protested hastily, as her lips parted. "I'm not sorry. I'm thankful for my escape. That sounds bitter to you. Perhaps I am bitter, but the bitterness is for myself, not her; and it doesn't sway my judgment of her influence upon Craig by a hair's breadth. He thinks it does, naturally, and he discounts my warnings. But I know, and you will know, if you don't see it yet, that he must shake her off. Otherwise he's damned."

Jean kindled from his fiery earnestness.

"What must I do?" she asked. "Do you think the new studio is a mistake?"

"No; I don't say it is. Craig had to come uptown. I'm not maintaining, either, that he can't paint under such conditions. Some men they stimulate. It isn't the studio; it's the commercial campaign it stands for which makes my gorge rise. Mind you, I don't censure Craig for not grasping Miss Hepworth in character. His youth is responsible for that fluke. But if he listens to Julie, he'll soon be painting everybody at their best moments. He'll take orders like a factory—yes; and execute then? like a factory—shallow, slap-dash, characterless vanities all of a mould, which fools will buy and the future ignore. There is no lost soul so tortured as the fashionable portrait-painter who has once known honest work. You must save Craig from such a fate. Don't think he is too strong to succumb. I've seen men with as much promise as his go under. Help him keep his feeling fresh. See that he has time to linger over and search out each subject. Make him paint even the mediocrities as they are."

"How shall I begin?"

"Throw Julie overboard," answered MacGregor, instantly. "I did not come here to mince words. I want to bring this home to you before I leave the country. I sail for Africa day after to-morrow."

"For Africa!"

"Yes. This is good-by. A magazine has made me an offer I can't afford to refuse."

She was oppressed by a great loneliness.

"Then I must fight it out single-handed," she said.

"You would fight single-handed if I were here, I'm afraid. Nobody can help you much. The most I can do is to try to convince you that you must fight. You must show Julie her place, and show her soon. Don't be soft-hearted about it. She's not soft, trust my word. You are dealing with an enemy—understand it clearly. She is an enemy and a clever one. Julie could not prevent your marriage, but she may break it."

She paled at the conviction of his tone.

"I can't believe it!"

"Can't you? I tell you the process of alienation has begun. Doesn't Craig think you indifferent about the studio?"

"Perhaps. I had reasons—"

"Chuck them away."

"And he knows I've been busy with Richter. Craig himself is lukewarm about the studio."

"You must not be. It may be your battle-ground. I don't say it will; but it may be, and it behooves you to look after your defences." He glowered at the painted face a moment, then: "You may know that the Chameleon was Julie's own choice for sister-in-law. Yes? It's a fact worth thinking over. Good-by, Jean, and good luck! I haven't been agreeable, but I've spoken as a friend. You feel that, I hope?"

"Yes," she answered unsteadily; "and thank you."

MacGregor winced as her voice broke.

"Buck up, buck up!" he charged. "You'll win out, sure!"

She brooded over his words till Atwood's return, but without seeing her way, and a restless night suggested only courses too fantastic for the light of day. She could not repeat MacGregor's warnings to Craig, nor could she voice them as her own; while to attack Julie openly seemed maddest of all. She could only drift and bide a time to assert herself with dignity.

Such a chance seemed to offer at luncheon when Mrs. Van Ostade asked Craig for suggestions regarding the decoration of the small room off the main studio.

"It has never been done up, you know," she continued. "The last tenant did not occupy it at all. We shall need it, however, and I think it should be put in order at once. I'll use my own discretion, if you don't want to be bothered."

"But that is Jean's affair," he said.

Julie's eyebrows arched.

"Really!"

"She and I settled it in the beginning that she should have that room for her work."

His sister drew her knife through an inoffensive chop with bloodthirsty vehemence.

"Indeed!" she returned.

"I will look after its decoration," put in Jean, quietly.

Mrs. Van Ostade's dusky skin shadowed with the dull red which marked her infrequent flush.

"It must be in harmony with the other rooms," she said sharply. "At times it will be necessary to throw everything open."

"Of course."

"And it should be done immediately. In fact, Mr. Satterlee promised to look in at the studio about it at five o'clock to-day."

Jean was staggered, but she could not hesitate.

"I will meet Mr. Satterlee," she answered.

Julie's thin lips parted in a travesty of a smile.

"You are sure it would be agreeable?" she asked.

Atwood lifted his eyes at her tone.

"Agreeable, Julie?" he said. "Why do you give the word that twist? Why shouldn't it be agreeable?"

Jean felt like an animal in a trap, but she faced Mrs. Van Ostade with head erect and unflinching eyes.

"Yes; why?" she demanded.

Julie seemed to weigh a reply which prudent second thought bade her check.

"How tragic you two have suddenly become," she drawled. "Isn't it possible that the exacting Richter may have a prior claim? I am only too happy that Jean can find time to revisit the studio—and meet Mr. Satterlee. I hope, Craig, you will be present yourself?"

Atwood looked frankly distressed over the rancorous turn the discussion had taken.

"If you'll wait for me, Jean," he said, "we will walk over together. Miss Hepworth is to give me a sitting at three."

Jean went heavy-hearted to her room and flung herself down to wonder dully how it would end. Drowsiness overtook her in these unprofitable questionings, and, spent with her wearing night, she fell into a deep slumber which shut out all thought till a knock called her back to face reality smugly embodied in a servant with a card-tray.

Paul! The bit of pasteboard fluttered to the floor. What brought him here? Then, perceiving a gleam of human curiosity light the face of the automaton with the tray, she gripped her self-control and bade the man tell Bartlett that she would see him.

"It's Amy," explained the dentist, rising from a respectful survey of Mrs. Van Ostade's drawing-room. "Nothing will do her but that you must come up to the flat. It isn't a thing I could 'phone or I wouldn't have broken in on you like this, let alone hustling down here between appointments and maybe missing other patients."

"But what is it?"

"The drummer. Amy thinks he means to shake her, and she's gone all to pieces. I ran in there to ask for the rent, which is 'way behind, and found her all in a heap. It was no place for P.B. Amy needs another woman and needs her bad; and it seems to be up to you. I know it's tough, asking you to go back to the Lorna Doone where every stick of furniture—"

"I'll go," she interrupted. "If Amy didn't need me, I know you would not have come."

"I'm afraid I can't wait to ride up with you," Paul apologized. "You see, I'm only here between appointments, and—"

"I understand. Besides, I must see Mr. Atwood first."

She mounted hurriedly to the billiard-room where Craig must still be at work, but hesitated on the threshold. The door was half open, and, unseen herself, she saw both painter and sitter. Virginia Hepworth had dropped her pose and had come behind Craig's chair. Neither spoke, though his brush was idle. They merely faced the canvas in a silence, the long-standing intimacy of which stabbed Jean with a jealous pang and sent her away with her message unspoken.

She trusted Craig, but she could not trust herself, and deemed it the part of wisdom to leave word with the dispassionate butler that a friend's sickness would prevent her going to the studio.

XXVII

Jean entered the Lorna Doone with a sense of having known the place in some former life. Its braggart onyx, its rugs, its palms, all the veneer which went to make for "tone"—that fetich of the dentist—greeted her with a luster scarcely dimmed; the negro hall-boy flashed a toothful smile of recognition; and even a scratch, which their moving had left on the green denim by the flat door, had its keen associations.

It was a relief to lay eyes upon Amy, who had no close relationship to this dead yet risen past. Amy, poor wight, seemed related to nothing familiar. Easily flooding tears, which gushed afresh at sight of Jean, had washed her prettiness away.

"I knew you'd come," she whispered, clinging desperately. "Paul thought it was no use to ask, but I made him go. You're not mad at me, Jean, for sending? I've nobody else—not a soul."

Jean soothed her as she would a child, and leading her into a bedroom close at hand, made her lie down. No sooner did her head touch the pillow, however, than she struggled up again.

"I can't lie still," she pleaded. "Don't make me lie still. I tossed here all night. I can't rest, I must talk. I want you to know what's happened. I want you to tell me what to do. I must do something. It can't go on. I'll lose my mind. I'll die."

Jean drew the woebegone figure to her.

"Tell me, Amy," she said gently. "Perhaps it isn't as black as it seems."

Amy rocked herself disconsolately.

"It's blacker than it seems," she lamented. "Oh, if I'd never taken the flat! Fred never wanted me to do it. I've only myself to thank. I didn't know when I was well off."

"But what has the flat to do with your trouble?"

"Everything. I thought it would be heaven to keep house,—my own house,—but it's been a hell. Fred said we couldn't afford a girl, though I never saw why, for he's done splendid in his new territory. And he didn't like my cooking! I only learned the plain things at the refuge, you know, and he's been pampered, living so much at hotels. Somehow I never can do things his way. Traveling men think a lot of their stomachs, and Fred is more particular than most."

Jean began to comprehend the sordid little tragedy.

"But you'll learn," she comforted. "Make Fred buy you a first-class cook-book. Try the recipes by yourself till you succeed. Don't feed him on the experiments."

"I did try by myself. I practiced on a Welsh rabbit, and I thought I had it down fine. So I surprised him one night after the theater when he came home hungry. He said it wasn't fit for a h-h-hog!"

Jean's indignation boiled over.

"It was a thousand times too good for him," she cried.

"Don't," begged Amy. "I didn't blame him after I tasted it. The thing I do blame him for and can't bear is the way he criticises my looks. I can't always look pretty and do my work. Fred seems to think I ought, and is always holding up Stella to me without stopping to remember that she has nothing to do but sing and change her clothes."

"Stella! Do you let Stella Wilkes come here?"

"Fred made me ask her. She's got a flat herself—just a common sort of a place that she rents furnished, with two chorus-girls. She's making money now. She left the Coney Island beer-hall for one of those cheap Fourteenth Street theaters. Fred says she's bound to make a hit. He's crazy about her,"—her voice rose to a wail,—"just crazy!"

Jean held the shaking form closer.

"Aren't you mistaken?" she said, without conviction.

"Mistaken!" The girl wrenched herself erect. "Last night I saw her in his arms."

"Amy!"

"I saw them—here—in my own house! Stella was here when Fred came home from Newark—I guess she knew he was coming—and he made her take off her things and stay to supper. It wasn't a good supper. The gas-range wouldn't work, and I'd forgotten to put Fred's beer in the ice-box. I was hot and cross from standing over the fire, and hadn't a minute to do my hair. I saw Fred looking from me to Stella, who was dressed to kill, and I knew what he thought. I could have cried right there. I don't know how I got through the meal, but it ended somehow, and they went off into the parlor, leaving me to clear away the things. I washed the dishes up, for, company or not, I hate to let them stand over until morning; and then fixed myself a little to go where they were. I must have got through sooner than they expected. I saw him kiss her as plain as I see you."

"Did they know you saw them?"

"I let them know," rejoined Amy, with a heart-breaking laugh. "I'll bet her ears burn yet. I ordered her out of the house, and she went, double-quick!"

"And he?"

The light died out of Amy's face.

"Fred went, too," she said numbly. "I haven't seen him since. I'll never see him again, I guess. I'm the most miserable girl alive! What shall I do? What shall I do?"

"Divorce the scoundrel," counseled Jean, promptly. "I'll take care of the lawyer. I'll employ detectives, too, if you need more evidence, as I suppose you will. He must be made to pay alimony. But you've nothing to fear, even if you don't get a cent. You earned your living once; you can do it again. Be rid of him at once."

Amy turned her face away.

"You don't know," she moaned.

"What is it I don't know?"

"The truth—the real truth."

"You mean you still care for him?"

"I do care for him—I always shall—but that's not what I mean. I can't divorce Fred. I'm not—not his wife."

Jean sprang to her feet.

"You're not married!"

A spasm of anguish racked the shrinking form.

"Not—not yet."

Jean stood in rigid dismay, striving to read this enigma.

"Not yet," she repeated slowly. "Did you believe, Amy, could you believe, he ever meant to deal honestly with you?"

"Yes!" The girl turned passionately. "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! He couldn't at first. His wife had divorced him, and he wasn't allowed to remarry for three years. The time wasn't up when we met again; it wasn't up when we began to live together. It seemed so long to wait. I trusted him. I loved him."

"But now? He is free now?"

"Yes."

"And does nothing!"

"We—we put it off."

"You mean, he put it off. Amy! Amy! Can't you realize that he is worthless? Can't you understand that you must root him out of your life? Face this like a brave woman. I'll help you make a fresh start. Be independent. Cut yourself off from him completely. Do it now—now!"

Amy's haggard eyes were unresponsive.

"It's too late."

"No, no!"

"It's too late. I can't cut myself off from him. Jean!" Her voice quavered to shrill intensity. "Jean! Don't you—don't you see!"

Jean saw and was answered, and her womanhood bade her sweep the weakling to her breast.

"I've kept it from him," wept Amy. "He hates children about. I did not dare tell him."

"I dare," cried Jean, like a trumpet-call. "And I will."

Her assurance quieted the girl like an anodyne, and presently she slept. Sundown, twilight, and night succeeded. The watcher's muscles grew cramped, but whenever she sought to loose the sleeper's clasp, Amy whimpered like a feverish child, and so she sat compassionately on aiding nature's healing work. Meanwhile she tried to frame her appeal to the drummer. How or when she should reach him she knew not; Amy must bring about a meeting. She did not believe that he had definitely deserted his victim. His sample-cases in the hall, his innumerable pipes, his clothing strewn about the bedroom, all argued a return. She longed that he might come now while her wrath burned hottest and she might scorch him to a sense of his infamy. It could be done. She was confident that she could stir him somehow. Surely, he was not all beast. Somewhere underneath the selfish hide lurked a torpid microscopic soul, some germ of pity, some spark of manhood.

Then Amy awoke, refreshed, heartened, yet still spineless, clinging, and dependent; and Jean threw herself into the task of cheering this mockery of a home. She made Amy bathe her dreadful eyes, arrange her hair, don a dress the drummer liked; and then set her ordering the neglected flat, while she herself conjured up a meal from the unpromising materials which a search of the larder disclosed. The little kitchen was haunted with ghosts of her other life. The dentist's astonishing ice-cream freezer and the patent dish-washer stared her in the face, and her hunt for the tea-canister revealed the kit of tools she had bought to surprise him. Not a utensil hung here which was not of their choosing.

And so it was with the other rooms. When she came to lay the cloth, its grape-vine pattern greeted her like a forgotten acquaintance; the colonial sideboard and the massive table, as formerly, united to resist invasion of their tiny stronghold. The silver candelabra, restored to the giver, still flanked Grimes's Louis XV clock upon the mantelpiece; the galaxy of American poets hung where she had appointed. The Jean who had done these things, lived this existence, was a distant, shadowy personality, and the feat of making her intelligible to another seemed more than ever impossible. She rejoiced that she had locked this chapter from Craig. Her present self was her real self, the Jean he idealized, the real Jean.

The belated supper braced Amy's mood. She became apologetic for the drummer and sanguine of the future.

"Don't be harsh with Fred," she entreated. "Tell him the truth, but don't hurt his pride. Fred is so proud. He's the proudest man I ever knew. Besides, I'm every bit as much to blame. Stroke him the right way, and he'll do almost anything you want. I could have managed him, if I'd been well. He means all right. He'll do right, too. I wish—I wish you could see us married, Jean. If he would only come now, we could get a minister in and have it over to-night."

Jean hoped as fervently as Amy for the drummer's coming, and in this hope lingered till she could wait no longer.

"Go to bed," she charged. "Sitting up won't hurry him home. If he comes, don't weep, don't reproach him, don't plead with him, don't—above all—don't apologize. Keep him guessing for once, and leave the talking to me. Find out in some way where I can see him. If he will be home to-morrow evening, I'll come here; if there's a chance of catching him earlier at the office of his firm, let me know and I'll go there. Meanwhile say nothing, but look your best."

Amy promised all things, and Jean hurried out, horrified at the lateness of the hour. The long down-town journey at this hour daunted her till she shook off the atmosphere of the Lorna Doone sufficiently to recall that penny-saving was no more a vital factor in her life. Cabs were not wont to stalk custom in this neighborhood, however, and even a search of the nearest cross-street, where business predominated, was fruitless. As she hesitated, scouring the scene, the attentions of a group of corner loafers became pointed, and, believing one of them about to accost her, she darted down a convenient stair of the subway and boarded a train which was just about to depart. She rode past two stations before she discovered that in her haste she had entered from an uptown platform.

Dismounting, she began a wait in the whited suffocating cavern, which seemed endless. Under the hard glitter of the arc-lights the raw flamboyant advertisements of soaps, whiskies, hair tonics, liver pills, and department-store specials became a physical pain. The voices of the ticket-choppers, gossiping across the tracks of the President whom they called by a diminutive of his first name, were like the drone of monster flies in a bottle. Then the green and yellow eyes of her dilatory train gleamed far down the tunnel, and the rails quickened and murmured under its onset. This show of speed was delusive, however. They halted leisurely at platforms where no one got off or on, and loitered mysteriously in the bowels of the earth where were no stations whatsoever. The system seemed hopelessly out of joint and the handful of passengers sighed or swore, according to sex, and tried with grotesque noddings to nap through the tedious delays. Then more waits and more stations succeeded, and the ranks of the sufferers thinned until only Jean and a red-nosed woman, who smelled of gin and thirsted for conversation, were left.

At last came release, and, spurred forward by the waxing friendliness of the red-nose, who also alighted, she hurried to the surface. The remaining distance was short, and in five minutes she was rummaging her shopping-bag for a latch-key. The servants were of course abed. Not a light was visible. All the house apparently slumbered in after-midnight peace. She experienced a burglarious sense of adventure in fitting her key to the lock, and a guilty start when the heavy door escaped her fingers and shut with a resounding slam. At the same instant a light streamed from the library at the farther end of the hall, disclosing Julie haughtily erect in the opening, and Craig's stricken face just behind.

XXVIII

"It is I, Craig," Jean called. "Surely you haven't worried?"

The man groaned.

"Worried!" he cried. "What does it all mean, Jean?"

He would have come out to her, but Julie laid a restraining hand on his sleeve, saying,—

"Keep yourself in hand, Craig dear."

Jean moved quickly down the hall and confronted them.

"What is this mystery?" she demanded. "Did not the servant deliver my message?"

Mrs. Van Ostade signed for her to enter the library. She passed in with a bewildered look at Atwood, who walked uncertainly to the fireplace and stood gazing down into its lifeless grate. His sister shut the door and put her back against it.

"Didn't you receive my message?" Jean again addressed Craig. "Miss Hepworth was with you, and I disliked to interrupt. There was no time for a note. I left too hurriedly."

"With whom?" The question was Julie's and was delivered like a blow.

Jean faced her.

"I went alone," she replied quietly. "Does it matter?"

Mrs. Van Ostade flung out an imperious finger.

"Read that card beside you on the desk," she directed. "'Paul Bartlett, D.D.S. Crown and bridge work a specialty,' Do you deny meeting that person to-day?"

"Certainly not. He brought word that a sick friend needed me, and left immediately afterward."

"And you have not seen him since?"

"No." Her denial rang out emphatically. "Craig," she appealed, "what is the meaning of this catechism? I have been with Amy ever since I left the house. She is in great trouble. It is a terrible story."

"It is indeed," struck in Julie. "Do you swallow it, Craig? Can anybody! Perhaps now you will begin to use the reasoning powers which your infatuation for this adventuress has clouded. How could you ever have trusted her! Wasn't the bare fact of the reformatory enough?"

"Craig!" Appeal, reproach, anguish, all blended in that bitter cry.

Atwood disclaimed responsibility with a gesture.

"Your mother," he said.

"Yes; your mother," Julie echoed. "Before she sat ten minutes in this room she had told all she knew—do you understand me?—all she knew! I was your friend till then. I don't pretend I was not cut to the heart by Craig's mad marriage. I would have given my right hand to prevent it. Hadn't I seen you before you ever entered his studio? Didn't I know how vulgar your associates were? Perhaps your 'Amy' was the drunken little fool who created a scene in the restaurant where I made your acquaintance? But I tried to put that out of mind when I accepted the marriage. I took you into my own home; I hoped to school you to fill your new place in life worthily."

"And have I not?" Jean interpolated proudly. "Have I shamed you or him?"

Julie scorned reply.

"But I knew nothing of the refuge story," she railed on. "I never suspected the awful truth when you evaded every question I asked about your girlhood. I knew your past had been common; I could not dream it had also been criminal."

"Julie!" Atwood entreated.

"The time has come for plain dealing," she answered him. "You will live to thank me for opening your eyes."

Jean took a step nearer her accuser.

"Let her go on," she challenged contemptuously. "She only distorts what I have told you already."

Julie's dark face grew thunderous.

"Do I!" she retorted. "Let us see. What have you told Craig of this man Bartlett? What have you told him of the flat at the Lorna Doone? Where are your glib answers now? Can you suppose that, knowing your history, I would suspect nothing when Satterlee put you out of countenance at the Copley Studios? A double, indeed! From that moment you avoided the place. From that moment every shift of yours strengthened my belief that I had stumbled on one more murky chapter of your life. Satterlee's memory improved; he recalled your twin's name. Thereafter my investigations were child's play. Can you, dare you, deny that you were known at the Lorna Doone as Bartlett's wife?"

Jean's face grew pale; Craig's, her agonized glance perceived, was whiter still.

"It was a mistake," she answered. "They thought—"

"Ah!" Julie's cry was long-drawn, triumphant. "Do you hear, Craig? She admits that she was known as Mrs. Bartlett. My poor brother! By her own confession you have married either a discarded mistress or a bigamist!"

Jean's brain whirled. That passion could put such a monstrous construction on her conduct, passed belief.

"Lies!" she gasped.

"Prove them false!"

"Lies, cruel lies!"

Atwood sprang to her side.

"I could not believe them, Jean," he cried. "You are too honest, too pure—"

"Prove them false!" Julie challenged again.

Jean turned her back upon her.

"This is between you and me, Craig," she pleaded, struggling for self-control. "I am the honest woman you have always believed me. I have concealed nothing shameful. My only thought was to spare you pain. You shall know now, everything; but it is a story for your ears alone. It concerns us only, dear, our happiness, our love."

He cast a look of entreaty at Julie, who met it with an acid smile.

"You are wax in her hands," she taunted. "She can cajole you into thinking black is white."

"No, no," he protested. "You are unjust to her, Julie. I know her as you cannot. She is the soul of truth."

Jean's heart leaped at his words.

"God bless you for that!" she exclaimed. "Let her hear, then! Why should I fear her now?"

The dentist's attentions at the boarding-house, their walks and theater-goings, his help when the department store cast her out, their engagement, the taking and furnishing of a flat, the apparition of Stella, the confession and the crash—all she touched upon without false shame, without attempt to gloss her free agency and responsibility. She dealt gently with Paul, magnifying his virtues, palliating his great fault, bearing witness to the sincerity of his remorse. But Craig she could not spare, pity him as she might. She saw his drawn face wince as if under bodily pain, and before she ended he was groping for a chair. She perceived, as she had feared, that an ideal was gone from him, perhaps the dearest ideal of all; yet she did not realize what a blow she had struck this stunned, flaccid figure with averted head, till, breaking the long silence which oppressed the room when she had done, he asked,—

"Did you love this man, Jean?"

She weighed her answer painfully.

"Not as we know love, Craig," she said.

"You would have sold yourself for a home—for a flat in the Lorna Doone! Where was your remembrance of the birches then?"

She forgave the words in pity for the pain which begot them. She forgot Julie. Nothing in life mattered, if love were lost. A great devouring fear lest he slip from her drove her forward and flung her kneeling at his side.

"You were with me always, Craig, always," she said brokenly. "Is it too hard to believe? If you try to paint an ideal and the picture falls short, does that make your ideal less dear? What hope had I ever to meet you again? How could I dream that I stood for more in your thoughts than a heedless fugitive of whom you were well rid? You could not know that you had given me courage for the guardhouse and the prison; made me strive to become the girl you thought me; changed the whole trend of my foolish life! How then have I been unfaithful? Was it treachery to you, whom I never looked to see again, that when a good man—yes; at heart, Paul is a good man—offered me a way of escape I should take it? You ask me if I would have sold myself for a home, for that poor little flat in the Lorna Doone whose cheapness I never appreciated till to-night—I answer no. I know now that I did not love him; but I did not know it then. It was left for you to teach me."

He made no response when she ceased. His hands lay nerveless under hers; his eyes still brooded on the fireless hearth. So for a hundred heart-beats they remained together.

"You believe me, Craig?"

"Yes," he wrenched forth at last.

Jean slowly withdrew her hands.

"But you cannot wholly forgive?"

He had no answer.

"I can say no more," she added, rising; and came again face to face with Julie, who made way for her at the door. "I leave your house to-morrow, Mrs. Van Ostade. If I could, I would go to-night."

Free of gnawing secrecies at last! The thought brought a specious sense of peace. Julie's yoke broken! Her step on the stair grew buoyant. The battle desired by MacGregor had been fought. Precipitated by causes with which neither had reckoned, waged with a fierce heat alien to art, Craig's emancipation had nevertheless been at stake. The break had come, and it was beyond remedy. He must cleave to his wife.

Too excited for sleep, she began at once her preparations for quitting Julie's hateful roof, and one after another overcame the obstacles which packing in the small hours entailed. Each overflowing chair, every yawning door and drawer, testified the increased complexity of her life and the bigness of her task. The bride of a single dinner-dress had become under Craig's lavish generosity the mistress of great possessions. There were gowns of many uses and many hues; hats and blouses in extravagant number; shoes—a little regiment of shoes aligned neatly in their trees; costly trifles for her desk; books and pictures in breath-taking profusion.

She now remembered that her one trunk, with Craig's many upon which she depended, was stored on the top floor, and she debated whether to wake one of the servants or await her husband's help. In the end she did neither. She disliked Mrs. Van Ostade's servants, one and all, suspecting them of tale-bearing, and after a vain wait for Craig, who still lingered below, she went about the business for herself. It was a difficult matter to accomplish without rousing the house, and when, after much travail of mind and disused muscle, she effected the transfer of her own trunk, she was tempted to do what she could with it and let her other belongings follow as they might. This course, also, she rejected. Nothing except a complete evacuation would satisfy, and she craved the joy of leaving Julie's bridal gift conspicuously unpacked.

By three o'clock all was done, and as she flung herself wearily upon her bed she heard Craig's leaden step mount the stair. He entered their living-room, which, save for one or two small articles he would scarcely miss, she had not dismantled, switched on the electricity, and after a pause closed the door of the dressing-room connecting with the darkened chamber where she lay. Jean heard him light a cigarette and drop heavily into a chair, which he abandoned almost at once to pace the floor. The sound of his pacing went on and on, varied only by the scrape of matches as he lit cigarette after cigarette, the penetrating oriental scent of which began in time to seep into her own room and infect her with his unrest.

She took alarm to find him so implacable. Did his sister sway him still? Had Julie poisoned the truth with the acid of her hate? Might she lose him after all? She could scarcely keep herself from calling his name. And the monotonous footfall went on and on, on and on, trampling her heart, grinding its iteration into her sick brain. Then, when it seemed endurable no longer, it became a sedative, and she slept to dream that she was a new inmate of Cottage No. 6, with a tyrannous, vindictive matron whose face was the face of Julie Van Ostade.

She stirred with the day and lay with shut eyes, tasting the blissful reality of familiar things. This was no cell-like room, no refuge pallet. She had only to stretch out her hand—thus—to the bed beside her own, and touch—? Nothing! Craig's bed stood precisely as the maid had prepared it for his coming. Was he pacing yet? She listened, but no sound came. Creeping to the living-room door she listened again; then turned the knob. Empty! The untouched pillows of the divan, the overflowing ash-tray, the lingering haze, bespoke an all-night vigil. He had not only let the sun go down upon his wrath, he had watched it rise again! An answering glow kindled in her bruised pride.

Left rudderless by his silence, she cast about eagerly for some new plan of action while she dressed. Last night she had meant to order her things sent to the studio until they could plan the future, but that course seemed feasible no longer. She searched her pocketbook for funds and found only tickets for a popular comedy. She smiled upon them grimly. Comedy, forsooth! Here was more comic stuff—the screaming farce of woman's lot! Flouted, she had no choice but to fold her hands and wait while the dominant male in his wisdom decided her destiny.

At her accustomed hour she touched the bell for her coffee, and with sharpened observation saw at once that, unlike other days, the tray held but a single service.

"Mr. Atwood breakfasted downstairs?" she said carelessly.

The maid's eyes roved the dissipated scene of Atwood's reflections and lit upon a strapped trunk which Jean had for convenience pulled into the dressing-room.

"Yes," she answered. "Mr. Craig came down very early."

"Did he go out?"

"More than an hour ago."

Jean let the coffee go cold and crumbled her toast untasted. How could she endure this passivity! Must she forever be the spectator? Amidst these drab reveries her eyes rested for some minutes upon the topmost of the morning papers, which the maid had brought as usual with the breakfast, before one of its by no means modest head-lines resolved itself into the words,—

MURDERED IN CENTRAL PARK

Then a familiar name and a familiar address leaped from the context, and she seized breathlessly upon the brief double-leaded paragraph and read it twice from end to end.

"The northern extremity of Central Park," ran the account, "became last night the scene of a tragedy which its loneliness and insufficient lighting have long invited. Shortly after midnight the body of Frederic Chapman, a commercial traveler in the employ of Webster, Cassell & Co., residing in the Lorna Doone apartments, not ten blocks from the spot where he met his death, was found with a bullet through the heart. Up to the time of going to press, no trace of the murderer or weapon had been discovered, although the physician summoned by Officer Burns, who came upon the body in his regular rounds, was of the opinion that life had been extinct less than an hour. Both precinct and central office detectives are at work upon the case. Mr. Chapman leaves a young widow, who is prostrated by the blow."

Jean sprang to her feet, her own woes forgotten in her horrified perception of Amy's dire need. Tearing out the paragraph, she penciled across its head-lines, "I have gone to her," and enclosing it in an envelope addressed to Atwood, set it conspicuously on his desk.

XXIX

Early as she reached the Lorna Doone, Jean found others before her, drawn by the morbid lure of sudden death. The hawkers of "extras" already filled the street with their cries; open-mouthed children swarmed about the entrance of the apartment-house as if this, not the park, were the historic ground; while Amy's narrow hall was choked with reporters, amidst whom Amy herself, colorless, bright-eyed, babbled wearilessly of the drummer's virtues.

"He was the best salesman they ever had," she was saying. "Put that in the paper, won't you? In another year he'd most likely have had an interest in the business. They couldn't get along without him, they said. He was the best salesman they ever had. People just had to buy when Fred called. He seemed to hypnotize customers. One man—" and she rambled into the story of a conquest, beginning nowhere and ending in fatuity with the unceasing refrain, "He was the best salesman they ever had."

The sight of Jean shunted her from this theme to self-pity. She clung to her hysterically, declaring she was her only friend and calling upon the reporters to witness what a friend she was! They had, of course, heard of Francis Craig Atwood, the great artist? This was his wife—her old friend, her only friend. Jean urged her gently toward the bedroom, and, shutting the door upon her, turned and asked the pressmen to go. They assented and left immediately, save one of boyish face who delayed some minutes for sympathetic comment on the tragedy.

"I'm only a cub reporter, Mrs. Atwood," he added, "and I have to take back something. That's the rule in our office—get the story or get out. Poor Mrs. Chapman was too upset to give me anything of value. Perhaps you'd be willing to help me make good?"

"I know nothing but what the papers have told," Jean replied.

"I don't mean the shooting—merely a fact or two about Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, whom you know so well. When were they married?"

"I can't tell you," she said hastily. "I—I was not present."

"But approximately? I don't want the dates. She looks a bride, and you know the public is interested in brides. They haven't lived here long, I suppose?"

"No; not long," she assented, thankful for the loophole; "a few weeks."

"This was their first home?"

"Practically. They boarded for a time. Excuse me now, please. You must see how much she needs me."

"She is lucky to have you, Mrs. Atwood. Girlhood friends, I presume?"

"Yes, yes. Go now, please."

She turned him out at last and paused an instant to brace her nerves before joining Amy. At the far end of the hall the parlor door stood ajar, and she saw with a shiver that the shades were down. Then Amy peered from the bedroom in search of her, a grief-stricken figure with wringing hands.

"Don't keep me in here," she moaned. "Let me walk, walk." And she moved toward the darkened room.

"Not there!" Jean cried, preventing her. "Not there!"

Amy stared an instant and then uttered a laugh more terrible than tears.

"He is not in the parlor," she replied. "They took him to an undertaker's. There's a man—I forgot to tell you—there's a man from the undertaker's here now. He wants clothes, black clothes. He's in the spare room, hunting. I—I couldn't touch them. I told him to look for himself. You help him, Jean. I couldn't touch Fred's things. It seemed—oh, I just couldn't!"

Jean let her wander where she would, and opened the guest-room door. A heavy-jowled man pivoted about at her entrance and stuffed a handful of letters into a pocket of one of the dead drummer's coats. The garment was not black.

"What are you doing there?" she demanded. "That coat might answer for a horse-race, not a funeral."

The man had a glib answer ready.

"I took it down to look behind," he said. "The letters fell out."

She doubted his word and, walking to the closet, made a selection from the more sober wear.

"Take these," she ordered.

He thanked her, gathered the clothing together, and left the room; and she heard the hall door close after him while she lingered a moment to replace the things his rummaging had disturbed. Coming out herself, the first object to meet her eye was a telltale bit of cloth protruding from the umbrella-rack, into which, she promptly discovered, the supposed undertaker's assistant had stuffed every article she had given him. The sight unnerved her, and she sought Amy in the parlor and told her what she had seen.

"Don't let people in here," she warned. "The man was, of course, a reporter. No experienced detective would have left the clothes behind."

Amy plucked at her throat as if stifled.

"What did he w-want?" she chattered. "What did he want?"

"Scandal, probably."

"You think so?" whispered the girl, ghastly white. "You think so? You don't suppose he came because—because he suspects—"

"Suspects whom?"

"Me!" she wailed, her cry trembling to a shriek. "Me! Me! Me! I did it, Jean. I shot him. I killed Fred. I'm the one. I—"

Jean clapped a hand over her mouth.

"Hush!" she implored. "You're mad!"

Amy tore herself free and dropped huddled to the floor.

"I'm not mad. I wish I were. They'd only lock me up, if I were mad. Now they'll kill me, too."

Jean shook her roughly.

"Stop!" she commanded. "Some one might overhear and believe you. Don't say such things. It's dangerous."

Amy threw back her head with a repetition of her awful laugh.

"You don't believe me!" she cried. "I'll make you believe me. Listen: He came home last night after you left. You hadn't been gone ten minutes when he came. He'd been drinking, but he was good-natured, and I thought I would speak to him myself. It didn't seem as if I could wait for you to speak to him, Jean. I thought I could manage it—he was so good-natured—and so I asked him to make me an honest woman. I never mentioned the baby—then! And I wasn't cross or mean with him. I asked him as nice as I knew how. But he wouldn't listen—it was the drink in him—and he struck me. Fred never struck me before in his life. He was always such a gentleman. It was the drink in him made him strike me. After that I went into the bedroom and cried, and I heard him go to the sideboard and pour out more whisky. He did it twice. By and by he came into the hall and took his hat, and I called to him and asked him not to go out again. I said I was sorry for bothering him; but he went out just the same. Then I followed. I knew, I don't know how, but I knew he was going to Stella's, and it didn't seem, after all I'd been through, I could stand for it. Sure enough, he turned down the avenue toward that flat of hers I told you about, with me after him keeping on the other side. I lagged behind a little when he reached Stella's street, for it was lighter by her door than on the avenue, and when I got around the corner he wasn't anywhere to be seen, and I knew for certain he'd gone in at her number. I'd been trembling all over up to then, but now I felt bold as a lion, I was so mad, and I marched straight up to the house myself. I decided I wouldn't ring her bell—it's just one of those common flat-houses without an elevator—but somebody else's, and then, after the catch was pulled, go up and take them by surprise.

"I was half running when I came to the steps, and before I could stop myself, or hide, or do anything, I banged right into Fred, who hadn't been able to get in at all and was coming away. His face was terrible when he saw who it was, but I wasn't afraid of him any more and told him he'd got to hear something now that would bring him to his senses, if anything could. He saw I meant business and said, 'Oh, well, spit it out!' But just then some people came along and walked close behind us all the way to the corner. The avenue was full of people, too, for the show at that little concert-hall near the park entrance was just over, so we crossed into the park to be by ourselves. We were quite a way in before I spoke, for I was thinking what to say, and finally when Fred said he wasn't going a step farther, I up and told him about the baby. He said that was a likely story and started to pull away, and then—then I took out the pistol. It was Fred's six-shooter; he'd kept it in the top bureau drawer ever since the last scare about burglars, and I caught it up when I followed him out. I didn't mean it for him. I only meant to shoot myself, if he wouldn't do right by me when he'd heard the truth. But he thought I wanted to kill him, and he grabbed hold of my arm to get it away. Then, somehow, all of a sudden it was done, and there he was lying across the path with his head in the grass. I don't know how long I stood there, or why I didn't kill myself. I ought to have shot myself right there. But I only stood, numb-like, till all at once I got frightened and began to run. I ran along by the lake and threw the revolver in the water, and went out of the park by another entrance and came back here. Nobody saw me go out; nobody saw me come in. The elevator boy goes home at twelve o'clock. I guess you believe me now, don't you?"

Jean froze before the horror of it. While she mechanically soothed the hapless creature who, her secret out, had relapsed into ungovernable hysteria wherein Fred's praises alternated with shuddering terror of the future, her own thoughts crowded in a disorder almost as chaotic. She faced a crime, and yet no crime. Must she bid Amy give herself up to the law? Must this frail girl undergo the torture of imprisonment and trial for having served as little more than the passive tool of circumstance? If they held their peace, the mystery might never be cleared. Would justice suffer greatly by such silence? But Amy would suffer! The fear of discovery—the fear Jean herself knew so well—would dog her to her grave. To trust the law was the frank course, but would the law—blind, clumsy, fallible Law whose heavy hand had all but spoiled her own life—would the law believe Amy had gone out, carrying a weapon, without intent to do murder? The dilemma was too cruel.

The door-bell bored itself into her consciousness, and she went out to confront more reporters.

"Mrs. Chapman is too ill to see you," she said curtly.

"But it's you we want to see," returned one, whose face she recalled from the earlier invasion. "There are new developments, and we'd like to have your comment. It's of public interest, Mrs. Atwood."

Her anger flamed out against them.

"What have I to do with your public?" she demanded. "I have nothing to say to it."

"But you consented to an interview this morning," rejoined the spokesman for the group. "Why do you object to another?"

"I consented to an interview!"

"Here you are," he said, producing one of the more sensational newspapers. "'The beautiful wife of the well-known illustrator, Francis Craig Atwood, has been with the heart-broken little bride since early morning. Mrs. Atwood and Mrs. Chapman were schoolgirl chums whose friendship has endured to be a solace in this crushing hour. Mrs. Atwood brokenly expressed her horror at the catastrophe and added one or two touching details concerning the Chapmans' ideal married life. Their wedding—'"

Jean seized the cub reporter's "story" and read it for herself. The drummer shone a paragon of refinement in the light of her friendship and Craig's, for Atwood was not neglected; two paragraphs, indeed, were given over to a résumé of his artistic career.

Tears of mortification sprang to her eyes.

"What an outrage!" she exclaimed. "Mr. Atwood has never seen these people, never set foot in this building! I myself met this unfortunate man but once in my life!"

The group pricked up its ears.

"We shall be very glad to publish your denial," assured the spokesman.

"Oh, don't publish anything," she cried. "Drop us out of it altogether, I beg of you!"

"But in the light of the new developments, it would be only just to you and Mr. Atwood," he persisted.

"What developments?"

"The revelations concerning Chapman's—er—irregular mode of life. His former wife—she lives in Jersey City—has laid certain information before the police. She seems to care for him still, after a fashion. She only heard this morning of his remarriage, though she met and talked with him day before yesterday."

Jean's hand sought the wall.

"What does she know?"

"The police won't disclose. But they say her information, taken with another clew that's come into their hands, will lead shortly to an arrest. Shall we publish the denial, Mrs. Atwood?"

"Yes," she answered; "yes."

As she closed the door, Amy tottered down the hall.

"I heard!" she gasped. "I heard all they said. The police—the police will come next! They've found out I'm not Fred's wife. I'll be shamed before everybody. They'll suspect me first of all. They'll find out everything. You heard what they said about a clew? When they get hold of a clew, they get everything! They'll take me to the Tombs—the Tombs! Hark!"

The fretful bell rang again.

"The police!" chattered Amy. "The police!"

The same fear gripped Jean, but she mustered strength to push the girl into the bedroom and shut the door; and then, with sinking knees, went to answer the summons.

XXX

No uniformed agent of pursuing justice confronted her; only the face of him she loved best; and the great uplifting wave of relief cast her breathless in Craig's arms.

"Come away," he begged, his answering clasp the witness and the seal of their reconciliation. "Come away."

"Craig!" she whispered. "Craig!"

"I only just learned where you were. A reporter came to the studio, showed me his paper—"

"Falsehoods! They perverted my words—"

"I knew, I knew. I'm the one to blame, not you. If I'd gone home, stayed home, you would never have come here. Forgive me, Jean. I've been a fool."

"Hush," she said, laying a hand upon his lips. "We were both wrong. But I must have come to Amy. After what she told me last night, there was no choice. You'll understand when I explain. It's ghastly clear."

"But come away first. Don't give anyone a chance to ferret out your life, Jean. Why should you stay here now?"

A low, convulsive moan issued from the bedroom. Jean sprang to the door.

"Amy!" she called. "Don't be frightened. It's only Craig. Do you hear me? It was Craig who rang. I'll come to you soon."

Atwood followed to the little parlor.

"You see?" she said.

"But there must be some one else, some other woman—"

"There is no one who knows what I know. You must hear it, too, Craig. It's more than I can face alone. You must think for me, help me." And she poured the whole petrifying truth into his ears.

"She must give herself up," he said, at last.

"But—" And the dilemma of moral and legal guilt plagued her again.

He brushed her tender casuistry aside.

"The law must deal with such doubts," he answered. "We must help her face it, help her see that delay only counts against her. She must tell her story before they come at the facts without her."

"She believes they suspect already. They've found out something about that wretched man's life,—the reporters don't say what,—and she lies in that room shaking with terror at every ring of the bell. We thought you were the police."

"We must help her face it," he repeated. "I will drive her to police headquarters."

"Not you, Craig. You must not. The papers shall not drag you into this again. I will go with her."

"Isn't your name mine? You see it makes no difference. I'll not allow you to go through this alone. I've let you meet too much alone. We'll talk to Amy together, if you think best."

Jean's glance fell on Grimes's gilt clock.

"Amy has tasted nothing, and it's nearly noon," she said. "I must make coffee or something to give her strength. Wait till she has eaten."

She started for the kitchen, but brought up, white-faced, at the recurring summons of the bell. Their eyes met in panic. Were they too late? The ring was repeated while they questioned. Jean took a faltering step toward the door, listening for an out-burst from the bedroom; but Amy seemed not to hear. Craig stepped before her into the hall.

"Let me answer it," he said.

Then, before either could act, a key explored the lock, and Paul Bartlett's anxious face peered through the opening. He started at sight of them, but came forward with an ejaculation of relief.

"I remembered I had a key," he explained. "It was so still I thought something had gone wrong. Where's Amy?"

Jean signed toward the bedroom, and the three tip-toed into the parlor and shut the door. An awkward silence rested upon them for an instant. Jean's thoughts raced back to her last meeting with the dentist in this room, and she knew that Paul could be scarcely less the prey of his memories. Atwood himself, divining something of what such a reunion meant, was stricken with a share of their embarrassment.

Paul pulled himself together first.

"I came to help Amy, if I could," he said to Jean; "and also to see you. I've read the papers, and I thought"—he hesitated lamely—"I thought somebody ought to take your place. It's not pleasant to be dragged into a murder case—not pleasant for a lady, I mean," he corrected himself hastily. "I don't mind. Mrs. St. Aubyn won't mind, either. I've 'phoned her—she always liked Amy, you know—and she's coming soon. You needn't wait. You mustn't be expected to—to—oh, for God's sake, sir," he broke off, wheeling desperately upon Atwood, "take your wife away!"

Jean's eyes blurred with sudden tears, which fell unrestrained when Craig's chivalry met the dentist's halfway.

"Now I know you for the true man Jean has praised," he said, gripping Paul's hand. "But I can't take her away. She has a responsibility—we both have a responsibility it's impossible to shirk. Tell him, Jean!"

The dentist squared his shoulders in the old way, when she ceased.

"I'll see that Amy reaches headquarters," he said doggedly. "Neither of you need go. There isn't the slightest necessity. I'm her old friend, the lessee of this flat: who would be more likely to act for her? You convince her that she must toe the mark—I can't undertake that part; and then, the sooner you leave, the better."

Atwood turned irresolutely toward the window and threw up the shade as if his physical being craved light. Jean met the straightforward eyes.

"Why should you shoulder it, Paul?"

Bartlett shot a look at Atwood, who nervously drummed the pane, his gaze fixed outward; and then, with a sweeping gesture, invoked the silent argument of the room.

"I guess you know," he added simply.

Her face softened with ineffable tenderness.

"I'll tell Amy you are here," she said.

The men heard her pass down the hall and knock; wait, knock again, calling Amy's name; wait once more; and then return.

"Shall we let her sleep while she can?" she whispered. "It's a hideous thing that she must meet."

Atwood's look questioned the dentist, whose reply was to brush by them both and assault Amy's door.

"Amy!" he shouted. "Amy!"

They held their breath. Back in the parlor the gilt clock ticked like a midsummer mad insect; the cries of newsboys rose muffled from the street; even a drip of water sounded from some leaky kitchen tap; but from the bedroom came nothing.

Jean tried the knob.

"Locked!"

The dentist laid his shoulder to the woodwork, put forth his strength, and the door burst in with an impetus that carried him headlong; but before either could follow he had recovered himself and turned to block the way.

"Keep back, Jean," he commanded sharply. "Keep back!"

Their suspense was brief. Almost immediately he came out, closed the door gently after him, and held up a red-labeled vial.

"Carbolic acid!" he said hoarsely.

Jean uttered a sharp cry.

"A doctor!" she exclaimed.

Paul shook his head.

"I am doctor enough to know death. Atwood, get your wife away."

"But now—" Jean resisted.

"Go, go!" he commanded, driving them before him. "Mrs. St. Aubyn will do what a woman can. I will attend to the police. You left for rest, believing her asleep. I suspected suicide, and broke down the door. That's our story. Go while you can."

They went out as in a dream, striking away at random when they issued on the street, seeking only to shun the still idling curious, grateful beyond words for release, avid for the pure, vital air. Presently, in some quarter, they knew not where, a cab-driver hailed them, and they passively entered his hansom and as passively sat dependent on his superior will.

"Where to?" asked the man, impatiently.

Atwood shook himself awake. "The Copley Studios," he answered. "Do you know the building? It's near—"

The closing trap clipped his directions, and they drove away. They gave no heed to their course till, passing a park entrance, they came full upon a knot of urchins and nursemaids clustered between lake and drive.

"That's where the Chapman murder took place," volunteered the driver.

Jean shut her eyes.

"This way of all ways!"

"It is behind us now," Craig comforted. "It's all behind us now."

Neither spoke again till they reached the studio, and a porter announced the arrival of several trunks.

"They're yours, Jean," Atwood said. "I ordered them sent here when Julie telephoned for instructions. I realize that there is no going back. She admits that she did you a wrong—she will tell you so herself; but that doesn't alter matters. We must live our own lives. To-night we'll go away for a time. In the mountains or by the sea, whichever you will, we'll plan for the future. It's time the air-castles were made real."

He ordered a luncheon from a neighboring restaurant, forced her to eat, and then to rest. She said that sleep was impossible, and that she must repack against their journey; but her eyelids grew heavy even while she protested, and she was just drowsily aware that he threw over her some studio drapery which emitted a spicy oriental scent.

It was a dreamless sleep until just before she woke, when she shivered again under the obsession of Amy's door-bell. The studio furnishings delivered her from the delusion, but a bell rang on. Where was Craig? Then her eye fell upon a scrawl, transfixed to her pillow by a hatpin, which told her that he had gone to arrange for their departure; and she roused herself to answer the door. Here, for an instant, the dream seemed still to haunt, for the caller who greeted her was the reporter of the morning who had taken her denial.

"I'm right sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Atwood," he apologized. "I'm looking for your husband."

"Mr. Atwood is out."

"Could I see him later, perhaps? It's about five-thirty now. Would six o'clock suit?"

"Why do you annoy him?" she asked wearily. "I told you that he has nothing to do with this awful affair."

"The public thinks he has, and in a way, through your knowing Mrs. Chapman, it's true. Anyhow, I'm authorized to make him a proposition with dollars in it. Our Sunday editor is willing to let him name his own figure for a column interview and a sketch of the Wilkes girl, in any medium he likes, which he can knock off from our own photographs. We got some rattling good snap-shots just as she was taken into custody."

Jean stared blankly into his enthusiastic face.

"Taken into custody?" she said. "The Wilkes girl! You mean—on suspicion—of murder!"

"Haven't you seen the afternoon editions?" cried the man, incredulously. "You don't say you haven't heard about the new figure in the case, the Fourteenth Street music-hall favorite, Stella Wilkes! It was Chapman's divorced wife who put the police on the scent. She'd spotted them together, and the janitor of the Wilkes girl's flat-house identified Chapman as a man who'd been running there after her. Of course by itself, that's no evidence of guilt; but they've unearthed more than that. One of the clever men of our staff got hold of a letter which the girl wrote Chapman. The police are holding it back, but it's a threat of some kind, and strong enough to warrant them gathering her in for the grand jury's consideration. But let me send up a hall-boy with the latest. I'll try again at six for Mr. Atwood."

Stella! Stella accused of the murder! She pressed her hands to her dizzy head and groped back to the studio. Could fate devise a more ironic jest! Stella, wrecker of Amy's happiness, herself dragged down! Then, her brain clearing, her personal responsibility overwhelmed her. She alone had received Amy's confession. She alone could vouch for Stella's innocence. She must dip her hands again into this defiling pitch, endure more publicity, risk exposure, humiliate Craig! And for Stella—byword of Shawnee Springs, fiend who had made the refuge twice a hell, terror of her struggle to live the dark past down—of all human creatures, Stella Wilkes!

But it must be done. She made herself ready for the street with benumbed fingers, till the thought of Craig again arrested her. Should she wait for him?

He entered as she hesitated.

"Rested, Jean?" he called cheerily, delaying a moment in the hall. "Here are your papers. The boy said you wanted them." Then, from the threshold, "You're ill!"

She caught one of the newspapers from him and struck it open. Its head-lines shouted confirmation of the reporter's words.

"Look!"

"'Footlight favorite ... damaging letter ... journalistic enterprise,'" he repeated.

"You see what it means?"

"Wait, wait!" He read on feverishly to the end.

Jean gave a last mechanical touch to her veil.

"I am going down to police headquarters to tell what I know, Craig."

"No," he cried. "You must not mix in this again. You shall not. There is some better way. We must think it out. There is Bartlett—he knows!"

"Through me!"

"I think he'd be willing—no; that's folly. We can't ask the man to perjure himself. We must hit on something else. You must not be the one. Think what it might mean!"

"I've thought."

"They would dig up the past—all your acquaintance with Amy. The Wilkes creature's tongue could never be stopped. She doesn't know now that Mrs. Atwood means Jean Fanshaw. She must not know. Take no rash step. We must wait, temporize."

"Temporize with an innocent person accused of crime!"

"They don't accuse her yet—formally. She is held—detained—whatever the lawyer's jargon is. She isn't convicted. She never will be. They can't convict her on one letter.—I doubt if they'll indict her. Why, she may prove an alibi at once! Wait, Jean, wait! She's merely under suspicion of—"

"Murder!" She stripped away his sophistries with a word. "Isn't that enough? What of her feelings while we wait? Is it nothing to be suspected of killing a man?"

"What is her reputation now? Unspeakable!"

"More reason that we make it no worse. No, no, Craig; I must do this thing at any cost."

He threw out his hands in impassioned appeal.

"Any cost! Any cost!" he cried. "Do you realize what you're saying? Will you let her rag of a reputation weigh against your own, against the position you've fought for, against my good name? If you won't spare yourself, spare me!"

"Craig!" she implored, "be just!"

"I am only asking you to wait. A night may change everything. It can't make her name blacker; it may save you."

"Suppose it changes nothing; suppose no alibi is proved; suppose they do indict! How would my delay look then? Can't you see that my way is the only way? Don't think I'm not counting the cost." Her voice wavered and she shut her eyes against his unnerving face which seemed to have shed its boyishness forever, against this room which everywhere bespoke the future she jeopardized. "I do! I do! But we must go—go at once."

His face set sternly.

"I refuse."

"Craig!"

"I refuse. This morning, when we had no way to turn, I was ready to stand by you. But now—now I wash my hands of it all. If you go—"

Her face turned ashen.

"If I go?" she repeated.

"You go alone."

"And afterward?"

He dashed a distracted hand across his forehead and turned away without answer.

"Yet I must go," she said.

Before her blind fingers found the outer door, he was again beside her.

"You're right," he owned. "Forgive me, Jean. We'll see it through."

Their ride in the twilight seemed an excursion in eternity. Home-going New York met them in obstructive millions. Apparently they alone sought the lower city. From zone to zone they descended—luxury, shabby gentility, squalor succeeding in turn—till their destination loomed a dread tangible reality. It was fittingly seated here, Jean felt, where life's dregs drifted uppermost, sin was a commonplace, arrest a diversion. Would not such as these glory in the deed she found so hard? Would not the brain beneath that "picture" hat, the sable plumes of which—jaunty, insolent, triumphant—floated the center of a sidewalk throng, envy her the publicity from which she shrank? Then, as the ribald crowd passed and the garish blaze of a concert-saloon lit the woman's face, she threw herself back in the shadow with a sharp cry.

"Look, Craig! Look!"

Atwood craned from the cab, which a dray had blocked, but saw only agitated backs as the saloon swallowed up the pavement idol.

A policeman grinned sociably from the curb.

"Stella Wilkes," he explained. "Chesty, ain't she? She was pretty wilted, though, when they ran her in. I saw her come."

Craig's hand convulsively gripped Jean's.

"They've let her go?" he questioned. "She's free?"

"Sure—an' callin' on her friends. Hadn't you heard? Mrs. Chapman left a note ownin' up. If they'd found it sooner, this party would have had a pleasanter afternoon. Still, I guess she's plenty satisfied. They say a vaudeville house has offered her five hundred a week. She'd better cinch the deal to-night. It will all be forgotten to-morrow."

Atwood strained the white-faced figure to his breast.

"You heard him, Jean? He's right. It will be forgotten to-morrow."

From that dear shelter she, too, foresaw a kindlier future.

"To-morrow," she echoed.

From that dear shelter she, too, foresaw a kindlier future.

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