The Coming of Bill

with a pair of shoulders on him like what this kid's got? Say, squire,

what's the matter with calling the fight off and starting fair? Miss

Ruth would be tickled to death if you would. Can the rough stuff,

colonel. I know you think you've been given a raw deal, Kirk chipping

in like that and copping off Miss Ruth, but for the love of Mike, what

does it matter? You seen for yourself what a dandy kid this is. Well,

then, check your grouch with your hat. Do the square thing. Have out

the auto and come right round to the studio and make it up. What's

wrong with that, colonel? Honest, they'd be tickled clean through."

At this point Keggs entered, followed by a footman carrying wooden

bricks.

"Keggs," said Mr. Bannister, "telephone for the automobile at once!"

"That's the talk, colonel," cried Steve joyfully. "I know you were a

sport."

"......to take me down to Wall Street."

Keggs bowed.

"Oh Keggs," said Mr. Bannister, as he turned to leave.

"Sir?"

"Another thing. See that Dingle does not enter the house again."

And Mr. Bannister resumed his writing, while Steve, gathering up the

wheelbarrow, the box of bricks, and the dying pig, took William by the

hand and retreated.

* * * * *

That terminated Ruth's attempts to conciliate her father.

There remained Bailey. From Bailey she was prepared to stand no

nonsense. Meeting him on the street, she fairly kidnapped him, driving

him into a taxicab and pushing him into the studio, where he was

confronted by his nephew.

Bailey came poorly through the ordeal. William Bannister, a stern

critic, weighed him up in one long stare, found him wanting, and

announced his decision with all the strength of powerful lungs. In the

end he had to be removed, hiccupping, and Bailey, after lingering a few

uneasy moments making conversation to Kirk, departed, with such a look

about the back of him as he sprang into his cab that Ruth felt that the

visit was one which would not be repeated.

She went back into the studio with a rather heavy heart. She was fond

of Bailey.

The sight of Kirk restored her. After all, what had happened was only

what she had expected. She had chosen her path, and she did not regret

it.

Chapter X An Interlude of Peace

Two events of importance in the small world which centred round William

B. Winfield occurred at about this time. The first was the entrance of

Mamie, the second the exit of Mrs. Porter.

Mamie was the last of a series of nurses who came and went in somewhat

rapid succession during the early years of the White Hope's life. She

was introduced by Steve, who, it seemed, had known her since she was a

child. She was the nineteen-year-old daughter of a compositor on one of

the morning papers, a little, mouselike thing, with tiny hands and

feet, a soft voice, and eyes that took up far more than their fair

share of her face.

She had had no professional experience as a nursery-maid; but, as Steve

pointed out, the fact that, in the absence of her mother, who had died

some years previously, she had had sole charge of three small brothers

at the age when small brothers are least easily handled, and had

steered them through to the office-boy age without mishap, put her

extremely high in the class of gifted amateurs. Mamie was accordingly

given a trial, and survived it triumphantly. William Bannister, that

discerning youth, took to her at once. Kirk liked the neat way she

moved about the studio, his heart being still sore at the performance

of one of her predecessors, who had upset and put a substantial foot

through his masterpiece, that same "Ariadne in Naxos" which Lora Delane

Porter had criticised on the occasion of her first visit to the studio.

Ruth, for her part, was delighted with Mamie.

As for Steve, though as an outside member of the firm he cannot be

considered to count, he had long ago made up his mind about her. Some

time before, when he had found it impossible for him to be in her

presence, still less to converse with her, without experiencing a warm,

clammy, shooting sensation and a feeling of general weakness similar to

that which follows a well-directed blow at the solar plexus, he had

come to the conclusion that he must be in love. The furious jealousy

which assailed him on seeing her embraced by and embracing a stout

person old enough to be her father convinced him of this.

The discovery that the stout man actually was her father's brother

relieved his mind to a certain extent, but the episode left him shaken.

He made up his mind to propose at once and get it over. When Mamie

joined the garrison of No. 90 a year later the dashing feat was still

unperformed. There was that about Mamie which unmanned Steve. She was

so small and dainty that the ruggedness which had once been his pride

seemed to him, when he thought of her, an insuperable defect. The

conviction that he was a roughneck deepened in him and tied his tongue.

The defection of Mrs. Porter was a gradual affair. From a very early

period in the new regime she had been dissatisfied. Accustomed to rule,

she found herself in an unexpectedly minor position. She had definite

views on the hygienic upbringing of children, and these she imparted to

Ruth, who listened pleasantly, smiled, and ignored them.

Mrs. Porter was not used to such treatment. She found Ruth considerably

less malleable than she had been before marriage, and she resented the

change.

Kirk, coming in one afternoon, found Ruth laughing.

"It's only Aunt Lora," she said. "She will come in and lecture me on

how to raise babies. She's crazy about microbes. It's the new idea.

Sterilization, and all that. She thinks that everything a child touches

ought to be sterilized first to kill the germs. Bill's running awful

risks being allowed to play about the studio like this."

Kirk looked at his son and heir, who was submitting at that moment to

be bathed. He was standing up. It was a peculiarity of his that he

refused to sit down in a bath, being apparently under the impression,

when asked to do so, that there was a conspiracy afoot to drown him.

"I don't see how the kid could be much fitter."

"It's not so much what he is now. She is worrying about what might

happen to him. She can talk about bacilli till your flesh creeps.

Honestly, if Bill ever did get really ill, I believe Aunt Lora could

talk me round to her views about them in a minute. It's only the fact

that he is so splendidly well that makes it seem so absurd."

Kirk laughed.

"It's all very well to laugh. You haven't heard her. I've caught myself

wavering a dozen times. Do you know, she says a child ought not to be

kissed?"

"It has struck me," said Kirk meditatively, "that your Aunt Lora, if I

may make the suggestion, is the least bit of what Steve would call a

shy-dome. Is there anything else she had mentioned?'

"Hundreds of things. Bill ought to be kept in a properly sterilized

nursery, with sterilized toys and sterilized everything, and the

temperature ought to be just so high and no higher, and just so low and

no lower. Get her to talk about it to you. She makes you wonder why

everybody is not dead."

"This is a new development, surely? Has she ever broken out in this

place before?"

"Oh, yes. In the old days she often used to talk about it. She has

written books about it."

"I thought her books were all about the selfishness of the modern young

man in not marrying."

"Not at all. Some of them are about how to look after the baby. It's no

good the modern young man marrying if he's going to murder his baby

directly afterward, is it?"

"Something in that. There's just one objection to this sterilized

nursery business, though, which she doesn't seem to have detected. How

am I going to provide these things on an income of five thousand and at

the same time live in that luxury which the artist soul demands? Bill,

my lad, you'll have to sacrifice yourself for your father's good. When

I'm a millionaire we'll see about it. Meanwhile..."

"Meanwhile," said Ruth, "come and be dried before you catch your death

of cold." She gathered William Bannister into her lap.

"I pity any germ that tries to play catch-as-catch-can with that

infant," remarked Kirk. "He'd simply flatten it out in a round. Did you

ever see such a chest on a kid of that age?"

It was after the installation of Whiskers at the studio that the

diminution of Mrs. Porter's visits became really marked. There was

something almost approaching a battle over Whiskers, who was an Irish

terrier puppy which Hank Jardine had presented to William Bannister as

a belated birthday present.

Mrs. Porter utterly excommunicated Whiskers. Nothing, she maintained,

was so notoriously supercharged with bacilli as a long-haired dog. If

this was true, William Bannister certainly gave them every chance to

get to work upon himself. It was his constant pleasure to clutch

Whiskers to him in a vice-like clinch, to bury his face in his shaggy

back, and generally to court destruction. Yet the more he clutched, the

healthier did he appear to grow, and Mrs. Porter's demand for the dog's

banishment was overruled.

Mrs. Porter retired in dudgeon. She liked to rule, and at No. 90 she

felt that she had become merely among those present. She was in the

position of a mother country whose colony has revolted. For years she

had been accustomed to look on Ruth as a disciple, a weaker spirit whom

she could mould to her will, and now Ruth was refusing to be moulded.

So Mrs. Porter's visits ceased. Ruth still saw her at the apartment

when she cared to go there, but she kept away from the studio. She

considered that in the matter of William Bannister her claim had been

jumped, that she had been deposed; and she withdrew.

"I shall bear up," said Kirk, when this fact was brought home to him.

"I mistrust your Aunt Lora as I should mistrust some great natural

force which may become active at any moment and give you yours. An

earthquake, for instance. I have no quarrel with your Aunt Lora in her

quiescent state, but I fear the developments of that giant mind. We are

better off without her."

"All the same," said Ruth loyally, "she's rather a dear. And we ought

to remember that, if it hadn't been for her, you and I would never have

met."

"I do remember it. And I'm grateful. But I can't help feeling that a

woman capable of taking other people's lives and juggling with them as

if they were india-rubber balls as she did with ours, is likely at any

moment to break out in a new place. My gratitude to her is the sort of

gratitude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late

for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.

Your Aunt Lora is a human cyclone. No, on the whole, she's more like an

earthquake. She has a habit of splitting up and altering the face of

the world whenever she feels like it, and I'm too well satisfied with

my world at present to relish the idea of having it changed."

Little by little the garrison of the studio had been whittled down.

Except for Steve, the community had no regular members outside the

family itself. Hank was generally out of town. Bailey paid one more

visit, then seemed to consider that he could now absent himself

altogether. And the members of Kirk's bachelor circle stayed away to a

man.

Their isolation was rendered more complete by the fact that Ruth, when

she had ornamented New York society, had made few real friends. Most of

the girls she had known bored her. They were gushing creatures with a

passion for sharing and imparting secrets, and Ruth's cool reserve had

alienated her from them.

When she married she dropped out. The romance of her wedding gave

people something to talk about for a few days, and then she was

forgotten.

And so it came about that she had her desire and was able practically

to monopolize Kirk. He and she and William Bannister lived in a kind of

hermit's cell for three and enjoyed this highly unnatural state of

things enormously. Life had never seemed so full either to Kirk or

herself. There was always something to do, something to think about,

something to look forward to, if it was only a visit to a theatre or

the inspection of William Bannister's bath.

Chapter XI Stung to Action

It was in the third year of the White Hope's life that the placid

evenness of Kirk's existence began to be troubled. The orderly

procession of the days was broken by happenings of unusual importance,

one at least of them extraordinarily unpleasant. This was the failure

of a certain stock in which nearly half of Kirk's patrimony was

invested, that capital which had always seemed to him as solid a part

of life as the asphalt on which he walked, as unchangeable a part of

nature as the air he breathed. He had always had it, and he could

hardly bring himself to realize that he was not always to have it.

It gave him an extraordinary feeling of panic and discomfort when at

length he faced the fact squarely that his private means, on the

possession of which he had based the whole lazy scheme of his life,

were as much at the mercy of fate as the stake which a gambler flings

on the green cloth. He did not know enough of business to understand

the complicated processes by which a stock hitherto supposed to be as

impregnable as municipal bonds had been hammered into a ragged remnant

in the course of a single day; but the result of them was unpleasantly

clear and easily grasped.

His income was cut in half, and instead of being a comfortably off

young man, idly watching the pageant of life from a seat in the grand

stand, he must now plunge into the crowd and endeavour to earn a living

as others did.

For his losses did not begin and end with the ruin of this particular

stock. At intervals during the past two years he had been nibbling at

his capital, and now, forced to examine his affairs frankly and

minutely, he was astonished at the inroads he had made upon it.

There had been the upkeep of the summer shack he had bought in

Connecticut. There had been expenses in connection with William

Bannister. There had been little treats for Ruth. There had been cigars

and clothes and dinners and taxi-cabs and all the other trifles which

cost nothing but mount up and make a man wander beyond the bounds of

his legitimate income.

It was borne in upon Kirk, as he reflected upon these things, that the

only evidence he had shown of the possession of the artistic

temperament had been the joyous carelessness of his extravagance. In

that only had he been the artist. It shocked him to think how little

honest work he had done during the past two years. He had lived in a

golden haze into which work had not entered.

He was to be shocked still more very soon.

Stung to action by his thoughts, he embarked upon a sweeping attack on

the stronghold of those who exchange cash for artists' dreams. He

ransacked the studio and set out on his mission in a cab bulging with

large, small, and medium-sized canvases. Like a wave receding from a

breakwater he returned late in the day, a branded failure.

The dealers had eyed his canvases, large, small, and medium-sized, and,

in direct contravention of their professed object in life, had refused

to deal. Only one of them, a man with grimy hands but a moderately

golden heart, after passing a sepia thumb over some of the more

ambitious works, had offered him fifteen dollars for a little sketch

which he had made in an energetic moment of William Bannister crawling

on the floor. This, the dealer asserted, was the sort of "darned mushy

stuff" the public fell for, and he held it to be worth the fifteen, but

not a cent more. Kirk, humble by now, accepted three battered-looking

bills and departed.

He had a long talk with Ruth that night, and rose from it in the frame

of mind which in some men is induced by prayer. Ruth was quite

marvellously sensible and sympathetic.

"I wanted you," she said in answer to his self-reproaches, "and here we

are, together. It's simply nonsense to talk about ruining my life and

dragging me down. What does it matter about this money? We have

got plenty left."

"We've got about as much left as you used to spend on hats in the old

days."

"Well, we can easily make it do. I've thought for some time that we

were growing too extravagant. And talking of hats, I had no right to

have that last one you bought me. It was wickedly expensive. We can

economize there, at any rate. We can get along splendidly on what you

have now. Besides, directly you settle down and start to paint, we

shall be quite rich again."

Kirk laughed grimly.

"I wish you were a dealer," he said. "Fifteen dollars is what I have

managed to extract from them so far. One of the Great Unwashed on Sixth

Avenue gave me that for that sketch I did of Bill on the floor."

"Which took you about three minutes to do," Ruth pointed out

triumphantly. "You see! You're bound to make a fortune if you stick to

it."

Kirk put his arm round her and gave her a silent hug of gratitude. He

had dreaded this talk, and lo! it was putting new life into him.

They sat for a few moments in silence.

"I don't deserve it," said Kirk at last. "Instead of comforting me like

this, and making me think I'm rather a fine sort of a fellow, you ought

to be lashing me with scorpions. I don't suppose any man has ever made

such a criminal idiot of himself in this city before."

"You couldn't tell that this stock was going to fail."

"No; but I could have done some work these last three years and made

it not matter whether it failed or not. You can't comfort me out of

that knowledge. I knew all along that I was being a waster and a loafer,

but I was so happy that I didn't mind. I was so interested in seeing

what you and the kid would do next that I didn't seem to have time to

work. And the result is that I've gone right back.

"There was a time when I really could paint a bit. Not much, it's true,

but enough to get along with. Well, I'm going to start it again in

earnest now, and if I don't make good, well, there's always Hank's

offer."

Ruth turned a little pale. They had discussed Hank's offer before, but

then life had been bright and cloudless and Hank's offer a thing to

smile at. Now it had assumed an uncomfortably practical aspect.

"You will make good," said Ruth.

"I'll do my best," said Kirk. But even as he spoke his mind was

pondering on the proposition which Hank had made.

Hank, always flitting from New York into the unknown and back again,

had called at the studio one evening, after a long absence, looking

sick and tired. He was one of those lean, wiry men whom it is unusual

to see in this condition, and Kirk was sympathetic and inquisitive.

Hank needed no pressing. He was full of his story.

"I've been in Colombia," he said. "I got back on a fruit-steamer this

morning. Do you know anything of Colombia?"

Kirk reflected.

"Only that there's generally a revolution there," he said.

"There wasn't anything of that kind this trip, except in my interior."

Hank pulled thoughtfully at his pipe. The odour of his remarkable brand

of tobacco filled the studio. "I've had a Hades of a time," he said

simply.

Kirk looked at him curiously. Hank was in a singularly chastened mood

to-night.

"What took you there?"

"Gold."

"Gold? Mining?"

Hank nodded.

"I didn't know there were gold-mines in that part of the world," said

Kirk.

"There are. The gold that filled the holds of Spanish galleons in the

sixteenth century came from Colombia. The place is simply stiff with

old Spanish relics."

"But surely the mines must have been worked out ages ago."

"Only on the surface."

Kirk laughed.

"How do you mean, only on the surface? Explain. I don't know a thing

about gold, except that getting it out of picture-dealers is like

getting blood out of a turnip."

"It's simple enough. The earth hoards its gold in two ways. There's

auriferous rock and auriferous dirt. If the stuff is in the rock, you

crush it. If it's in the dirt, you wash it."

"It sounds simple."

"It is. The difficult part is finding it."

"And you have done that?"

"I have. Or I'm practically certain I have. At any rate, I know that I

have discovered the ditches made by the Spaniards three hundred years

ago. If there was gold there in those days there is apt to be gold

there now. Only it isn't on the surface any longer. They cleaned up as

far as the surface is concerned, so I have to sink shafts and dig

tunnels."

"I see. It isn't so simple as it used to be."

"It is, practically, if you have any knowledge of mining."

"Well, what's your trouble?" asked Kirk. "Why did you come back? Why

aren't you out there grabbing it with both hands and getting yourself

into shape to be a walking gold-mine to your friends? I don't like to

see this idle spirit in you, Hank."

Hank smoked long and thoughtfully.

"Kirk," he said suddenly.

"Well?"

Hank shook his head.

"No, it's no good."

"What is no good? What do you mean?"

"I came back," said Hank, suddenly lucid, "with a wild notion of

getting you to come in with me on this thing."

"What! Go to Colombia with you?"

Hank nodded.

"But, of course, it's not possible. It's no job for a married man."

"Why not? If this gold of yours is just lying about in heaps it seems

to me that a married man is exactly the man who ought to be around

grabbing it. Or do you believe that old yarn about two being able to

live as cheaply as one? Take it from me, it's not so. If there is gold

waiting to be gathered up in handfuls, me for it. When do we start? Can

I bring Ruth and the kid?"

"I wish we could start. If I could have had you with me these last few

months I'd never have quit. But I guess it's out of the question.

You've no idea what sort of an inferno it is, and I won't let you come

into it with your eyes shut. But if ever you are in a real tight corner

let me know. It might be worth your while then to take a few risks."

"Oh! there are risks?"

"Risks! My claims are located along the Atrato River in the Choco

district. Does that convey anything to you?"

"Not a thing."

"The workings are three hundred miles inland. Just three hundred miles

of pure Hades. You can get all the fevers you ever heard of, and a few

more, I got most of them last trip."

"I thought you were looking pretty bad."

"I ought to be. I've swallowed so much quinine since I saw you last

that my ears are buzzing still. And then there are the insects. They

all bite. Some bite worse than others, but not much. Darn it! even the

butterflies bite out there. Every animal in the country has some other

animal constantly chasing it until a white man comes along, when they

call a truce and both chase him. And the vegetation is so thick and

grows so quickly that you have to cut down the jungle about the

workings every few days or so to avoid being swamped by it. Otherwise,"

finished Hank, refilling his pipe and lighting it, "the place is a

pretty good kind of summer resort."

"And you're going back to it? Back to the quinine and the beasts and

the butterflies?"

"Sure. The gold runs up to twenty dollars the cubic yard and is worth

eighteen dollars an ounce."

"When are you going?"

"I'm in no hurry. This year, next year, some time, never. No, not

never. Call it some time."

"And you want me to come, too?"

"I would give half of whatever there is in the mine to have you come.

But things being as they are, well, I guess we can call it off. Is

there any chance in the world, Kirk, of your ever ceasing to be a

bloated capitalist? Could any of your stocks go back on you?"

"I doubt it. They're pretty gilt-edged, I fancy, though I've never

studied the question of stocks. My little gold-mine isn't in the same

class with yours, but it's as solid as a rock, and no fevers and

insects attached to it, either."

* * * * *

And now the gold-mine had proved of less than rock-like solidity. The

most gilt-edged of all the stocks had failed. The capitalist had become

in one brief day the struggling artist.

Hank's proposal seemed a good deal less fantastic now to Kirk as he

prepared for his second onslaught, the grand attack, on the stronghold

of those who bought art with gold.

Chapter XII A Climax

One afternoon, about two weeks later, Kirk, returning to the studio

from an unprofitable raid into the region of the dealers, found on the

table a card bearing the name of Mrs. Robert Wilbur. This had been

crossed out, and beneath it, in a straggly hand, the name Miss Wilbur

had been written.

The phenomenon of a caller at the cell of the two hermits was so

strange that he awaited Ruth's arrival with more than his customary

impatience. She would be able to identify the visitor. George Pennicut,

questioned on the point, had no information of any value to impart. A

very pretty young lady she was, said George, with what you might call a

lively manner. She had seemed disappointed at finding nobody at home.

No, she had left no message.

Ruth, arriving a few moments later, was met by Kirk with the card in

his hand.

"Can you throw any light on this?" he said. "Who is Miss Wilbur, who

has what you might call a lively manner and appears disappointed when

she does not find us at home?"

Ruth looked at the card.

"Sybil Wilbur? I wonder what she wants."

"Who is she? Let's get that settled first."

"Oh, she's a girl I used to know. I haven't seen her for two years. I

thought she had forgotten my existence."

"Call her up on the phone. If we don't solve this mystery we shan't

sleep to-night. It's like Robinson Crusoe and the footprint."

Ruth went to the telephone. After a short conversation she turned to

Kirk with sparkling eyes and the air of one with news to impart.

"Kirk! She wants you to paint her portrait!"

"What!"

"She's engaged to Bailey! Just got engaged! And the first thing she

does is to insist on his letting her come to you for her portrait,"

Ruth bubbled with laughter. "It's to be a birthday present for Bailey,

and Bailey has got to pay for it. That's so exactly like Sybil."

"I hope the portrait will be. She's taking chances."

"I think it's simply sweet of her. She's a real friend."

"At fairly long intervals, apparently. Did you say you had not seen her

for two years?"

"She is an erratic little thing with an awfully good heart. I feel

touched at her remembering us. Oh, Kirk, you must do a simply wonderful

portrait, something that everybody will talk about, and then our

fortune will be made! You will become the only painter that people will

go to for their portraits."

Kirk did not answer. His experiences of late had developed in him an

unwonted mistrust of his powers. To this was added the knowledge that,

except for an impressionist study of Ruth for private exhibition only,

he had never attempted a portrait. To be called upon suddenly like this

to show his powers gave him much the same feeling which he had

experienced when called upon as a child to recite poetry before an

audience. It was a species of stage fright.

But it was certainly a chance. Portrait-painting was an uncommonly

lucrative line of business. His imagination, stirred by Ruth's, saw

visions of wealthy applicants turned away from the studio door owing to

pressure of work on the part of the famous man for whose services they

were bidding vast sums.

"By Jove!" he said thoughtfully.

Another aspect of the matter occurred to him.

"I wonder what Bailey thinks about it!"

"Oh, he's probably so much in love with her that he doesn't mind what

she does. Besides, Bailey likes you."

"Does he?"

"Oh, well, if he doesn't, he will. This will bring you together."

"I suppose he knows about it?"

"Oh, yes. Sybil said he did. It's all settled. She will be here

to-morrow for the first sitting."

Kirk spoke the fear that was in his mind.

"Ruth, old girl, I'm horribly nervous about this. I am taken with a

sort of second sight. I see myself making a ghastly failure of this job

and Bailey knocking me down and refusing to come across with the

cheque."

"Sybil is bringing the cheque with her to-morrow," said Ruth simply.

"Is she?" said Kirk. "Now I wonder if that makes it worse or better.

I'm trying to think!"

Sybil Wilbur fluttered in next day at noon, a tiny, restless creature

who darted about the studio like a humming-bird. She effervesced with

the joy of life. She uttered little squeaks of delight at everything

she saw. She hugged Ruth, beamed at Kirk, went wild over William

Bannister, thought the studio too cute for words, insisted on being

shown all over it, and talked incessantly.

It was about two o'clock before she actually began to sit, and even

then she was no statue. A thought would come into her small head and

she would whirl round to impart it to Ruth, destroying in a second the

pose which it had taken Kirk ten painful minutes to fix.

Kirk was too amused to be irritated. She was such a friendly little

soul and so obviously devoted to Ruth that he felt she was entitled to

be a nuisance as a sitter. He wondered more and more what weird

principle of selection had been at work to bring Bailey and this

butterfly together. He had never given any deep thought to the study of

his brother-in-law's character; but, from his small knowledge of him,

he would have imagined some one a trifle more substantial and serious

as the ideal wife for him. Life, he conceived, was to Bailey a stately

march. Sybil Wilbur evidently looked on it as a mad gallop.

Ruth felt the same. She was fond of Sybil, but she could not see her as

the fore-ordained Mrs. Bailey.

"I suppose she swept him off his feet," she said. "It just shows that

you never really get to know a person even if you're their sister.

Bailey must have all sorts of hidden sides to his character which I

never noticed, unless she has. But I don't think there is much

of that about Sybil. She's just a child. But she's very amusing, isn't

she? She enjoys life so furiously."

"I think Bailey will find her rather a handful. Does she ever sit

still, by the way? If she is going to act right along as she did to-day

this portrait will look like that cubist picture of the 'Dance at the

Spring'."

As the sittings went on Miss Wilbur consented gradually to simmer down

and the portrait progressed with a fair amount of speed. But Kirk was

conscious every day of a growing sensation of panic. He was trying his

very hardest, but it was bad work, and he knew it.

His hand had never had very much cunning, but what it had had it had

lost in the years of his idleness. Every day showed him more clearly

that the portrait of Miss Wilbur, on which so much depended, was an

amateurish daub. He worked doggedly on, but his heart was cold with

that chill that grips the artist when he looks on his work and sees it

to be bad.

At last it was finished. Ruth thought it splendid. Sybil Wilbur

pronounced it cute, as she did most things. Kirk could hardly bear to

look at it. In its finished state it was worse than he could have

believed possible.

In the old days he had been a fair painter with one or two bad faults.

Now the faults seemed to have grown like weeds, choking whatever of

merit he might once have possessed. This was a horrible production, and

he was profoundly thankful when it was packed up and removed from the

studio. But behind his thankfulness lurked the feeling that all was not

yet over, that there was worse to come.

It came.

It was heralded by a tearful telephone call from Miss Wilbur, who rang

up Ruth with the agitated information that "Bailey didn't seem to like

it." And on the heels of the message came Bailey in person, pink from

forehead to collar, and almost as wrathful as he had been on the great

occasion of his first visit to the studio. His annoyance robbed his

speech of its normal stateliness. He struck a colloquial note unusual

with him.

"I guess you know what I've come about," he said.

He had found Kirk alone in the studio, as ill luck would have it. In

the absence of Ruth he ventured to speak more freely than he would have

done in her presence.

"It's an infernal outrage," he went on. "I've been stung, and you know

it."

Kirk said nothing. His silence infuriated Bailey.

"It's the portrait I'm speaking about, the portrait, if you have the

nerve to call it that, of Miss Wilbur. I was against her sitting to you

from the first, but she insisted. Now she's sorry."

"It's as bad as all that, is it?" said Kirk dully. He felt curiously

indisposed to fight. A listlessness had gripped him. He was even a

little sorry for Bailey. He saw his point of view and sympathized with

it.

"Yes," said Bailey fiercely. "It is, and you know it."

Kirk nodded. Bailey was quite right. He did know it.

"It's a joke," went on Bailey shrilly. "I can't hang it up. People

would laugh at it. And to think that I paid you all that money for it.

I could have got a real artist for half the price."

"That is easily remedied," said Kirk. "I will send you a cheque

to-morrow."

Bailey was not to be appeased. The venom of more than three years cried

out for utterance. He had always held definite views upon Kirk, and

Heaven had sent him the opportunity of expressing them.

"Yes, I dare say," he said contemptuously. "That would settle the whole

thing, wouldn't it? What do you think you are; a millionaire? Talking

as if that amount of money made no difference to you? Where does my

sister come in? How about Ruth? You sneak her away from her home and

then......-"

Kirk's lethargy left him. He flushed.

"I think that will be about all, Bannister?" he said. He spoke quietly,

but his voice trembled.

But Bailey's long-dammed hatred, having at last found an outlet, was

not to be checked in a moment.

"Will it? Will it? The hell it will. Let me tell you that I came here

to talk straight to you, and I'm going to do it. It's about time you

had your darned dime-novel romance shown up to you the way it strikes

somebody else. You think you're a tremendous dashing twentieth-century

Young Lochinvar, don't you? You thought you had done a pretty

smooth bit of work when you sneaked Ruth away! You! You haven't enough

backbone in you even to make a bluff at working to support her. You're

just what my father said you were, a loafer who pretends to be an

artist. You've got away with it up to now, but you've shown yourself up

at last. You damned waster!"

Kirk walked to the door and flung it open.

"You're perfectly right, Bannister," he said quietly. "Everything you

have said is quite true. And now would you mind going?"

"I've not finished yet."

"Yes, you have."

Bailey hesitated. The first time frenzy had left him, and he was

beginning to be a little ashamed of himself for having expressed his

views in a manner which, though satisfying, was, he felt, less

dignified than he could have wished.

He looked at Kirk, who was standing stiffly by the door. Something in

his attitude decided Bailey to leave well alone. Such had been his

indignation that it was only now that for the first time it struck him

that his statement of opinion had not been made without considerable

bodily danger to himself. Jarred nerves had stood him in the stead of

courage; but now his nerves were soothed and he saw things clearly.

He choked down what he had intended to say and walked out. Kirk closed

the door softly behind him and began to pace the studio floor as he had

done on that night when Ruth had fought for her life in the room

upstairs.

His mind worked slowly at first. Then, as it cleared, he began to think

more and more rapidly, till the thoughts leaped and ran like tongues of

fire scorching him.

It was all true. That was what hurt. Every word that Bailey had flung

at him had been strictly just.

He had thought himself a fine, romantic fellow. He was a waster and a

loafer who pretended to be an artist. He had thrown away the little

talent he had once possessed. He had behaved shamefully to Ruth,

shirking his responsibilities and idling through life. He realized it

now, when it was too late.

Suddenly through the chaos of his reflections there shone out clearly

one coherent thought, the recollection of what Hank Jardine had offered

to him. "If ever you are in a real tight corner......"

* * * * *

His brain cleared. He sat down calmly to wait for Ruth. His mind was

made up. Hank's offer was the way out, the only way out, and he must

take it.

BOOK TWO

Chapter I Empty-handed

The steamship Santa Barbara, of the United Fruit Line, moved

slowly through the glittering water of the bay on her way to dock. Out

at quarantine earlier in the morning there had been a mist, through

which passing ships loomed up vague and shapeless; but now the sun had

dispersed it and a perfect May morning welcomed the Santa

Barbara home.

Kirk leaned on the rail, looking with dull eyes on the city he had left

a year before. Only a year! It seemed ten. As he stood there he felt an

old man.

A drummer, a cheery soul who had come aboard at Porto Rico, sauntered

up, beaming with well-being and good-fellowship.

"Looks pretty good, sir," said he.

Kirk did not answer. He had not heard.

"Some burg," ventured the drummer.

Again encountering silence, he turned away, hurt. This churlish

attitude on the part of one returning to God's country on one of God's

own mornings surprised and wounded him.

To him all was right with the world. He had breakfasted well; he was

smoking a good cigar; and he was strong in the knowledge that he had

done well by the firm this trip and that bouquets were due to be handed

to him in the office on lower Broadway. He was annoyed with Kirk for

having cast even a tiny cloud upon his contentment.

He communicated his feelings to the third officer, who happened to come

on deck at that moment.

"Say, who is that guy?" he asked complainingly. "The big son of

a gun leaning on the rail. Seems like he'd got a hangover this morning.

Is he deaf and dumb or just plain grouchy?"

The third officer eyed Kirk's back with sympathy.

"I shouldn't worry him, Freddie," he said. "I guess if you had been up

against it like him you'd be shy on the small talk. That's a fellow

called Winfield. They carried him on board at Colon. He was about all

in. Got fever in Colombia, inland at the mines, and nearly died. His

pal did die. Ever met Hank Jardine?"

"Long, thin man?"

The other nodded.

"One of the best. He made two trips with us."

"And he's dead?"

"Died of fever away back in the interior, where there's nothing much

else except mosquitoes. He and Winfield went in there after gold."

"Did they get any?" asked the drummer, interested.

The third officer spat disgustedly over the rail.

"You ask Winfield. Or, rather, don't, because I guess it's not his pet

subject. He told me all about it when he was getting better. There was

gold there, all right, in chunks. It only needed to be dug for. And

somebody else did the digging. Of all the skin games! It made me pretty

hot under the collar, and it wasn't me that was stung.

"Out there you can't buy land if you're a foreigner; you have to lease

it from the natives. Poor old Hank leased his bit, all right, and when

he'd got to his claim he found somebody else working on it. It seemed

there had been a flaw in his agreement and the owners had let it over

his head to these other guys, who had slipped them more than what Hank

had done."

"What did he do?"

"He couldn't do anything. They were the right side of the law, or what

they call law out there. There was nothing to do except beat it back

again three hundred miles to the coast. That's where they got the fever

which finished Hank. So you can understand," concluded the third

officer, "that Mr. Winfield isn't in what you can call a sunny mood. If

I were you, I'd go and talk to someone else, if conversation's what you

need."

Kirk stood motionless at the rail, thinking. It was not what was past

that occupied his thoughts, as the third officer had supposed; it was

the future.

The forlorn hope had failed; he was limping back to Ruth wounded and

broken. He had sent her a wireless message. She would be at the dock to

meet him. How could he face her? Fate had been against him, it was

true, but he was in no mood to make excuses for himself. He had failed.

That was the beginning and the end of it. He had set out to bring back

wealth and comfort to her, and he was returning empty-handed.

That was what the immediate future held, the meeting with Ruth. And

after? His imagination was not equal to the task of considering that.

He had failed as an artist. There was no future for him there. He must

find some other work. But he was fit for no other work. He had no

training. What could he do in a city where keenness of competition is a

tradition? It would be as if an unarmed man should attack a fortress.

The thought of the years he had wasted was very bitter. Looking back,

he could see how fate had tricked him into throwing away his one

talent. He had had promise. With hard work he could have become an

artist, a professional, a man whose work was worth money in the open

market. He had never had it in him to be a great artist, but he had had

the facility which goes to make a good worker of the second class. He

had it still. Given the time for hard study, it was still in him to

take his proper place among painters.

But time for study was out of his reach now. He must set to work at

once, without a day's delay, on something which would bring him

immediate money. The reflection brought his mind back abruptly to the

practical consideration of the future.

Before him, as he stood there, the ragged battlements of New York

seemed to frown down on him with a cold cruelty that paralysed his

mind. He had seen them a hundred times before. They should have been

familiar and friendly. But this morning they were strange and sinister.

The skyline which daunts the emigrant as he comes up the bay to his new

home struck fear into Kirk's heart.

He turned away and began to walk up and down the deck.

He felt tired and lonely. For the first time he realized just what it

meant to him that he should never see Hank again. It had been hard,

almost impossible, till now to force his mind to face that fact. He had

winced away from it. But now it would not be avoided. It fell upon him

like a shadow.

Hank had filled a place of his own in Kirk's life. Theirs had been one

of those smooth friendships which absence cannot harm. Often they had

not seen each other for months at a time. Indeed, now that he thought

of it, Hank was generally away; and he could not remember that they had

ever exchanged letters. Yet even so there had been a bond between them

which had never broken. And now Hank had dropped out.

Kirk began to think about death. As with most men of his temperament,

it was a subject on which his mind had seldom dwelt, never for any

length of time. His parents had died when he was too young to

understand; and circumstances had shielded him from the shadow of the

great mystery. Birth he understood; it had forced itself into the

scheme of his life; but death till now had been a stranger to him.

The realization of it affected him oddly. In a sense, he found it

stimulating; not stimulating as birth had been, but more subtly. He

could recall vividly the thrill that had come to him with the birth of

his son. For days he had walked as one in a trance. The world had

seemed unreal, like an opium-smoker's dream. There had been magic

everywhere.

But death had exactly the opposite effect. It made everything curiously

real, himself most of all. He had the sensation, as he thought of Hank,

of knowing himself for the first time. Somehow he felt strengthened,

braced for the fight, as a soldier might who sees his comrade fall at

his side.

There was something almost vindictive in the feeling that came to him.

It was too vague to be analysed, but it filled him with a desire to

fight, gave him a sense of determination of which he had never before

been conscious. It toughened him, and made the old, easy-going Kirk

Winfield seem a stranger at whom he could look with detachment and a

certain contempt.

As he walked back along the deck the battlements of the city met his

gaze once more. But now they seemed less formidable.

In the leisurely fashion of the home-coming ship the Santa

Barbara slid into her dock. The gangplank was thrust out. Kirk

walked ashore.

For a moment he thought that Ruth had not come to meet him. Then his

heart leaped madly. He had seen her.

* * * * *

There are worse spots in the world than the sheds of the New York

customs, but few more desolate; yet to Kirk just then the shadowy

vastness seemed a sunlit garden. A flame of happiness blazed up in his

mind, blotting out in an instant the forebodings which had lurked there

like evil creatures in a dark vault. The future, with its explanations

and plans, could take care of itself. Ruth was a thing of the present.

He put his arms round her and held her. The friendly drummer, who

chanced to be near, observed them with interest and a good deal of

pleasure. The third officer's story had temporarily destroyed his

feeling that all was right with the world, and his sympathetic heart

welcomed this evidence that life held compensations even for men who

had been swindled out of valuable gold-mines.

"I guess he's not feeling so worse, after all," he mused, and went on

his way with an easy mind to be fawned upon by his grateful firm.

Ruth was holding Kirk at arm's length, her eyes full of tears at the

sight.

"You poor boy, how thin you are!"

"I had fever. It's an awful place for fever out there."

"Kirk!"

"Oh, I'm all right now. The voyage set me up. They made a great fuss

over me on board."

Ruth's hand was clinging to his arm. He squeezed it against his side.

It was wonderful to him, this sense of being together again after these

centuries of absence. It drove from his mind the thought of all the

explanations which sooner or later he had got to make. Whatever might

come after, he would keep this moment in his memory golden and

untarnished.

"Don't you worry about me," he said. "Now that I've found you again I'm

feeling better than I ever did in my life. You wait till you see me

sparring with Steve to-morrow. By the way, how is Steve?"

"Splendid."

"And Bill?"

Ruth drew herself up haughtily.

"You dare to ask about your son after Steve? How clumsy that sounds! I

mean you dare to put Steve before your son. I believe you've only just

realized that you have a son."

"I've only just realized there's anybody or anything in the world

except my wife."

"Well, after that I suppose I've got to forgive you. Since you have

asked after Bill at last, I may tell you that he's very well indeed."

Kirk's eyes glowed.

"He ought to be a great kid by now."

"He is."

"And Mamie? Have you still got her?"

"I wouldn't lose her for a million."

"And Whiskers?"

"I'm afraid Whiskers is gone."

"Not dead?"

"No. I gave him away."

"For Heaven's sake! Why?"

"Well, dear, the fact is, I've come around to Aunt Lora's way of

thinking."

"Eh?"

"About germs."

Kirk laughed, the first real laugh he had had for a year.

"That insane fad of hers!"

Ruth was serious.

"I have," she said. "We're taking a great deal more care of Bill than

in the old days. I hate to think of the way I used to let him run

around wild then. He might have died."

"What nonsense! He was simply bursting with health all the time."

"I had a horrible shock after you left," Ruth went on. "The poor little

fellow was awfully ill with some kind of a fever. The doctor almost

gave him up."

"Good heavens!"

"Aunt Lora helped me to nurse him, and she made me see how I had been

exposing him to all sorts of risks, and, well, now we guard against

them."

There was a silence.

"I grew to rely on her a great deal, Kirk, when you were away. You know

I always used to before we were married. She's so wonderfully strong.

And then when your letters stopped coming......"

"There aren't any postal arrangements out there in the interior. It was

the worst part of it, not being able to write to you or hear from you.

Heavens, what an exile I've been this last year! Anything may have

happened!"

"Perhaps something has," said Ruth mysteriously.

"What do you mean?"

"Wait and see. Oh, I know one thing that has happened. I've been

looking at you all this while trying to think what it was. You've grown

a beard, and it looks perfectly horrid."

"Sheer laziness. It shall come off this very day. I knew you would hate

it."

"I certainly do. It makes you look so old."

Kirk's face clouded.

"I feel old."

For the first time since he had left the ship the memory of Hank had

come back to him. The sight of Ruth had driven it away, but now it

swept back on him. The golden moment was over. Life with all its

troubles and its explanations and its burdening sense of failure must

be faced.

"What's the matter?" asked Ruth, startled by the sudden change.

"I was thinking of poor old Hank."

"Where is Mr. Jardine? Didn't he come back with you?"

"He's dead, dear," said Kirk gently. "He died of fever while we were

working our way back to the coast."

"Oh!"

It was the idea of death that shocked Ruth, not the particular

manifestation of it. Hank had not touched her life. She had begun by

disliking him and ended by feeling for him the tolerant sort of

affection which she might have bestowed upon a dog or a cat. Hank as a

man was nothing to her, and she could not quite keep her indifference

out of her voice.

It was only later, when he looked back on this conversation, that Kirk

realized this. At the moment he was unconscious of it, significant as

it was of the fact that there were points at which his mind and Ruth's

did not touch.

When Ruth spoke again it was to change the subject.

"Well, Kirk," she said, "have you come back with your trunk crammed

with nuggets? You haven't said a word about the mine yet, and I'm dying

to know."

He groaned inwardly. The moment he had been dreading had arrived more

swiftly than he had expected. It was time for him to face facts.

"No," he said shortly.

Ruth looked at him curiously. She met his eyes and saw the pain in

them, and intuition told her in an instant what Kirk, stumbling through

his story, could not have told her in an hour. She squeezed his arm

affectionately.

"Don't tell me," she said. "I understand. And it doesn't matter. It

doesn't matter a bit."

"Doesn't matter? But......"

Ruth's eyes were dancing.

"Kirk, dear, I've something to tell you. Wait till we get outside."

"What do you mean?"

"You'll soon see?"

They went out into the street. Against the kerb a large red automobile

was standing. The chauffeur touched his cap as he saw them. Kirk stared

at him dumbly.

"In you get, dear," said Ruth.

She met his astonished gaze with a smile of triumph. This was her

moment, the moment for which she had been waiting. The chauffeur

started the machine.

"I don't understand. Whose car is this?"

"Mine. Yours. Ours. Oh, Kirk, darling, I was so afraid that you would

come back bulging with a fortune that would make my little one look

like nothing. But you haven't, you haven't, and it's just splendid."

She caught his hand and pressed it. "It's simply sweet of you to look

so astonished. I was hoping you would. This car belongs to us, and

there's another just as big besides, and a house, and, oh, everything

you can think of. Kirk, dear, we've nothing to worry us any longer.

We're rich!"

Chapter II An Unknown Path

Kirk blinked. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The automobile

was still there, and he was still in it. Ruth was still gazing at him

with the triumphant look in her eyes. The chauffeur, silent emblem of a

substantial bank-balance, still sat stiffly at the steering-wheel.

"Rich?" Kirk repeated.

"Rich," Ruth assured him.

"I don't understand."

Ruth's smile faded.

"Poor father......"

"Your father?"

"He died just after you sailed. Just before Bill got ill." She gave a

little sigh. "Kirk, how odd life is!"

"But......-"

"It was terrible. It was some kind of a stroke. He had been working too

hard and taking no exercise. You know when he sent Steve away that time

he didn't engage anybody else in his place. He went back to his old way

of living, which the doctor had warned him against. He worked and

worked, until one day, Bailey says, he fainted at the office. They

brought him home, and he just went out like a burned-out candle. I, I

went to him, but for a long time he wouldn't see me.

"Oh, Kirk, the hours I spent in the library hoping that he would let me

come to him! But he never did till right at the end. Then I went up,

and he was dying. He couldn't speak. I don't know now how he felt

toward me at the last. I kissed him. He was all shrunk to nothing. I

had a horrible feeling that I had never been a real daughter to him.

But, but, you know, he made it difficult, awfully difficult. And then

he died; Bailey was on one side of the bed and I was on the other, and

the nurse and the doctor were whispering outside the door. I could hear

them through the transom."

She slipped her hand into Kirk's and sat silent while the car slid into

the traffic of Fifth Avenue. For the second time the shadow of the

Great Mystery had fallen on the brightness of the perfect morning.

The car had stopped at Thirty-Fourth Street to allow the hurrying

crowds to cross the avenue. Kirk looked at them with a feeling of

sadness. It was not caused by John Bannister's death. He was too honest

to be able to plunge himself into false emotion at will. His feeling

was more a vague uneasiness, almost a presentiment. Things changed so

quickly in this world. Old landmarks shifted as the crowd of strangers

was shifting before him now, hurrying into his life and hurrying out of

it.

He, too, had changed. Ruth, though he had detected no signs of it,

must be different from the Ruth he had left a year ago. The old life

was dead. What had the new life in store for him? Wealth for one

thing, other standards of living, new experiences.

An odd sensation of regret that this stream of gold had descended upon

him deepened his momentary depression. They had been so happy, he and

Ruth and the kid, in the old days of the hermit's cell. Something that

was almost a superstitious fear of this unexpected legacy came upon

him.

It was unlucky money, grudgingly given at the eleventh hour. He seemed

to feel John Bannister watching him with a sneer, and he was afraid of

him. His nerves were still a little unstrung from the horror of his

wanderings, and the fever had left him weak. It seemed to him that

there was a curse on the old man's wealth, that somehow it was destined

to bring him unhappiness.

The policeman waved his hand. The car jerked forward. The sudden

movement brought him to himself. He smiled, a little ashamed of having

been so fanciful; the sky was blue; the sun shone; a cool breeze put

the joy of life into him; and at his side Ruth sat, smiling now. From

her, too, the cloud had been lifted.

"It seems like a fairy-story," said Kirk, breaking the silence that had

fallen between them.

"I think it must have been the thought of Bill that made him do it,"

said Ruth. "He left half his money to Bailey and half to me during my

lifetime. Bailey's married now, by the way." She paused. "I'm afraid

father never forgave you, dear," she added. "He made Bailey the trustee

for the money, and it goes to Bill in trust after my death."

She looked at him rather nervously it seemed to Kirk. The terms of the

will had been the cause of some trouble to her. Especially had she

speculated on his reception of the news that Bailey was to play so

important a part in the administration of the money. Kirk had never

told her what had passed between him and Bailey that afternoon in the

studio, but her quick intelligence had enabled her to guess at the

truth; and she was aware that the minds of the two men, their

temperaments, were naturally antagonistic.

Kirk's reception of the news relieved her.

"Of course," he said. "He couldn't do anything else. He knew nothing of

me except that I was a kind of man with whom he was quite out of

sympathy. He mistrusted all artists, I expect, in a bunch. And, anyway,

an artist is pretty sure to be a bad man of business. He would know

that. And, and, well, what I mean is, it strikes me as a very sensible

arrangement. Why are we stopping here?"

The car had drawn up before a large house on the upper avenue, one of

those houses which advertise affluence with as little reticence as a

fat diamond solitaire.

"We live here," said Ruth, laughing.

Kirk drew a long breath.

"Do we? By George!" he exclaimed. "I see it's going to take me quite a

while to get used to this state of things."

A thought struck him.

"How about the studio? Have you got rid of it?"

"Of course not. The idea! After the perfect times we had there! We're

going to keep it on as an annex. Every now and then, when we are tired

of being rich, we'll creep off there and boil eggs over the gas-stove

and pretend we are just ordinary persons again."

"And oftener than every now and then this particular plutocrat is going

to creep off there and try to teach himself to paint pictures."

Ruth nodded.

"Yes, I think you ought to have a hobby. It's good for you."

Kirk said nothing. But it was not as a hobby that he was regarding his

painting. He had come to a knowledge of realities in the wilderness and

to an appreciation of the fact that he had a soul which could not be

kept alive except by honest work.

He had the decent man's distaste for living on his wife's money. He

supposed it was inevitable that a certain portion of it must go to his

support, but he was resolved that there should be in the sight of the

gods who look down on human affairs at least a reasonable excuse for

his existence. If work could make him anything approaching a real

artist, he would become one.

Meanwhile he was quite willing that Ruth should look upon his life-work

as a pleasant pastime to save him from ennui. Even to his wife a man is

not always eager to exhibit his soul in its nakedness.

"By the way," said Ruth, "you won't find George Pennicut at the studio.

He has gone back to England."

"I'm sorry. I liked George."

"He liked you. He left all sorts of messages. He nearly wept when he

said good-bye. But he wouldn't stop. In a burst of confidence he told

me what the trouble was. Our blue sky had got on his nerves. He wanted

a London drizzle again. He said the thought of it made him homesick."

Kirk entered the house thoughtfully. Somehow this last piece of news

had put the coping-stone on the edifice of his, his what? Depression? It

was hardly that. No, it was rather a kind of vague regret for the life

which had so definitely ended, the feeling which the Romans called

desiderium and the Greeks pathos. The defection of George

Pennicut was a small thing in itself, but it meant the removal of

another landmark.

"We had some bully good times in that studio," he said.

The words were a requiem.

The first person whom he met in this great house, in the kingdom of

which he was to be king-consort, was a butler of incredible

stateliness. This was none other than Steve's friend Keggs. But round

the outlying portions of this official he had perceived, as the door

opened, a section of a woman in a brown dress.

The butler moving to one side, he found himself confronting Mrs. Lora

Delane Porter.

If other things in Kirk's world had changed, time had wrought in vain

upon the great authoress. She looked as masterful, as unyielding, and

as efficient as she had looked at the time of his departure. She took

his hand without emotion and inspected him keenly.

"You are thinner," she remarked.

"I said that, Aunt Lora," said Ruth. "Poor boy, he's a skeleton."

"You are not so robust."

"I have been ill."

Ruth interposed.

"He's had fever, Aunt Lora, and you are not to tease him."

"I should be the last person to tease any man. What sort of fever?"

"I think it was a blend of all sorts," replied Kirk. "A kind of Irish

stew of a fever."

"You are not infectious?"

"Certainly not."

Mrs. Porter checked Ruth as she was about to speak.

"We owe it to William to be careful," she explained. "After all the

trouble we have taken to exclude him from germs it is only reasonable

to make these inquiries."

"Come along, dear," said Ruth, "and I'll show you the house. Don't mind

Aunt Lora," she whispered; "she means well, and she really is splendid

with Bill."

Kirk followed her. He was feeling chilled again. His old mistrust of

Mrs. Porter revived. If their brief interview was to be taken as

evidence, she seemed to have regained entirely her old ascendancy over

Ruth. He felt vaguely uneasy, as a man might who walks in a powder

magazine.

"Aunt Lora lives here now," observed Ruth casually, as they went

upstairs.

Kirk started.

"Literally, do you mean? Is this her home?"

Ruth smiled at him over her shoulder.

"She won't interfere with you," she said. "Surely this great house is

large enough for the three of us. Besides, she's so devoted to Bill.

She looks after him all the time; of course, nowadays I don't get quite

so much time to be with him myself. One has an awful lot of calls on

one. I feel Bill is so safe with Aunt Lora on the premises."

She stopped at a door on the first floor.

"This is Bill's nursery. He's out just now. Mamie takes him for a drive

every morning when it's fine."

Something impelled Kirk to speak.

"Don't you ever take him for walks in the morning now?" he asked. "He

used to love it."

"Silly! Of course I do, when I can manage it. For drives, rather. Aunt

Lora is rather against his walking much in the city. He might so easily

catch something, you know."

She opened the door.

"There!" she said. "What do you think of that for a nursery?"

If Kirk had spoken his mind he would have said that of all the ghastly

nurseries the human brain could have conceived this was the ghastliest.

It was a large, square room, and to Kirk's startled eyes had much the

appearance of an operating theatre at a hospital.

There was no carpet on the tiled floor. The walls, likewise tiled, were

so bare that the eye ached contemplating them. In the corner by the

window stood the little white cot. Beside it on the wall hung a large

thermometer. Various knobs of brass decorated the opposite wall. At the

farther end of the room was a bath, complete with shower and all the

other apparatus of a modern tub.

It was probably the most horrible room in all New York.

"Well, what do you think of it?" demanded Ruth proudly.

Kirk gazed at her, speechless. This, he said to himself, was Ruth, his

wife, who had housed his son in the spare bedroom of the studio and

allowed a shaggy Irish terrier to sleep on his bed; who had permitted

him to play by the hour in the dust of the studio floor, who had even

assisted him to do so by descending into the dust herself in the role

of a bear or a snake.

What had happened to this world from which he had been absent but one

short year? Was everybody mad, or was he hopelessly behind the times?

"Well?" Ruth reminded him.

Kirk eyed the dreadful room.

"It looks clean," he said at last.

"It is clean," said the voice of Lora Delane Porter proudly behind him.

She had followed them up the stairs to do the honours of the nursery,

the centre of her world. "It is essentially clean. There is not an

object in that room which is not carefully sterilized night and morning

with a weak solution of boric acid!"

"Even Mamie?" inquired Kirk.

It had been his intention to be mildly jocular, but Mrs. Porter's reply

showed him that in jest he had spoken the truth.

"Certainly. Have you any idea, Kirk, of the number of germs there are

on the surface of the human body? It runs into billions. You", she

fixed him with her steely eye, "you are at the present moment one mass

of microbes."

"I sneaked through quarantine all right."

"To the adult there is not so much danger in these microbes, provided

he or she maintains a reasonable degree of personal cleanliness. That

is why adults may be permitted to mix with other adults without

preliminary sterilization. But in the case of a growing child it is

entirely different. No precaution is excessive. So......"

From below at this point there came the sound of the front-door bell.

Ruth went to the landing and looked over the banisters.

"That ought to be Bill and Mamie back from their drive," she said.

The sound of a child's voice came to Kirk as he stood listening; and as

he heard it all the old feeling of paternal pride and excitement, which

had left him during his wanderings, swept over him like a wave. He

reproached himself that, while the memory of Ruth had been with him

during every waking moment of the past year, there had been occasions

when that of William Bannister had become a little faded.

He ran down the stairs.

"Hello, Mamie!" he said. "How are you? You're looking well."

Mamie greeted him with the shy smile which was wont to cause such havoc

in Steve's heart.

"And who's this you've got with you? Mamie, you know you've no business

going about with young men like this. Who is he?"

He stood looking at William Bannister, and William Bannister stood

looking at him, Kirk smiling, William staring with the intense gravity

of childhood and trying to place this bearded stranger among his circle

of friends. He seemed to be thinking that the familiarity of the

other's manner indicated a certain amount of previous acquaintanceship.

"Watch that busy brain working," said Kirk. "He's trying to place me.

It's all right, Bill, old man; it's my fault. I had no right to spring

myself on you with eight feet of beard. It isn't giving you a square

deal. Never mind, it's coming off in a few minutes, never to return,

and then, perhaps, you'll remember that you've a father."

"Fa-a-a-ar!" shrieked William Bannister triumphantly, taking the cue

with admirable swiftness.

He leaped at Kirk, and Kirk swung him up in

the air. It was quite an effort, for William Bannister had grown

astonishingly in the past year.

"Pop," said he firmly, as if resolved to prevent any possibility of

mistake. "Daddy," he added, continuing to play upon the theme. He

summed up. "You're my pop."

Then, satisfied that this was final and that there could now be no

chance for Kirk to back out of the contract, he reached out a hand and

gave a tug at the beard which had led to all the confusion.

"What's this?"

"You may well ask," said Kirk. "I got struck that way because I left

you and mummy for a whole year. But now I'm back I'm going to be

allowed to take it off and give it away. Whom shall I give it to?

Steve? Do you think Steve would like it? Yes, you can go on pulling it;

it won't break. On the other hand, I should just like to mention that

it's hurting something fierce, my son. It's fastened on at the other

end, you know."

"Why?"

"Don't ask me. That's the way it's built."

William Bannister obligingly disentangled himself from the beard.

"Where you been?" he inquired.

"Miles and miles away. You know the Battery?"

William Bannister nodded.

"Well, a long way past that. First I took a ship and went ever so many

miles. Then I landed and went ever so many more miles, with all sorts

of beasts trying to bite pieces out of me."

This interested William Bannister.

"Tigers?" he inquired.

"I didn't actually see any tigers, but I expect they were sneaking

round. There were mosquitoes, though. You know what a mosquito is?"

William nodded.

"Bumps," he observed crisply.

"That's right. You see this lump here, just above my mouth? Well,

that's not a mosquito-bite; that's my nose; but think of something

about that size and you'll have some idea of what a mosquito-bite is

like out there. But why am I boring you with my troubles? Tell me all

about yourself. You've certainly been growing, whatever else you may

have been doing while I've been away; I can hardly lift you. Has Steve

taught you to box yet?"

At this moment he was aware that he had become the centre of a small

group. Looking round he found himself gazing into a face so stiff with

horror and disapproval that he was startled almost into dropping

William. What could have happened to induce Mrs. Porter to look like

that he could not imagine; but her expression checked his flow of light

conversation as if it had been turned off with a switch. He lowered

Bill to the ground.

"What on earth's the matter?" he asked. "What has happened?"

Without replying, Mrs. Porter made a gesture in the direction of the

nursery, which had the effect of sending Mamie and her charge off again

on the journey upstairs which Kirk's advent had interrupted. Bill

seemed sorry to go, but he trudged sturdily on without remark. Kirk

followed him with his eyes till he disappeared at the bend of the

stairway.

"What's the matter?" he repeated.

"Are you mad, Kirk?" demanded Mrs. Porter in a tense voice.

Kirk turned helplessly to Ruth.

"You had better let me explain, Aunt Lora," she said. "Of course Kirk

couldn't be expected to know, poor boy. You seem to forget that he has

only this minute come into the house."

Aunt Lora was not to be appeased.

"That is absolutely no excuse. He has just left a ship where he cannot

have failed to pick up bacilli of every description. He has himself

only recently recovered from a probably infectious fever. He is wearing

a beard, notoriously the most germ-ridden abomination in existence."

Kirk started. He was not proud of his beard, but he had not regarded it

as quite the pestilential thing which it seemed to be in the eyes of

Mrs. Porter.

"And he picks up the child!" she went on. "Hugs him! Kisses him! And

you say he could not have known better! Surely the most elementary

common sense!"

"Aunt Lora!" said Ruth.

She spoke quietly, but there was a note in her voice which acted on

Mrs. Porter like magic. Her flow of words ceased abruptly. It was a

small incident, but it had the effect of making Kirk, grateful as he

was for the interruption, somehow vaguely uneasy for a moment.

It seemed to indicate some subtle change in Ruth's character, some new

quality of hardness added to it. The Ruth he had left when he sailed

for Colombia would, he felt, have been incapable of quelling her

masterful aunt so very decisively and with such an economy of words. It

suggested previous warfare, in which the elder women had been subdued

to a point where a mere exclamation could pull her up when she forgot

herself.

Kirk felt uncomfortable. He did not like these sudden discoveries about

Ruth.

"I will explain to Kirk," she said. "You go up and see that everything

is right in the nursery."

And, amazing spectacle! off went Mrs. Porter without another word.

Ruth put her arm in Kirk's and led him off to the smoking-room.

"You may smoke a cigar while I tell you all about Bill," she said.

Kirk lit a cigar, bewildered. It is always unpleasant to be the person

to whom things have to be explained.

"Poor old boy," Ruth went on, "you certainly are thin. But about Bill.

I am afraid you are going to be a little upset about Bill, Kirk. Aunt

Lora has no tact, and she will make a speech on every possible

occasion; but she was right just now. It really was rather dangerous,

picking Bill up like that and kissing him."

Kirk stared.

"I don't understand. Did you expect me to wave my hand to him? Or would

it have been more correct to bow?"

"Don't be so satirical, Kirk; you wither me. No, seriously, you really

mustn't kiss Bill. I never do. Nobody does."

"What!"

"I dare say it sounds ridiculous to you, but you were not here when he

was so ill and nearly died. You remember what I was telling you at the

dock? About giving Whiskers away? Well, this is all part of it. After

what happened I feel, like Aunt Lora, that we simply can't take too

many precautions. You saw his nursery. Well, it would be simply a waste

of money giving him a nursery like that if he was allowed to be exposed

to infection when he was out of it."

"And I am supposed to be infectious?"

"Not more than anybody else. There's no need to be hurt about it. It's

just as much a sacrifice for me."

"So nobody makes a fuss over Bill now, is that it?"

"Well, no. Not in the way you mean."

"Pretty dreary outlook for the kid, isn't it?"

"It's all for his good."

"What a ghastly expression!"

Ruth left her chair and came and sat on the arm of Kirk's. She ruffled

his hair lightly with the tips of her fingers. Kirk, who had been

disposed to be militant, softened instantly. The action brought back

a flood of memories. It conjured up recollections of peaceful evenings

in the old studio, for this had been a favourite habit of Ruth's. It

made him feel that he loved her more than he had ever done in his life;

and, incidentally, that he was a brute to try and thwart her in anything

whatsoever.

"I know it's horrid for you, dear old boy," said Ruth coaxingly; "but

do be good and not make a fuss about it. Not kissing Bill doesn't mean

that you need be any the less fond of him. I know it will be strange at

first, I didn't get used to it for ever so long, but, honestly, it is

for his good, however ghastly the expression of the thing may sound."

"It's treating the kid like a wretched invalid," grumbled Kirk.

"You wait till you see him playing, and then you'll know if he's a

wretched invalid or not!"

"May I see him playing?"

"Don't be silly. Of course."

"I thought I had better ask. Being the perambulating plague-spot I am,

I was not taking any risks."

"How horribly self-centred you are! You will talk as if you were in

some special sort of quarantine. I keep on telling you it's the same

for all of us."

"I suppose when I'm with him I shall have to be sterilized?"

"I don't think it necessary myself, but Aunt Lora does, so it's always

done. It humours her, and it really isn't any trouble. Besides, it may

be necessary after all. One never knows, and it's best to be on the

safe side."

Kirk laid down his cigar firmly, the cold cigar which stress of emotion

had made him forget to keep alight.

"Ruth, old girl," he said earnestly, "this is pure lunacy."

Ruth's fingers wandered idly through his hair. She did not speak for

some moments.

"You will be good about it, won't you, Kirk dear?" she said at last.

It is curious what a large part hair and its treatment may play in the

undoing of strong men. The case of Samson may be recalled in this

connection. Kirk, with Ruth ruffling the wiry growth that hid his

scalp, was incapable of serious opposition. He tried to be morose and

resolute, but failed miserably.

"Oh, very well," he grunted.

"That's a good boy. And you promise you won't go hugging Bill again?"

"Very well."

"There's an angel for you. Now I'll fix you a cocktail as a reward."

"Well, mind you sterilize it carefully."

Ruth laughed. Having gained her point she could afford to. She made the

cocktail and brought it to him.

"And now I'll be off and dress, and then you can take me out to lunch

somewhere."

"Aren't you dressed?"

"My goodness, no. Not for going to restaurants. You forget that I'm one

of the idle rich now. I spend my whole day putting on different kinds

of clothes. I've a position to keep up now, Mr. Winfield."

Kirk lit a fresh cigar and sat thinking. The old feeling of desolation

which had attacked him as he came up the bay had returned. He felt like

a stranger in a strange world. Life was not the same. Ruth was not the

same. Nothing was the same.

The more he contemplated the new regulations affecting Bill the

chillier and more unfriendly did they seem to him. He could not bring

himself to realize Ruth as one of the great army of cranks preaching

and carrying out the gospel of Lora Delane Porter. It seemed so at

variance with her character as he had known it. He could not seriously

bring himself to believe that she genuinely approved of these absurd

restrictions. Yet, apparently she did.

He looked into the future. It had a grey and bleak aspect. He seemed to

himself like a man gazing down an unknown path full of unknown perils.

Chapter III The Misadventure of Steve

Kirk was not the only person whom the sudden change in the financial

position of the Winfield family had hit hard. The blighting effects of

sudden wealth had touched Steve while Kirk was still in Colombia.

In a sense, it had wrecked Steve's world. Nobody had told him to stop

or even diminish the number of his visits, but the fact remained that,

by the time Kirk returned to New York, he had practically ceased to go

to the house on Fifth Avenue.

For all his roughness, Steve possessed a delicacy which sometimes

almost amounted to diffidence; and he did not need to be told that

there was a substantial difference, as far as he was concerned, between

the new headquarters of the family and the old. At the studio he had

been accustomed to walk in when it pleased him, sure of a welcome; but

he had an idea that he did not fit as neatly into the atmosphere of

Fifth Avenue as he had done into that of Sixty-First Street; and nobody

disabused him of it.

It was perhaps the presence of Mrs. Porter that really made the

difference. In spite of the compliments she had sometimes paid to his

common sense, Mrs. Porter did not put Steve at his ease. He was almost

afraid of her. Consequently, when he came to Fifth Avenue, he remained

below stairs, talking pugilism with Keggs.

It was from Keggs that he first learned of the changes that had taken

place in the surroundings of William Bannister.

"I've 'ad the privilege of serving in some of the best houses in

England," said the butler one evening, as they sat smoking in the

pantry, "and I've never seen such goings on. I don't hold with the

pampering of children."

"What do you mean, pampering?" asked Steve.

"Well, Lord love a duck!" replied the butler, who in his moments of

relaxation was addicted to homely expletives of the lower London type.

"If you don't call it pampering, what do you call pampering? He ain't

allowed to touch nothing that ain't been, it's slipped my memory what

they call it, but it's got something to do with microbes. They sprinkle

stuff on his toys and on his clothes and on his nurse; what's more, and

on any one who comes to see him. And his nursery ain't what I

call a nursery at all. It's nothing more or less than a private

'ospital, with its white tiles and its antiseptics and what not, and

the temperature just so and no lower nor higher. I don't call it 'aving

a proper faith in Providence, pampering and fussing over a child to

that extent."

"You're stringing me!"

"Not a bit of it, Mr. Dingle. I've seen the nursery with my own eyes,

and I 'ave my information direct from the young person who looks after

the child."

"But, say, in the old days that kid was about the dandiest little sport

that ever came down the pike. You seen him that day I brought him round

to say hello to the old man. He didn't have no nursery at all then, let

alone one with white tiles. I've seen him come up off the studio floor

looking like a coon with the dust. And Miss Ruth tickled to see him

like that, too. For the love of Mike, what's come to her?"

"It's all along of this Porter," said Keggs morosely. "She's done it

all. And if," he went on with sudden heat, "she don't break her 'abit

of addressing me in a tone what the 'umblest dorg would resent, I'm

liable to forget my place and give her a piece of my mind. Coming round

and interfering!"

"Got your goat, has she?" commented Steve, interested. "She's

what you'd call a tough proposition, that dame. I used to have my eye

on her all the time in the old days, waiting for her to start

something. But say, I'd like to see this nursery you've been talking

about. Take me up and let me lamp it."

Keggs shook his head.

"I daren't, Mr. Dingle. It 'ud be as much as my place is worth."

"But, darn it! I'm the kid's godfather."

"That wouldn't make no difference to that Porter. She'd pick on me just

the same. But, if you care to risk it, Mr. Dingle, I'll show you where

it is. You'll find the young person up there. She'll tell you more

about the child's 'abits and daily life than I can."

"Good enough," said Steve.

He had not seen Mamie for some time, and absence had made the heart

grow fonder. It embittered him that his meetings with her were all too

rare nowadays. She seemed to have abandoned the practice of walking

altogether, for, whenever he saw her now she was driving in the

automobile with Bill. Keggs' information about the new system threw

some light upon this and made him all the more anxious to meet her now.

It was a curious delusion of Steve's that he was always going to pluck

up courage and propose to Mamie the very next time he saw her. This had

gone on now for over two years, but he still clung to it. Repeated

failures to reveal his burning emotions never caused him to lose the

conviction that he would do it for certain next time.

It was in his customary braced-up, do-or-die frame of mind that he

entered the nursery now.

His visit to Keggs had been rather a late one and had lasted some time

before the subject of the White Hope had been broached, with the result

that, when Steve arrived among the white tiles and antiseptics, he

found his godson in bed and asleep. In a chair by the cot Mamie sat

sewing.

Her eyes widened with surprise when she saw who the visitor was, and

she put a finger to her lip and pointed to the sleeper. And, as we have

to record another of the long list of Steve's failures to propose we

may say here, in excuse, that this reception took a great deal of the

edge off the dashing resolution which had been his up to that moment.

It made him feel self-conscious from the start.

"Whatever brings you up here, Steve?" whispered Mamie.

It was not a very tactful remark, perhaps, considering that Steve was

the child's godfather, and, as such, might reasonably expect to be

allowed a free pass to his nursery; but Mamie, like Keggs, had fallen

so under the domination of Lora Delane Porter that she had grown to

consider it almost a natural law that no one came to see Bill unless

approved of and personally conducted by her.

Steve did not answer. He was gaping at the fittings of the place in

which he found himself. It was precisely as Keggs had described it,

white tiles and all.

He was roused from his reflections by the approach of Mamie, or,

rather, not so much by her approach as by the fact that at this moment

she suddenly squirted something at him. It was cold and wet and hit him

in the face before, as he put it to Keggs later, he could get his guard

up.

"For the love of......"

"Sh!" said Mamie warningly.

"What's the idea? What are you handing me?"

"I've got to. It's to sterilize you. I do it to every one."

"Gee! You've got a swell job! Well, go to it, then. Shoot! I'm ready."

"It's boric acid," explained Mamie.

"I shouldn't wonder. Is this all part of the Porter circus?"

"Yes."

"Where is she?" inquired Steve in sudden alarm. "Is she likely to butt

in?"

"No. She's out."

"Good," said Steve, and sat down, relieved, to resume his inspection of

the room.

When he had finished he drew a deep breath.

"Well!" he said softly. "Say, Mamie, what do you think about it?"

"I'm not paid to think about it, Steve."

"That means you agree with me that it's the punkest state of things you

ever struck. Well, you're quite right. It is. It's a shame to think of

that innocent kid having this sort of deal handed to him. Why, just

think of him at the studio!"

But Mamie, whatever her private views, was loyal to her employers. She

refused to be drawn into a discussion on the subject.

"Have you been downstairs with Mr. Keggs, Steve?"

"Yes. It was him that told me about all this. Say, Mame, we ain't seen

much of each other lately."

"No."

"Mighty little."

"Yes."

Having got as far as this, Steve should, of course, have gone

resolutely ahead. After all, it is not a very long step from telling a

girl in a hushed whisper with a shake in it that you have not seen much

of her lately to hinting that you would like to see a great deal more

of her in the future.

Steve was on the right lines, and he knew it; but that fatal lack of

nerve which had wrecked him on all the other occasions when he had got

as far as this undid him now. He relapsed into silence, and Mamie went

on sewing.

In a way, if you shut your eyes to the white tiles and the thermometer

and the brass knobs and the shower-bath, it was a peaceful scene; and

Steve, as he sat there and watched Mamie sew, was stirred by it. Remove

the white tiles, the thermometer the brass knobs, and the shower-bath,

and this was precisely the sort of scene his imagination conjured up

when the business of life slackened sufficiently to allow him to dream

dreams.

There he was, sitting in one chair; there was Mamie, sitting in

another; and there in the corner was the little white cot, well,

perhaps that was being a shade too prophetic; on the other hand, it

always came into these dreams of his. There, in short, was everything

arranged just as he pictured it; and all that was needed to make the

picture real was for him to propose and Mamie to accept him.

It was the disturbing thought that the second condition did not

necessarily follow on to the first that had kept Steve from taking the

plunge for the last two years. Unlike the hero of the poem, he feared

his fate too much to put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.

Presently the silence began to oppress Steve. Mamie had her needlework,

and that apparently served her in lieu of conversation; but Steve had

nothing to occupy him, and he began to grow restless. He always

despised himself thoroughly for his feebleness on these occasions; and

he despised himself now. He determined to make a big effort.

"Mamie!" he said.

As he was nervous and had been silent so long that his vocal cords had

gone off duty under the impression that their day's work was over, the

word came out of him like a husky gunshot. Mamie started, and the White

Hope, who had been sleeping peacefully, stirred and muttered.

"S-sh!" hissed Mamie.

Steve collapsed with the feeling that it was not his lucky night, while

Mamie bent anxiously over the cot. The sleeper, however, did not wake.

He gurgled, gave a sigh, then resumed his interrupted repose. Mamie

returned to her seat.

"Yes?" she said, as if nothing had occurred, and as if there had been

no interval between Steve's remark and her reply.

Steve could not equal her calmness. He had been strung up when he

spoke, and the interruption had undone him. He reflected ruefully that

he might have said something to the point if he had been allowed to go

straight on; now he had forgotten what he had meant to say.

"Oh, nothing," he replied.

Silence fell once more on the nursery.

Steve was bracing himself up for another attack when suddenly there

came a sound of voices from the stairs. One voice was a mere murmur,

but the other was sharp and unmistakable, the incisive note of Lora

Delane Porter. It brought Steve and Mamie to their feet simultaneously.

"What's it matter?" said Steve stoutly, answering the panic in Mamie's

eyes. "It's not her house, and I got a perfect right to be here."

"You don't know her. I shall get into trouble."

Mamie was pale with apprehension. She knew her Lora Delane Porter, and

she knew what would happen if Steve were to be discovered there. It

was, as Keggs put it, as much as her place was worth.

For a brief instant Mamie faced a future in which she was driven from

Bill's presence into outer darkness, dismissed, and told never to

return. That was what would happen. Sitting and talking with Steve in

the sacred nursery at this time of night was a crime, and she had known

it all the time. But she had been glad to see Steve again after all

this while, if Steve had known how glad, he would certainly have found

courage and said what he had so often failed to say, and, knowing that

Mrs. Porter was out, she had thought the risk of his presence worth

taking. Now, with discovery imminent, panic came upon her.

The voices were quite close now. There was no doubt of the destination

of the speakers. They were heading slowly but directly for the nursery.

Steve, not being fully abreast of the new rules and regulations of the

sacred apartment, could not read Mamie's mind completely. He did not

know that, under Mrs. Porter's code, the admission of a visitor during

the hours of sleep was a felony in the first degree, punishable by

instant dismissal. But Mamie's face and her brief reference to trouble

were enough to tell him that the position was critical, and with the

instinct of the trapped he looked round him for cover.

But the White Hope's nursery was not constructed with a view to

providing cover for bulky gentlemen who should not have been there. It

was as bare as a billiard-table as far as practicable hiding-places

were concerned.

And then his eye caught the water-proof sheet of the shower-bath.

Behind that there was just room for concealment.

With a brief nod of encouragement to Mamie, he leaped at it. The door

opened as he disappeared.

Mrs. Porter's rules concerning visitors, though stringent as regarded

Mamie, were capable of being relaxed when she herself was the person to

relax them. She had a visitor with her now, a long, severe-looking lady

with a sharp nose surmounted by spectacles, who, taking in the white

tiles, the thermometer, the cot, and the brass knobs in a single

comprehensive glance, observed: "Admirable!"

Mrs, Porter was obviously pleased with this approval. Her companion was

a woman doctor of great repute among the advanced apostles of hygiene;

and praise from her was praise indeed. She advanced into the room with

an air of suppressed pride.

"These tiles are thoroughly cleaned twice each day with an antiseptic

solution."

"Just so," said the spectacled lady.

"You notice the thermometer."

"Exactly."

"Those knobs you see on the wall have various uses."

"Quite."

They examined the knobs with an air of profound seriousness, Mrs.

Porter erect and complacent, the other leaning forward and peering

through her spectacles. Mamie took advantage of their backs and turned

to cast a hurried glance at the water-proof curtain. It was certainly

an admirable screen; no sign of Steve was visible; but nevertheless she

did not cease to quake.

"This," said Mrs. Porter, "controls the heat. This, this, and this are

for the ventilation."

"Just so, just so, just so," said the doctor. "And this, of course, is

for the shower-bath? I understand!"

And, extending a firm finger, she gave the knob a forceful push.

Mrs. Porter nodded.

"That is the cold shower," she said. "This is the hot. It is a very

ingenious arrangement, one of Malcolmson's patents. There is a

regulator at the side of the bath which enables the nurse to get just

the correct temperature. I will turn on both, and then......"

It was as Mrs. Porter's hand was extended toward the knob that the

paralysis which terror had put upon Mamie relaxed its grip. She had

stood by without a movement while the cold water splashed down upon the

hidden Steve. Her heart had ached for him, but she had not stirred. But

now, with the prospect of allowing him to be boiled alive before her,

she acted.

It is generally only on the stage that a little child comes to the

rescue of adults at critical moments; but William Bannister was

accorded the opportunity of doing so off it. It happened that at the

moment of Mrs. Porter's entry Mamie had been standing near his cot, and

she had not moved since. The consequence was that she was within easy

reach of him; and, despair giving her what in the circumstances

amounted to a flash of inspiration, she leaned quickly forward, even as

Mrs. Porter's finger touched the knob, and gave the round head on the

pillow a rapid push.

William Bannister sat up with a grunt, rubbed his eyes, and, seeing

strangers, began to cry.

It was so obvious to Mrs. Porter and her companion, both from the

evidence of their guilty consciences and the look of respectful

reproach on Mamie's face, that the sound of their voices had disturbed

the child, that they were routed from the start.

"Oh, dear me! He is awake," said the lady doctor.

"I am afraid we did not lower our voices," added Mrs. Porter. "And yet

William is usually such a sound sleeper. Perhaps we had better......"

"Just so," said the doctor.

"......go downstairs while the nurse gets him off to sleep again."

"Quite."

The door closed behind them.

* * * * *

"Oh, Steve!" said Mamie.

The White Hope had gone to sleep again with the amazing speed of

childhood, and Mamie was looking pityingly at the bedraggled object

which had emerged cautiously from behind the waterproof.

"I got mine," muttered Steve ruefully. "You ain't got a towel anywhere,

have you, Mame?"

Mamie produced a towel and watched him apologetically as he attempted

to dry himself.

"I'm so sorry, Steve."

"Cut it out. It was my fault. I oughtn't to have been there. Say, it

was a bit of luck the kid waking just then."

"Yes," said Mamie.

Observe the tricks that conscience plays us. If Mamie had told Steve

what had caused William to wake he would certainly have been so charmed

by her presence of mind, exerted on his behalf to save him from the

warm fate which Mrs. Porter's unconscious hand had been about to bring

down upon him, that he would have forgotten his diffidence then and

there and, as the poet has it, have eased his bosom of much perilous

stuff.

But conscience would not allow Mamie to reveal the secret. Already she

was suffering the pangs of remorse for having, in however good a cause,

broken her idol's rest with a push that might have given the poor lamb

a headache. She could not confess the crime even to Steve.

And if Steve had had the pluck to tell Mamie that he loved her, as

he stood before her dripping with the water which he had suffered

in silence rather than betray her, she would have fallen into his

arms. For Steve at that moment had all the glamour for her of the

self-sacrificing hero of a moving-picture film. He had not actually

risked death for her, perhaps, but he had taken a sudden cold

shower-bath without a murmur, all for her.

Mamie was thrilled. She looked at him with the gleaming eyes of

devotion.

But Steve, just because he knew that he was wet and fancied that he

must look ridiculous, held his peace.

And presently, his secret still locked in his bosom, and his collar

sticking limply to his neck, he crept downstairs, avoiding the society

of his fellow man, and slunk out into the night where, if there was no

Mamie, there were, at any rate, dry clothes.

Chapter IV The Widening Gap

The new life hit Kirk as a wave hits a bather; and, like a wave, swept

him off his feet, choked him, and generally filled him with a feeling

of discomfort.

He should have been prepared for it, but he was not. He should have

divined from the first that the money was bound to produce changes

other than a mere shifting of headquarters from Sixty-First Street to

Fifth Avenue. But he had deluded himself at first with the idea that

Ruth was different from other women, that she was superior to the

artificial pleasures of the Society which is distinguished by the big

S.

In a moment of weakness, induced by hair-ruffling, he had given in on

the point of the hygienic upbringing of William Bannister; but there,

he had imagined, his troubles were to cease. He had supposed that he

was about to resume the old hermit's-cell life of the studio and live

in a world which contained only Ruth, Bill, and himself.

He was quickly undeceived. Within two days he was made aware of the

fact that Ruth was in the very centre of the social whirlpool and that

she took it for granted that he would join her there. There was nothing

of the hermit about Ruth now. She was amazingly undomestic.

Her old distaste for the fashionable life of New York seemed to have

vanished absolutely. As far as Kirk could see, she was always

entertaining or being entertained. He was pitched head-long into a

world where people talked incessantly of things which bored him and did

things which seemed to him simply mad. And Ruth, whom he had thought he

understood, revelled in it all.

At first he tried to get at her point of view, to discover what she

found to enjoy in this lunatic existence of aimlessness and futility.

One night, as they were driving home from a dinner which had bored him

unspeakably, he asked the question point-blank. It seemed to him

incredible that she could take pleasure in an entertainment which had

filled him with such depression.

"Ruth," he said impulsively, as the car moved off, "what do you see in

this sort of thing? How can you stand these people? What have you in

common with them?"

"Poor old Kirk. I know you hated it to-night. But we shan't be dining

with the Baileys every night."

Bailey Bannister had been their host on that occasion, and the dinner

had been elaborate and gorgeous. Mrs. Bailey was now one of the leaders

of the younger set. Bailey, looking much more than a year older than

when Kirk had seen him last, had presided at the head of the table with

great dignity, and the meeting with him had not contributed to the

pleasure of Kirk's evening.

"Were you awfully bored? You seemed to be getting along quite well with

Sybil."

"I like her. She's good fun."

"She's certainly having good fun. I'd give anything to know what Bailey

really thinks of it. She is the most shockingly extravagant little

creature in New York. You know the Wilburs were quite poor, and poor

Sybil was kept very short. I think that marrying Bailey and having all

this money to play with has turned her head."

It struck Kirk that the criticism applied equally well to the critic.

"She does the most absurd things. She gave a freak dinner when you were

away that cost I don't know how much. She is always doing something.

Well, I suppose Bailey knows what he is about; but at her present pace

she must be keeping him busy making money to pay for all her fads. You

ought to paint a picture of Bailey, Kirk, as the typical patient

American husband. You couldn't get a better model."

"Suggest it to him, and let me hide somewhere where I can hear what he

says. Bailey has his own opinion of my pictures."

Ruth laughed a little nervously. She had always wondered exactly what

had taken place that day in the studio, and the subject was one which

she was shy of exhuming. She turned the conversation.

"What did you ask me just now? Something about......"

"I asked you what you had in common with these people."

Ruth reflected.

"Oh, well, it's rather difficult to say if you put it like that.

They're just people, you know. They are amusing sometimes. I used to

know most of them. I suppose that is the chief thing which brings us

together. They happen to be there, and if you're travelling on a road

you naturally talk to your fellow travellers. But why? Don't you like

them? Which of them didn't you like?"

It was Kirk's turn to reflect.

"Well, that's hard to answer, too. I don't think I actively liked or

disliked any of them. They seemed to me just not worth while. My point

is, rather, why are we wasting a perfectly good evening mixing with

them? What's the use? That's my case in a nut-shell."

"If you put it like that, what's the use of anything? One must do

something. We can't be hermits."

A curious feeling of being infinitely far from Ruth came over Kirk. She

dismissed his dream as a whimsical impossibility not worthy of serious

consideration. Why could they not be hermits? They had been hermits

before, and it had been the happiest period of both their lives. Why,

just because an old man had died and left them money, must they rule

out the best thing in life as impossible and plunge into a nightmare

which was not life at all?

He had tried to deceive himself, but he could do so no longer. Ruth had

changed. The curse with which his sensitive imagination had invested

John Bannister's legacy was, after all no imaginary curse. Like a

golden wedge, it had forced Ruth and himself apart.

Everything had changed. He was no longer the centre of Ruth's life. He

was just an encumbrance, a nuisance who could not be got rid of and

must remain a permanent handicap, always in the way.

So thought Kirk morbidly as the automobile passed through the silent

streets. It must be remembered that he had been extremely bored for a

solid three hours, and was predisposed, consequently, to gloomy

thoughts.

Whatever his faults, Kirk rarely whined. He had never felt so miserable

in his life, but he tried to infuse a tone of lightness into the

conversation. After all, if Ruth's intuition fell short of enabling her

to understand his feelings, nothing was to be gained by parading them.

"I guess it's my fault," he said, "that I haven't got abreast of the

society game as yet. You had better give me a few pointers. My trouble

is that, being new to them, I can't tell whether these people are types

or exceptions. Take Clarence Grayling, for instance. Are there any more

at home like Clarence?"

"My dear child, all Bailey's special friends are like Clarence,

exactly like. I remember telling him so once."

"Who was the specimen with the little black moustache who thought

America crude and said that the only place to live in was southern

Italy? Is he an isolated case or an epidemic?"

"He is scarcer than Clarence, but he's quite a well-marked type. He is

the millionaire's son who has done Europe and doesn't mean you to

forget it."

"There was a chesty person with a wave of hair coming down over his

forehead. A sickeningly handsome fellow who looked like a poet. I think

they called him Basil. Does he run around in flocks, or is he unique?"

Ruth did not reply for a moment. Basil Milbank was a part of the past

which, in the year during which Kirk had been away, had come rather

startlingly to life.

There had been a time when Basil had been very near and important to

her. Indeed, but for the intervention of Mrs. Porter, described in an

earlier passage, she would certainly have married Basil. Then Kirk had

crossed her path and had monopolized her. During the studio period the

recollection of Basil had grown faint. After that, just at the moment

when Kirk was not there to lend her strength, he had come back into her

life. For nearly a year she had seen him daily; and gradually, at first

almost with fear, she had realized that the old fascination was by no

means such a thing of the past as she had supposed.

She had hoped for Kirk's return as a general, sorely pressed, hopes for

reinforcements. With Kirk at her side she felt Basil would slip back

into his proper place in the scheme of things. And, behold! Kirk had

returned and still the tension remained unrelaxed.

For Kirk had changed. After the first day she could not conceal it from

herself. That it was she who had changed did not present itself to her

as a possible explanation of the fact that she now felt out of touch

with her husband. All she knew was that they had been linked together

by bonds of sympathy, and were so no longer.

She found Kirk dull. She hated to admit it, but the truth forced itself

upon her. He had begun to bore her.

She collected her thoughts and answered his question.

"Basil Milbank? Oh, I should call him unique."

She felt a wild impulse to warn him, to explain the real significance

of this man whom he classed contemptuously with Clarence Grayling and

that absurd little Dana Ferris as somebody of no account. She wanted to

cry out to him that she was in danger and that only he could help her.

But she could not speak, and Kirk went on in the same tone of

half-tolerant contempt:

"Who is he?"

She controlled herself with an effort, and answered indifferently.

"Oh, Basil? Well, you might say he's everything. He plays polo, leads

cotillions, yachts, shoots, plays the piano wonderfully, everything.

People usually like him very much." She paused. "Women especially."

She had tried to put something into her tone which might serve to

awaken him, something which might prepare the way for what she wanted

to say, and what, if she did not say it now, when the mood was on her,

she could never say. But Kirk was deaf.

"He looks that sort of man," he said.

And, as he said it, the accumulated boredom of the past three hours

found vent in a vast yawn.

Ruth set her teeth. She felt as if she had received a blow.

When he spoke again it was on the subject of street-paving defects in

New York City.

* * * * *

It was true, as Ruth had said, that they did not dine with the Baileys

every night, but that seemed to Kirk, as the days went on, the one and

only bright spot in the new state of affairs. He could not bring

himself to treat life with a philosophical resignation. His was not

open revolt. He was outwardly docile, but inwardly he rebelled

furiously.

Perhaps the unnaturally secluded life which he had led since his

marriage had unfitted him for mixing in society even more than nature

had done. He had grown out of the habit of mixing. Crowds irritated

him. He hated doing the same thing at the same time as a hundred other

people.

Like most Bohemians, he was at his best in a small circle. He liked his

friends as single spies, not in battalions. He was a man who should

have had a few intimates and no acquaintances; and his present life was

bounded north, south, east, and west by acquaintances. Most of the men

to whom he spoke he did not even know by name.

He would seek information from Ruth as they drove home.

"Who was the pop-eyed second-story man with the bald head and the

convex waistcoat who glued himself to me to-night?"

"If you mean the fine old gentleman with the slightly prominent eyes

and rather thin hair, that was Brock Mason, the vice-president of

consolidated groceries. You mustn't even think disrespectfully of a man

as rich as that."

"He isn't what you would call a sparkling talker."

"He doesn't have to be. His time is worth a hundred dollars a minute,

or a second, I forget which."

"Put me down for a nickel's worth next time."

And then they began to laugh over Ruth's suggestion that they should

save up and hire Mr. Mason for an afternoon and make him keep quiet all

the time; for Ruth was generally ready to join him in ridiculing their

new acquaintances. She had none of that reverence for the great and the

near-great which, running to seed, becomes snobbery.

It was this trait in her which kept alive, long after it might have

died, the hope that her present state of mind was only a phase, and

that, when she had tired of the new game, she would become the old Ruth

of the studio. But, when he was honest with himself, he was forced to

admit that she showed no signs of ever tiring of it.

They had drifted apart. They were out of touch with each other. It was

not an uncommon state of things in the circle in which Kirk now found

himself. Indeed, it seemed to him that the semi-detached couple was the

rule rather than the exception.

But there was small consolation in this reflection. He was not at all

interested in the domestic troubles of the people he mixed with. His

own hit him very hard.

Ruth had criticized little Mrs. Bailey, but there was no doubt that she

herself had had her head turned quite as completely by the new life.

The first time that Kirk realized this was when he came upon an article

in a Sunday paper, printed around a blurred caricature which professed

to be a photograph of Mrs. Kirk Winfield, in which she was alluded to

with reverence and gusto as one of society's leading hostesses. In the

course of the article reference was made to no fewer than three freak

dinners of varying ingenuity which she had provided for her delighted

friends.

It was this that staggered Kirk. That Mrs. Bailey should indulge in

this particular form of insanity was intelligible. But that Ruth should

have descended to it was another thing altogether.

He did not refer to the article when he met Ruth, but he was more than

ever conscious of the gap between them, the gap which was widening

every day.

The experiences he had undergone during the year of his wandering had

strengthened Kirk considerably, but nature is not easily expelled; and

the constitutional weakness of character which had hampered him through

life prevented him from making any open protests or appeal. Moreover,

he could understand now her point of view, and that disarmed him.

He saw how this state of things had come about. In a sense, it was the

natural state of things. Ruth had been brought up in certain

surroundings. Her love for him, new and overwhelming, had enabled her

to free herself temporarily from these surroundings and to become

reconciled to a life for which, he told himself, she had never been

intended. Fate had thrown her back into her natural sphere. And now she

revelled in the old environment as an exile revels in the life of the

homeland from which he has been so long absent.

That was the crux of the tragedy. Ruth was at home. He was not. Ruth

was among her own people. He was a stranger among strangers, a prisoner

in a land where men spoke with an alien tongue.

There was nothing to be done. The gods had played one of their

practical jokes, and he must join in the laugh against himself and try

to pretend that he was not hurt.

Chapter V The Real Thing

Kirk sat in the nursery with his chin on his hands, staring gloomily

at William Bannister. On the floor William Bannister played some game

of his own invention with his box of bricks.

They were alone. It was the first time they had been alone together for

two weeks. As a rule, when Kirk paid his daily visit, Lora Delane

Porter was there, watchful and forbidding, prepared, on the slightest

excuse, to fall upon him with rules and prohibitions. To-day she was

out, and Kirk had the field to himself, for Mamie, whose duty it was to

mount guard, and who had been threatened with many terrible things by

Mrs. Porter if she did not stay on guard, had once more allowed her too

sympathetic nature to get the better of her and had vanished.

Kirk was too dispirited to take advantage of his good fortune. He had a

sense of being there on parole, of being on his honour not to touch. So

he sat in his chair, and looked at Bill; while Bill, crooning to

himself, played decorously with bricks.

The truth had been a long time in coming home to Kirk, but it had

reached him at last. Ever since his return he had clung to the belief

that it was a genuine conviction of its merits that had led Ruth to

support her aunt's scheme for Bill's welfare. He himself had always

looked on the exaggerated precautions for the maintenance of the

latter's health as ridiculous and unnecessary; but he had acquiesced in

them because he thought that Ruth sincerely believed them

indispensable.

After all, he had not been there when Bill so nearly died, and he could

understand that the shock of that episode might have distorted the

judgment even of a woman so well balanced as Ruth. He was quite ready

to be loyal to her in the matter, however distasteful it might be to

him.

But now he saw the truth. A succession of tiny incidents had brought

light to him. Ruth might or might not be to some extent genuine in her

belief in the new system, but her chief motive for giving it her

support was something quite different. He had tried not to admit to

himself, but he could do so no longer. Ruth allowed Mrs. Porter to have

her way because it suited her to do so; because, with Mrs. Porter on

the premises, she had more leisure in which to amuse herself; because,

to put it in a word, the child had begun to bore her.

Everything pointed to that. In the old days it had been her chief

pleasure to be with the boy. Their walks in the park had been a daily

ceremony with which nothing had been allowed to interfere. But now she

always had some excuse for keeping away from him.

Her visits to the nursery, when she did go there, were brief and

perfunctory. And the mischief of it was that she always presented such

admirable reasons for abstaining from Bill's society, when it was

suggested to her that she should go to him, that it was impossible to

bring her out into the open and settle the matter once and for all.

Patience was one of the virtues which set off the defects in Kirk's

character; but he did not feel very patient now as he sat and watched

Bill playing on the floor.

"Well, Bill, old man, what do you make of it all?" he said at last.

The child looked up and fixed him with unwinking eyes. Kirk winced.

They were so exactly Ruth's eyes. That wide-open expression when

somebody, speaking suddenly to her, interrupted a train of thought, was

one of her hundred minor charms.

Bill had reproduced it to the life. He stared for a moment; then, as if

there had been some telepathy between them, said: "I want mummy."

Kirk laughed bitterly.

"You aren't the only one. I want mummy, too."

"Where is mummy?"

"I couldn't tell you exactly. At a luncheon-party somewhere."

"What's luncheon-party?"

"A sort of entertainment where everybody eats too much and talks all

the time without ever saying a thing that's worth hearing."

Bill considered this gravely.

"Why?"

"Because they like it, I suppose."

"Why do they like it?"

"Goodness knows."

"Does mummy like it?"

"I suppose so."

"Does mummy eat too much?"

"She doesn't. The others do."

"Why?"

William Bannister's thirst for knowledge was at this time perhaps his

most marked characteristic. No encyclopaedia could have coped with it.

Kirk was accustomed to do his best, cheerfully yielding up what little

information on general subjects he happened to possess, but he was like

Mrs. Partington sweeping back the Atlantic Ocean with her broom.

"Because they've been raised that way," he replied to the last

question. "Bill, old man, when you grow up, don't you ever become one

of these fellows who can't walk two blocks without stopping three times

to catch up with their breath. If you get like that mutt Dana Ferris

you'll break my heart. And you're heading that way, poor kid."

"What's Ferris?"

"He's a man I met at dinner the other night. When he was your age he

was the richest child in America, and everybody fussed over him till he

grew up into a wretched little creature with a black moustache and two

chins. You ought to see him. He would make you laugh; and you don't get

much to laugh at nowadays. I guess it isn't hygienic for a kid to

laugh. Bill, honestly, what do you think of things? Don't you

ever want to hurl one of those sterilized bricks of yours at a certain

lady? Or has she taken all the heart out of you by this time?"

This was beyond Bill, as Kirk's monologues frequently were. He changed

the subject.

"I wish I had a cat," he said, by way of starting a new topic.

"Well, why haven't you a cat? Why haven't you a dozen cats if you want

them?"

"I asked Aunty Lora could I have a cat, and she said: 'Certainly not,

cats are...cats are......"

"Unhygienic?"

"What's that?"

"It's what your Aunt Lora might think a cat was. Or did she say

pestilential?"

"I don't amember."

"But she wouldn't let you have one?"

"Mamie said a cat might scratch me."

"Well, you wouldn't mind that?" said Kirk anxiously.

He had come to be almost morbidly on the look-out for evidence which

might go to prove that this cotton-wool existence was stealing from the

child the birthright of courage which was his from both his parents.

Much often depends on little things, and, if Bill had replied in the

affirmative to the question, it would probably have had the result of

sending Kirk there and then raging through the house conducting a sort

of War of Independence.

The only thing that had kept him from doing so before was the

reflection that Mrs. Porter's system could not be definitely taxed with

any harmful results. But his mind was never easy. Every day found him

still nervously on the alert for symptoms.

Bill soothed him now by answering "No" in a very decided voice. All

well so far, but it had been an anxious moment.

It seemed incredible to Kirk that the life he was leading should not in

time turn the child into a whimpering bundle of nerves. His

conversations with Bill were, as a result, a sort of spiritual parallel

to the daily taking of his temperature with the thermometer. Sooner or

later he always led the talk round to some point where Bill must make a

definite pronouncement which would show whether or not the insidious

decay had begun to set in.

So far all appeared to be well. In earlier conversations Bill, subtly

questioned, had stoutly maintained that he was not afraid of Indians,

dogs, pirates, mice, cows, June-bugs, or noises in the dark. He had

even gone so far as to state that if an Indian chief found his way into

the nursery he, Bill, would chop his head off. The most exacting father

could not have asked more. And yet Kirk was not satisfied: he remained

uneasy.

It so happened that this afternoon Bill, who had had hitherto to

maintain his reputation for intrepidity entirely by verbal statements,

was afforded an opportunity of providing a practical demonstration that

his heart was in the right place. The game he was playing with the

bricks was one that involved a certain amount of running about with a

puffing accompaniment of a vaguely equine nature. And while performing

this part of the programme he chanced to trip. He hesitated for a

moment, as if uncertain whether to fall or remain standing; then did

the former with a most emphatic bump.

He scrambled up, stood looking at Kirk with a twitching lip, then gave

a great gulp, and resumed his trotting. The whole exhibition of

indomitable heroism was over in half a minute, and he did not even

bother to wait for applause.

The effect of the incident on Kirk was magical. He was in the position

of an earnest worshipper who, tortured with doubts, has prayed for a

sign. This was a revelation. A million anti-Indian statements, however

resolute, were nothing to this.

This was the real thing. Before his eyes this super-child of his had

fallen in a manner which might quite reasonably have led to tears;

which would, Kirk felt sure, have produced bellows of anguish from

every other child in America. And what had happened? Not a moan. No,

sir, not one solitary cry. Just a gulp which you had to strain your

ears to hear, and which, at that, might have been a mere taking-in of

breath such as every athlete must do, and all was over.

This child of his was the real thing. It had been proved beyond

possibility of criticism.

There are moments when a man on parole forgets his promise. All thought

of rules and prohibitions went from Kirk. He rose from his seat,

grabbed his son with both hands, and hugged him. We cannot even begin

to estimate the number of bacilli which must have rushed, whooping with

joy, on to the unfortunate child. Under a microscope it would probably

have looked like an Old Home Week. And Kirk did not care. He simply

kept on hugging. That was the sort of man he was, thoroughly heartless.

"Bill, you're great!" he cried.

Bill had been an amazed party to the incident. Nothing of this kind had

happened to him for so long that he had forgotten there were children

to whom this sort of thing did happen. Then he recollected a similar

encounter with a bearded man down in the hall when he came in one

morning from his ride in the automobile. A moment later he had

connected his facts.

This man who had no beard was the same man as the man who had a beard,

and this behaviour was a personal eccentricity of his. The thought

crossed his mind that Aunty Lora would not approve of this.

And then, surprisingly, there came the thought that he did not care

whether Aunty Lora approved or not. He liked it, and that was

enough for him.

The seeds of revolt had been sown in the bosom of William Bannister.

It happened that Ruth, returning from her luncheon-party, looked in at

the nursery on her way upstairs. She was confronted with the spectacle

of Bill seated on Kirk's lap, his face against Kirk's shoulder. Kirk,

though he had stopped speaking as the door opened, appeared to be in

the middle of a story, for Bill, after a brief glance at the newcomer,

asked: "What happened then?"

"Kirk, really!" said Ruth.

Kirk did not appear in the least ashamed of himself.

"Ruth, this kid is the most amazing kid. Do you know what happened just

now? He was running along and he tripped and came down flat. And he

didn't even think of crying. He just picked himself up, and......"

"That was very brave of you, Billy. But, seriously, Kirk, you shouldn't

hug him like that. Think what Aunt Lora would say!"

"Aunt Lora be......Bother Aunt Lora!"

"Well, I won't give you away. If she heard, she would write a book

about it. And she was just starting to come up when I was downstairs.

We came in together. You had better fly while there's time."

It was sound advice, and Kirk took it.

It was not till some time later, going over the incident again in his

mind, he realized how very lightly Ruth had treated what, if she really

adhered to Mrs. Porter's views on hygiene, should have been to her a

dreadful discovery. The reflection was pleasant to him for a moment; it

seemed to draw Ruth and himself closer together; then he saw the

reverse side of it.

If Ruth did not really believe in this absurd hygienic nonsense, why

had she permitted it to be practised upon the boy? There was only one

answer, and it was the one which Kirk had already guessed at. She did

it because it gave her more freedom, because it bored her to look after

the child herself, because she was not the same Ruth he had left at the

studio when he started with Hank Jardine for Colombia.

Chapter VI The Outcasts

Three months of his new life had gone by before Kirk awoke from the

stupor which had gripped him as the result of the general upheaval of

his world. Ever since his return from Colombia he had honestly been

intending to resume his painting, and, attacking it this time in a

business-like way, to try to mould himself into the semblance of an

efficient artist.

His mind had been full of fine resolutions. He would engage a good

teacher, some competent artist whom fortune had not treated well and

who would be glad of the job, Washington Square and its neighbourhood

were full of them, and settle down grimly, working regular hours, to

recover lost ground.

But the rush of life, as lived on the upper avenue, had swept him away.

He had been carried along on the rapids of dinners, parties, dances,

theatres, luncheons, and the rest, and his great resolve had gone

bobbing away from him on the current.

He had recovered it now and climbed painfully ashore, feeling bruised

and exhausted, but determined.

* * * * *

Among the motley crowd which had made the studio a home in the days of

Kirk's bachelorhood had been an artist, one might almost say an

ex-artist, named Robert Dwight Penway. An over-fondness for rye whisky

at the Brevoort cafe had handicapped Robert as an active force in the

world of New York art. As a practical worker he was not greatly

esteemed, least of all by the editors of magazines, who had paid

advance cheques to him for work which, when delivered at all, was

delivered too late for publication. These, once bitten, were now twice

shy of Mr. Penway. They did not deny his great talents, which were,

indeed, indisputable; but they were fixed in their determination not to

make use of them.

Fate could have provided no more suitable ally for Kirk. It was

universally admitted around Washington Square and, grudgingly, down-town

that in the matter of theory Mr. Penway excelled. He could teach to

perfection what he was too erratic to practise.

Robert Dwight Penway, run to earth one sultry evening in the Brevoort,

welcomed Kirk as a brother, as a rich brother. Even when his first

impression, that he was to have the run of the house on Fifth Avenue

and mix freely with touchable multi-millionaires, had been corrected,

his altitude was still brotherly. He parted from Kirk with many solemn

promises to present himself at the studio daily and teach him enough

art to put him clear at the top of the profession. "Way above all

these other dubs," asserted Mr. Penway.

Robert Dwight Penway's attitude toward his contemporaries in art bore a

striking resemblance to Steve's estimate of his successors in the

middle-weight department of the American prize-ring.

Surprisingly to those who knew him, Mr. Penway was as good as his word.

Certainly Kirk's terms had been extremely generous; but he had thrown

away many a contract of equal value in his palmy days. Possibly his

activity was due to his liking for Kirk; or it may have been that the

prospect of sitting by with a cigar while somebody else worked, with

nothing to do all day except offer criticism, and advice, appealed to

him.

At any rate, he appeared at the studio on the following afternoon,

completely sober and excessively critical. He examined the canvases

which Kirk had hauled from shelves and corners for his inspection. One

after another he gazed upon them in an increasingly significant

silence. When the last one was laid aside he delivered judgment.

"Golly!" he said.

Kirk flushed. It was not that he was not in complete agreement with the

verdict. Looking at these paintings, some of which he had in the old

days thought extremely good, he was forced to admit that "Golly" was

the only possible criticism.

He had not seen them for a long time, and absence had enabled him to

correct first impressions. Moreover, something had happened to him,

causing him to detect flaws where he had seen only merits. Life had

sharpened his powers of judgment. He was a grown man looking at the

follies of his youth.

"Burn them!" said Mr. Penway, lighting a cigar with the air of one

restoring his tissues after a strenuous ordeal. "Burn the lot. They're

awful. Darned amateur nightmares. They offend the eye. Cast them into a

burning fiery furnace."

Kirk nodded. The criticism was just. It erred, if at all, on the side

of mildness. Certainly something had happened to him since he

perpetrated those daubs. He had developed. He saw things with new eyes.

"I guess I had better start right in again at the beginning," he sad.

"Earlier than that," amended Mr. Penway.

* * * * *

So Kirk settled down to a routine of hard work; and, so doing, drove

another blow at the wedge which was separating his life from Ruth's.

There were days now when they did not meet at all, and others when they

saw each other for a few short moments in which neither seemed to have

much to say.

Ruth had made a perfunctory protest against the new departure.

"Really," she said, "it does seem absurd for you to spend all your time

down at that old studio. It isn't as if you had to. But, of course, if

you want to......"

And she had gone on to speak of other subjects. It was plain to Kirk

that his absence scarcely affected her. She was still in the rapids,

and every day carried her farther away from him.

It did not hurt him now. A sort of apathy seemed to have fallen on him.

The old days became more and more remote. Sometimes he doubted whether

anything remained of her former love for him, and sometimes he wondered

if he still loved her. She was so different that it was almost as if

she were a stranger. Once they had had everything in common. Now it

seemed to him that they had nothing, not even Bill.

He did not brood upon it. He gave himself no time for that. He worked

doggedly on under the blasphemous but efficient guidance of Mr. Penway.

He was becoming a man with a fixed idea, the idea of making good.

He began to make headway. His beginnings were small, but practical. He

no longer sat down when the spirit moved him to dash off vague

masterpieces which might turn into something quite unexpected on the

road to completion; he snatched at anything definite that presented

itself.

Sometimes it was a couple of illustrations to a short story in one of

the minor magazines, sometimes a picture to go with an eulogy of a

patent medicine. Whatever it was, he seized upon it and put into it all

the talent he possessed. And thanks to the indefatigable coaching of

Robert Dwight Penway, a certain merit was beginning to creep into his

work. His drawing was growing firmer. He no longer shirked

difficulties.

Mr. Penway was good enough to approve of his progress. Being free from

any morbid distaste for himself, he attributed that progress to its

proper source. As he said once in a moment of expansive candour, he

could, given a free hand and something to drink and smoke while doing

it, make an artist out of two sticks and a lump of coal.

"Why, I've made you turn out things that are like something on

earth, my boy," he said proudly. "And that," he added, as he reached

out for the bottle of Bourbon which Kirk had provided for him, "is

going some."

Kirk was far too grateful to resent the slightly unflattering note a

more spirited man might have detected in the remark.

* * * * *

Only once during those days did Kirk allow himself to weaken and admit

to himself how wretched he was. He was drawing a picture of Steve at

the time, and Steve had the sympathy which encourages weakness in

others.

It was a significant sign of his changed attitude towards his

profession that he was not drawing Steve as a figure in an allegorical

picture or as "Apollo" or "The Toiler," but simply as a well-developed

young man who had had the good sense to support his nether garments

with Middleton's Undeniable Suspenders. The picture, when completed,

would show Steve smirking down at the region of his waist-line and

announcing with pride and satisfaction: "They're Middleton's!" Kirk was

putting all he knew into the work, and his face, as he drew, was dark

and gloomy.

Steve noted this with concern. He had perceived for some time that Kirk

had changed. He had lost all his old boyish enjoyment of their

sparring-bouts, and he threw the medicine-ball with an absent gloom

almost equal to Bailey's.

It had not occurred to Steve to question Kirk about this. If Kirk had

anything on his mind which he wished to impart he would say it.

Meanwhile, the friendly thing for him to do was to be quiet and pretend

to notice nothing.

It seemed to Steve that nothing was going right these days. Here was

he, chafing at his inability to open his heart to Mamie. Here was Kirk,

obviously in trouble. And, a smaller thing, but of interest, as showing

how universal the present depression was, there was Bailey Bannister,

equally obviously much worried over something or other.

For Bailey had reinstated Steve in the place he had occupied before old

John Bannister had dismissed him, and for some time past Steve had

marked him down as a man with a secret trouble. He had never been of a

riotously cheerful disposition, but it had been possible once to draw

him into conversation at the close of the morning's exercises. Now he

hardly spoke. And often, when Steve arrived in the morning, he was

informed that Mr. Bannister had started for Wall Street early on

important business.

These things troubled Steve. His simple soul abhorred a mystery.

But it was the case of Kirk that worried him most, for he half guessed

that the latter's gloom had to do with Ruth; and he worshipped Ruth.

Kirk laid down his sketch and got up.

"I guess that'll do for the moment, Steve," he said.

Steve relaxed the attitude of proud satisfaction which he had assumed

in order to do justice to the Undeniable Suspenders. He stretched

himself and sat down.

"You certainly are working to beat the band just now, squire," he

remarked.

"It's a pretty good thing, work, Steve," said Kirk. "If it does nothing

else, it keeps you from thinking."

He knew it was feeble of him, but he was powerfully impelled to relieve

himself by confiding his wretchedness to Steve. He need not say much,

he told himself plausibly, only just enough to lighten the burden a

little.

He would not be disloyal to Ruth, he had not sunk to that!but, after

all Steve was Steve. It was not like blurting out his troubles to a

stranger. It would harm nobody, and do him a great deal of good, if he

talked to Steve.

He relit his pipe, which had gone out during a tense spell of work on

the suspenders.

"Well, Steve," he said, "what do you think of life? How is this best of

all possible worlds treating you?"

Steve deposed that life was pretty punk.

"You're a great describer, Steve. You've hit it first time. Punk is the

word. It's funny, if you look at it properly. Take my own case. The

superficial observer, who is apt to be a bonehead, would say that I

ought to be singing psalms of joy. I am married to the woman I wanted

to marry. I have a son who, not to be fulsome, is a perfectly good sort

of son. I have no financial troubles. I eat well. I have ceased to

tremble when I see a job of work. In fact, I have advanced in my art to

such an extent that shrewd business men like Middleton put the

pictorial side of their Undeniable Suspenders in my hands and go off to

play golf with their minds easy, having perfect confidence in my skill

and judgment. If I can't be merry and bright, who can? Do you find me

merry and bright, Steve?"

"I've seen you in better shape," said Steve cautiously.

"I've felt in better shape."

Steve coughed. The conversation was about to become delicate.

"What's eating you, colonel?" he asked presently.

Kirk frowned in silence at the Undeniable for a few moments. Then the

pent-up misery of months exploded in a cascade of words. He jumped up

and began to walk restlessly about the studio.

"Damn it! Steve, I ought not to say a word, I know. It's weak and

cowardly and bad taste and everything else you can think of to speak of

it, even to you. One's supposed to stand this sort of roasting at the

stake with a grin, as if one enjoyed it. But, after all, you are

different. It's not as if it was any one. You are different,

aren't you?"

"Sure."

"Well, you know what's wrong as well as I do."

"Surest thing you know. It's hit me, too."

"How's that?"

"Well, things ain't the same. That's about what it comes to."

Kirk stopped and looked at him. His expression was wistful. "I ought

not to be talking about it."

"You go right ahead, squire," said Steve soothingly. "I know just how

you feel, and I guess talking's not going to do any harm. Act as if I

wasn't here. Look on it as a monologue. I don't amount to anything."

"When did you go to the house last, Steve?"

Steve reflected.

"About a couple of weeks ago, I reckon."

"See the kid?"

Steve shook his head.

"Seeing his nibs ain't my long suit these days. I may be wrong, but I

got the idea there was a dead-line for me about three blocks away from

the nursery. I asked Keggs was the coast clear, but he said the Porter

dame was in the ring, so I kind of thought I'd better away. I don't

seem to fit in with all them white tiles and thermometers."

"You used to see him every day when we were here. And you didn't seem

to contaminate him, as far as any one could notice."

There was a silence.

"Do you see him often, colonel?"

Kirk laughed.

"Oh, yes. I'm favoured. I pay a state visit every day. Think of that! I

sit in a chair at the other end of the room while Mrs. Porter stands

between to see that I don't start anything. Bill plays with his

sterilized bricks. Occasionally he and I exchange a few civil words.

It's as jolly and sociable as you could want. We have great times."

"Say, on the level, I wonder you stand for it."

"I've got to stand for it."

"He's your kid."

"Not exclusively. I have a partner, Steve."

Steve snorted dolefully.

"Ain't it hell the way things break loose in this world!" he sighed.

"Who'd have thought two years ago......"

"Do you make it only two? I should have put it at about two thousand."

"Honest, squire, if any one had told me then that Miss Ruth had it in

her to take up with all these fool stunts......"

"Well, I can't say I was prepared for it."

Steve coughed again. Kirk was in an expansive mood this afternoon, and

the occasion was ideal for the putting forward of certain views which

he had long wished to impart. But, on the other hand, the subject was a

peculiarly delicate one. It has been well said that it is better for a

third party to quarrel with a buzz-saw than to interfere between

husband and wife; and Steve was constitutionally averse to anything

that savoured of butting in.

Still, Kirk had turned the talk into this channel. He decided to risk

it.

"If I were you," he said, "I'd get busy and start something."

"Such as what?"

Steve decided to abandon caution and speak his mind. Him, almost as

much as Kirk, the existing state of things had driven to desperation.

Though in a sense he was only a spectator, the fact that the altered

conditions of Kirk's life involved his almost complete separation from

Mamie gave him what might be called a stake in the affair. The brief

and rare glimpses which he got of her nowadays made it absolutely

impossible for him to conduct his wooing on a business-like basis. A

diffident man cannot possibly achieve any success in odd moments.

Constant propinquity is his only hope.

That fact alone, he considered, almost gave him the right to interfere.

And, apart from that, his affection for Kirk and Ruth gave him a claim.

Finally, he held what was practically an official position in the

family councils on the strength of being William Bannister Winfield's

godfather.

He loved William Bannister as a son, and it had been one of his

favourite day dreams to conjure up a vision of the time when he should

be permitted to undertake the child's physical training. He had toyed

lovingly with the idea of imparting to this promising pupil all that he

knew of the greatest game on earth. He had watched him in the old days

staggering about the studio, and had pictured him grown to his full

strength, his muscles trained, his brain full of the wisdom of one who,

if his mother had not kicked, would have been middle-weight champion of

America.

He had resigned himself to the fact that the infant's social status

made it impossible that he should be the real White Hope whom he had

once pictured beating all comers in the roped ring; but, after all,

there was a certain mild fame to be acquired even by an amateur. And

now that dream was over, unless Kirk could be goaded into strong action

in time.

"Why don't you sneak the kid away somewhere?" he suggested. "Why don't

you go right in at them and say: 'It's my kid, and I'm going to take

him away into the country out of all this white-tile stuff and let him

roll in the mud same as he used to.' Why, say, there's that shack of

yours in Connecticut, just made for it. That kid would have the time of

his life there."

"You think that's the solution, do you, Steve?"

"I'm dead sure it is." Steve's voice became more and more enthusiastic

as the idea unfolded itself. "Why, it ain't only the kid I'm thinking

of. There's Miss Ruth. Say, you don't mind me pulling this line of

talk?"

"Go ahead. I began it. What about Miss Ruth?"

"Well, you know just what's the matter with her. She's let this society

game run away with her. I guess she started it because she felt

lonesome when you were away; and now it's got her and she can't drop

it. All she wants is a jolt. It would slow her up and show her just

where she was. She's asking for it. One good, snappy jolt would put the

whole thing right. And this thing of jerking the kid away to

Connecticut would be the right dope, believe me."

Kirk shook his head.

"It wouldn't do, Steve. It isn't that I don't want to do it; but one

must play to the rules. I can't explain what I mean. I can only say

it's impossible. Let's think of a parallel case. When you were in the

ring, there must have been times when you had a chance of hitting your

man low. Why didn't you do it? It would have jolted him, all right."

"Why, I'd have lost on a foul."

"Well, so should I lose on a foul if I started the sort of rough-house

you suggest."

"I don't get you."

"Well, if you want it in plain English, Ruth would never forgive me. Is

that clear enough?"

"You're dead wrong, boss," said Steve excitedly. "I know her."

"I thought I did. Well, anyway, Steve, thanks for the suggestion; but,

believe me, nothing doing. And now, if you feel like it, I wish you

would resume your celebrated imitation of a man exulting over the fact

that he is wearing Middleton's Undeniable. There isn't much more to do,

and I should like to get through with it to-day, if possible. There,

hold that pose. It's exactly right. The honest man gloating over his

suspenders. You ought to go on the stage, Steve."

Chapter VII Cutting the Tangled Knot

There are some men whose mission in life it appears to be to go about

the world creating crises in the lives of other people. When there is

thunder in the air they precipitate the thunderbolt.

Bailey Bannister was one of these. He meant extraordinarily well, but

he was a dangerous man for that very reason, and in a properly

constituted world would have been segregated or kept under supervision.

He would not leave the tangled lives of those around him to adjust

themselves. He blundered in and tried to help. He nearly always

produced a definite result, but seldom the one at which he aimed.

That he should have interfered in the affairs of Ruth and Kirk at this

time was, it must be admitted, unselfish of him, for just now he was

having troubles of his own on a somewhat extensive scale. His wife's

extravagance was putting a strain on his finances, and he was faced

with the choice of checking her or increasing his income. Being very

much in love, he shrank from the former task and adopted the other way

out of the difficulty.

It was this that had led to the change in his manner noticed by Steve.

In order to make more money he had had to take risks, and only recently

had he begun to perceive how extremely risky these risks were. For the

first time in its history the firm of Bannister was making first-hand

acquaintance with frenzied finance.

It is, perhaps, a little unfair to lay the blame for this entirely at

the door of Bailey's Sybil. Her extravagance was largely responsible;

but Bailey's newly found freedom was also a factor in the developments

of the firm's operations. If you keep a dog, a dog with a high sense of

his abilities and importance, tied up and muzzled for a length of time

and then abruptly set it free the chances are that it will celebrate

its freedom. This had happened in the case of Bailey.

Just as her father's money had caused Ruth to plunge into a whirl of

pleasures which she did not really enjoy, merely for the novelty of it,

so the death of John Bannister and his own consequent accession to the

throne had upset Bailey's balance and embarked him on an orgy of

speculation quite foreign to his true nature. All their lives Ruth and

Bailey had been repressed by their father, and his removal had

unsteadied them.

Bailey, on whom the shadow of the dead man had pressed particularly

severely, had been quite intoxicated by sudden freedom. He had been a

cipher in the firm of Bannister & Son. In the firm of Bannister & Co.

he was an untrammelled despot. He did that which was right in his own

eyes, and there was no one to say him nay.

It was true that veteran members of the firm, looking in the glass,

found white hairs where no white hairs had been and wrinkles on

foreheads which, under the solid rule of old John Bannister, had been

smooth; but it would have taken more than these straws to convince

Bailey that the wind which was blowing was an ill-wind. He had

developed in a day the sublime self-confidence of a young Napoleon. He

was all dash and enterprise, the hurricane fighter of Wall Street.

With these private interests to occupy him, it is surprising that he

should have found time to take the affairs of Ruth and Kirk in hand.

But he did.

For some time he had watched the widening gulf between them with pained

solicitude. He disliked Kirk personally; but that did not influence

him. He conceived it to be his duty to suppress private prejudices.

Duty seemed to call him to go to Kirk's aid and smooth out his domestic

difficulties.

What urged him to this course more than anything else was Ruth's

growing intimacy with Basil Milbank; for, in the period which had

elapsed since the conversation recorded earlier in the story, when Kirk

had first made the other's acquaintance, the gifted Basil had become a

very important and menacing figure in Ruth's life.

To Ruth, as to most women, his gifts were his attraction. He danced

well; he talked well; he did everything well. He appealed to a side of

Ruth's nature which Kirk scarcely touched, a side which had only come

into prominence in the last year.

His manner was admirable. He suggested sympathy without expressing it.

He could convey to Ruth that he thought her a misunderstood and

neglected wife while talking to her about the weather. He could make

his own knight-errant attitude toward her perfectly plain without

saying a word, merely by playing soft music to her on the piano; for he

had the gift of saying more with his finger-tips than most men could

have said in a long speech carefully rehearsed.

Kirk's inability to accompany Ruth into her present life had given

Basil his chance. Into the gap which now lay between them he had

slipped with a smooth neatness born of experience.

Bailey hated Basil. Men, as a rule, did, without knowing why. Basil's

reputation was shady, without being actually bad. He was a suspect who

had never been convicted. New York contained several husbands who eyed

him askance, but could not verify their suspicions, and the apparent

hopelessness of ever doing so made them look on Basil as a man who had

carried smoothness into the realms of fine art. He was considered too

gifted to be wholesome. The men of his set, being for the most part

amiably stupid, resented his cleverness.

Bailey, just at present, was feeling strongly on the subject of Basil.

He was at that stage of his married life when he would have preferred

his Sybil to speak civilly to no other man than himself. And only

yesterday Sybil had come to him to inform him with obvious delight that

Basil Milbank had invited her to join his yacht party for a lengthy

voyage.

This had stung Bailey. He was not included in the invitation. The whole

affair struck him as sinister. It was true that Sybil had never shown

any sign of being fascinated by Basil; but, he told himself, there was

no knowing. He forbade Sybil to accept the invitation. To soothe her

disappointment, he sent her off then and there to Tiffany's with a

roving commission to get what she liked; for Bailey, the stern, strong

man, the man who knew when to put his foot down, was no tyrant. But he

would have been indignant at the suggestion that he had bribed Sybil to

refuse Basil's invitation.

One of the arguments which Sybil had advanced in the brief discussion

which had followed the putting down of Bailey's foot had been that Ruth

had been invited and accepted, so why should not she? Bailey had not

replied to this, it was at this point of the proceedings that the

Tiffany motive had been introduced, but he had not forgotten it. He

thought it over, and decided to call upon Ruth. He did so.

It was unfortunate that the nervous strain of being the Napoleon of

Wall Street had had the effect of increasing to a marked extent the

portentousness of Bailey's always portentous manner. Ruth rebelled

against it. There was an insufferable suggestion of ripe old age and

fatherliness in his attitude which she found irritating in the extreme.

All her life she had chafed at authority, and now, when Bailey set

himself up as one possessing it, she showed the worst side of herself

to him.

He struck this unfortunate note from the very beginning.

"Ruth," he said, "I wish to speak seriously to you."

Ruth looked at him with hostile eyes, but did not speak. He did not

know it, poor man, but he had selected an exceedingly bad moment for

his lecture. It so happened that, only half an hour before, she and

Kirk had come nearer to open warfare than they had ever come.

It had come about in this way. Kirk had slept badly the night before,

and, as he lay awake in the small hours, his conscience had troubled

him.

Had he done all that it was in him to do to bridge the gap between Ruth

and himself? That was what his conscience had wanted to know. The

answer was in the negative. On the following day, just before Bailey's

call, he accordingly sought Ruth out, and, rather nervously, for Ruth

made him feel nervous nowadays, suggested that he and she and William

Bannister should take the air in each other's company and go and feed

the squirrels in the park.

Ruth declined. It is possible that she declined somewhat curtly. The

day was close and oppressive, and she had a headache and a general

feeling of ill-will toward her species. Also, in her heart, she

considered that the scheme proposed smacked too much of Sunday

afternoon domesticity in Brooklyn. The idea of papa, mamma, and baby

sporting together in a public park offended her sense of the social

proprieties.

She did not reveal these thoughts to Kirk because she was more than a

little ashamed of them. A year ago, she knew, she would not have

objected to the idea. A year ago such an expedition would have been a

daily occurrence with her. Now she felt if William Bannister wished to

feed squirrels, Mamie was his proper companion.

She could not put all this baldly to Kirk, so she placed the burden of

her refusal on the adequate shoulders of Lora Delane Porter. Aunt Lora,

she said, would never hear of William Bannister wandering at large in

such an unhygienic fashion. Upon which Kirk, whose patience was not so

robust as it had been, and who, like Ruth, found the day oppressive and

making for irritability, had cursed Aunt Lora heartily, given it as his

opinion that between them she and Ruth were turning the child from a

human being into a sort of spineless, effeminate exhibit in a museum,

and had taken himself off to the studio muttering disjointed things.

Ruth was still quivering with the indignation of a woman who has been

cheated of the last word when Bailey appeared and announced that he

wished to speak seriously to her.

Bailey saw the hostility in her eyes and winced a little before it. He

was not feeling altogether at his ease. He had had experience of Ruth

in this mood, and she had taught him to respect it.

But he was not going to shirk his duty. He resumed:

"I am only speaking for your own good," he said. "I know that it

is nothing but thoughtlessness on your part, but I am naturally

anxious......"

"Bailey," interrupted Ruth, "get to the point."

Bailey drew a long breath.

"Well, then," he said, baulked of his preamble, and rushing on his

fate, "I think you see too much of Basil Milbank."

Ruth raised her eyebrows.

"Oh?"

The mildness of her tone deceived Bailey.

"I do not like to speak of these things," he went on more happily; "but

I feel that I must. It is my duty. Basil Milbank has not a good

reputation. He is not the sort of man who, ah, who, in fact, he has not

a good reputation."

"Oh?"

"I understand that he has invited you to form one of his yacht party."

"How did you know?"

"Sybil told me. He invited her. I refused to allow her to accept the

invitation."

"And what did Sybil say?"

"She was naturally a little disappointed, of course, but she did as I

requested."

"I wonder she didn't pack her things and go straight off."

"My dear Ruth!"

"That is what I should have done."

"You don't know what you are saying."

"Oh? Do you think I should let Kirk dictate to me like that?"

"He is certain to disapprove of your going when he hears of the

invitation. What will you do?"

Ruth's eyes opened. For a moment she looked almost ugly.

"What shall I do? Why, go, of course."

She clenched her teeth. A woman's mind can work curiously, and she was

associating Kirk with Bailey in what she considered an unwarrantable

intrusion into her private affairs. It was as if Kirk, and not Bailey,

were standing there, demanding that she should not associate with Basil

Milbank.

"I shall make it my business," said Bailey, "to warn Kirk that this man

is not a desirable companion for you."

The discussion of this miserable yacht affair had brought back to

Bailey all the jealousy which he had felt when Sybil had first told him

of it. All the vague stories he had ever heard about Basil were surging

in his mind like waves of some corrosive acid. He had become a leading

member of the extreme wing of the anti-Milbank party. He regarded Basil

with the aversion which a dignified pigeon might feel for a circling

hawk; and he was now looking on this yacht party as a deadly peril from

which Ruth must be saved at any cost.

"I shall speak to him very strongly," he added.

Ruth's suppressed anger blazed up in the sudden way which before now

had disconcerted her brother.

"Bailey, what do you mean by coming here and saying this sort of thing?

You're becoming a perfect old woman. You spend your whole time prying

into other people's affairs. I'm sorry for Sybil."

Bailey cast one reproachable look at her and left the room with pained

dignity. Something seemed to tell him that no good could come to him

from a prolongation of the interview. Ruth, in this mood, always had

been too much for him, and always would be. Well, he had done his duty

as far as he was concerned. It now remained to do the same by Kirk.

He hailed a taxi and drove to the studio.

Kirk was busy and not anxious for conversation, least of all with

Bailey. He had not forgotten their last tete-a-tete.

Bailey, however, was regarding him with a feeling almost of

friendliness. They were bound together by a common grievance against

Basil Milbank.

"I came here, Winfield," he said, after a few moments of awkward

conversation on neutral topics, "because I understand that this man

Milbank has invited Ruth to join his yacht party."

"What yacht party?"

"This man Milbank is taking a party for a cruise shortly in his yacht."

"Who is Milbank?"

"Surely you have met him? Yes, he was at my house one night when you

and Ruth dined there shortly after your return."

"I don't remember him. However, it doesn't matter. But why does the

fact that he has asked Ruth on his yacht excite you? Are you nervous

about the sea?"

"I dislike this man Milbank very much, Winfield. I think Ruth sees too

much of him."

Kirk stiffened. His eyebrows rose the fraction of an inch.

"Oh?" he said.

It seemed to Bailey for an instant that he had been talking all his

life to people who raised their eyebrows and said "Oh!" but he

continued manfully.

"I do not think that Ruth should know him, Winfield."

"Wouldn't Ruth be rather a good judge of that?"

His tone nettled Bailey, but the man conscious of doing his duty

acquires an artificial thickness of skin, and he controlled himself.

But he had lost that feeling of friendliness, of sympathy with a

brother in misfortune which he had brought in with him.

"I disagree with you entirely," he said.

"Another thing," went on Kirk. "If this man Milbank, I still can't

place him, is such a thug, or whatever it is that he happens to be, how

did he come to be at your house the night you say I met him?"

Bailey winced. He wished the world was not perpetually reminding him

that Basil and Sybil were on speaking terms.

"Sybil invited him. I may say he has asked Sybil to make one of the

yacht party. I absolutely forbade it."

"But, Heavens! What's wrong with the man?"

"He has a bad reputation."

"Has he, indeed!"

"And I wish my wife to associate with him as little as possible. And I

should advise you to forbid Ruth to see more of him than she can help."

Kirk laughed. The idea struck him as comic.

"My good man, I don't forbid Ruth to do things."

Bailey, objecting to being called any one's good man, especially

Kirk's, permitted his temper to get the better of him.

"Then you should," he snapped. "I have no wish to quarrel with you. I

came in here in a friendly spirit to warn you; but I must say that for

a man who married a girl, as you married Ruth, in direct opposition to

the wishes of her family, you take a curious view of your obligations.

Ruth has always been a headstrong, impulsive girl, and it is for you to

see that she is protected from herself. If you are indifferent to her

welfare, then all I can say is that you should not have married her.

You appear to think otherwise. Good afternoon."

He stalked out of the studio, leaving Kirk uncomfortably conscious that

he had had the worst of the argument. Bailey had been officious, no

doubt, and his pompous mode of expression was not soothing, but there

was no doubt that he had had right on his side.

Marrying Ruth did not involve obligations. He had never considered her

in that light, but perhaps she was a girl who had to be protected from

herself. She was certainly impulsive. Bailey had been right there, if

nowhere else.

Who was this fellow Milbank who had sprung suddenly from nowhere into

the position of a menace? What were Ruth's feelings toward him? Kirk

threw his mind back to the dinner-party at Bailey's and tried to place

him.

Was it the man, yes, he had it now. It was the man with the wave of

hair over his forehead, the fellow who looked like a poet. Memory came

to him with a rush. He recalled his instinctive dislike for the fellow.

So that was Milbank, was it? He got up and put away his brushes. There

would be no more work for him that afternoon.

He walked slowly home. The heat of the day had grown steadily more

oppressive. It was one of those airless, stifling afternoons which

afflict New York in the summer. He remembered seeing something about a

record in the evening paper which he had bought on his way to the

studio, a whole column about heat and humidity. It certainly felt

unusually warm even for New York.

It was one of those days when nerves are strained, when molehills

become mountains, and mountains are all Everests. He had felt it when

he talked with Ruth about Bill and the squirrels, and he felt it now.

He was conscious of being extraordinarily irritated, not so much with

any particular person as with the world in general. The very vagueness

of Bailey's insinuations against Basil Milbank increased his

resentment.

What a pompous ass Bailey was! What a fool he had been to give Bailey

such a chance of snubbing him! What an extraordinarily futile and

unpleasant world it was altogether!

He braced himself with an effort. It was this heat which was making him

magnify trifles. Bailey was a fool. Probably there was nothing whatever

wrong with this fellow Milbank. Probably he had some personal objection

to the man, and that was all.

And yet the image of Basil which had come back to his mind was not

reassuring. He had mistrusted him that night, and he mistrusted him

now.

What should he do? Ruth was not Sybil. She was not the sort of woman a

man could forbid to do things. It would require tact to induce her to

refuse Basil's invitation.

As he reached the door an idea came to him, so simple that he wondered

that it had not occurred to him before. It was, perhaps, an echo of his

conversation with Steve.

He would get Ruth to come away with him to the shack in the Connecticut

woods. As he dwelt on the idea the heat of the day seemed to become

less oppressive and his heart leaped. How cool and pleasant it would be

out there! They would take Bill with them and live the simple life

again, in the country this time instead of in town. Perhaps out there,

far away from the over-crowded city, he and Ruth would be able to come

to an understanding and bridge over that ghastly gulf.

As for his work, he could do that as well in the woods as in New York.

And, anyhow, he had earned a vacation. For days Mr. Penway had been

hinting that the time had arrived for a folding of the hands.

Mr. Penway's views on New York and its record humidity were strong and

crisply expressed. His idea, he told Kirk, was that some sport with a

heart should loan him a couple of hundred bucks and let him beat it to

the seashore before he melted.

In the drawing-room Ruth was playing the piano softly, as she had done

so often at the studio. Kirk went to her and kissed her. A marked

coolness in her reception of the kiss increased the feeling of

nervousness which he had felt at the sight of her. It came back to him

that they had parted that afternoon, for the first time, on definitely

hostile terms.

He decided to ignore the fact. Something told him that Ruth had not

forgotten, but it might be that cheerfulness now would blot out the

resentment of past irritability.

But in his embarrassment he was more than cheerful. As Steve had been

on the occasion of his visit to old John Bannister, he was breezy,

breezy with an effort that was as painful to Ruth as it was to himself,

breezy with a horrible musical comedy breeziness.

He could have adopted no more fatal tone with Ruth at that moment. All

the afternoon she had been a complicated tangle of fretted nerves. Her

quarrel with Kirk, Bailey's visit, a conscience that would not lie down

and go to sleep at her orders, but insisted on running riot, all these

things had unfitted her to bear up amiably under sudden, self-conscious

breeziness.

And the heat of the day, charged now with the oppressiveness of

long-overdue thunder, completed her mood. When Kirk came in and began

to speak, the softest notes of the human voice would have jarred upon

her. And Kirk, in his nervousness, was almost shouting.

His voice rang through the room, and Ruth winced away from it like a

stricken thing. From out of the hell of nerves and heat and interfering

brothers there materialized itself, as she sat there, a very vivid

hatred of Kirk.

Kirk, meanwhile, uneasy, but a little guessing at the fury behind

Ruth's calm face, was expounding his great scheme, his panacea for all

the ills of domestic misunderstandings and parted lives.

"Ruth, old girl."

Ruth shuddered.

"Ruth, old girl, I've had a bully good idea. It's getting too warm for

anything in New York. Did you ever feel anything like it is to-day? Why

shouldn't you and I pop down to the shack and camp out there for a week

or so? And we would take Bill with us. Just we three, with somebody to

do the cooking. It would be great. What do you say?"

What Ruth said languidly was: "It's quite impossible."

It was damping; but Kirk felt that at all costs he must refuse to be

damped. He clutched at his cheerfulness and held it.

"Nonsense," he retorted. "Why is it impossible? It's a great idea."

Ruth half hid a yawn. She knew she was behaving abominably, and she was

glad of it.

"It's impossible as far as I'm concerned. I have a hundred things to do

before I can leave New York."

"Well, I could do with a day or two to clear up a few bits of work I

have on hand. Why couldn't we start this day week?"

"It is out of the question for me. About then I shall be on Mr.

Milbank's yacht. He has invited me to join his party. The actual day is

not settled, but it will be in about a week's time."

"Oh!" said Kirk.

Ruth said nothing.

"Have you accepted the invitation?"

"I have not actually answered his letter. I was just going to when you

came in."

"But you mean to accept it?"

"Certainly. Several of my friends will be there. Sybil for one."

"Not Sybil."

"Oh, I know Bailey has made some ridiculous objection to her going, but

I mean to persuade her."

Kirk did not answer. She looked at him steadily.

"So Bailey did call on you this afternoon? He told me he was going to,

but I hoped he would think better of it. But apparently there are no

limits to Bailey's stupidity."

"Yes, Bailey came to the studio. He seemed troubled about this yacht

party."

"Did he advise you to forbid me to go?"

"Well, yes; he did."

"And now you have come to do it?"

"Not at all. I told Bailey that you were not the sort of woman one

forbade to do things."

"I'm not."

There was a pause.

"All the same, I wish you wouldn't go."

Ruth did not answer.

"It would be very jolly out at the shack."

Ruth shuddered elaborately and gave a little laugh.

"Would it? It's rather a question of taste. Personally, I can't imagine

anything more depressing and uncomfortable than being cooped up in a

draughty frame house miles away from anywhere. There's no reason why

you should not go, though, if you like that sort of thing. Of course,

you must not take Bill."

"Why not?"

Kirk spoke calmly enough, but he was very near the breaking point. All

his good resolutions had vanished under the acid of Ruth's manner.

"I couldn't let him rough it like that. Aunt Lora would have a fit."

Conditions being favourable, it only needs a spark to explode a powder

magazine; and there are moments when a word can turn an outwardly calm

and patient man into a raging maniac. This introduction of Mrs.

Porter's name into the discussion at this particular point broke down

the last remnants of Kirk's self-control.

For a few seconds his fury so mastered him that he could not speak.

Then, suddenly, the storm passed and he found himself cool and

venomous. He looked at Ruth curiously. It seemed incredible to him that

he had ever loved her.

"We had better get this settled," he said in a hard, quiet voice.

Ruth started. She had never heard him speak like this before. She had

not imagined him capable of speaking in that way. Even in the days

when she had loved him most she had never looked up to him. She had

considered his nature weak, and she had loved his weakness. Except

in the case of her father, she had always dominated the persons with

whom she mixed; and she had taken it for granted that her will was

stronger than Kirk's. Something in his voice now told her that she had

under-estimated him.

"Get what settled?" she asked, and was furious with herself because her

voice shook.

"Is Mrs. Porter the mother of the child, or are you? What has Mrs.

Porter to do with it? Why should I ask her permission? How does it

happen to be any business of Mrs. Porter's at all?"

Ruth felt baffled. He was giving her no chance to take the offensive.

There was nothing in his tone which she could openly resent. He was not

shouting at her, he was speaking quietly. There was nothing for her to

do but answer the question, and she knew that her answer would give him

another point in the contest. Even as she spoke she knew that her words

were ridiculous.

"Aunt Lora has been wonderful with him. No child could have been better

looked after."

"I know she has used him as a vehicle for her particular form of

insanity, but that's not the point. What I am asking is why she was

introduced at all."

"I told you. When you were away, Bill nearly......"

"Died. I know. I'm not forgetting that. And naturally for a time you

were frightened. It is just possible that for the moment you lost your

head and honestly thought that Mrs. Porter's methods were the only

chance for him. But that state of mind could not last all the time with

you. You are not a crank like your aunt. You are a perfectly sensible,

level-headed woman. And you must have seen the idiocy of it all long

before I came back. Why did you let it go on?"

Ruth did not answer.

"I will tell you why. Because it saved you trouble. Because it gave you

more leisure for the sort of futile waste of time which seems to be the

only thing you care for nowadays. Don't trouble to deny it. Do you

think I haven't seen in these last few months that Bill bores you to

death? Oh, I know you always have some perfect excuse for keeping away

from him. It's too much trouble for you to be a mother to him, so you

hedge with your conscience by letting Mrs. Porter pamper him and

sterilize his toys and all the rest of it, and try to make yourself

think that you have done your duty to him. You know that, as far as

everything goes that matters, any tenement child is better off than

Bill."

"I......"

"You had better let me finish what I have got to say. I will be as

brief as I can. That is my case as regards Bill. Now about myself. What

do you think I am made of? I've stood it just as long as I could; you

have tried me too hard. I'm through. Heaven knows why it should have

come to this. It is not so very long ago that Bill was half the world

to you and I was the other half. Now, apparently, there is not room in

your world for either of us."

Ruth had risen. She was trembling.

"I think we had better end this."

He broke in on her words.

"End it? Yes, you're right. One way or the other. Either go back to the

old life or start a new one. What we are living now is a horrible

burlesque."

"What do you mean? How start a new life?"

"I mean exactly what I say. In the life you are living now I am an

anachronism. I'm a survival. I'm out of date and in the way. You would

be freer without me."

"That's absurd."

"Is the idea so novel? Is our marriage the only failure in New York?"

"Do you mean that we ought to separate?"

"Only a little more, a very little more, than we are separated now.

Never see each other again instead of seeing each other for a few

minutes every day. It's not a very big step to take."

Ruth sat down and rested her chin on her hand, staring at nothing. Kirk

went to the window and looked out.

Over the park the sky was black. In the room behind him the light had

faded till it seemed as if night were come. The air was heavy and

stifling. A flicker of lightning came and went in the darkness over the

trees.

He turned abruptly.

"It is the only reasonable thing to do. Our present mode of life is a

farce. We are drifting farther apart every day. Perhaps I have changed.

I know you have. We are two strangers chained together. We have made a

muddle of it, and the best thing we can do is to admit it.

"I am no good to you. I have no part in your present life. You're the

queen and I'm just the prince consort, the fellow who happens to be

Mrs. Winfield's husband. It's not a pleasant part to have to play, and

I have had enough of it. We had better separate before we hate each

other. You have your amusements. I have my work. We can continue them

apart. We shall both be better off."

He stopped. Ruth did not speak. She was still sitting in the same

attitude. It was too dark to see her face. It formed a little splash of

white in the dusk. She did not move.

Kirk went to the door.

"I'm going up to say good-bye to Bill. Have you anything to say against

that? And I shall say good-bye to him in my own way."

She made no sign that she had heard him.

"Good-bye," he said again.

The door closed.

Up in the nursery Bill crooned to himself as he played on the floor.

Mamie sat in a chair, sewing. The opening of the door caused them to

look up simultaneously.

"Hello," said Bill.

His voice was cordial without being enthusiastic. He was glad to see

Kirk, but tin soldiers were tin soldiers and demanded concentrated

attention. When you are in the middle of intricate manoeuvres you

cannot allow yourself to be more than momentarily distracted by

anything.

"Mamie," said Kirk hoarsely, "go out for a minute, will you? I shan't

be long."

Mamie obediently departed. Later, when Keggs was spreading the news of

Kirk's departure in the servants' hall, she remembered that his manner

had struck her as strange.

Kirk sat down in the chair she had left and looked at Bill. He felt

choked. There was a mist before his eyes.

"Bill."

The child, absorbed in his game, did not look up.

"Bill, old man, come here a minute. I've something to say."

Bill looked up, nodded, moved a couple of soldiers, and got up. He came

to Kirk's side. His chosen mode of progression at this time was a kind

of lurch. He was accustomed to breathe heavily during the journey, and

on arrival at the terminus usually shouted triumphantly.

Kirk put an arm round him. Bill stared gravely up into his face. There

was a silence. From outside came a sudden rumbling crash. Bill jumped.

"Funder," he said in a voice that shook a little.

"Not afraid of thunder, are you?" said Kirk.

Bill shook his head stoutly.

"Bill."

"Yes, daddy?"

Kirk fought to keep his voice steady.

"Bill, old man, I'm afraid you won't see me again for some time. I'm

going away."

"In a ship?"

"No, not in a ship."

"In a train?"

"Perhaps."

"Take me with you, daddy."

"I'm afraid I can't, Bill."

"Shan't I ever see you again?"

Kirk winced. How direct children are! What was it they called it in the

papers? "The custody of the child." How little it said and how much it

meant!

The sight of Bill's wide eyes and quivering mouth reminded him that he

was not the only person involved in the tragedy of those five words. He

pulled himself together. Bill was waiting anxiously for an answer to

his question. There was no need to make Bill unhappy before his time.

"Of course you will," he said, trying to make his voice cheerful.

"Of course I will," echoed Bill dutifully.

Kirk could not trust himself to speak again. The old sensation of

choking had come back to him. The room was a blur.

He caught Bill to him in a grip that made the child cry out, held him

for a long minute, then put him gently down and made blindly for the

door.

The storm had burst by the time Kirk found himself in the street. The

thunder crashed and great spears of lightning flashed across the sky. A

few heavy drops heralded the approach of the rain, and before he had

reached the corner it was beating down in torrents.

He walked on, raising his face to the storm, finding in it a curious

relief. A magical coolness had crept into the air, and with it a

strange calm into his troubled mind. He looked back at the scene

through which he had passed as at something infinitely remote. He could

not realize distinctly what had happened. He was only aware that

everything was over, that with a few words he had broken his life into

small pieces. Too impatient to unravel the tangled knot, he had cut it,

and nothing could mend it now.

"Why?"

The rain had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The sun was struggling

through a mass of thin cloud over the park. The world was full of the

drip and rush of water. All that had made the day oppressive and

strained nerves to breaking point had gone, leaving peace behind. Kirk

felt like one waking from an evil dream.

"Why did it happen?" he asked himself. "What made me do it?"

A distant rumble of thunder answered the question.

Chapter VIII Steve to the Rescue

It is an unfortunate fact that, when a powder-magazine explodes, the

damage is not confined to the person who struck the match, but extends

to the innocent bystanders. In the present case it was Steve Dingle who

sustained the worst injuries.

Of the others who might have been affected, Mrs. Lora Delane Porter was

bomb-proof. No explosion in her neighbourhood could shake her. She

received the news of Kirk's outbreak with composure. Privately, in her

eugenic heart, she considered his presence superfluous now that William

Bannister was safely launched upon his career.

In the drama of which she was the self-appointed stage-director, Kirk

was a mere super supporting the infant star. Her great mind, occupied

almost entirely by the past and the future, took little account of the

present. So long as Kirk did not interfere with her management of Bill,

he was at liberty, so far as she was concerned, to come or go as he

pleased.

Steve could not imitate her admirable detachment. He was a poor

philosopher, and all that his mind could grasp was that Kirk was in

trouble and that Ruth had apparently gone mad.

The affair did not come to his ears immediately. He visited the studio

at frequent intervals and found Kirk there, working hard and showing no

signs of having passed through a crisis which had wrecked his life. He

was quiet, it is true, but then he was apt to be quiet nowadays.

Probably, if it had not been for Keggs, he would have been kept in

ignorance of what had happened for a time.

Walking one evening up Broadway, he met Keggs taking the air and

observing the night-life of New York like himself.

Keggs greeted Steve with enthusiasm. He liked Steve, and it was just

possible that Steve might not have heard about the great upheaval. He

suggested a drink at a neighbouring saloon.

"We have not seen you at our house lately, Mr. Dingle," he remarked,