The Flirt

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THE FLIRT

BY BOOTH TARKINGTON

To SUSANAH

THE FLIRT

CHAPTER ONE

Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoon of that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white serge which attracted a little attention from those observers who were able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women’s clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this very day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the Park Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor took some note of the alien garment.

Mr. Corliss, treading for the first time in seventeen years the pavements of this namesake of his grandfather, mildly repaid its interest in himself. The street, once the most peaceful in the world, he thought, had changed. It was still long and straight, still shaded by trees so noble that they were betrothed, here and there, high over the wide white roadway, the shimmering tunnels thus contrived shot with gold and blue; but its pristine complete restfulness was departed: gasoline had arrived, and a pedestrian, even this August day of heat, must glance two ways before crossing.

Architectural transformations, as vital, staggered the returned native. In his boyhood that posthumously libelled sovereign lady, Anne, had terribly prevailed among the dwellings on this highway; now, however, there was little left of the jig-saw’s hare-brained ministrations; but the growing pains of the adolescent city had wrought some madness here. There had been a revolution which was a riot; and, plainly incited by a new outbreak of the colonies, the Goth, the Tudor, and the Tuscan had harried the upper reaches to a turmoil attaining its climax in a howl or two from the Spanish Moor.

Yet it was a pleasant street in spite of its improvements; in spite, too, of a long, gray smoke-plume crossing the summer sky and dropping an occasional atomy of coal upon Mr. Corliss’s white coat. The green continuous masses of tree-foliage, lawn, and shrubbery were splendidly asserted; there was a faint wholesome odour from the fine block pavement of the roadway, white, save where the snailish water-wagon laid its long strips of steaming brown. Locusts, serenaders of the heat, invisible among the branches, rasped their interminable cadences, competing bitterly with the monotonous chattering of lawn-mowers propelled by glistening black men over the level swards beneath. And though porch and terrace were left to vacant wicker chairs and swinging-seats, and to flowers and plants in jars and green boxes, and the people sat unseen—and, it might be guessed, unclad for exhibition, in the dimmer recesses of their houses—nevertheless, a summery girl under an alluring parasol now and then prettily trod the sidewalks, and did not altogether suppress an ample consciousness of the white pedestrian’s stalwart grace; nor was his quick glance too distressingly modest to be aware of these faint but attractive perturbations.

A few of the oldest houses remained as he remembered them, and there were two or three relics of mansard and cupola days; but the herd of cast-iron deer that once guarded these lawns, standing sentinel to all true gentry: Whither were they fled? In his boyhood, one specimen betokened a family of position and affluence; two, one on each side of the front walk, spoke of a noble opulence; two and a fountain were overwhelming. He wondered in what obscure thickets that once proud herd now grazed; and then he smiled, as through a leafy opening of shrubbery he caught a glimpse of a last survivor, still loyally alert, the haughty head thrown back in everlasting challenge and one foreleg lifted, standing in a vast and shadowy backyard with a clothesline fastened to its antlers.

Mr. Corliss remembered that backyard very well: it was an old battlefield whereon he had conquered; and he wondered if “the Lindley boys” still lived there, and if Richard Lindley would hate him now as implacably as then.

A hundred yards farther on, he paused before a house more familiar to him than any other, and gave it a moment’s whimsical attention, without emotion.

It was a shabby old brick structure, and it stood among the gayest, the most flamboyant dwellings of all Corliss Street like a bewildered tramp surrounded by carnival maskers. It held place full in the course of the fury for demolition and rebuilding, but remained unaltered—even unrepaired, one might have thought—since the early seventies, when it was built. There was a sagging cornice, and the nauseous brown which the walls had years ago been painted was sooted to a repellent dinge, so cracked and peeled that the haggard red bricks were exposed, like a beggar through the holes in his coat. It was one of those houses which are large without being commodious; its very tall, very narrow windows, with their attenuated, rusty inside shutters, boasting to the passerby of high ceilings but betraying the miserly floor spaces. At each side of the front door was a high and cramped bay-window, one of them insanely culminating in a little six-sided tower of slate, and both of them girdled above the basement windows by a narrow porch, which ran across the front of the house and gave access to the shallow vestibule. However, a pleasant circumstance modified the gloom of this edifice and assured it a remnant of reserve and dignity in its ill-considered old age: it stood back a fine hundred feet from the highway, and was shielded in part by a friendly group of maple trees and one glorious elm, hoary, robust, and majestic, a veteran of the days when this was forest ground.

Mr. Corliss concluded his momentary pause by walking up the broken cement path, which was hard beset by plantain-weed and the long grass of the ill-kept lawn. Ascending the steps, he was assailed by an odour as of vehement bananas, a diffusion from some painful little chairs standing in the long, high, dim, rather sorrowful hall disclosed beyond the open double doors. They were stiff little chairs of an inconsequent, mongrel pattern; armless, with perforated wooden seats; legs tortured by the lathe to a semblance of buttons strung on a rod; and they had that day received a streaky coat of a gilding preparation which exhaled the olfactory vehemence mentioned. Their present station was temporary, their purpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were doing some incidental gilding on their own account, leaving blots and splashes and sporadic little round footprints on the hardwood floor.

The old-fashioned brass bell-handle upon the caller’s right drooped from its socket in a dead fag, but after comprehensive manipulation on the part of the young man, and equal complaint on its own, it was constrained to permit a dim tinkle remotely. Somewhere in the interior a woman’s voice, not young, sang a repeated fragment of “Lead, Kindly Light,” to the accompaniment of a flapping dust-cloth, sounds which ceased upon a second successful encounter with the bell. Ensued a silence, probably to be interpreted as a period of whispered consultation out of range; a younger voice called softly and urgently, “Laura!” and a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of something over twenty made her appearance to Mr. Corliss.

At sight of her he instantly restored a thin gold card-case to the pocket whence he was in the act of removing it. She looked at him with only grave, impersonal inquiry; no appreciative invoice of him was to be detected in her quiet eyes, which may have surprised him, possibly the more because he was aware there was plenty of appreciation in his own kindling glance. She was very white and black, this lady. Tall, trim, clear, she looked cool in spite of the black winter skirt she wore, an effect helped somewhat, perhaps, by the crisp freshness of her white waist, with its masculine collar and slim black tie, and undoubtedly by the even and lustreless light ivory of her skin, against which the strong black eyebrows and undulated black hair were lined with attractive precision; but, most of all, that coolness was the emanation of her undisturbed and tranquil eyes. They were not phlegmatic: a continuing spark glowed far within them, not ardently, but steadily and inscrutably, like the fixed stars in winter.

Mr. Valentine Corliss, of Paris and Naples, removed his white-ribboned straw hat and bowed as no one had ever bowed in that doorway. This most vivid salutation—accomplished by adding something to a rather quick inclination of the body from the hips, with the back and neck held straight expressed deference without affecting or inviting cordiality. It was an elaborate little formality of a kind fancifully called “foreign,” and evidently habitual to the performer.

It produced no outward effect upon the recipient. Such self-control is unusual.

“Is Mr. Madison at home? My name is Valentine Corliss.”

“He is at home.” She indicated an open doorway upon her right. “Will you wait in there?”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Corliss, passing within. “I shall be–-” He left the sentence unfinished, for he was already alone, and at liberty to reflect upon the extraordinary coolness of this cool young woman.

The room, with its closed blinds, was soothingly dark after the riotous sun without, a grateful obscurity which was one of two attractions discovered in it by Mr. Corliss while he waited. It was a depressing little chamber, disproportionately high, uncheered by seven chairs (each of a different family, but all belonging to the same knobby species, and all upholstered a repellent blue), a scratched “inlaid table,” likewise knobby, and a dangerous looking small sofa—turbulent furniture, warmly harmonious, however, in a common challenge to the visitor to take comfort in any of it. A once-gilt gas chandelier hung from the distant ceiling, with three globes of frosted glass, but undeniable evidence that five were intended; and two of the three had been severely bitten. There was a hostile little coal-grate, making a mouth under a mantel of imitation black marble, behind an old blue-satin fire-screen upon which red cat-tails and an owl over a pond had been roughly embroidered in high relief, this owl motive being the inspiration of innumerable other owls reflected in innumerable other ponds in the formerly silver moonlight with which the walls were papered. Corliss thought he remembered that in his boyhood, when it was known as “the parlour” (though he guessed that the Madison family called it “the reception room,” now) this was the place where his aunt received callers who, she justifiably hoped, would not linger. Altogether, it struck him that it might be a good test-room for an alienist: no incipient lunacy would remain incipient here.

There was one incongruity which surprised him—a wicker waste-paper basket, so nonsensically out of place in this arid cell, where not the wildest hare-brain could picture any one coming to read or write, that he bestowed upon it a particular, frowning attention, and so discovered the second attractive possession of the room. A fresh and lovely pink rose, just opening full from the bud, lay in the bottom of the basket.

There was a rustling somewhere in the house and a murmur, above which a boy’s voice became audible in emphatic but undistinguishable complaint. A whispering followed, and a woman exclaimed protestingly, “Cora!” And then a startlingly pretty girl came carelessly into the room through the open door.

She was humming “Quand I’ Amour Meurt” in a gay preoccupation, and evidently sought something upon the table in the centre of the room, for she continued her progress toward it several steps before realizing the presence of a visitor. She was a year or so younger than the girl who had admitted him, fairer and obviously more plastic, more expressive, more perishable, a great deal more insistently feminine; though it was to be seen that they were sisters. This one had eyes almost as dark as the other’s, but these were not cool; they were sweet, unrestful, and seeking; brilliant with a vivacious hunger: and not Diana but huntresses more ardent have such eyes. Her hair was much lighter than her sister’s; it was the colour of dry corn-silk in the sun; and she was the shorter by a head, rounder everywhere and not so slender; but no dumpling: she was exquisitely made. There was a softness about her: something of velvet, nothing of mush. She diffused with her entrance a radiance of gayety and of gentleness; sunlight ran with her. She seemed the incarnation of a caressing smile.

She was point-device. Her close, white skirt hung from a plainly embroidered white waist to a silken instep; and from the crown of her charming head to the tall heels of her graceful white suede slippers, heels of a sweeter curve than the waist of a violin, she was as modern and lovely as this dingy old house was belated and hideous.

Mr. Valentine Corliss spared the fraction of a second for another glance at the rose in the waste-basket.

The girl saw him before she reached the table, gave a little gasp of surprise, and halted with one hand carried prettily to her breast.

“Oh!” she said impulsively; “I BEG your pardon. I didn’t know there was–- I was looking for a book I thought I–-“

She stopped, whelmed with a breath-taking shyness, her eyes, after one quick but condensed encounter with those of Mr. Corliss, falling beneath exquisite lashes. Her voice was one to stir all men: it needs not many words for a supremely beautiful “speaking-voice” to be recognized for what it is; and this girl’s was like herself, hauntingly lovely. The intelligent young man immediately realized that no one who heard it could ever forget it.

“I see,” she faltered, turning to leave the room; “it isn’t here—the book.”

“There’s something else of yours here,” said Corliss.

“Is there?” She paused, hesitating at the door, looking at him over her shoulder uncertainly.

“You dropped this rose.” He lifted the rose from the waste-basket and repeated the bow he had made at the front door. This time it was not altogether wasted.

“I?”

“Yes. You lost it. It belongs to you.”

“Yes—it does. How curious!” she said slowly. “How curious it happened to be THERE!” She stepped to take it from him, her eyes upon his in charming astonishment. “And how odd that–-” She stopped; then said quickly:

“How did you know it was MY rose?”

“Any one would know!”

Her expression of surprise was instantaneously merged in a flash of honest pleasure and admiration, such as only an artist may feel in the presence of a little masterpiece by a fellow-craftsman.

Happily, anticlimax was spared them by the arrival of the person for whom the visitor had asked at the door, and the young man retained the rose in his hand.

Mr. Madison, a shapeless hillock with a large, harassed, red face, evidently suffered from the heat: his gray hair was rumpled back from a damp forehead; the sleeves of his black alpaca coat were pulled up to the elbow above his uncuffed white shirtsleeves; and he carried in one mottled hand the ruins of a palm-leaf fan, in the other a balled wet handkerchief which released an aroma of camphor upon the banana-burdened air. He bore evidences of inadequate adjustment after a disturbed siesta, but, exercising a mechanical cordiality, preceded himself into the room by a genial half-cough and a hearty, “Well-well-well,” as if wishing to indicate a spirit of polite, even excited, hospitality.

“I expected you might be turning up, after your letter,” he said, shaking hands. “Well, well, well! I remember you as a boy. Wouldn’t have known you, of course; but I expect you’ll find the town about as much changed as you are.”

With a father’s blindness to all that is really vital, he concluded his greeting inconsequently: “Oh, this is my little girl Cora.”

“Run along, little girl,” said the fat father.

His little girl’s radiant glance at the alert visitor imparted her thorough comprehension of all the old man’s absurdities, which had reached their climax in her dismissal. Her parting look, falling from Corliss’s face to the waste-basket at his feet, just touched the rose in his hand as she passed through the door.

CHAPTER TWO

Cora paused in the hall at a point about twenty feet from the door, a girlish stratagem frequently of surprising advantage to the practitioner; but the two men had begun to speak of the weather. Suffering a momentary disappointment, she went on, stepping silently, and passed through a door at the end of the hall into a large and barren looking dining-room, stiffly and skimpily furnished, but well-lighted, owing to the fact that one end of it had been transformed into a narrow “conservatory,” a glass alcove now tenanted by two dried palms and a number of vacant jars and earthen crocks.

Here her sister sat by an open window, repairing masculine underwear; and a handsome, shabby, dirty boy of about thirteen sprawled on the floor of the “conservatory” unloosing upon its innocent, cracked, old black and white tiles a ghastly family of snakes, owls, and visaged crescent moons, in orange, green, and other loathsome chalks. As Cora entered from the hall, a woman of fifty came in at a door opposite, and, a dust-cloth retained under her left arm, an unsheathed weapon ready for emergency, leaned sociably against the door-casing and continued to polish a tablespoon with a bit of powdered chamois-skin. She was tall and slightly bent; and, like the flat, old, silver spoon in her hand, seemed to have been worn thin by use; yet it was plain that the three young people in the room “got their looks” from her. Her eyes, if tired, were tolerant and fond; and her voice held its youth and something of the music of Cora’s.

“What is he like?” She addressed the daughter by the window.

“Why don’t you ask Coralie?” suggested the sprawling artist, relaxing his hideous labour. He pronounced his sister’s name with intense bitterness. He called it “Cora-LEE,” with an implication far from subtle that his sister had at some time thus Gallicized herself, presumably for masculine favour; and he was pleased to receive tribute to his satire in a flash of dislike from her lovely eyes.

“I ask Laura because it was Laura who went to the door, “Mrs. Madison answered. “I do not ask Cora because Cora hasn’t seen him. Do I satisfy you, Hedrick?”

“`Cora hasn’t seen him!’” the boy hooted mockingly. “She hasn’t? She was peeking out of the library shutters when he came up the front walk, and she wouldn’t let me go to the door; she told Laura to go, but first she took the library waste-basket and laid one o’ them roses–-“

“THOSE roses,” said Cora sharply. “He WILL hang around the neighbours’ stables. I think you ought to do something about it, mother.”

“THEM roses!” repeated Hedrick fiercely. “One o’ them roses Dick Lindley sent her this morning. Laid it in the waste-basket and sneaked it into the reception room for an excuse to go galloping in and–-“

“`Galloping’?” said Mrs. Madison gravely.

“It was a pretty bum excuse,” continued the unaffected youth, “but you bet your life you’ll never beat our Cora-LEE when there’s a person in pants on the premises! It’s sickening.” He rose, and performed something like a toe-dance, a supposed imitation of his sister’s mincing approach to the visitor. “Oh, dear, I am such a little sweety! Here I am all alone just reeking with Browning-and-Tennyson and thinking to myself about such lovely things, and walking around looking for my nice, pretty rose. Where can it be? Oh heavens, Mister, are YOU here? Oh my, I never, never thought that there was a MAN here! How you frighten me! See what a shy little thing I am? You DO SEE, DON’T you, old sweeticums? Ta, ta, here’s papa. Remember me by that rose, ‘cause it’s just like me. Me and it’s twins, you see, cutie-sugar!” The diabolical boy then concluded with a reversion to the severity of his own manner: “If she was MY daughter I’d whip her!”

His indignation was left in the air, for the three ladies had instinctively united against him, treacherously including his private feud in the sex-war of the ages: Cora jumped lightly upon the table and sat whistling and polishing the nails of one hand upon the palm of another; Laura continued to sew without looking up, and Mrs. Madison, conquering a tendency to laugh, preserved a serene countenance and said ruminatively:

“They were all rather queer, the Corlisses.”

Hedrick stared incredulously, baffled; but men must expect these things, and this was no doubt a helpful item in his education.

“I wonder if he wants to sell the house, said Mrs. Madison.

“I wish he would. Anything that would make father get out of it!” Cora exclaimed. “I hope Mr. Corliss will burn it if he doesn’t sell it.”

“He might want to live here himself.”

“He!” Cora emitted a derisive outcry.

Her mother gave her a quick, odd look, in which there was a real alarm. “What is he like, Cora?”

“Awfully foreign and distinguished!”

This brought Hedrick to confront her with a leap as of some wild animal under a lash. He landed close to her; his face awful.

“Princely, I should call him,” said Cora, her enthusiasm undaunted. “Distinctly princely!”

“Princely,” moaned Hedrick. “Pe-rin-sley!”

“Hedrick!” Mrs. Madison reproved him automatically. “In what way is he `foreign,’ Cora?”

“Oh, every way.” Cora let her glance rest dreamily upon the goaded boy. “He has a splendid head set upon a magnificent torso–-“

“TORSO!” Hedrick whispered hoarsely.

“Tall, a glorious figure—like a young guardsman’s.” Madness was gathering in her brother’s eyes; and observing it with quiet pleasure, she added: “One sees immediately he has the grand manner, the bel air.”

Hedrick exploded. “`BEL AIR’!” he screamed, and began to jump up and down, tossing his arms frantically, and gasping with emotion. “Oh, bel air! Oh, blah! `Henry Esmond!’ Been readin’ `Henry Esmond!’ Oh, you be-yoo-tiful Cora-Beatrix-a-LEE! Magganifisent torso! GullO-rious figgi-your! Bel air! Oh, slush! Oh, luv-a-ly slush!” He cast himself convulsively upon the floor, full length. “Luv-a-ly, LUV-a-ly slush!”

“He is thirty, I should say,” continued Cora, thoughtfully. “Yes—about thirty. A strong, keen face, rather tanned. He’s between fair and dark–-“

Hedrick raised himself to the attitude of the “Dying Gaul.” “And with `hair slightly silvered at the temples!’ AIN’T his hair slightly silvered at the temples?” he cried imploringly. “Oh, sister, in pity’s name let his hair be slightly silvered at the temples? Only three grains of corn, your Grace; my children are starving!”

He collapsed again, laid his face upon his extended arms, and writhed.

“He has rather wonderful eyes,” said Cora. “They seem to look right through you.”

“Slush, slush, luv-a-ly slush,” came in muffled tones from the floor.

“And he wears his clothes so well—so differently! You feel at once that he’s not a person, but a personage.”

Hedrick sat up, his eyes closed, his features contorted as with agony, and chanted, impromptu:

“Slush, slush, luv-a-ly, slush!

Le’ss all go a-swimmin’ in a dollar’s worth o’ mush.

Slush in the morning, slush at night,

If I don’t get my slush I’m bound to get tight!”

“Hedrick!” said his mother.

“Altogether I should say that Mr. Valentine Corliss looks as if he lived up to his name,” Cora went on tranquilly. “Valentine Corliss of Corliss Street—I think I rather like the sound of that name.” She let her beautiful voice linger upon it, caressingly. “Valentine Corliss.”

Hedrick opened his eyes, allowed his countenance to resume its ordinary proportions, and spoke another name slowly and with honeyed thoughtfulness:

“Ray Vilas.”

This was the shot that told. Cora sprang down from the table with an exclamation.

Hedrick, subduing elation, added gently, in a mournful whisper:

“POOR old Dick Lindley!”

His efforts to sting his sister were completely successful at last: Cora was visibly agitated, and appealed hotly to her mother. “Am I to bear this kind of thing all my life? Aren’t you EVER going to punish his insolence?”

“Hedrick, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison sadly.

Cora turned to the girl by the window with a pathetic gesture. “Laura–-” she said, and hesitated.

Laura Madison looked up into her sister’s troubled eyes.

“I feel so morbid,” said Cora, flushing a little and glancing away. “I wish–-” She stopped.

The silent Laura set aside her work, rose and went out of the room. Her cheeks, too, had reddened faintly, a circumstance sharply noted by the terrible boy. He sat where he was, asprawl, propped by his arms behind him, watching with acute concentration the injured departure of Cora, following her sister. At the door, Cora, without pausing, threw him a look over her shoulder: a full-eyed shot of frankest hatred.

A few moments later, magnificent chords sounded through the house. The piano was old, but tuned to the middle of the note, and the keys were swept by a master hand. The wires were not hammered; they were touched knowingly as by the player’s own fingers, and so they sang—and from out among the chords there stole an errant melody. This was not “piano-playing” and not a pianist’s triumphant nimbleness—it was music. Art is the language of a heart that knows how to speak, and a heart that knew how was speaking here. What it told was something immeasurably wistful, something that might have welled up in the breast of a young girl standing at twilight in an April orchard. It was the inexpressible made into sound, an improvisation by a master player.

“You hear what she’s up to?” said Hedrick, turning his head at last. But his mother had departed.

He again extended himself flat upon the floor, face downward, this time as a necessary preliminary to rising after a manner of his own invention. Mysteriously he became higher in the middle, his body slowly forming first a round and then a pointed arch, with forehead, knees, and elbows touching the floor. A brilliantly executed manoeuvre closed his Gothic period, set him upright and upon his feet; then, without ostentation, he proceeded to the kitchen, where he found his mother polishing a sugar-bowl.

He challenged her with a damnatory gesture in the direction of the music. “You hear what Cora’s up to? ”

Mrs. Madison’s expression was disturbed; she gave her son a look almost of appeal, and said, gently:

“I believe there’s nothing precisely criminal in her getting Laura to play for her. Laura’s playing always soothes her when she feels out of sorts—and—you weren’t very considerate of her, Hedrick. You upset her.”

“Mentioning Ray Vilas, you mean?” he demanded.

“You weren’t kind.”

“She deserves it. Look at her! YOU know why she’s got Laura at the piano now.”

“It’s—it’s because you worried her,” his mother faltered evasively. “Besides, it is very hot, and Cora isn’t as strong as she looks. She said she felt morbid and–-“

“Morbid? Blah!” interrupted the direct boy. “She’s started after this Corliss man just like she did for Vilas. If I was Dick Lindley I wouldn’t stand for Cora’s–-“

“Hedrick!” His mother checked his outburst pleadingly. “Cora has so much harder time than the other girls; they’re all so much better off. They seem to get everything they want, just by asking: nice clothes and jewellery—and automobiles. That seems to make a great difference nowadays; they all seem to have automobiles. We’re so dreadfully poor, and Cora has to struggle so for what good times she–-“

“Her?” the boy jibed bitterly. “I don’t see her doing any particular struggling.” He waved his hand in a wide gesture. “She takes it ALL!”

“There, there!” the mother said, and, as if feeling the need of placating this harsh judge, continued gently: “Cora isn’t strong, Hedrick, and she does have a hard time. Almost every one of the other girls in her set is at the seashore or somewhere having a gay summer. You don’t realize, but it’s mortifying to have to be the only one to stay at home, with everybody knowing it’s because your father can’t afford to send her. And this house is so hopeless,” Mrs. Madison went on, extending her plea hopefully; “it’s impossible to make it attractive, but Cora keeps trying and trying: she was all morning on her knees gilding those chairs for the music-room, poor child, and–-“

“`Music-room’!” sneered the boy. “Gilt chairs! All show-off! That’s all she ever thinks about. It’s all there is to Cora, just show-off, so she’ll get a string o’ fellows chasin’ after her. She’s started for this Corliss just exactly the way she did for Ray Vilas!”

“Hedrick!”

“Just look at her!” he cried vehemently. “Don’t you know she’s tryin’ to make this Corliss think it’s HER playin’ the piano right now?”

“Oh, no–-“

“Didn’t she do that with Ray Vilas?” he demanded quickly. “Wasn’t that exactly what she did the first time he ever came here—got Laura to play and made him think it was HER? Didn’t she?”

“Oh—just in fun.” Mrs. Madison’s tone lacked conviction; she turned, a little confusedly, from the glaring boy and fumbled among the silver on the kitchen table. “Besides—she told him afterward that it was Laura.”

“He walked in on her one day when she was battin’ away at the piano herself with her back to the door. Then she pretended it had been a joke, and he was so far gone by that time he didn’t care. He’s crazy, anyway,” added the youth, casually. “Who is this Corliss?”

“He owns this house. His family were early settlers and used to be very prominent, but they’re all dead except this one. His mother was a widow; she went abroad to live and took him with her when he was about your age, and I don’t think he’s ever been back since.”

“Did he use to live in this house?”

“No; an aunt of his did. She left it to him when she died, two years ago. Your father was agent for her.”

“You think this Corliss wants to sell it?”

“It’s been for sale all the time he’s owned it. That’s why we moved here; it made the rent low.”

“Is he rich?”

“They used to have money, but maybe it’s all spent. It seemed to me he might want to raise money on the house, because I don’t see any other reason that could bring him back here. He’s already mortgaged it pretty heavily, your father told me. I don’t–-” Mrs. Madison paused abruptly, her eyes widening at a dismaying thought. “Oh, I do hope your father will know better than to ask him to stay to dinner!”

Hedrick’s expression became cryptic. “Father won’t ask him,” he said. “But I’ll bet you a thousand dollars he stays!”

The mother followed her son’s thought and did not seek to elicit verbal explanation of the certainty which justified so large a venture. “Oh, I hope not,” she said. “Sarah’s threatening to leave, anyway; and she gets so cross if there’s extra cooking on wash-days.”

“Well, Sarah’ll have to get cross,” said the boy grimly; “and I‘ll have to plug out and go for a quart of brick ice-cream and carry it home in all this heat; and Laura and you’ll have to stand over the stove with Sarah; and father’ll have to change his shirt; and we’ll all have to toil and moil and sweat and suffer while Cora-lee sits out on the front porch and talks toodle-do-dums to her new duke. And then she’ll have YOU go out and kid him along while–-“

“HEDRICK!”

“Yes, you will!—while she gets herself all dressed and powdered up again. After that, she’ll do her share of the work: she’ll strain her poor back carryin’ Dick Lindley’s flowers down the back stairs and stickin’ ‘em in a vase over a hole in the tablecloth that Laura hasn’t had time to sew up. You wait and see!”

The gloomy realism of this prophecy was not without effect upon the seer’s mother. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed, protestingly. “We really can’t manage it. I’m sure Cora won’t want to ask him–-“

“You’ll see!”

“No; I’m sure she wouldn’t think of it, but if she does I’ll tell her we can’t. We really can’t, to-day.”

Her son looked pityingly upon her. “She ought to be MY daughter,” he said, the sinister implication all too plain;—“just about five minutes!”

With that, he effectively closed the interview and left her.

He returned to his abandoned art labours in the “conservatory,” and meditatively perpetrated monstrosities upon the tiles for the next half-hour, at the end of which he concealed his box of chalks, with an anxiety possibly not unwarranted, beneath the sideboard; and made his way toward the front door, first glancing, unseen, into the kitchen where his mother still pursued the silver. He walked through the hall on tiptoe, taking care to step upon the much stained and worn strip of “Turkish” carpet, and not upon the more resonant wooden floor. The music had ceased long since.

The open doorway was like a brilliantly painted picture hung upon the darkness of the hall, though its human centre of interest was no startling bit of work, consisting of Mr. Madison pottering aimlessly about the sun-flooded, unkempt lawn, fanning himself, and now and then stooping to pull up one of the thousands of plantain-weeds that beset the grass. With him the little spy had no concern; but from a part of the porch out of sight from the hall came Cora’s exquisite voice and the light and pleasant baritone of the visitor. Hedrick flattened himself in a corner just inside the door.

“I should break any engagement whatsoever if I had one,” Mr. Corliss was saying with what the eavesdropper considered an offensively “foreign” accent and an equally unjustifiable gallantry; “but of course I haven’t: I am so utterly a stranger here. Your mother is immensely hospitable to wish you to ask me, and I’ll be only too glad to stay. Perhaps after dinner you’ll be very, very kind and play again? Of course you know how remarkable such–-“

“Oh, just improvising,” Cora tossed off, carelessly, with a deprecatory ripple of laughter. “It’s purely with the mood, you see. I can’t make myself do things. No; I fancy I shall not play again today.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Shan’t I fasten that in your buttonhole for you,” said Cora.

“You see how patiently I’ve been awaiting the offer!”

There was another little silence; and the listener was able to construct a picture (possibly in part from an active memory) of Cora’s delicate hands uplifted to the gentleman’s lapel and Cora’s eyes for a moment likewise uplifted.

“Yes, one has moods,” she said, dreamily. “I am ALL moods. I think you are too, Mr. Corliss. You LOOK moody. Aren’t you?”

A horrible grin might have been seen to disfigure the shadow in the corner just within the doorway.

CHAPTER THREE

It was cooler outdoors, after dinner, in the dusk of that evening; nevertheless three members of the Madison family denied themselves the breeze, and, as by a tacitly recognized and habitual house-rule, so disposed themselves as to afford the most agreeable isolation for the younger daughter and the guest, who occupied wicker chairs upon the porch. The mother and father sat beneath a hot, gas droplight in the small “library”; Mrs. Madison with an evening newspaper, her husband with “King Solomon’s Mines”; and Laura, after crisply declining an urgent request from Hedrick to play, had disappeared upstairs. The inimical lad alone was inspired for the ungrateful role of duenna.

He sat upon the topmost of the porch steps with the air of being permanently implanted; leaning forward, elbows on knees, cheeks on palms, in a treacherous affectation of profound reverie; and his back (all of him that was plainly visible in the hall light) tauntingly close to a delicate foot which would, God wot! willingly have launched him into the darkness beyond. It was his dreadful pleasure to understand wholly the itching of that shapely silk and satin foot.

The gas-light from the hall laid a broad orange path to the steps—Cora and her companion sat just beyond it, his whiteness gray, and she a pale ethereality in the shadow. She wore an evening gown that revealed a vague lilac through white, and shimmered upon her like a vapour. She was very quiet; and there was a wan sweetness about her, an exhalation of wistfulness. Cora, in the evening, was more like a rose than ever. She was fragrant in the dusk. The spell she cast was an Undine’s: it was not to be thought so exquisite a thing as she could last. And who may know how she managed to say what she did in the silence and darkness? For it was said—without words, without touch, even without a look—as plainly as if she had spoken or written the message: “If I am a rose, I am one to be worn and borne away. Are you the man?”

With the fall of night, the street they faced had become still, save for an infrequent squawk of irritation on the part of one of the passing automobiles, gadding for the most part silently, like fireflies. But after a time a strolling trio of negroes came singing along the sidewalk.

“In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear

those banjos ringing;

In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear

those darkies singing.

How the ole folks would injoy it; they would sit

all night an’ lis-sun,

As we sang I-I-N the evening BY-Y-Y the moonlight.’

“Ah, THAT takes me back!” exclaimed Corliss. “That’s as it used to be. I might be a boy again.”

“And I suppose this old house has many memories for you?” said Cora, softly.

“Not very many. My, old-maid aunt didn’t like me overmuch, I believe; and I wasn’t here often. My mother and I lived far down the street. A big apartment-house stands there now, I noticed as I was walking out here this afternoon—the `Verema,’ it is called, absurdly enough!”

“Ray Vilas lives there,” volunteered Hedrick, not altering his position.

“Vilas?” said the visitor politely, with a casual recollection that the name had been once or twice emphasized by the youth at dinner. “I don’t remember Vilas among the old names here.”

“It wasn’t, I guess,” said Hedrick. “Ray Vilas has only been here about two years. He came from Kentucky.”

“A great friend of yours, I suppose.”

“He ain’t a boy,” said Hedrick, and returned to silence without further explanation.

“How cool and kind the stars are tonight,” said Cora, very gently.

She leaned forward from her chair, extending a white arm along the iron railing of the porch; bending toward Corliss, and speaking toward him and away from Hedrick in as low a voice as possible, probably entertaining a reasonable hope of not being overheard.

“I love things that are cool and kind,” she said. I love things that are cool and strong. I love iron.” She moved her arm caressingly upon the railing. “I love its cool, smooth touch. Any strong life must have iron in it. I like iron in men.”

She leaned a very little closer to him.

“Have you iron in you, Mr. Corliss?” she asked.

At these words the frayed edge of Hedrick’s broad white collar was lifted perceptibly from his coat, as if by a shudder passing over the back and shoulders beneath.

“If I have not,” answered Corliss in a low voice, I will have—now!”

“Tell me about yourself,” she said.

“Dear lady,” he began—and it was an effective beginning, for a sigh of pleasure parted her lips as he spoke—“there is nothing interesting to tell. I have spent a very commonplace life.”

“I think not. You shouldn’t call any life commonplace that has escaped THIS!” The lovely voice was all the richer for the pain that shook it now. “This monotony, this unending desert of ashes, this death in life!”

“This town, you mean?”

“This prison, I mean! Everything. Tell me what lies outside of it. You can.”

“What makes you think I can?”

“I don’t need to answer that. You understand perfectly.”

Valentine Corliss drew in his breath with a sound murmurous of delight, and for a time they did not speak.

“Yes,” he said, finally, “I think I do.”

“There are meetings in the desert,” he went on, slowly. “A lonely traveller finds another at a spring, sometimes.”

“And sometimes they find that they speak the same language?”

His answer came, almost in a whisper:

“`Even as you and I.’”

“`Even as you and I,’” she echoed, even more faintly.

“Yes.”

Cora breathed rapidly in the silence that followed; she had every appearance of a woman deeply and mysteriously stirred. Her companion watched her keenly in the dusk, and whatever the reciprocal symptoms of emotion he may have exhibited, they were far from tumultuous, bearing more likeness to the quiet satisfaction of a good card-player taking what may prove to be a decisive trick.

After a time she leaned back in her chair again, and began to fan herself slowly.

“You have lived in the Orient, haven’t you, Mr. Corliss?” she said in an ordinary tone.

“Not lived. I’ve been East once or twice. I spend a greater part of the year at Posilipo.”

“Where is that?”

“On the fringe of Naples.”

“Do you live in a hotel?”

“No.” A slight surprise sounded in his voice. “I have a villa there.”

“Do you know what that seems to me?” Cora asked gravely, after a pause; then answered herself, after another: “Like magic. Like a strange, beautiful dream.”

“Yes, it is beautiful,” he said.

“Then tell me: What do you do there?”

“I spend a lot of time on the water in a boat.”

“Sailing?”

“On sapphires and emeralds and turquoises and rubies, melted and blown into waves.”

“And you go yachting over that glory?”

“Fishing with my crew—and loafing.”

“But your boat is really a yacht, isn’t it?”

“Oh, it might be called anything,” he laughed.

“And your sailors are Italian fishermen?”

Hedrick slew a mosquito upon his temple, smiting himself hard. “No, they’re Chinese!” he muttered hoarsely.

“They’re Neapolitans,” said Corliss.

“Do they wear red sashes and earrings?” asked Cora.

“One of them wears earrings and a derby hat!”

“Ah!” she protested, turning to him again. “You don’t tell me. You let me cross-question you, but you don’t tell me things! Don’t you see? I want to know what LIFE is! I want to know of strange seas, of strange people, of pain and of danger, of great music, of curious thoughts! What are the Neapolitan women like?”

“They fade early.”

She leaned closer to him. “Before the fading have you—have you loved—many?”

“All the pretty ones I ever saw, he answered gayly, but with something in his tone (as there was in hers) which implied that all the time they were really talking of things other than those spoken. Yet here this secret subject seemed to come near the surface.

She let him hear a genuine little snap of her teeth. I THOUGHT you were like that!”

He laughed. “Ah, but you were sure to see it!”

“You could ‘a’ seen a Neapolitan woman yesterday, Cora,” said Hedrick, obligingly, “if you’d looked out the front window. She was working a hurdy-gurdy up and down this neighbourhood all afternoon.” He turned genially to face his sister, and added: “Ray Vilas used to say there were lots of pretty girls in Lexington.”

Cora sprang to her feet. “You’re not smoking,” she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery. “Let me get you some matches.”

She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library. But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.

“So thoughtless of me,” she said cheerfully, resuming her seat. She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss’s hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm. “Of course you wanted to smoke. I can’t think why I didn’t realize it before. I must have–-“

A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.

“Hedrick! I should like to see you! Hedrick rose, and, looking neither to the right nor, to the left, went stonily into the house, and appeared before the powers.

“Call me?” he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.

Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.

“I don’t know what to do with you. Why can’t you let your sister alone?”

“Has Laura been complaining of me?”

“Oh, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison.

Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof: his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew. He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.

“Well, what’d Cora say I been doing to her?”

“You know perfectly well what you’ve been doing,” said Mr. Madison sharply.

“Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps. What’d she SAY?”

His father evidently considered it wiser not to repeat the text of accusation. “You know what you did,” he said heavily.

“Oho!” Hedrick’s eyes became severe, and his sire’s evasively shifted from them.

“You keep away from the porch,” said the, father, uneasily.

“You mean what I said about Ray Vilas?” asked the boy.

Both parents looked uncomfortable, and Mr. Madison, turning a leaf in his book, gave a mediocre imitation of an austere person resuming his reading after an impertinent interruption.

“That’s what you mean,” said the boy accusingly. “Ray Vilas!”

“Just you keep away from that porch.”

“Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?” demanded Hedrick.

“You let your sister alone.”

“I got a right to know what she said, haven’t I?”

There was no response, which appeared to satisfy Hedrick perfectly. Neither parent met his glance; the mother troubled and the father dogged, while the boy rejoiced sternly in some occult triumph. He inflated his scant chest in pomp and hurled at the defeated pair the well-known words:

“I wish she was MY daughter—about five minutes!”

New sounds from without—men’s voices in greeting, and a ripple of response from Cora somewhat lacking in enthusiasm—afforded Mr. Madison unmistakable relief, and an errand upon which to send his deadly offspring.

Hedrick, after a reconnaissance in the hall, obeyed at leisure. Closing the library door nonchalantly behind him, he found himself at the foot of a flight of unillumined back stairs, where his manner underwent a swift alteration, for here was an adventure to be gone about with ceremony. “Ventre St. Gris!” he muttered hoarsely, and loosened the long rapier in the shabby sheath at his side. For, with the closing of the door, he had become a Huguenot gentleman, over forty and a little grizzled perhaps, but modest and unassuming; wiry, alert, lightning-quick, with a wrist of steel and a heart of gold; and he was about to ascend the stairs of an unknown house at Blois in total darkness. He went up, crouching, ready for anything, without a footfall, not even causing a hideous creak; and gained the top in safety. Here he turned into an obscure passage, and at the end of it beheld, through an open door, a little room in which a dark-eyed lady sat writing in a book by the light of an oil lamp.

The wary Huguenot remained in the shadow and observed her.

Laura was writing in an old ledger she had found in the attic, blank and unused. She had rebound it herself in heavy gray leather; and fitted it with a tiny padlock and key. She wore the key under her dress upon a very thin silver chain round her neck. Upon the first page of the book was written a date, now more than a year past, the month was June—and beneath it:

“Love came to me to-day.”

Nothing more was written upon that page.

CHAPTER FOUR

Laura, at this writing, looked piquantly unfamiliar to her brother: her eyes were moist and bright; her cheeks were flushed and as she bent low, intently close to the book, a loosened wavy strand of her dark hair almost touched the page. Hedrick had never before seen her wearing an expression so “becoming” as the eager and tremulous warmth of this; though sometimes, at the piano, she would play in a reverie which wrought such glamour about her that even a brother was obliged to consider her rather handsome. She looked more than handsome now, so strangely lovely, in fact, that his eyes watered painfully with the protracted struggle to read a little of the writing in her book before she discovered him.

He gave it up at last, and lounged forward blinking, with the air of finding it sweet to do nothing.

“Whatch’ writin’?” he asked in simple carelessness.

At the first sound of his movement she closed the book in a flash; then, with a startled, protective gesture, extended her arms over it, covering it.

“What is it, Hedrick?” she asked, breathlessly.

“What’s the padlock for?”

“Nothing,” she panted. “What is it you want?”

“You writin’ poetry?”

Laura’s eyes dilated; she looked dangerous.

“Oh, I don’t care about your old book,” said Hedrick, with an amused nonchalance Talleyrand might have admired. “There’s callers, and you have to come down.”

“Who sent you?”

“A man I’ve often noticed around the house,” he replied blightingly. “You may have seen him—I think his name’s Madison. His wife and he both sent for you.”

One of Laura’s hands instinctively began to arrange her hair, but the other remained upon the book. “Who is it calling?”

“Richard Lindley and that Wade Trumble.”

Laura rose, standing between her brother and the table. “Tell mother I will come down.”

Hedrick moved a little nearer, whereupon, observing his eye, she put her right hand behind her upon the book. She was not deceived, and boys are not only superb strategic actors sometimes, but calamitously quick. Appearing to be unaware of her careful defence, he leaned against the wall and crossed his feet in an original and interesting manner.

“Of course YOU understand,” he said cosily. “Cora wants to keep this Corliss in a corner of the porch where she can coo at him; so you and mother’ll have to raise a ballyhoo for Dick Lindley and that Wade Trumble. It’d been funny if Dick hadn’t noticed anybody was there and kissed her. What on earth does he want to stay engaged to her for, anyway?”

“You don’t know that she is engaged to Mr. Lindley, Hedrick.”

“Get out!” he hooted. “What’s the use talking like that to me? A blind mackerel could see she’s let poor old Lindley think he’s High Man with her these last few months; but he’ll have to hit the pike now, I reckon, ‘cause this Corliss is altogether too pe-rin-sley for Dick’s class. Lee roy est mort. Vive lee roy!”

“Hedrick, won’t you please run along? I want to change my dress.”

“What for? There was company for dinner and you didn’t change then.”

Laura’s flushed cheeks flushed deeper, and in her confusion she answered too quickly. “I only have one evening gown. I—of course I can’t wear it every night.”

“Well, then,” he returned triumphantly, “what do you want to put it on now for?”

“PLEASE run along, Hedrick,” she pleaded.

“You didn’t for this Corliss,” he persisted sharply. You know Dick Lindley couldn’t see anybody but Cora to save his life, and I don’t suppose there’s a girl on earth fool enough to dress up for that Wade Trum–-“

“Hedrick!” Laura’s voice rang with a warning which he remembered to have heard upon a few previous occasions when she had easily proved herself physically stronger than he. “Go and tell mother I’m coming,” she said.

He began to whistle “Beulah Land” as he went, but, with the swift closing of the door behind him, abandoned that pathetically optimistic hymn prematurely, after the third bar.

Twenty minutes later, when Laura came out and went downstairs, a fine straight figure in her black evening gown, the Sieur de Marsac—that hard-bitten Huguenot, whose middle-aged shabbiness was but the outward and deceptive seeming of the longest head and the best sword in France—emerged cautiously from the passageway and stood listening until her footsteps were heard descending the front stairs. Nevertheless, the most painstaking search of her room, a search as systematic as it was feverish, failed to reveal where she had hidden the book.

He returned wearily to the porch.

A prophet has always been supposed to take some pleasure, perhaps morbid, in seeing his predictions fulfilled; and it may have been a consolation to the gloomy heart of Hedrick, sorely injured by Laura’s offensive care of her treasure, to find the grouping upon the porch as he had foretold: Cora and Mr. Corliss sitting a little aloof from the others, far enough to permit their holding an indistinct and murmurous conversation of their own. Their sequestration, even by so short a distance, gave them an appearance of intimacy which probably accounted for the rather absent greeting bestowed by Mr. Lindley upon the son of the house, who met him with some favour.

This Richard Lindley was a thin, friendly looking young man with a pleasing, old-fashioned face which suggested that if he were minded to be portrayed it should be by the daguerreotype, and that a high, black stock would have been more suitable to him than his businesslike, modern neck-gear. He had fine eyes, which seemed habitually concerned with faraway things, though when he looked at Cora they sparkled; however, it cannot be said that the sparkling continued at its brightest when his glance wandered (as it not infrequently did this evening) from her lovely head to the rose in Mr. Corliss’s white coat.

Hedrick, resuming a position upon the top step between the two groups, found the conversation of the larger annoying because it prevented him from hearing that of the smaller. It was carried on for the greater part by his mother and Mr. Trumble; Laura sat silent between these two; and Lindley’s mood was obviously contemplative. Mr. Wade Trumble, twenty-six, small, earnest, and already beginning to lose his hair, was talkative enough.

He was one of those people who are so continuously aggressive that they are negligible. “What’s the matter here? Nobody pays any attention to me. I’M important!” He might have had that legend engraved on his card, it spoke from everything else that was his: face, voice, gesture—even from his clothes, for they also clamoured for attention without receiving it. Worn by another man, their extravagance of shape and shade might have advertised a self-sacrificing effort for the picturesque; but upon Mr. Trumble they paradoxically confirmed an impression that he was well off and close. Certainly this was the impression confirmed in the mind of the shrewdest and most experienced observer on that veranda. The accomplished Valentine Corliss was quite able to share Cora’s detachment satisfactorily, and be very actively aware of other things at the same time. For instance: Richard Lindley’s preoccupation had neither escaped him nor remained unconnected in his mind with that gentleman’s somewhat attentive notice of the present position of a certain rose.

Mr. Trumble took up Mrs. Madison’s placid weather talk as if it had been a flaunting challenge; he made it a matter of conscience and for argument; for he was a doughty champion, it appeared, when nothings were in question, one of those stern men who will have accuracy in the banal, insisting upon portent in talk meant to be slid over as mere courteous sound.

“I don’t know about that, now,” he said with severe emphasis. “I don’t know about that at all. I can’t say I agree with you. In fact, I do not agree with you: it was hotter in the early part of July, year before last, than it has been at any time this summer. Several degrees hotter—several degrees.”

“I fear I must beg to differ with you,” he said, catching the poor lady again, a moment later. “I beg to differ decidedly. Other places get a great deal more heat. Look at Egypt.”

“Permit me to disagree, he interrupted her at once, when she pathetically squirmed to another subject. “There’s more than one side to this matter. You are looking at this matter from a totally wrong angle… . Let me inform you that statistics… .” Mrs. Madison’s gentle voice was no more than just audible in the short intervals he permitted; a blind listener would have thought Mr. Trumble at the telephone. Hedrick was thankful when his mother finally gave up altogether the display of her ignorance, inaccuracy, and general misinformation, and Trumble talked alone. That must have been the young man’s object; certainly he had struggled for it; and so it must have pleased him. He talked on and on and on; he passed from one topic to another with no pause; swinging over the gaps with a “Now you take,” or, “And that reminds me,” filling many a vacancy with “So-and-so and so-and-so,” and other stencils, while casting about for material to continue. Everything was italicized, the significant and the trivial, to the same monotone of emphasis. Death and shoe-laces were all the same to him.

Anything was all the same to him so long as he talked.

Hedrick’s irritation was gradually dispelled; and, becoming used to the sound, he found it lulling; relaxed his attitude and drowsed; Mr. Lindley was obviously lost in a reverie; Mrs. Madison, her hand shading her eyes, went over her market-list for the morrow and otherwise set her house in order; Laura alone sat straight in her chair; and her face was toward the vocalist, but as she was in deep shadow her expression could not be guessed. However, one person in that group must have listened with genuine pleasure—else why did he talk?

It was the returned native whose departure at last rang the curtain on the monologue. The end of the long sheltered seclusion of Cora and her companion was a whispered word. He spoke it first:

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

Cora gave a keen, quick, indrawn sigh—not of sorrow—and sank back in her chair, as he touched her hand in farewell and rose to go. She remained where she was, motionless and silent in the dark, while he crossed to Mrs. Madison, and prefaced a leave-taking unusually formal for these precincts with his mannered bow. He shook hands with Richard Lindley, asking genially:

“Do you still live where you did—just below here?”

“Yes.”

“When I passed by there this afternoon, said Corliss, “it recalled a stupendous conflict we had, once upon a time; but I couldn’t remember the cause.”

“I remember the cause,” said Mr. Lindley, but, stopping rather short, omitted to state it. “At all events, it was settled.”

“Yes,” said the other quietly. “You whipped me.”

“Did I so?” Corliss laughed gayly. “We mustn’t let it happen again!”

Mr. Trumble joined the parting guest, making simultaneous adieus with unmistakable elation. Mr. Trumble’s dreadful entertainment had made it a happy evening for him.

As they went down the steps together, the top of his head just above the level of his companion’s shoulder, he lifted to Corliss a searching gaze like an actor’s hopeful scrutiny of a new acquaintance; and before they reached the street his bark rang eagerly on the stilly night: “Now THERE is a point on which I beg to differ with you… .”

Mrs. Madison gave Lindley her hand. “I think I’ll go in. Good-night, Richard. Come, Hedrick!”

Hedrick rose, groaning, and batted his eyes painfully as he faced the hall light. “What’d you and this Corliss fight about?” he asked, sleepily.

“Nothing,” said Lindley.

“You said you remembered.”

“Oh, I remember a lot of useless things.”

“Well, what was it? I want to know what you fought about.”

“Come, Hedrick,” repeated his mother, setting a gently urgent hand on his shoulder.”

“I won’t,” said the boy impatiently, shaking her off and growing suddenly very wideawake and determined. “I won’t move a step till he tells me what they fought about. Not a step!”

“Well—it was about a `show.’ We were only boys, you know—younger than you, perhaps.”

“A circus?”

“A boy-circus he and my brother got up in our yard. I wasn’t in it.”

“Well, what did you fight about?”

“I thought Val Corliss wasn’t quite fair to my brother. That’s all.”

“No, it isn’t! How wasn’t he fair?”

“They sold tickets to the other boys; and I thought my brother didn’t get his share.”

“This Corliss kept it all?”

“Oh, something like that,” said Lindley, laughing.

“Probably I was in the wrong.”

“And he licked you?”

“All over the place!”

“I wish I’d seen it,” said Hedrick, not unsympathetically, but as a sportsman. And he consented to be led away.

Laura had been standing at the top of the steps looking down the street, where Corliss and his brisk companion had emerged momentarily from deep shadows under the trees into the illumination of a swinging arc-lamp at the corner. They disappeared; and she turned, and, smiling, gave the delaying guest her hand in good-night.

His expression, which was somewhat troubled, changed to one of surprise as her face came into the light, for it was transfigured. Deeply flushed, her eyes luminous, she wore that shining look Hedrick had seen as she wrote in her secret book.

“Why, Laura!” said Lindley, wondering.

She said good-night again, and went in slowly. As she reached the foot of the stairs, she heard him moving a chair upon the porch, and Cora speaking sharply:

“Please don’t sit close to me!” There was a sudden shrillness in the voice of honey, and the six words were run so rapidly together they seemed to form but one. After a moment Cora added, with a deprecatory ripple of laughter not quite free from the same shrillness:

“You see, Richard, it’s so—it’s so hot, tonight.

CHAPTER FIVE

Half an hour later, when Lindley had gone, Cora closed the front doors in a manner which drew an immediate cry of agony from the room where her father was trying to sleep. She stood on tiptoe to turn out the gas-light in the hall; but for a time the key resisted the insufficient pressure of her finger-tips: the little orange flame, with its black-green crescent over the armature, so maliciously like the “eye” of a peacock feather, limned the exquisite planes of the upturned face; modelled them with soft and regular shadows; painted a sullen loveliness. The key turned a little, but not enough; and she whispered to herself a monosyllable not usually attributed to the vocabulary of a damsel of rank. Next moment, her expression flashed in a brilliant change, like that of a pouting child suddenly remembering that tomorrow is Christmas. The key surrendered instantly, and she ran gayly up the familiar stairs in the darkness.

The transom of Laura’s door shone brightly; but the knob, turning uselessly in Cora’s hand, proved the door itself not so hospitable. There was a brief rustling within the room; the bolt snapped, and Laura opened the door.

“Why, Laura,” said Cora, observing her sister with transient curiosity, “you haven’t undressed. What have you been doing? Something’s the matter with you. I know what it is,” she added, laughing, as she seated herself on the edge of the old black-walnut bed. “You’re in love with Wade Trumble!”

“He’s a strong man,” observed Laura. “A remarkable throat.”

“Horrible little person!” said Cora, forgetting what she owed the unfortunate Mr. Trumble for the vocal wall which had so effectively sheltered her earlier in the evening. “He’s like one of those booming June-bugs, batting against the walls, falling into lamp-chimneys–—’

“He doesn’t get very near the light he wants,” said Laura.

“Me? Yes, he would like to, the rat! But he’s consoled when he can get any one to listen to his awful chatter. He makes up to himself among women for the way he gets sat on at the club. But he has his use: he shows off the other men so, by contrast. Oh, Laura!” She lifted both hands to her cheeks, which were beautiful with a quick suffusion of high colour. “Isn’t he gorgeous!”

“Yes,” said Laura gently, “I’ve always thought so.

“Now what’s the use of that?” asked Cora peevishly, “with ME? I didn’t mean Richard Lindley. You KNOW what I mean.”

“Yes—of course—I do,” Laura said.

Cora gave her a long look in which a childlike pleading mingled with a faint, strange trouble; then this glance wandered moodily from the face of her sister to her own slippers, which she elevated to meet her descending line of vision.

“And you know I can’t help it,” she said, shifting quickly to the role of accuser. “So what’s the use of behaving like the Pest?” She let her feet drop to the floor again, and her voice trembled a little as she went on: “Laura, you don’t know what I had to endure from him tonight. I really don’t think I can stand it to live in the same house any longer with that frightful little devil. He’s been throwing Ray Vilas’s name at me until—oh, it was ghastly tonight! And then—then–-” Her tremulousness increased. “I haven’t said anything about it all day, but I MET him on the street downtown, this morning–-“

“You met Vilas?” Laura looked startled. “Did he speak to you?”

“`Speak to me!’” Cora’s exclamation shook with a half-laugh of hysteria. “He made an awful SCENE! He came out of the Richfield Hotel barroom on Main Street just as I was going into the jeweller’s next door, and he stopped and bowed like a monkey, square in front of me, and—and he took off his hat and set it on the pavement at my feet and told me to kick it into the gutter! Everybody stopped and stared; and I couldn’t get by him. And he said—he said I’d kicked his heart into the gutter and he didn’t want it to catch cold without a hat! And wouldn’t I please be so kind as to kick–-” She choked with angry mortification. “It was horrible! People were stopping and laughing, and a rowdy began to make fun of Ray, and pushed him, and they got into a scuffle, and I ran into the jeweller’s and almost fainted.”

“He is insane!” said Laura, aghast.

“He’s nothing of the kind; he’s just a brute. He does it to make people say I’m the cause of his drinking; and everybody in this gossipy old town DOES say it—just because I got bored to death with his everlasting do-you-love-me-to-day-as-well-as-yesterday style of torment, and couldn’t help liking Richard better. Yes, every old cat in town says I ruined him, and that’s what he wants them to say. It’s so unmanly! I wish he’d die! Yes, I DO wish he would! Why doesn’t he kill himself?”

“Ah, don’t say that,” protested Laura.

“Why not? He’s threatened to enough. And I’m afraid to go out of the house because I can’t tell when I’ll meet him or what he’ll do. I was almost sick in that jeweller’s shop, this morning, and so upset I came away without getting my pendant. There’s ANOTHER thing I’ve got to go through, I suppose!” She pounded the yielding pillow desperately. “Oh, oh, oh! Life isn’t worth living—it seems to me sometimes as if everybody in the world spent his time trying to think up ways to make it harder for me! I couldn’t have worn the pendant, though, even if I’d got it,” she went on, becoming thoughtful. “It’s Richard’s silly old engagement ring, you know,” she explained, lightly. “I had it made up into a pendant, and heaven knows how I’m going to get Richard to see it the right way. He was so unreasonable tonight.”

“Was he cross about Mr. Corliss monopolizing you?”

“Oh, you know how he is,” said Cora. “He didn’t speak of it exactly. But after you’d gone, he asked me–-” She stopped with a little gulp, an expression of keen distaste about her mouth.

“Oh, he wants me to wear my ring,” she continued, with sudden rapidity: “and how the dickens CAN I when I can’t even tell him it’s been made into a pendant! He wants to speak to father; he wants to ANNOUNCE it. He’s sold out his business for what he thinks is a good deal of money, and he wants me to marry him next month and take some miserable little trip, I don’t know where, for a few weeks, before he invests what he’s made in another business. Oh!” she cried. “It’s a HORRIBLE thing to ask a girl to do: to settle down—just housekeeping, housekeeping, housekeeping forever in this stupid, stupid town! It’s so unfair! Men are just possessive; they think it’s loving you to want to possess you themselves. A beautiful `love’! It’s so mean! Men!” She sprang up and threw out both arms in a vehement gesture of revolt. “Damn ‘em, I wish they’d let me ALONE!”

Laura’s eyes had lost their quiet; they showed a glint of tears, and she was breathing quickly. In this crisis of emotion the two girls went to each other silently; Cora turned, and Laura began to unfasten Cora’s dress in the back.

“Poor Richard!” said Laura presently, putting into her mouth a tiny pearl button which had detached itself at her touch. “This was his first evening in the overflow. No wonder he was troubled!”

“Pooh!” said Cora. “As if you and mamma weren’t good enough for him to talk to! He’s spoiled. He’s so used to being called `the most popular man in town’ and knowing that every girl on Corliss Street wanted to marry him–-” She broke off, and exclaimed sharply: “I wish they would!

“Cora!”

“Oh, I suppose you mean that’s the reason I went in for him?”

“No, no,” explained Laura hurriedly. “I only meant, stand still.”

“Well, it was!” And Cora’s abrupt laugh had the glad, free ring fancy attaches to the merry confidences of a buccaneer in trusted company.

Laura knelt to continue unfastening the dress; and when it was finished she extended three of the tiny buttons in her hand. “They’re always loose on a new dress,” she said. “I’ll sew them all on tight, tomorrow.”

Cora smiled lovingly. “You good old thing,” she said. “You looked pretty tonight.”

“That’s nice!” Laura laughed, as she dropped the buttons into a little drawer of her bureau. It was an ugly, cheap, old bureau, its veneer loosened and peeling, the mirror small and flawed—a piece of furniture in keeping with the room, which was small, plain and hot, its only ornamental adjunct being a silver-framed photograph of Mrs. Madison, with Cora, as a child of seven or eight, upon her lap.

“You really do look ever so pretty,” asserted Cora.

“I wonder if I look as well as I did the last time I heard I was pretty,” said the other. “That was at the Assembly in March. Coming down the stairs, I heard a man from out of town say, `That black-haired Miss Madison is a pretty girl.’ And some one with him said, `Yes; you’ll think so until you meet her sister!’”

“You are an old dear!” Cora enfolded her delightedly; then, drawing back, exclaimed: “You KNOW he’s gorgeous!” And with a feverish little ripple of laughter, caught her dress together in the back and sped through the hall to her own room.

This was a very different affair from Laura’s, much cooler and larger; occupying half the width of the house; and a rather expensive struggle had made it pretty and even luxurious. The window curtains and the wall-paper were fresh, and of a quiet blue; there was a large divan of the same colour; a light desk, prettily equipped, occupied a corner; and between two gilt gas-brackets, whose patent burners were shielded by fringed silk shades, stood a cheval-glass six feet high. The door of a very large clothes-pantry stood open, showing a fine company of dresses, suspended from forms in an orderly manner; near by, a rosewood cabinet exhibited a delicate collection of shoes and slippers upon its four shelves. A dressing-table, charmingly littered with everything, took the place of a bureau; and upon it, in a massive silver frame, was a large photograph of Mr. Richard Lindley. The frame was handsome, but somewhat battered: it had seen service. However, the photograph was quite new.

There were photographs everywhere photographs framed and unframed; photographs large and photographs small, the fresh and the faded; tintypes, kodaks, “full lengths,” “cabinets,” groups—every kind of photograph; and among them were several of Cora herself, one of her mother, one of Laura, and two others of girls. All the rest were sterner. Two or three were seamed across with cracks, hastily recalled sentences to destruction; and here and there remained tokens of a draughtsman’s over-generous struggle to confer upon some of the smooth-shaven faces additional manliness in the shape of sweeping moustaches, long beards, goatees, mutton-chops, and, in the case of one gentleman of a blond, delicate and tenor-like beauty, neck-whiskers;—decorations in many instances so deeply and damply pencilled that subsequent attempts at erasure had failed of great success. Certainly, Hedrick had his own way of relieving dull times.

Cora turned up the lights at the sides of the cheval-glass, looked at herself earnestly, then absently, and began to loosen her hair. Her lifted hands hesitated; she re-arranged the slight displacement of her hair already effected; set two chairs before the mirror, seated herself in one; pulled up her dress, where it was slipping from her shoulder, rested an arm upon the back of the other chair as, earlier in the evening, she had rested it upon the iron railing of the porch, and, leaning forward, assumed as exactly as possible the attitude in which she had sat so long beside Valentine Corliss. She leaned very slowly closer and yet closer to the mirror; a rich colour spread over her; her eyes, gazing into themselves, became dreamy, inexpressibly wistful, cloudily sweet; her breath was tumultuous. “`Even as you and I’?” she whispered.

Then, in the final moment of this after-the-fact rehearsal, as her face almost touched the glass, she forgot how and what she had looked to Corliss; she forgot him; she forgot him utterly: she leaped to her feet and kissed the mirrored lips with a sort of passion.

“You DARLING!” she cried. Cora’s christening had been unimaginative, for the name means only, “maiden.” She should have been called Narcissa.

The rhapsody was over instantly, leaving an emotional vacuum like a silence at the dentist’s. Cora yawned, and resumed the loosening of her hair.

When she had put on her nightgown, she went from one window to another, closing the shutters against the coming of the morning light to wake her. As she reached the last window, a sudden high wind rushed among the trees outside; a white flare leaped at her face, startling her; there was a boom and rattle as of the brasses, cymbals, and kettle-drums of some fatal orchestra; and almost at once it began to rain.

And with that, from the distance came a voice, singing; and at the first sound of it, though it was far away and almost indistinguishable, Cora started more violently than at the lightning; she sprang to the mirror lights, put them out; threw herself upon the bed, and huddled there in the darkness.

The wind passed; the heart of the storm was miles away; this was only its fringe; but the rain pattered sharply upon the thick foliage outside her windows; and the singing voice came slowly up the street.

It was a strange voice: high-pitched and hoarse—and not quite human, so utter was the animal abandon of it.

“I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,” it wailed and piped, coming nearer; and the gay little air—wrought to a grotesque of itself by this wild, high voice in the rain—might have been a banshee’s love-song.

“I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie.

She’s as pure as the lily in the dell–-“

The voice grew louder; came in front of the house; came into the yard; came and sang just under Cora’s window. There it fell silent a moment; then was lifted in a long peal of imbecile laughter, and sang again:

“Then slowly, slowly rase she up

And slowly she came nigh him,

And when she drew the curtain by—

`Young man I think you’re dyin’.’”

Cora’s door opened and closed softly, and Laura, barefooted, stole to the bed and put an arm about the shaking form of her sister.

“The drunken beast!” sobbed Cora. “It’s to disgrace me! That’s what he wants. He’d like nothing better than headlines in the papers: `Ray Vilas arrested at the Madison residence’!” She choked with anger and mortification. “The neighbours–-“

“They’re nearly all away,” whispered Laura. “You needn’t fear–-“

“Hark!”

The voice stopped singing, and began to mumble incoherently; then it rose again in a lamentable outcry:

“Oh, God of the fallen, be Thou merciful to me! Be Thou merciful—merciful—MERCIFUL” …

“MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL, MERCIFUL!” it shrieked, over and over, with increasing loudness, and to such nerve-racking effect that Cora, gasping, beat the bedclothes frantically with her hands at each iteration.

The transom over the door became luminous; some one had lighted the gas in the upper hall. Both girls jumped from the bed, ran to the door, and opened it. Their mother, wearing a red wrapper, was standing at the head of the stairs, which Mr. Madison, in his night-shirt and slippers, was slowly and heavily descending.

Before he reached the front door, the voice outside ceased its dreadful plaint with the abrupt anticlimax of a phonograph stopped in the middle of a record. There was the sound of a struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies, branches cracking.

“Let me go, da–-” cried the voice, drowned again at half a word, as by a powerful hand upon a screaming mouth.

The old man opened the front door, stepped out, closing it behind him; and the three women looked at each other wanly during a hushed interval like that in a sleeping-car at night when the train stops. Presently he came in again, and started up the stairs, heavily and slowly, as he had gone down.

“Richard Lindley stopped him,” he said, sighing with the ascent, and not looking up. “He heard him as he came along the street, and dressed as quick as he could, and ran up and got him. Richard’s taken him away.”

He went to his own room, panting, mopping his damp gray hair with his fat wrist, and looking at no one.

Cora began to cry again. It was an hour before any of this family had recovered sufficient poise to realize, with the shuddering gratitude of adventurers spared from the abyss, that, under Providence, Hedrick had not wakened!

CHAPTER SIX

Much light shatters much loveliness; but a pretty girl who looks pretty outdoors on a dazzling hot summer morning is prettier then than ever. Cora knew it; of course she knew it; she knew exactly how she looked, as she left the concrete bridge behind her at the upper end of Corliss Street and turned into a shrub-bordered bypath of the river park. In imagination she stood at the turn of the path just ahead, watching her own approach: she saw herself as a picture—the white-domed parasol, with its cheerful pale-green lining, a background for her white hat, her corn-silk hair, and her delicately flushed face. She saw her pale, live arms through their thin sleeves, and the light grasp of her gloved fingers upon the glistening stick of the parasol; she saw the long, simple lines of her close white dress and their graceful interchanging movements with the alternate advance of her white shoes over the fine gravel path; she saw the dazzling splashes of sunshine playing upon her through the changeful branches overhead. Cora never lacked a gallery: she sat there herself.

She refreshed the eyes of a respectable burgess of sixty, a person so colourless that no one, after passing him, could have remembered anything about him except that he wore glasses and some sort of moustache; and to Cora’s vision he was as near transparent as any man could be, yet she did not miss the almost imperceptible signs of his approval, as they met and continued on their opposite ways. She did not glance round, nor did he pause in his slow walk; neither was she clairvoyant; none the less, she knew that he turned his head and looked back at her.

The path led away from the drives and more public walks of the park, to a low hill, thoughtfully untouched by the gardener and left to the shadowy thickets and good-smelling underbrush of its rich native woodland. And here, by a brown bench, waited a tall gentleman in white.

They touched hands and sat without speaking. For several moments they continued the silence, then turned slowly and looked at each other; then looked slowly and gravely away, as if to an audience in front of them. They knew how to do it; but probably a critic in the first row would have concluded that Cora felt it even more than Valentine Corliss enjoyed it.

“I suppose this is very clandestine,” she said, after a deep breath. “I don’t think I care, though.”

“I hope you do,” he smiled, “so that I could think your coming means more.”

“Then I’ll care,” she said, and looked at him again.

“You dear!” he exclaimed deliberately.

She bit her lip and looked down, but not before he had seen the quick dilation of her ardent eyes. “I wanted to be out of doors,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s one thing of yours I don’t like, Mr. Corliss.”

“I’ll throw it away, then. Tell me.”

“Your house. I don’t like living in it, very much. I’m sorry you CAN’T throw it away.”

“I’m thinking of doing that very thing,” he laughed. “But I’m glad I found the rose in that queer old waste-basket first.”

“Not too much like a rose, sometimes,” she said. “I think this morning I’m a little like some of the old doors up on the third floor: I feel rather unhinged, Mr. Corliss.”

“You don’t look it, Miss Madison!”

“I didn’t sleep very well.” She bestowed upon him a glance which transmuted her actual explanation into, “I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you.” It was perfectly definite; but the acute gentleman laughed genially.

“Go on with you!” he said.

Her eyes sparkled, and she joined laughter with him. “But it’s true: you did keep me awake. Besides, I had a serenade.”

“Serenade? I had an idea they didn’t do that any more over here. I remember the young men going about at night with an orchestra sometimes when I was a boy, but I supposed–-“

“Oh, it wasn’t much like that,” she interrupted, carelessly. “I don’t think that sort of thing has been done for years and years. It wasn’t an orchestra—just a man singing under my window.”

“With a guitar?”

“No.” She laughed a little. “Just singing.”

“But it rained last night,” said Corliss, puzzled.

“Oh, HE wouldn’t mind that!”

“How stupid of me! Of course, he wouldn’t.

Was it Richard Lindley?”

“Never!”

“I see. Yes, that was a bad guess: I’m sure Lindley’s just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn’t fit a romantic frame—singing under a lady’s window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader must have been very young.’

“He is,” said Cora. “I suppose he’s about twenty-three; just a boy—and a very annoying one, too!”

Her companion looked at her narrowly. “By any chance, is he the person your little brother seemed so fond of mentioning—Mr. Vilas?”

Cora gave a genuine start. “Good heavens! What makes you think that?” she cried, but she was sufficiently disconcerted to confirm his amused suspicion.

“So it was Mr. Vilas,” he said. “He’s one of the jilted, of course.”

“Oh, `jilted’!” she exclaimed. “All the wild boys that a girl can’t make herself like aren’t `jilted,’ are they?”

“I believe I should say—yes,” he returned. “Yes, in this instance, just about all of them.”

“Is every woman a target for you, Mr. Corliss? I suppose you know that you have a most uncomfortable way of shooting up the landscape.” She stirred uneasily, and moved away from him to the other end of the bench.

“I didn’t miss that time,” he laughed. “Don’t you ever miss?”

He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: “You can be sure I’m not going to miss anything about YOU.”

It was as if his bending near her had been to rouge her. But it cannot be said that she disliked his effect upon her; for the deep breath she drew in audibly, through her shut teeth, was a signal of delight; and then followed one of those fraught silences not uncharacteristic of dialogues with Cora.

Presently, she gracefully and uselessly smoothed her hair from the left temple with the backs of her fingers, of course finishing the gesture prettily by tucking in a hairpin tighter above the nape of her neck. Then, with recovered coolness, she asked:

“Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house, Mr. Corliss?”

“Perhaps that was part of why I came,” he said, gayly. “I need a great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison.”

“For your villa and your yacht?”

“No; I’m a magician, dear lady–-“

“Yes,” she said, almost angrily. “Of course you know it!”

“You mock me! No; I’m going to make everybody rich who will trust me. I have a secret, and it’s worth a mountain of gold. I’ve put all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for myself, but it’s going to take a great deal more than that. And everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo’s island.”

“Then I’m sorry papa hasn’t anything to put in,” she said.

“But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?” he laughed.

“Do you want me to?” she asked with a quick, serious glance straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.

“I have an extremely definite impression,” he said lightly, “that you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to.”

“And I have another that you have still another `extremely definite impression’ that takes rank over that,” she said, but not with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. “It is that you can make ME do just what you want me to.”

Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed aloud. “What a girl!” he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole body started and visibly thrilled.

She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder; her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to her cheeks again.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s soiled,” he said, a speech which she punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape; but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot cheek; and he was reassured: it was not his touching her that had offended her, but the allusion to it.

“Thanks,” he said, very softly.

She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig little holes in the gravel of the path. “Richard Lindley is looking for investments,” she said.

“I’m glad to hear he’s been so successful,” returned Corliss.

“He might like a share in your gold-mine.”

“Thank heaven it isn’t literally a gold-mine,” he exclaimed. “There have been so many crooked ones exploited I don’t believe you could get anybody nowadays to come in on a real one. But I think you’d make an excellent partner for an adventurer who had discovered hidden treasure; and I’m that particular kind of adventurer. I think I’ll take you in.”

“Do you?”

“How would you like to save a man from being ruined?”

“Ruined? You don’t mean it literally?”

“Literally!” He laughed gayly. “If I don’t `land’ this I’m gone, smashed, finished—quite ended! Don’t bother, I’m going to `land’ it. And it’s rather a serious compliment I’m paying you, thinking you can help me. I’d like to see a woman—just once in the world—who could manage a thing like this.” He became suddenly very grave. “Good God! wouldn’t I be at her feet!”

Her eyes became even more eager. “You think I—I MIGHT be a woman who could?”

“Who knows, Miss Madison? I believe–-” He stopped abruptly, then in a lowered, graver voice asked: “Doesn’t it somehow seem a little queer to you when we call each other, `Miss Madison’ and `Mr. Corliss’?”

“Yes,” she answered slowly; “it does.”

“Doesn’t it seem to you,” he went on, in the same tone, “that we only `Miss’ and `Mister’ each other in fun? That though you never saw me until yesterday, we’ve gone pretty far beyond mere surfaces? That we did in our talk, last night?”

“Yes,” she repeated; “it does.”

He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:

“How far are we going?”

“I don’t know.” She was barely audible; but she turned deliberately, and there took place an eager exchange of looks which continued a long while. At last, and without ending this serious encounter, she whispered:

“How far do YOU think?”

Mr. Corliss did not answer, and a peculiar phenomenon became vaguely evident to the girl facing him: his eyes were still fixed full upon hers, but he was not actually looking at her; nevertheless, and with an extraordinarily acute attention, he was unquestionably looking at something. The direct front of pupil and iris did not waver from her; but for the time he was not aware of her; had not even heard her question. Something in the outer field of his vision had suddenly and completely engrossed him; something in that nebulous and hazy background which we see, as we say, with the white of the eye. Cora instinctively turned and looked behind her, down the path.

There was no one in sight except a little girl and the elderly burgess who had glanced over his shoulder at Cora as she entered the park; and he was, in face, mien, and attire, so thoroughly the unnoticeable, average man-on-the-street that she did not even recall him as the looker-round of a little while ago. He was strolling benevolently, the little girl clinging to one of his hands, the other holding an apple; and a composite photograph of a thousand grandfathers might have resulted in this man’s picture.

As the man and little girl came slowly up the walk toward the couple on the bench there was a faint tinkle at Cora’s feet: her companion’s scarfpin, which had fallen from his tie. He was maladroit about picking it up, trying with thumb and forefinger to seize the pin itself, instead of the more readily grasped design of small pearls at the top, so that he pushed it a little deeper into the gravel; and then occurred a tiny coincidence: the elderly man, passing, let fall the apple from his hand, and it rolled toward the pin just as Corliss managed to secure the latter. For an instant, though the situation was so absolutely commonplace, so casual, Cora had a wandering consciousness of some mysterious tensity; a feeling like the premonition of a crisis very near at hand. This sensation was the more curious because nothing whatever happened. The man got his apple, joined in the child’s laughter, and went on.

“What was it you asked me?” said Corliss, lifting his head again and restoring the pin to his tie. He gazed carelessly at the back of the grandsire, disappearing beyond a bush at a bend in the path.

“Who was that man?” said Cora with some curiosity.

“That old fellow? I haven’t an idea. You see I’ve been away from here so many years I remember almost no one. Why?”

“I don’t know, unless it was because I had an idea you were thinking of him instead of me. You didn’t listen to what I said.”

“That was because I was thinking so intensely of you,” he began instantly. “A startlingly vivid thought of you came to me just then. Didn’t I look like a man in a trance?”

“What was the thought?”

“It was a picture: I saw you standing under a great bulging sail, and the water flying by in moonlight; oh, a moon and a night such as you have never seen! and a big blue headland looming up against the moon, and crowned with lemon groves and vineyards, all sparkling with fireflies—old watch-towers and the roofs of white villas gleaming among olive orchards on the slopes—the sound of mandolins–-“

“Ah!” she sighed, the elderly man, his grandchild, and his apple well-forgotten.

“Do you think it was a prophecy?” he asked.

“What do YOU think?” she breathed. “That was really what I asked you before.”

“I think,” he said slowly, “that I’m in danger of forgetting that my `hidden treasure’ is the most important thing in the world.”

“In great danger?” The words were not vocal.

He moved close to her; their eyes met again, with increased eagerness, and held fast; she was trembling, visibly; and her lips—parted with her tumultuous breathing—were not far from his.

“Isn’t any man in great danger,” he said, “if he falls in love with you?”

“Well?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Toward four o’clock that afternoon, a very thin, fair young man shakily heaved himself into a hammock under the trees in that broad backyard wherein, as Valentine Corliss had yesterday noticed, the last iron monarch of the herd, with unabated arrogance, had entered domestic service as a clothes-prop. The young man, who was of delicate appearance and unhumanly pale, stretched himself at full length on his back, closed his eyes, moaned feebly, cursed the heat in a stricken whisper. Then, as a locust directly overhead violently shattered the silence, and seemed like to continue the outrage forever, the shaken lounger stopped his ears with his fingers and addressed the insect in old Saxon.

A white jacketed mulatto came from the house bearing something on a silver tray.

“Julip, Mist’ Vilas?” he said sympathetically.

Ray Vilas rustily manoeuvred into a sitting position; and, with eyes still closed, made shift to accept the julep in both hands, drained half of it, opened his eyes, and thanked the cup-bearer feebly, in a voice and accent reminiscent of the melodious South.

“And I wonder,” he added, “if you can tell me–-“

“I’m Miz William Lindley’s house-man, Joe Vaxdens,” said the mulatto, in the tone of an indulgent nurse. “You in Miz Lindley’s backyard right now, sittin’ in a hammick.”

“I seem to gather almost that much for myself,” returned the patient. “But I should like to know how I got here.”

“Jes’ come out the front door an’ walk’ aroun’ the house an’ set down. Mist’ Richard had to go downtown; tole me not to wake you; but I heerd you splashin’ in the bath an’ you tole me you din’ want no breakfuss–-“

“Yes, Joe, I’m aware of what’s occurred since I woke,” said Vilas, and, throwing away the straws, finished the julep at one draught. “What I want to know is how I happened to be here at Mr. Lindley’s.”

“Mist’ Richard brought you las’ night, suh. I don’ know where he got you, but I heered a considerable thrashum aroun’, up an’ down the house, an’ so I come help him git you to bed in one vem spare-rooms.” Joe chuckled ingratiatingly. “Lord name! You cert’n’y wasn’t askin’ fer no BED!”

He took the glass, and the young man reclined again in the hammock, a hot blush vanquishing his pallor. “Was I—was I very bad, Joe?”

“Oh, you was all RIGHT,” Joe hastened to reassure him. “You was jes’ on’y a little bit tight.”

“Did it really seem only a little?” the other asked hopefully.

“Yessuh,” said Joe promptly. “Nothin’ at all. You jes’ wanted to rare roun’ little bit. Mist’ Richard took gun away from you–-“

“What?”

“Oh, I tole him you wasn’ goin’ use it!” Joe laughed. “But you so wile be din’ know what you do. You cert’n’y was drunkes’ man I see in LONG while,” he said admiringly. “You pert near had us bofe wore out ‘fore you give up, an’ Mist’ Richard an’ me, we USE’ to han’lin’ drunkum man, too—use’ to have big times week-in, week-out ‘ith Mist’ Will—at’s Mist’ Richard’s brother, you know, suh, what died o’ whiskey.” He laughed again in high good-humour. “You cert’n’y laid it all over any vem ole times we had ‘ith Mist’ Will!”

Mr. Vilas shifted his position in the hammock uneasily; Joe’s honest intentions to be of cheer to the sufferer were not wholly successful.

“I tole Mist’ Richard,” the kindly servitor continued, “it was a mighty good thing his ma gone up Norf endurin’ the hot spell. Sence Mist’ Will die she can’t hardly bear to see drunkum man aroun’ the house. Mist’ Richard hardly ever tech nothin’ himself no more. You goin’ feel better, suh, out in the f’esh air,” he concluded, comfortingly as he moved away.

“Joe!”

“Yessuh.”

Mr. Vilas pulled himself upright for a moment. “What use in the world do you reckon one julep is to me? ”

“Mist’ Richard say to give you one drink ef you ask’ for it, suh,” answered Joe, looking troubled.

“Well, you’ve told me enough now about last night to make any man hang himself, and I’m beginning to remember enough more–-“

“Pshaw, Mist’ Vilas,” the coloured man interrupted, deprecatingly, “you din’ broke nothin’! You on’y had couple glass’ wine too much. You din’ make no trouble at all; jes’ went right off to bed. You ought seen some vem ole times me an Mist’ Richard use to have ‘ith Mist’ Will–-“

“Joe!”

“Yessuh.”

“I want three more juleps and I want them right away.”

The troubled expression upon the coloured man’s face deepened. “Mist’ Richard say jes’ one, suh,” he said reluctantly. “I’m afraid–-“

“Joe.”

“ Yessuh.”

“I don’t know,” said Ray Vilas slowly, “whether or not you ever heard that I was born and raised in Kentucky.”

“Yessuh,” returned Joe humbly. “I heerd so.”

“Well, then,” said the young man in a quiet voice, “you go and get me three juleps. I’ll settle it with Mr. Richard.”

“Yessuh.”

But it was with a fifth of these renovators that Lindley found his guest occupied, an hour later, while upon a small table nearby a sixth, untouched, awaited disposal beside an emptied coffee-cup. Also, Mr. Vilas was smoking a cigarette with unshadowed pleasure; his eye was bright, his expression care-free; and he was sitting up in the hammock, swinging cheerfully, and singing the “Marseillaise.” Richard approached through the yard, coming from the street without entering the house; and anxiety was manifest in the glance he threw at the green-topped glass upon the table, and in his greeting.

“Hail, gloom!” returned Mr. Vilas, cordially, and, observing the anxious glance, he swiftly removed the untouched goblet from the table to his own immediate possession. “Two simultaneous juleps will enhance the higher welfare, he explained airily. “Sir, your Mr. Varden was induced to place a somewhat larger order with us than he protested to be your intention. Trusting you to exonerate him from all so-and-so and that these few words, etcetera!” He depleted the elder glass of its liquor, waved it in the air, cried, “Health, host!” and set it upon the table. “I believe I do not err in assuming my cup-bearer’s name to be Varden, although he himself, in his simple Americo-Africanism, is pleased to pluralize it. Do I fret you, host?”

“Not in the least,” said Richard, dropping upon a rustic bench, and beginning to fan himself with his straw hat. “What’s the use of fretting about a boy who hasn’t sense enough to fret about himself?”

“`Boy?’” Mr. Vilas affected puzzlement. “Do I hear aright? Sir, do you boy me? Bethink you, I am now the shell of five mint-juleps plus, and am pot-valiant. And is this mere capacity itself to be lightly BOYED? Again, do I not wear a man’s garment, a man’s garnitures? Heed your answer; for this serge, these flannels, and these silks are yours, and though I may not fill them to the utmost, I do to the longmost, precisely. I am the stature of a man; had it not been for your razor I should wear the beard of a man; therefore I’ll not be boyed. What have you to say in defence?”

“Hadn’t you better let me get Joe to bring you something to eat?” asked Richard.

“Eat?” Mr. Vilas disposed of the suggestion with mournful hauteur. “There! For the once I forgive you. Let the subject never be mentioned between us again. We will tactfully turn to a topic of interest. My memories of last evening, at first hazy and somewhat disconcerting, now merely amuse me. Following the pleasant Spanish custom, I went a-serenading, but was kidnapped from beneath the precious casement by—by a zealous arrival. Host, `zealous arrival’ is not the julep in action: it is a triumph of paraphrase.”

“I wish you’d let Joe take you back to bed,” said Richard.

“Always bent on thoughts of the flesh,” observed the other sadly. “Beds are for bodies, and I am become a thing of spirit. My soul is grateful a little for your care of its casing. You behold, I am generous: I am able to thank my successor to Carmen!”

Lindley’s back stiffened. “Vilas!”

“Spare me your protests.” The younger man waved his hand languidly. You wish not to confer upon this subject–-“

“It’s a subject we’ll omit,” said Richard.

His companion stopped swinging, allowed the hammock to come to rest; his air of badinage fell from him; for the moment he seemed entirely sober; and he spoke with gentleness. “Mr. Lindley, if you please, I am still a gentleman—at times.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Richard quickly.

“No need of that!” The speaker’s former careless and boisterous manner instantly resumed possession. “You must permit me to speak of a wholly fictitious lady, a creature of my wanton fancy, sir, whom I call Carmen. It will enable me to relieve my burdened soul of some remarks I have long wished to address to your excellent self.”

“Oh, all right,” muttered Richard, much annoyed.

“Let us imagine,” continued Mr. Vilas, beginning to swing again, “that I thought I had won this Carmen–-“

Lindley uttered an exclamation, shifted his position in his chair, and fixed a bored attention upon the passing vehicles in the glimpse of the street afforded between the house and the shrubberies along the side fence. The other, without appearing to note his annoyance, went on, cheerfully:

“She was a precocious huntress: early in youth she passed through the accumulator stage, leaving it to the crude or village belle to rejoice in numbers and the excitement of teasing cubs in the bear-pit. It is the nature of this imagined Carmen to play fiercely with one imitation of love after another: a man thinks he wins her, but it is merely that she has chosen him—for a while. And Carmen can have what she chooses; if the man exists who could show her that she cannot, she would follow him through the devil’s dance; but neither you nor I would be that man, my dear sir. We assume that Carmen’s eyes have been mine—her heart is another matter—and that she has grown weary of my somewhat Sicilian manner of looking into them, and, following her nature and the law of periodicity which Carmens must bow to, she seeks a cooler gaze and calls Mr. Richard Lindley to come and take a turn at looking. Now, Mr. Richard Lindley is straight as a die: he will not even show that he hears the call until he is sure that I have been dismissed: therefore, I have no quarrel with him. Also, I cannot even hate him, for in my clearer julep vision I see that he is but an interregnum. Let me not offend my friend: chagrin is to be his as it is mine. I was a strong draught, he but the quieting potion our Carmen took to settle it. We shall be brothers in woe some day. Nothing in the universe lasts except Hell: Life is running water; Love, a looking-glass; Death, an empty theatre! That reminds me: as you are not listening I will sing.”

He finished his drink and lifted his voice hilariously:

“The heavenly stars far above her,

The wind of the infinite sea,

Who know all her perfidy, love her,

So why call it madness in me?

Ah, why call it madness–-“

He set his glass with a crash upon the table, staring over his companion’s shoulder.

“WHAT, if you please, is the royal exile who thus seeks refuge in our hermitage?

His host had already observed the approaching visitor with some surprise, and none too graciously. It was Valentine Corliss: he had turned in from the street and was crossing the lawn to join the two young men. Lindley rose, and, greeting him with sufficient cordiality, introduced Mr. Vilas, who bestowed upon the newcomer a very lively interest.

“You are as welcome, Mr. Corliss,” said this previous guest, earnestly, “as if these sylvan shades were mine. I hail you, not only for your own sake, but because your presence encourages a hope that our host may offer refreshment to the entire company.”

Corliss smilingly declined to be a party to this diplomacy, and seated himself beside Richard Lindley on the bench.

“Then I relapse!” exclaimed Mr. Vilas, throwing himself back full-length in the hammock. “I am not replete, but content. I shall meditate. Gentlemen, speak on!”

He waved his hand in a gracious gesture, indicating his intention to remain silent, and lay quiet, his eyes fixed steadfastly upon Corliss.

“I was coming to call on you,” said the latter to Lindley, “but I saw you from the street and thought you mightn’t mind my being as informal as I used to be, so many years ago.”

“Of course,” said Richard.

“I have a sinister purpose in coming,” Mr. Corliss laughingly went on. “I want to bore you a little first, and then make your fortune. No doubt that’s an old story to you, but I happen to be one of the adventurers whose argosies are laden with real cargoes. Nobody knows who has or hasn’t money to invest nowadays, and of course I’ve no means of knowing whether YOU have or not—you see what a direct chap I am—but if you have, or can lay hold of some, I can show you how to make it bring you an immense deal more.”

“Naturally,” said Richard pleasantly, “I shall be glad if you can do that.”

“Then I’ll come to the point. It is exceedingly simple; that’s certainly one attractive thing about it.” Corliss took some papers and unmounted photographs from his pocket, and began to spread them open on the bench between himself and Richard. “No doubt you know Southern Italy as well as I do.”

“Oh, I don’t `know’ it. I’ve been to Naples; down to Paestum; drove from Salerno to Sorrentoby Amalfi; but that was years ago.”

“Here’s a large scale map that will refresh your memory.” He unfolded it and laid it across their knees; it was frayed with wear along the folds, and had been heavily marked and dotted with red and blue pencillings. “My millions are in this large irregular section,” he continued. “It’s the anklebone and instep of Italy’s boot; this sizable province called Basilicata, east of Salerno, north of Calabria. And I’ll not hang fire on the point, Lindley. What I’ve got there is oil.”

“Olives?” asked Richard, puzzled.

“Hardly!” Corliss laughed. “Though of course one doesn’t connect petroleum with the thought of Italy, and of all Italy, Southern Italy. But in spite of the years I’ve lived there, I’ve discovered myself to be so essentially American and commercial that I want to drench the surface of that antique soil with the brown, bad-smelling crude oil that lies so deep beneath it. Basilicata is the coming great oil-field of the world—and that’s my secret. I dare to tell it here, as I shouldn’t dare in Naples.”

“Shouldn’t `dare’?” Richard repeated, with growing interest, and no doubt having some vague expectation of a tale of the Camorra. To him Naples had always seemed of all cities the most elusive and incomprehensible, a laughing, thieving, begging, mandolin-playing, music-and-murder haunted metropolis, about which anything was plausible; and this impression was not unique, as no inconsiderable proportion of Mr. Lindley’s fellow-countrymen share it, a fact thoroughly comprehended by the returned native.

“It isn’t a case of not daring on account of any bodily danger,” explained Corliss.

“No,” Richard smiled reminiscently. “I don’t believe that would have much weight with you if it were. You certainly showed no symptoms of that sort in your extreme youth. I remember you had the name of being about the most daring and foolhardy boy in town.”

“I grew up to be cautious enough in business, though,” said the other, shaking his head gravely. “I haven’t been able to afford not being careful.” He adjusted the map—a prefatory gesture. “Now, I’ll make this whole affair perfectly clear to you. It’s a simple matter, as are most big things. I’ll begin by telling you of Moliterno—he’s been my most intimate friend in that part of the continent for a great many years; since I went there as a boy, in fact.”

He sketched a portrait of his friend, Prince Moliterno, bachelor chief of a historic house, the soul of honour, “land-poor”; owning leagues and leagues of land, hills and mountains, broken towers and ruins, in central Basilicata, a province described as wild country and rough, off the rails and not easy to reach. Moliterno and the narrator had gone there to shoot; Corliss had seen “surface oil” upon the streams and pools; he recalled the discovery of oil near his own boyhood home in America; had talked of it to Moliterno, and both men had become more and more interested, then excited. They decided to sink a well.

Corliss described picturesquely the difficulties of this enterprise, the hardships and disappointments; how they dragged the big tools over the mountains by mule power; how they had kept it all secret; how he and Moliterno had done everything with the help of peasant labourers and one experienced man, who had “seen service in the Persian oil-fields.”

He gave the business reality, colouring it with details relevant and irrelevant, anecdotes and wayside incidents: he was fluent, elaborate, explicit throughout. They sank five wells, he said, “at the angles of this irregular pentagon you see here on the map, outlined in blue. These red circles are the wells.” Four of the wells “came in tremendous,” but they had managed to get them sealed after wasting—he was “sorry to think how many thousand barrels of oil.” The fifth well was so enormous that they had not been able to seal it at the time of the speaker’s departure for America.

“But I had a cablegram this morning,” he added, “letting me know they’ve managed to do it at last. Here is, the cablegram.” He handed Richard a form signed “Antonio Moliterno.”

“Now, to go back to what I said about not `daring’ to speak of this in Naples,” he continued, smiling. “The fear is financial, not physical.”

The knowledge of the lucky strike, he explained, must be kept from the “Neapolitan money-sharks.” A third of the land so rich in oil already belonged to the Moliterno estates, but it was necessary to obtain possession of the other two thirds “before the secret leaks into Naples.” So far, it was safe, the peasants of Basilicata being “as medieval a lot as one could wish.” He related that these peasants thought that the devils hiding inside the mountains had been stabbed by the drills, and that the oil was devils’ blood.

“You can see some of the country people hanging about, staring at a well, in this kodak, though it’s not a very good one.” He put into Richard’s hand a small, blurred photograph showing a spouting well with an indistinct crowd standing in an irregular semicircle before it.

“Is this the Basilicatan peasant costume? asked Richard, indicating a figure in the foreground, the only one revealed at all definitely. “It looks more oriental. Isn’t the man wearing a fez?”

“Let me see,” responded Mr. Corliss very quickly. “Perhaps I gave you the wrong picture. Oh, no,” he laughed easily, holding the kodak closer to his eyes; “that’s all right: it is a fez. That’s old Salviati, our engineer, the man I spoke of who’d worked in Persia, you know; he’s always worn a fez since then. Got in the habit of it out there and says he’ll never give it up. Moliterno’s always chaffing him about it. He’s a faithful old chap, Salviati.”

“I see.” Lindley looked thoughtfully at the picture, which the other carelessly returned to his hand. “There seems to be a lot of oil there.”

“It’s one of the smaller wells at that. And you can see from the kodak that it’s just `blowing’—not an eruption from being `shot,’ or the people wouldn’t stand so near. Yes; there’s an ocean of oil under that whole province; but we want a lot of money to get at it. It’s mountain country; our wells will all have to go over fifteen-hundred feet, and that’s expensive. We want to pipe the oil to Salerno, where the Standard’s ships will take it from us, and it will need a great deal for that. But most of all we want money to get hold of the land; we must control the whole field, and it’s big!”

“How did you happen to come here to finance it?”

“I was getting to that. Moliterno himself is as honourable a man as breathes God’s air. But my experience has been that Neapolitan capitalists are about the cleverest and slipperiest financiers in the world. We could have financed it twenty times over in Naples in a day, but neither Moliterno nor I was willing to trust them. The thing is enormous, you see—a really colossal fortune—and Italian law is full of ins and outs, and the first man we talked to confidentially would have given us his word to play straight, and, the instant we left him, would have flown post-haste for Basilicata and grabbed for himself the two thirds of the field not yet in our hands. Moliterno and I talked it over many, many times; we thought of going to Rome for the money, to Paris, to London, to New York; but I happened to remember the old house here that my aunt had left me—I wanted to sell it, to add whatever it brought to the money I’ve already put in—and then it struck me I might raise the rest here as well as anywhere else.”

The other nodded. “I understand.”

“I suppose you’ll think me rather sentimental,” Corliss went on, with a laugh which unexpectedly betrayed a little shyness. “I’ve never forgotten that I was born here—was a boy here. In all my wanderings I’ve always really thought of this as home.”

His voice trembled slightly and his face flushed; he smiled deprecatingly as though in apology for these symptoms of emotion; and at that both listeners felt (perhaps with surprise) the man’s strong attraction. There was something very engaging about him: in the frankness of his look and in the slight tremor in his voice; there was something appealing and yet manly in the confession, by this thoroughgoing cosmopolite, of his real feeling for the home-town.

“Of course I know how very few people, even among the `old citizens,’ would have any recollection whatever of me,” he went on; “but that doesn’t make any difference in my sentiment for the place and its people. That street out yonder was named for my grandfather: there’s a statue of my great uncle in the State House yard; all my own blood: belonged here, and though I have been a wanderer and may not be remembered—naturally am NOT remembered—yet the name is honoured here, and I—I–-” He faltered again, then concluded with quiet earnestness: “I thought that if my good luck was destined to bring fortunes to others, it might as well be to my own kind—that at least I’d offer them the chance before I offered it to any one else.” He turned and looked Richard in the face. “That’s why I’m here, Mr. Lindley.”

The other impulsively put out his hand. “I understand,” he said heartily.

“Thank you.” Corliss changed his tone for one less serious. “You’ve listened very patiently and I hope you’ll be rewarded for it. Certainly you will if you decide to come in with us. May I leave the maps and descriptions with you?”

“Yes, indeed. I’ll look them over carefully and have another talk with you about it.”

“Thank heaven, THAT’S over!” exclaimed the lounger in the hammock, who had not once removed his fascinated stare from the expressive face of Valentine Corliss. “If you have now concluded with dull care, allow me to put a vital question: Mr. Corliss, do you sing?”

The gentleman addressed favoured him with a quizzical glance from between half-closed lids, and probably checking an impulse to remark that he happened to know that his questioner sometimes sang, replied merely, “No.”

“It is a pity.”

“Why?”

“Nothing,” returned the other, inconsequently. It just struck me that you ought to sing the Toreador song.”

Richard Lindley, placing the notes and maps in his pocket, dropped them, and, stooping, began to gather the scattered papers with a very red face. Corliss, however, laughed good-naturedly.

“That’s most flattering,” he said; “though there are other things in `Carmen’ I prefer—probably because one doesn’t hear them so eternally.”

Vilas pulled himself up to a sitting position and began to swing again. “Observe our host, Mr. Corliss,” he commanded gayly. “He is a kind old Dobbin, much beloved, but cares damn little to hear you or me speak of music. He’d even rather discuss your oil business than listen to us talk of women, whereas nothing except women ever really interests YOU, my dear sir. He’s not our kind of man,” he concluded, mournfully; “not at all our kind of man!”

“I hope,” Corliss suggested, “he’s going to be my kind of man in the development of these oil-fields.”

“How ridic”—Mr. Vilas triumphed over the word after a slight struggle—“ulous! I shall review that: ridiculous of you to pretend to be interested in oil-fields. You are not that sort of person whatever. Nothing could be clearer than that you would never waste the time demanded by fields of oil. Groundlings call this `the mechanical age’—a vulgar error. My dear sir, you and I know that it is the age of Woman! Even poets have begun to see that she is alive. Formerly we did not speak of her at all, but of late years she has become such a scandal that she is getting talked about. Even our dramas, which used to be all blood, have become all flesh. I wish I were dead—but will continue my harangue because the thought is pellucid. Women selecting men to mate with are of only two kinds, just as there are but two kinds of children in a toy-shop. One child sets its fancy on one partic”—the orator paused, then continued—“on one certain toy and will make a distressing scene if she doesn’t get it: she will have that one; she will go straight to it, clasp it and keep it; she won’t have any other. The other kind of woman is to be understood if you will make the experiment of taking the other kind of child to a toy-shop and telling her you will buy her any toy in the place, but that you will buy her only one. If you do this in the morning, she will still be in the shop when it is closing for the night, because, though she runs to each toy in turn with excitement and delight, she sees another over her shoulder, and the one she has not touched is always her choice—until she has touched it! Some get broken in the handling. For my part, my wires are working rather rustily, but I must obey the Stage-Manager. For my requiem I wish somebody would ask them to play Gounod’s masterpiece.”

“What’s that?” asked Corliss, amused.

“`The Funeral March of a Marionette!’”

“I suppose you mean that for a cheerful way of announcing that you are a fatalist.”

“Fatalism? That is only a word, declared Mr. Vilas gravely. “If I am not a puppet then I am a god. Somehow, I do not seem to be a god. If a god is a god, one thinks he would know it himself. I now yield the floor. Thanking you cordially, I believe there is a lady walking yonder who commands salutation.”

He rose to his feet, bowing profoundly. Cora Madison was passing, strolling rather briskly down the street, not in the direction of her home. She waved her parasol with careless gayety to the trio under the trees, and, going on, was lost to their sight.

“Hello!” exclaimed Corliss, looking at his watch with a start of surprise. “I have two letters to write for the evening mail. I must be off.”

At this, Ray Vilas’s eyes—still fixed upon him, as they had been throughout the visit—opened to their fullest capacity, in a gaze of only partially alcoholic wildness.

Entirely aware of this singular glare, but not in the least disconcerted by it, the recipient proffered his easy farewells. “I had no idea it was so late. Good afternoon. Mr. Vilas, I have been delighted with your diagnosis. Lindley, I’m at your disposal when you’ve looked over my data. My very warm thanks for your patience, and—addio!”

Lindley looked after him as he strode quickly away across the green lawn, turning, at the street, in the direction Cora had taken; and the troubled Richard felt his heart sink with vague but miserable apprehension. There was a gasp of desperation beside him, and the sound of Ray Vilas’s lips parting and closing with little noises of pain.

“So he knows her,” said the boy, his thin body shaking. “Look at him, damn him! See his deep chest, that conqueror’s walk, the easy, confident, male pride of him: a true-born, natural rake—the Toreador all over!”

His agitation passed suddenly; he broke into a loud laugh, and flung a reckless hand to his companion’s shoulder.

“You good old fool,” he cried. “YOU’LL never play Don Jose!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hedrick Madison, like too many other people, had never thought seriously about the moon; nor ever had he encouraged it to become his familiar; and he underwent his first experience of its incomparable betrayals one brilliant night during the last week of that hot month. The preface to this romantic evening was substantial and prosaic: four times during dinner was he copiously replenished with hash, which occasioned so rich a surfeit within him that, upon the conclusion of the meal, he found himself in no condition to retort appropriately to a solicitous warning from Cora to keep away from the cat. Indeed, it was half an hour later, and he was sitting—to his own consciousness too heavily—upon the back fence, when belated inspiration arrived. But there is no sound where there is no ear to hear, and no repartee, alas! when the wretch who said the first part has gone, so that Cora remained unscathed as from his alley solitude Hedrick hurled in the teeth of the rising moon these bitter words:

“Oh, no; OUR cat only eats SOFT meat!”

He renewed a morbid silence, and the moon, with its customary deliberation, swung clear of a sweeping branch of the big elm in the front yard and shone full upon him. Nothing warned the fated youth not to sit there; no shadow of imminent catastrophe tinted that brightness: no angel whisper came to him, bidding him begone—and to go in a hurry and as far as possible. No; he sat upon the fence an inoffensive lad, and—except for still feeling his hash somewhat, and a gradually dispersing rancour concerning the cat—at peace. It is for such lulled mortals that the ever-lurking Furies save their most hideous surprises.

Chin on palms, he looked idly at the moon, and the moon inscrutably returned his stare. Plausible, bright, bland, it gave no sign that it was at its awful work. For the bride of night is like a card-dealer whose fingers move so swiftly through the pack the trickery goes unseen.

This moon upon which he was placidly gazing, because he had nothing else to do, betokened nought to Hedrick: to him it was the moon of any other night, the old moon; certainly no moon of his delight. Withal, it may never be gazed upon so fixedly and so protractedly—no matter how languidly—with entire impunity. That light breeds a bug in the brain. Who can deny how the moon wrought this thing under the hair of unconscious Hedrick, or doubt its responsibility for the thing that happened?

“LITTLE BOY!”

It was a very soft, small voice, silky and queer; and at first Hedrick had little suspicion that it could be addressing him: the most rigid self-analysis could have revealed to him no possibility of his fitting so ignominious a description.

“Oh, little boy!”

He looked over his shoulder and saw, standing in the alley behind him, a girl of about his own age. She was daintily dressed and had beautiful hair which was all shining in pale gold.

“Little boy!”

She was smiling up at him, and once more she used that wantonly inaccurate vocative:

“Little boy!”

Hedrick grunted unencouragingly. “Who you callin’ `little boy’?”

For reply she began to climb the fence. It was high, but the young lady was astonishingly agile, and not even to be deterred by several faint wails from tearing and ripping fabrics—casualties which appeared to be entirely beneath her notice. Arriving at the top rather dishevelled, and with irregular pennons here and there flung to the breeze from her attire, she seated herself cosily beside the dumbfounded Hedrick.

She turned her face to him and smiled—and there was something about her smile which Hedrick did not like. It discomforted him; nothing more. In sunlight he would have had the better chance to comprehend; but, unhappily, this was moonshine.

“Kiss me, little boy!” she said.

“I won’t!” exclaimed the shocked and indignant Hedrick, edging uneasily away from her.

“Let’s play,” she said cheerfully.

“Play what?”

“I like chickens. Did you know I like chickens?”

The rather singular lack of connection in her remarks struck him as a misplaced effort at humour.

“You’re having lots of fun with me, aren’t you?” he growled.

She instantly moved close to him and lifted her face to his.

“Kiss me, darling little boy!” she said.

There was something more than uncommonly queer about this stranger, an unearthliness of which he was confusedly perceptive, but she was not without a curious kind of prettiness, and her pale gold hair was beautiful. The doomed lad saw the moon shining through it.

“Kiss me, darling little boy!” she repeated.

His head whirled; for the moment she seemed divine.

George Washington used profanity at the Battle of Monmouth. Hedrick kissed her.

He instantly pushed her away with strong distaste. “There!” he said angrily. “I hope that’ll satisfy you!” He belonged to his sex.

“Kiss me some more, darling little boy!” she cried, and flung her arms about him.

With a smothered shout of dismay he tried to push her off, and they fell from the fence together, into the yard, at the cost of further and almost fatal injuries to the lady’s apparel.

Hedrick was first upon his feet. “Haven’t you got ANY sense?” he demanded.

She smiled unwaveringly, rose (without assistance) and repeated: “Kiss me some more, darling little boy!”

“No, I won’t! I wouldn’t for a thousand dollars!”

Apparently, she did not consider this discouraging. She began to advance endearingly, while he retreated backward. “Kiss me some–-“

“I won’t, I tell you!” Hedrick kept stepping away, moving in a desperate circle. He resorted to a brutal formula: “You make me sick!”

“Kiss me some more, darling lit–-“

“I won’t!” he bellowed. “And if you say that again I’ll–-“

“Kiss me some more, darling little boy!” She flung herself at him, and with a yell of terror he turned and ran at top-speed.

She pursued, laughing sweetly, and calling loudly as she ran, “Kiss me some more, darling little boy! Kiss me some more, darling little boy!”

The stricken Hedrick knew not whither to direct his flight: he dared not dash for the street with this imminent tattered incubus—she was almost upon him—and he frantically made for the kitchen door, only to swerve with a gasp of despair as his foot touched the step, for she was at his heels, and he was sickeningly assured she would cheerfully follow him through the house, shouting that damning refrain for all ears. A strangling fear took him by the throat—if Cora should come to be a spectator of this unspeakable flight, if Cora should hear that horrid plea for love! Then farewell peace; indeed, farewell all joy in life forever!

Panting sobbingly, he ducked under the amorous vampire’s arm and fled on. He zigzagged desperately to and fro across the broad, empty backyard, a small hand ever and anon managing to clutch his shoulder, the awful petition in his ears:

“Kiss me some more, darling little boy!”

“HEDRICK!”

Emerging from the kitchen door, Laura stood and gazed in wonder as the two eerie figures sped by her, circled, ducked, dodged, flew madly on. This commonplace purlieu was become the scene of a witch-chase; the moonlight fell upon the ghastly flitting face of the pursued, uplifted in agony, white, wet, with fay eyes; also it illumined the unreal elf following close, a breeze-blown fantasy in rags.

“Kiss me some more, darling little boy!”

Laura uttered a sharp exclamation. “Stand still, Hedrick!” she called. “You must!”

Hedrick made a piteous effort to increase his speed.

“It’s Lolita Martin,” called Laura. “She must have her way or nothing can be done with her. Stand STILL!”

Hedrick had never heard of Lolita Martin, but the added information concerning her was not ineffective: it operated as a spur; and Laura joined the hunt.

“Stand still!” she cried to the wretched quarry. She’s run away. She must be taken home. Stop, Hedrick! You MUST stop!”

Hedrick had no intention of stopping, but Laura was a runner, and, as he dodged the other, caught and held him fast. The next instant, Lolita, laughing happily, flung her arms round his neck from behind.

“Lemme go!” shuddered Hedrick. “Lemme go!”

“Kiss me again, darl–-“

“I—woof!” He became inarticulate.

“She isn’t quite right,” his sister whispered hurriedly in his ear. “She has spells when she’s weak mentally. You must be kind to her. She only wants you to–-“

“`ONLY’!” he echoed hoarsely. “I won’t ki–-” He was unable to finish the word.

“We must get her home,” said Laura anxiously. “Will you come with me, Lolita, dear?”

Apparently Lolita had no consciousness whatever of Laura’s presence. Instead of replying, she tightened her grasp upon Hedrick and warmly reiterated her request.

“Shut up, you parrot!” hissed the goaded boy.

“Perhaps she’ll go if you let her walk with her arms round your neck,” suggested Laura.

“If I WHAT?”

“Let’s try it. We’ve got to get her home; her mother must be frantic about her. Come, let’s see if she’ll go with us that way.”

With convincing earnestness, Hedrick refused to make the experiment until Laura suggested that he remain with Lolita while she summoned assistance; then, as no alternative appeared, his spirit broke utterly, and he consented to the trial, stipulating with a last burst of vehemence that the progress of the unthinkable pageant should be through the alley.

“Come, Lolita,” said Laura coaxingly. “We’re going for a nice walk.” At the adjective, Hedrick’s burdened shoulders were racked with a brief spasm, which recurred as his sister added: “Your darling little boy will let you keep hold of him.”

Lolita seemed content. Laughing gayly, she offered no opposition, but, maintaining her embrace with both arms and walking somewhat sidewise, went willingly enough; and the three slowly crossed the yard, passed through the empty stable and out into the alley. When they reached the cross-street at the alley’s upper end, Hedrick balked flatly.

Laura expostulated, then entreated. Hedrick refused with sincere loathing to be seen upon the street occupying his present position in the group. Laura assured him that there was no one to see; he replied that the moon was bright and the evening early; he would die, and readily, but he would not set foot in the street. Unfortunately, he had selected an unfavourable spot for argument: they were already within a yard or two of the street; and a strange boy, passing, stopped and observed, and whistled discourteously.

“Ain’t he the spooner!” remarked this unknown with hideous admiration.

“I’ll thank you,” returned Hedrick haughtily, “to go on about your own business.”

“Kiss me some more, darling little boy!” said Lolita.

The strange boy squawked, wailed, screamed with laughter, howled the loving petition in a dozen keys of mockery, while Hedrick writhed and Lolita clung. Enriched by a new and great experience, the torturer trotted on, leaving viperish cachinna-tions in his wake.

But the martyrdom was at an end. A woman, hurrying past, bareheaded, was greeted by a cry of delight from Lolita, who released Hedrick and ran to her with outstretched arms.

“We were bringing her home, Mrs. Martin,” said Laura, reassuringly. “She’s all right; nothing’s the matter except that her dress got torn. We found her playing in our yard.”

“I thank you a thousand times, Miss Madison,” cried Lolita’s mother, and flutteringly plunged into a description of her anxiety, her search for Lolita, and concluded with renewed expressions of gratitude for the child’s safe return, an outpouring of thankfulness and joy wholly incomprehensible to Hedrick.

“Not at all,” said Laura cheerfully. “Come, Hedrick. We’ll go home by the street, I think.” She touched his shoulder, and he went with her in stunned obedience. He was not able to face the incredible thing that had happened to him: he walked in a trance of horror.

“Poor little girl!” said Laura gently, with what seemed to her brother an indefensibly misplaced compassion. “Usually they have her live in an institution for people afflicted as she is, but they brought her home for a visit last week, I believe. Of course you didn’t understand, but I think you should have been more thoughtful. Really, you shouldn’t have flirted with her.”

Hedrick stopped short.

“`FLIRTED’!” His voice was beginning to show symptoms of changing, this year; it rose to a falsetto wail, flickered and went out.

With the departure of Lolita in safety, what had seemed bizarre and piteous became obscured, and another aspect of the adventure was presented to Laura. The sufferings of the arrogant are not wholly depressing to the spectator; and of arrogance Hedrick had ever been a master. She began to shake; a convulsion took her, and suddenly she sat upon the curbstone without dignity, and laughed as he had never seen her.

A horrid distrust of her rose within him: he began to realize in what plight he stood, what terrors o’erhung.

“Look here,” he said miserably, “are you—you aren’t—you don’t have to go and—and TALK about this, do you?”

“No, Hedrick,” she responded, rising and controlling herself somewhat. “Not so long as you’re good.”

This was no reassuring answer.

“And politer to Cora,” she added.

Seemingly he heard the lash of a slave-whip crack in the air. The future grew dark.

“I know you’ll try”—she said; and the unhappy lad felt that her assurance was justified; but she had not concluded the sentence—“darling little boy,” she capped it, choking slightly.

“No other little girl ever fell in love with you, did there, Hedrick?” she asked, and, receiving an incoherent but furious reply, she was again overcome, so that she must lean against the fence to recover. “It seems—so—so CURIOUS,” she explained, gasping, “that the first one—the—the only one—should be an—a—an–-” She was unable to continue.

Hedrick’s distrust became painfully increased: he began to feel that he disliked Laura.

She was still wiping her eyes and subject to recurrent outbursts when they reached their own abode; and as he bitterly flung himself into a chair upon the vacant front porch, he heard her stifling an attack as she mounted the stairs to her own room. He swung the chair about, with its back to the street, and sat facing the wall. He saw nothing. There are profundities in the abyss which reveal no glimpse of the sky.

Presently he heard his father coughing near by; and the sound was hateful, because it seemed secure and unshamed. It was a cough of moral superiority; and just then the son would have liked to believe that his parent’s boyhood had been one of degradation as complete as his own; but no one with this comfortable cough could ever have plumbed such depths: his imagination refused the picture he was bitterly certain that Mr. Madison had never kissed an idiot.

Hedrick had a dread that his father might speak to him; he was in no condition for light conversation. But Mr. Madison was unaware of his son’s near presence, and continued upon his purposeless way. He was smoking his one nightly cigar and enjoying the moonlight. He drifted out toward the sidewalk and was accosted by a passing acquaintance, a comfortable burgess of sixty, leading a child of six or seven, by the hand.

“Out taking the air, are you, Mr. Madison? said the pedestrian, pausing.

“Yes; just trying to cool off,” returned the other. “How are you, Pryor, anyway? I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

“Not since last summer,” said Pryor. “I only get here once or twice a year, to see my married daughter. I always try to spend August with her if I can. She’s still living in that little house, over on the next street, I bought for her through your real-estate company. I suppose you’re still in the same business?”

“Yes. Pretty slack, these days.”

“I suppose so, I suppose so,” responded Mr. Pryor, nodding. “Summer, I suppose it usually is. Well, I don’t know when I’ll be going out on the road again myself. Business is pretty slack all over the country this year.”

“Let’s see—I’ve forgotten,” said Madison ruminatively. “You travel, don’t you?”

“For a New York house,” affirmed Mr. Pryor. He did not, however, mention his “line.” “Yes-sir,” he added, merely as a decoration, and then said briskly: “I see you have a fine family, Mr. Madison; yes-sir, a fine family; I’ve passed here several times lately and I’ve noticed ‘em: fine family. Let’s see, you’ve got four, haven’t you?”

“Three,” said Madison. “Two girls and a boy.”

“Well, sir, that’s mighty nice,” observed Mr. Pryor; MIGHTY nice! I only have my one daughter, and of course me living in New York when I’m at home, and her here, why, I don’t get to see much of her. You got both your daughters living with you, haven’t you?”

“Yes, right here at home.”

“Let’s see: neither of ‘em’s married, I believe?”

“No; not yet.”

“Seems to me now,” said Pryor, taking off his glasses and wiping them, “seems to me I did hear somebody say one of ‘em was going to be married engaged, maybe.”

“No,” said Madison. “Not that I know of.”

“Well, I suppose you’d be the first to know! Yes-sir.” And both men laughed their appreciation of this folly. “They’re mighty good-looking girls, THAT’S certain,” continued Mr. Pryor. “And one of ‘em’s as fine a dresser as you’ll meet this side the Rue de la Paix.

“You mean in Paris?” asked Madison, slightly surprised at this allusion. “You’ve been over there, Pryor?”

“Oh, sometimes,” was the response. “My business takes me over, now and then. “I THINK it’s one of your daughters I’ve noticed dresses so well. Isn’t one of ‘em a mighty pretty girl about twenty-one or two, with a fine head of hair sort of lightish brown, beautiful figure, and carries a white parasol with a green lining sometimes?”

“Yes, that’s Cora, I guess.”

“Pretty name, too,” said Pryor approvingly. “Yes-sir. I saw her going into a florist’s, downtown, the other day, with a fine-looking young fellow—I can’t think of his name. Let’s see: my daughter was with me, and she’d heard his name—said his family used to be big people in this town and–-“

“Oh,” said Madison, “young Corliss.”

“Corliss!” exclaimed Mr. Pryor, with satisfaction. “That’s it, Corliss. Well, sir,” he chuckled, “from the way he was looking at your Miss Cora it struck me he seemed kind of anxious for her name to be Corliss, too.”

“Well, hardly I expect,” said the other. “They just barely know each other: he’s only been here a few weeks; they haven’t had time to get much acquainted, you see.”

“I suppose not,” agreed Mr. Pryor, with perfect readiness. “I suppose not. “I’ll bet HE tries all he can to get acquainted though; he looked pretty smart to me. Doesn’t he come about as often as the law allows?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Madison indifferently. “He doesn’t know many people about here any more, and it’s lonesome for him at the hotel. But I guess he comes to see the whole family; I left him in the library a little while ago, talking to my wife.”

“That’s the way! Get around the old folks first!” Mr. Pryor chuckled cordially; then in a mildly inquisitive tone he said: “Seems to be a fine, square young fellow, I expect?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Pretty name, `Cora’,” said Pryor.

“What’s this little girl’s name?” Mr. Madison indicated the child, who had stood with heroic patience throughout the incomprehensible dialogue.

“Lottie, for her mother. She’s a good little girl.”

“She is SO! I’ve got a young son she ought to know,” remarked Mr. Madison serenely, with an elderly father’s total unconsciousness of the bridgeless gap between seven and thirteen. “He’d like to play with her. I’ll call him.”

“I expect we better be getting on,” said Pryor. “It’s near Lottie’s bedtime; we just came out for our evening walk.”

“Well, he can come and shake hands with her anyway,” urged Hedrick’s father. “Then they’ll know each other, and they can play some other time.” He turned toward the house and called loudly:

“Hedrick!”

There was no response. Behind the back of his chair Hedrick could not be seen. He was still sitting immovable, his eyes torpidly fixed upon the wall.

“Hed-RICK!”

Silence.

“Oh, HED-rick!” shouted his father. “Come out here! I want you to meet a little girl! Come and see a nice little girl!”

Mr. Pryor’s grandchild was denied the pleasure. At the ghastly words “LITTLE GIRL,” Hedrick dropped from his chair flat upon the floor, crawled to the end of the porch, wriggled through the railing, and immersed himself in deep shadow against the side of the house.

Here he removed his shoes, noiselessly mounted to the sill of one of the library windows, then reconnoitred through a slit in the blinds before entering.

The gas burned low in the “droplight”—almost too dimly to reveal the two people upon a sofa across the room. It was a faint murmur from one of them that caused Hedrick to pause and peer more sharply. They were Cora and Corliss; he was bending close to her; her face was lifting to his.

“Ah, kiss me! Kiss me!” she whispered.

Hedrick dropped from the sill, climbed through a window of the kitchen, hurried up the back-stairs, and reached his own apartment in time to be violently ill in seclusion.

CHAPTER NINE

Villages are scattered plentifully over the unstable buttresses of Vesuvius, and the inhabitants sleep o’ nights: Why not? Quite unaware that he was much of their condition, Mr. Madison bade his incidental gossip and the tiny Lottie good-night, and sought his early bed. He maintained in good faith that Saturday night was “a great night to sleep,” because of the later hour for rising; probably having also some factitious conviction that there prevailed a hush preparative of the Sabbath. As a matter of fact, in summer, the other members of his family always looked uncommonly haggard at the Sunday breakfast-table. Accepting without question his preposterous legend of additional matutinal slumber, they postponed retiring to a late hour, and were awakened—simultaneously with thousands of fellow-sufferers—at about half-after five on Sunday morning, by a journalistic uprising. Over the town, in these early hours, rampaged the small vendors of the manifold sheets: local papers and papers from greater cities, hawker succeeding hawker with yell upon yell and brain-piercing shrillings in unbearable cadences. No good burgher ever complained: the people bore it, as in winter they bore the smoke that injured their health, ruined their linen, spoiled their complexions, forbade all hope of beauty and comfort in their city, and destroyed the sweetness of their homes and of their wives. It is an incredibly patient citizenry and exalts its persecutors.

Of the Madison family, Cora probably suffered most; and this was the time when it was no advantage to have the front bedroom. She had not slept until close upon dawn, and the hawkers woke her irreparably; she could but rage upon her hot pillow. By and by, there came a token that another anguish kept company with hers. She had left her door open for a better circulation of the warm and languid air, and from Hedrick’s room issued an “OOF!” of agonized disgust. Cora little suspected that the youth reeked not of newsboys: Hedrick’s miseries were introspective.

The cries from the street were interminable; each howler in turn heard faintly in the distance, then in crescendo until he had passed and another succeeded him, and all the while Cora lay tossing and whispering between clenched teeth. Having ample reason, that morning, to prefer sleep to thinking, sleep was impossible. But she fought for it: she did not easily surrender what she wanted; and she struggled on, with closed eyes, long after she had heard the others go down to breakfast.

About a hundred yards from her windows, to the rear, were the open windows of a church which fronted the next street, and stood dos-a-dos to the dwelling of the Madisons. The Sunday-school hour had been advanced for the hot weather, and, partly on this account, and partly because of the summer absence of many families, the attendants were few. But the young voices were conducted, rather than accompanied, in pious melody by a cornetist who worthily thought to amend, in his single person, what lack of volume this paucity occasioned. He was a slender young man in hot black clothes; he wore the unfacaded collar fatally and unanimously adopted by all adam’s-apple men of morals; he was washed, fair, flat-skulled, clean-minded, and industrious; and the only noise of any kind he ever made in the world was on Sunday.

“Prashus joowuls, sweet joowuls, THEE jams off iz crowowun,” sang the little voices feebly. They were almost unheard; but the young man helped them out: figuratively, he put them out. And the cornet was heard: it was heard for blocks and blocks; it was heard over all that part of the town—in the vicinity of the church it was the only thing that could be heard. In his daily walk this cornetist had no enemies: he was kind-hearted; he would not have shot a mad dog; he gladly nursed the sick. He sat upon the platform before the children; he swelled, perspired and blew, and felt that it was a good blowing. If other thoughts vapoured upon the borders of his mind, they were of the dinner he would eat, soon after noon, at the house of one of the frilled, white-muslin teachers. He was serene. His eyes were not blasted; his heart was not instantly withered; his thin, bluish hair did not fall from his head; his limbs were not detached from his torso—yet these misfortunes had been desired for him, with comprehension and sincerity, at the first flat blat of his brassy horn.

It is impossible to imagine the state of mind of this young cornetist, could he have known that he had caused the prettiest girl in town to jump violently out of bed with what petitions upon her lips regarding his present whereabouts and future detention! It happened that during the course of his Sunday walk on Corliss Street, that very afternoon, he saw her—was hard-smitten by her beauty, and for weeks thereafter laid unsuccessful plans to “meet” her. Her image was imprinted: he talked about her to his boarding-house friends and office acquaintances, his favourite description being, “the sweetest-looking lady I ever laid eyes on.”

Cora, descending to the breakfast-table rather white herself, was not unpleasantly shocked by the haggard aspect of Hedrick, who, with Laura and Mrs. Madison, still lingered.

“Good-morning, Cora,” he said politely, and while she stared, in suspicious surprise, he passed her a plate of toast with ostentatious courtesy; but before she could take one of the slices, “Wait,” he said; “it’s very nice toast, but I’m afraid it isn’t hot. I’ll take it to the kitchen and have it warmed for you.” And he took the plate and went out, walking softly.

Cora turned to her mother, appalled. “He’ll be sick!” she said.

Mrs. Madison shook her head and smiled sadly.

“He helped to wait on all of us: he must have been doing something awful.”

“More likely he wants permission to do something awful.”

Laura looked out of the window.

“There, Cora,” said Hedrick kindly, when he brought the toast; “you’ll find that nice and hot.”

She regarded him steadfastly, but with modesty he avoided her eye. “You wouldn’t make such a radical change in your nature, Hedrick,” she said, with a puzzled frown, “just to get out of going to church, would you?”

“I don’t want to get out of going to church,” he said. He gulped slightly. “I like church.”

And church-time found him marching decorously beside his father, the three ladies forming a rear rank; a small company in the very thin procession of fanning women and mopping men whose destination was the gray stone church at the foot of Corliss Street. The locusts railed overhead: Hedrick looked neither to the right nor to the left.

They passed a club, of which a lower window was vacated simultaneously with their coming into view; and a small but ornate figure in pale gray crash hurried down the steps and attached itself to the second row of Madisons. “Good-morning,” said Mr. Wade Trumble. “Thought I’d take a look-in at church this morning myself.”

Care of this encumbrance was usually expected of Laura and Mrs. Madison, but to their surprise Cora offered a sprightly rejoinder and presently dropped behind them with Mr. Trumble. Mr. Trumble was also surprised and, as naively, pleased.

“What’s happened?” he asked with cheerful frankness. “You haven’t given me a chance to talk to you for a long while.”

“Haven’t I?” she smiled enigmatically. “I don’t think you’ve tried very hard.”

This was too careless; it did not quite serve, even for Trumble. “What’s up?” he asked, not without shrewdness. “Is Richard Lindley out of town?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see. Perhaps it’s this new chap, Corliss? Has he left?”

“What nonsense! What have they got to do with my being nice to you?” She gave him a dangerous smile, and it wrought upon him visibly.

“Don’t you ever be nice to me unless you mean it,” he said feebly.

Cora looked grave and sweet; she seemed mysteriously moved. “I never do anything I don’t mean,” she said in a low voice which thrilled the little man. This was machine-work, easy and accurate.

“Cora–-” he began, breathlessly.

“There!” she exclaimed, shifting on the instant to a lively brusqueness. “That’s enough for you just NOW. We’re on our way to church!”

Trumble felt almost that she had accepted him.

“Have you got your penny for the contribution box?” she smiled. “I suppose you really give a great deal to the church. I hear you’re richer and richer.”

“I do pretty well,” he returned, coolly. “You can know just how well, if you like.”

“Not on Sunday,” she laughed; then went on, admiringly, “I hear you’re very dashing in your speculations.”

“Then you’ve heard wrong, because I don’t speculate,” he returned. “I’m not a gambler—except on certainties. I guess I disappointed a friend of yours the other day because I wouldn’t back him on a thousand-to-one shot.”

“Who was that?” she asked, with an expression entirely veiled.

“Corliss. He came to see me; wanted me to put real money into an oil scheme. Too thin!”

“Why is it `too thin’?” she asked carelessly.

“Too far away, for one thing—somewhere in Italy. Anybody who put up his cash would have to do it on Corliss’s bare word that he’s struck oil.”

“Well?” She turned her face to him, and a faint perturbation was manifest in her tone. “Isn’t Mr. Corliss’s `bare word’ supposed to be perfectly good?”

“Oh, I suppose so, but I don’t know. He isn’t known here: nobody really knows anything about him except that he was born here. Besides, I wouldn’t make an investment on my own father’s bare word, if he happened to be alive.”

“Perhaps not!” Cora spoke impulsively, a sudden anger getting the better of her, but she controlled it immediately. “Of course I don’t mean that,” she laughed, sweetly. “But I happen to think Mr. Corliss’s scheme a very handsome one, and I want my friends to make their fortunes, of course. Richard Lindley and papa are going into it.”

“I’ll bet they don’t,” said Trumble promptly. “Lindley told me he’d looked it over and couldn’t see his way to.”

“He did?” Cora stiffened perceptibly and bit her lip.

Trumble began to laugh. “This is funny: you trying to talk business! So Corliss has been telling you about it?”

“Yes, he has; and I understand it perfectly. I think there’s an enormous fortune in it, and you’d better not laugh at me: a woman’s instinct about such things is better than a man’s experience sometimes.”

“You’ll find neither Lindley nor your father are going to think so,” he returned skeptically.

She gave him a deep, sweet look. “But I mustn’t be disappointed in you,” she said, with the suggestion of a tremor in her voice, whatever THEY do! You’ll take my advice, won’t you—Wade?”

“I’ll take your advice in anything but business.” He shook his head ominously.

“And wouldn’t you take my advice in business,—she asked very slowly and significantly—“under ANY circumstances?”

“You mean,” he said huskily, “if you were my wife?”

She looked away, and slightly inclined her head. “No,” he answered doggedly, “I wouldn’t. You know mighty well that’s what I want you to be, and I’d give my soul for the tip of your shoe, but business is an entirely different matter, and I–-“

“WADE! she said, with wonderful and thrilling sweetness. They had reached the church; Hedrick and his father had entered; Mrs. Madison and Laura were waiting on the steps. Cora and Trumble came to a stop some yards away. “Wade, I—I WANT you to go into this.”

“Can’t do it,” he said stubbornly. “If you ever make up your mind to marry me, I’ll spend all the money you like on YOU, but you’ll have to keep to the woman’s side of the house.”

“You make it pretty hard for me to be nice to you,” she returned, and the tremor now more evident in her voice was perfectly genuine. “You positively refuse to do this—for me?”

“Yes I do. I wouldn’t buy sight-unseen to please God ‘lmighty, Cora Madison.” He looked at her shrewdly, struck by a sudden thought. “Did Corliss ask you to try and get me in?”

“He did not,” she responded, icily. “Your refusal is final?”

“Certainly!” He struck the pavement a smart rap with his walking-stick. “By George, I believe he DID ask you! That spoils church for me this morning; I’ll not go in. When you quit playing games, let me know. You needn’t try to work me any more, because I won’t stand for it, but if you ever get tired of playing, come and tell me so.” He uttered a bark of rueful laughter. “Ha! I must say that gentleman has an interesting way of combining business with pleasure!”

Under favourable circumstances the blow Cora dealt him might have been physically more violent. “Good-morning,” she laughed, gayly. “I’m not bothering much about Mr. Corliss’s oil in Italy. I had a bet with Laura I could keep you from saying `I beg to differ,’ or talking about the weather for five minutes. She’ll have to pay me!”

Then, still laughing, she lowered her parasol, and with superb impudence, brushed it smartly across his face; turned on her heel, and, red with fury, joined her mother and sister, and went into the church.

The service failed to occupy her attention: she had much in her thoughts to distract her. Nevertheless, she bestowed some wonderment upon the devotion with which her brother observed each ceremonial rite. He joined in prayer with real fervour; he sang earnestly and loudly; a great appeal sounded in his changing voice; and during the sermon he sat with his eyes upon the minister in a stricken fixity. All this was so remarkable that Cora could not choose but ponder upon it, and, observing Hedrick furtively, she caught, if not a clue itself, at least a glimpse of one. She saw Laura’s clear profile becoming subtly agitated; then noticed a shimmer of Laura’s dark eye as it wandered to Hedrick and so swiftly away it seemed not to dare to remain. Cora was quick: she perceived that Laura was repressing a constant desire to laugh and that she feared to look at Hedrick lest it overwhelm her. So Laura knew what had wrought the miracle. Cora made up her mind to explore this secret passage.

When the service was over and the people were placidly buzzing their way up the aisles, Cora felt herself drawn to look across the church, and following the telepathic impulse, turned her head to encounter the gaze of Ray Vilas. He was ascending the opposite aisle, walking beside Richard Lindley. He looked less pale than usual, though his thinness was so extreme it was like emaciation; but his eyes were clear and quiet, and the look he gave her was strangely gentle. Cora frowned and turned away her head with an air of annoyance. They came near each other in the convergence at the doors; but he made no effort to address her, and, moving away through the crowd as quickly as possible, disappeared.

Valentine Corliss was disclosed in the vestibule. He reached her an instant in advance of Mr. Lindley, who had suffered himself to be impeded; and Cora quickly handed the former her parasol, lightly taking his arm. Thus the slow Richard found himself walking beside Laura in a scattered group, its detached portion consisting of his near-betrothed and Corliss; for although the dexterous pair were first to leave the church, they contrived to be passed almost at once, and, assuming the position of trailers, lagged far behind on the homeward way.

Laura and Richard walked in the unmitigated glare of the sun; he had taken her black umbrella and conscientiously held it aloft, but over nobody. They walked in silence: they were quiet people, both of them; and Richard, not “talkative” under any circumstances, never had anything whatever to say to Laura Madison. He had known her for many years, ever since her childhood; seldom indeed formulating or expressing a definite thought about her, though sometimes it was vaguely of his consciousness that she played the piano nicely, and even then her music had taken its place as but a colour of Cora’s background. For to him, as to every one else (including Laura), Laura was in nothing her sister’s competitor. She was a neutral-tinted figure, taken-for-granted, obscured, and so near being nobody at all, that, as Richard Lindley walked beside her this morning, he glanced back at the lagging couple and uttered a long and almost sonorous sigh, which he would have been ashamed for anybody to hear; and then actually proceeded on his way without the slightest realization that anybody had heard it.

She understood. And she did not disturb the trance; she did nothing to make him observe that she was there. She walked on with head, shoulders, and back scorching in the fierce sun, and allowed him to continue shading the pavement before them with her umbrella. When they reached the house she gently took the umbrella from him and thanked him; and he mechanically raised his hat.

They had walked more than a mile together; he had not spoken a word, and he did not even know it.

CHAPTER TEN

Dinner on Sunday, the most elaborate feast of the week for the Madisons, was always set for one o’clock in the afternoon, and sometimes began before two, but not to-day: the escorts of both daughters remained, and a change of costume by Cora occasioned a long postponement. Justice demands the admission that her reappearance in a glamour of lilac was reward for the delay; nothing more ravishing was ever seen, she was warrantably informed by the quicker of the two guests, in a moment’s whispered tete-a-tete across the banisters as she descended. Another wait followed while she prettily arranged upon the table some dozens of asters from a small garden-bed, tilled, planted, and tended by Laura. Meanwhile, Mrs. Madison constantly turned the other cheek to the cook. Laura assisted in the pacification; Hedrick froze the ice-cream to an impenetrable solidity; and the nominal head of the family sat upon the front porch with the two young men, and wiped his wrists and rambled politically till they were summoned to the dining-room.

Cora did the talking for the table. She was in high spirits; no trace remained of a haggard night: there was a bloom upon her—she was radiant. Her gayety may have had some inspiration in her daring, for round her throat she wore a miraculously slender chain of gold and enamel, with a pendant of minute pale sapphires scrolled about a rather large and very white diamond. Laura started when she saw it, and involuntarily threw a glance almost of terror at Richard Lindley. But that melancholy and absent-minded gentleman observed neither the glance nor the jewel. He saw Cora’s eyes, when they were vouchsafed to his vision, and when they were not he apparently saw nothing at all.

With the general exodus from the table, Cora asked Laura to come to the piano and play, a request which brought a snort from Hedrick, who was taken off his guard. Catching Laura’s eye, he applied a handkerchief with renewed presence of mind, affecting to have sneezed, and stared searchingly over it at Corliss. He perceived that the man remained unmoved, evidently already informed that it was Laura who was the musician. Cora must be going it pretty fast this time: such was the form of her brother’s deduction.

When Laura opened the piano, Richard had taken a seat beside Cora, and Corliss stood leaning in the doorway. The player lost herself in a wandering medley, echoes from “Boheme” and “Pagliacci”; then drifted into improvisation and played her heart into it magnificently—a heart released to happiness. The still air of the room filled with wonderful, golden sound: a song like the song of a mother flying from earth to a child in the stars, a torrential tenderness, unpent and glorying in freedom. The flooding, triumphant chords rose, crashed—stopped with a shattering abruptness. Laura’s hands fell to her sides, then were raised to her glowing face and concealed it for a moment. She shivered; a quick, deep sigh heaved her breast; and she came back to herself like a prisoner leaving a window at the warden’s voice.

She turned. Cora and Corliss had left the room. Richard was sitting beside a vacant chair, staring helplessly at the open door.

If he had been vaguely conscious of Laura’s playing, which is possible, certainly he was unaware that it had ceased.

“The others have gone out to the porch,” she said composedly, and rose. “Shan’t we join them?”

“What?” he returned, blankly. “I beg your pardon–-“

“Let’s go out on the porch with the others.”

“No, I–-” He got to his feet confusedly. “I was thinking–- I believe I’d best be going home.”

“Not `best,’ I think,” she said. “Not even better!”

“I don’t see,” he said, his perplexity only increased.

“Mr. Corliss would,” she retorted quickly. “Come on: we’ll go and sit with them.” And she compelled his obedience by preceding him with such a confident assumption that he would follow that he did.

The fugitive pair were not upon the porch, however; they were discovered in the shade of a tree behind the house, seated upon a rug, and occupied in a conversation which would not have disturbed a sick-room. The pursuers came upon them, boldly sat beside them; and Laura began to talk with unwonted fluency to Corliss, but within five minutes found herself alone with Richard Lindley upon the rug. Cora had promised to show Mr. Corliss an “old print” in the library—so Cora said.

Lindley gave the remaining lady a desolate and faintly reproachful look. He was kind, but he was a man; and Laura saw that this last abandonment was being attributed in part to her.

She reddened, and, being not an angel, observed with crispness: “Certainly. You’re quite right: it’s my fault!”

“What did you say?” he asked vacantly.

She looked at him rather fixedly; his own gaze had returned to the angle of the house beyond which the other couple had just disappeared. “I said,” she answered, slowly, “I thought it wouldn’t rain this, afternoon.”

His wistful eyes absently swept the serene sky which had been cloudless for several days. “No, I suppose not,” he murmured.

“Richard,” she said with a little sharpness, “will you please listen to me for a moment?”

“Oh—what?” He was like a diver coming up out of deep water. “What did you say?” He laughed apologetically. “Wasn’t I listening? I beg your pardon. What is it, Laura?”

“Why do you let Mr. Corliss take Cora away from you like that?” she asked gravely.

“He doesn’t,” the young man returned with a rueful shake of the head. “Don’t you see? It’s Cora that goes.”

“Why do you let her, then?”

He sighed. “I don’t seem to be able to keep up with Cora, especially when she’s punishing me. I couldn’t do something she asked me to, last night–-“

“Invest with Mr. Corliss?” asked Laura quickly.

“Yes. It seemed to trouble her that I couldn’t. She’s convinced it’s a good thing: she thinks it would make a great fortune for us–-“

“`Us’?” repeated Laura gently. “You mean for you and her? When you’re–-“

“When we’re married. Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “that’s the way she stated it. She wanted me to put in all I have–-“

“Don’t do it!” said Laura decidedly.

He glanced at her with sharp inquiry. “Do you mean you would distrust Mr. Corliss?’

“I wasn’t thinking of that: I don’t know whether I’d trust him or not—I think I wouldn’t; there’s something veiled about him, and I don’t believe he is an easy man to know. What I meant was that I don’t believe it would really be a good thing for you with Cora.”

“It would please her, of course—thinking I deferred so much to her judgment.”

“Don’t do it!” she said again, impulsively.

“I don’t see how I can,” he returned sorrowfully.

“It’s my work for all the years since I got out of college, and if I lost it I’d have to begin all over again. It would mean postponing everything. Cora isn’t a girl you can ask to share a little salary, and if it were a question of years, perhaps— perhaps Cora might not feel she could wait for me, you see.”

He made this explanation with plaintive and boyish sincerity, hesitatingly, and as if pleading a cause. And Laura, after a long look at him, turned away, and in her eyes were actual tears of compassion for the incredible simpleton.

“I see,” she said. “Perhaps she might not.”

“Of course,” he went on, “she’s fond of having nice things, and she thinks this is a great chance for us to be millionaires; and then, too, I think she may feel that it would please Mr. Corliss and help to save him from disappointment. She seems to have taken a great fancy to him.”

Laura glanced at him, but did not speak.

“He IS attractive,” continued Richard feebly. “I think he has a great deal of what people call `magnetism’: he’s the kind of man who somehow makes you want to do what he wants you to. He seems a manly, straightforward sort, too—so far as one can tell—and when he came to me with his scheme I was strongly inclined to go into it. But it is too big a gamble, and I can’t, though I was sorry to disappoint him myself. He was perfectly cheerful about it and so pleasant it made me feel small. I don’t wonder at all that Cora likes him so much. Besides, he seems to understand her.”

Laura looked very grave. “I think he does,” she said slowly.

“And then he’s `different,’” said Richard. “He’s more a `man of the world’ than most of us here: she never saw anything just like him before, and she’s seen US all her life. She likes change, of course. That’s natural,” he said gently. “Poor Vilas says she wants a man to be different every day, and if he isn’t, then she wants a different man every day.”

“You’ve rather taken Ray Vilas under your wing, haven’t you?” asked Laura.

“Oh, no,” he answered deprecatingly. “I only try to keep him with me so he’ll stay away from downtown as much as possible.”

“Does he talk much of Cora?”

“All the time. There’s no stopping him. I suppose he can’t help it, because he thinks of nothing else.”

“Isn’t that rather—rather queer for you?”

“`Queer’?” he repeated.

“No, I suppose not!” She laughed impatiently. “And probably you don’t think it’s `queer’ of you to sit here helplessly, and let another man take your place–-“

“But I don’t `let’ him, Laura,” he protested.

“No, he just does it!”

“Well,” he smiled, “you must admit my efforts to supplant him haven’t–-“

“It won’t take any effort now,” she said, rising quickly. Valentine Corliss came into their view upon the sidewalk in front, taking his departure. Seeing that they observed him, he lifted his hat to Laura and nodded a cordial good-day to Lindley. Then he went on.

Just before he reached the corner of the lot, he encountered upon the pavement a citizen of elderly and plain appearance, strolling with a grandchild. The two men met and passed, each upon his opposite way, without pausing and without salutation, and neither Richard nor Laura, whose eyes were upon the meeting, perceived that they had taken cognizance of each other. But one had asked a question and the other had answered.

Mr. Pryor spoke in a low monotone, with a rapidity as singular as the restrained but perceptible emphasis he put upon one word of his question.

“I got you in the park,” he said; and it is to be deduced that “got” was argot. “You’re not DOING anything here, are you?”

“No!” answered Corliss with condensed venom, his back already to the other. He fanned himself with his hat as he went on. Mr. Pryor strolled up the street with imperturbable benevolence.

“Your coast is cleared,” said Laura, “since you wouldn’t clear it yourself.”

“Wish me luck,” said Richard as he left her.

She nodded brightly.

Before he disappeared, he looked back to her again (which profoundly surprised her) and smiled rather disconsolately, shaking his head as in prophecy of no very encouraging reception indoors. The manner of this glance recalled to Laura what his mother had once said of him. “Richard is one of those sweet, helpless men that some women adore and others despise. They fall in love with the ones that despise them.”

An ostentatious cough made her face about, being obviously designed to that effect; and she beheld her brother in the act of walking slowly across the yard with his back to her. He halted upon the border of her small garden of asters, regarded it anxiously, then spread his handkerchief upon the ground, knelt upon it, and with thoughtful care uprooted a few weeds which were beginning to sprout, and also such vagrant blades of grass as encroached upon the floral territory. He had the air of a virtuous man performing a good action which would never become known. Plainly, he thought himself in solitude and all unobserved.

It was a touching picture, pious and humble. Done into coloured glass, the kneeling boy and the asters—submerged in ardent sunshine—would have appropriately enriched a cathedral: Boyhood of Saint Florus the Gardener.

Laura heartlessly turned her back, and, affecting an interest in her sleeve, very soon experienced the sensation of being stared at with some poignancy from behind. Unchanged in attitude, she unravelled an imaginary thread, whereupon the cough reached her again, shrill and loud, its insistence not lacking in pathos.

She approached him, driftingly. No sign that he was aware came from the busied boy, though he coughed again, hollowly now—a proof that he was an artist. “All right, Hedrick,” she said kindly. “I heard you the first time.”

He looked up with utter incomprehension. “I’m afraid I’ve caught cold,” he said, simply. “I got a good many weeds out before breakfast, and the ground was damp.”

Hedrick was of the New School: everything direct, real, no striving for effect, no pressure on the stroke. He did his work: you could take it or leave it.

“You mustn’t strain so, dear,” returned his sister, shaking her head. “It won’t last if you do. You see this is only the first day.”

Struck to the heart by so brutal a misconception, he put all his wrongs into one look, rose in manly dignity, picked up his handkerchief, and left her.

Her eyes followed him, not without remorse: it was an exit which would have moved the bass-violist of a theatre orchestra. Sighing, she went to her own room by way of the kitchen and the back-stairs, and, having locked her door, brought the padlocked book from its hiding-place.

“I think I should not have played as I did, an hour ago,” she wrote. “It stirs me too greatly and I am afraid it makes me inclined to self-pity afterward, and I must never let myself feel THAT! If I once begin to feel sorry for myself… . But I WILL not! No. You are here in the world. You exist. You ARE! That is the great thing to know and it must be enough for me. It is. I played to You. I played JUST LOVE to you—all the yearning tenderness—all the supreme kindness I want to give you. Isn’t love really just glorified kindness? No, there is something more… . I feel it, though I do not know how to say it. But it was in my playing—I played it and played it. Suddenly I felt that in my playing I had shouted it from the housetops, that I had told the secret to all the world and EVERYBODY knew. I stopped, and for a moment it seemed to me that I was dying of shame. But no one understood. No one had even listened… . Sometimes it seems to me that I am like Cora, that I am very deeply her sister in some things. My heart goes all to You—my revelation of it, my release of it, my outlet of it is all here in these pages (except when I play as I did to-day and as I shall not play again) and perhaps the writing keeps me quiet. Cora scatters her own releasings: she is looking for the You she may never find; and perhaps the penalty for scattering is never finding. Sometimes I think the seeking has reacted and that now she seeks only what will make her feel. I hope she has not found it: I am afraid of this new man—not only for your sake, dear. I felt repelled by his glance at me the first time I saw him. I did not like it—I cannot say just why, unless that it seemed too intimate. I am afraid of him for her, which is a queer sort of feeling because she has alw–-“

Laura’s writing stopped there, for that day, interrupted by a hurried rapping upon the door and her mother’s voice calling her with stress and urgency.

The opening of the door revealed Mrs. Madison in a state of anxious perturbation, and admitted the sound of loud weeping and agitated voices from below.

“Please go down,” implored the mother. “You can do more with her than I can. She and your father have been having a terrible scene since Richard went home.”

Laura hurried down to the library.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Oh, COME in, Laura!” cried her sister, as Laura appeared in the doorway. “Don’t STAND there! Come in if you want to take part in a grand old family row!” With a furious and tear-stained face, she was confronting her father who stood before her in a resolute attitude and a profuse perspiration. “Shut the door!” shouted Cora violently, adding, as Laura obeyed, “Do you want that little Pest in here? Probably he’s eavesdropping anyway. But what difference does it make? I don’t care. Let him hear! Let anybody hear that wants to! They can hear how I’m tortured if they like. I didn’t close my eyes last night, and now I’m being tortured. Papa!” She stamped her foot. “Are you going to take back that insult to me?”

“`Insult’?” repeated her father, in angry astonishment.

“Pshaw,” said Laura, laughing soothingly and coming to her. “You know that’s nonsense, Cora. Kind old papa couldn’t do that if he tried. Dear, you know he never insulted anybody in his–-“

“Don’t touch me!” screamed Cora, repulsing her. “Listen, if you’ve got to, but let me alone. He did too! He did! He KNOWS what he said!”

“I do not!”

“He does! He does!” cried Cora. “He said that I was—I was too much `interested’ in Mr. Corliss.”

“Is that an `insult’?” the father demanded sharply.

“It was the way he said it,” Cora protested, sobbing. “He meant something he didn’t SAY. He did! He did! He MEANT to insult me!”

“I did nothing of the kind,” shouted the old man.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. I said I couldn’t understand your getting so excited about the fellow’s affairs and that you seemed to take a mighty sudden interest in him.”

“Well, what if I DO?” she screamed. Haven’t I a right to be interested in what I choose? I’ve got to be interested in SOMETHING, haven’t I? YOU don’t make life very interesting, do you? Do you think it’s interesting to spend the summer in this horrible old house with the paper falling off the walls and our rotten old furniture that I work my hands off trying to make look decent and can’t, and every other girl I know at the seashore with motor-cars and motor-boats, or getting a trip abroad and buying her clothes in Paris? What do YOU offer to interest me?”

The unfortunate man hung his head. “I don’t see what all that has to do with it–-“

She seemed to leap at him. “You DON’T? You DON’T?”

“No, I don’t. And I don’t see why you’re so crazy to please young Corliss about this business unless you’re infatuated with him. I had an idea—and I was pleased with it, too, because Richard’s a steady fellow—that you were just about engaged to Richard Lindley, and–-“

“Engaged!” she cried, repeating the word with bitter contempt. “Engaged! You don’t suppose I’ll marry him unless I want to, do you? I will if it suits me. I won’t if it suits me not to; understand that! I don’t consider myself engaged to anybody, and you needn’t either. What on earth has that got to do with your keeping Richard Lindley from doing what Mr. Corliss wants him to?”

“I’m not keeping him from anything. He didn’t say–-“

“He did!” stormed Cora. “He said he would if you went into it. He told me this afternoon, an hour ago.”

“Now wait,” said Madison. “I talked this over with Richard two days ago–-“

Cora stamped her foot again in frantic exasperation. “I’m talking about this afternoon!”

“Two days ago,” he repeated doggedly; “and we came to the same conclusion: it won’t do. He said he couldn’t go into it unless he went over there to Italy—and saw for himself just what he was putting his money into, and Corliss had told him that it couldn’t be done; that there wasn’t time, and showed him a cablegram from his Italian partner saying the secret had leaked out and that they’d have to form the company in Naples and sell the stock over there if it couldn’t be done here within the next week. Corliss said he had to ask for an immediate answer, and so Richard told him no, yesterday.”

“Oh, my God!” groaned Cora. “What has that got to do with YOUR going into it? You’re not going to risk any money! I don’t ask you to SPEND anything, do I? You haven’t got it if I did. All Mr. Corliss wants is your name. Can’t you give even THAT? What importance is it?”

Well, if it isn’t important, what difference does it make whether I give it or not?”

She flung up her arms as in despairing appeal for patience. “It IS important to him! Richard will do it if you will be secretary of the company: he promised me. Mr. Corliss told me your name was worth everything here: that men said downtown you could have been rich long ago if you hadn’t been so square. Richard trusts you; he says you’re the most trusted man in town–-“

“That’s why I can’t do it,” he interrupted.

“No!” Her vehemence increased suddenly to its utmost. “No! Don’t you say that, because it’s a lie. That isn’t the reason you won’t do it. You won’t do it because you think it would please ME! You’re afraid it might make me HAPPY! Happy—happy—HAPPY!” She beat her breast and cast herself headlong upon the sofa, sobbing wildly. “Don’t come near me!” she screamed at Laura, and sprang to her feet again, dishevelled and frantic. “Oh, Christ in heaven! is there such a thing as happiness in this beast of a world? I want to leave it. I want to go away: I want SO to die: Why can’t I? Why can’t I! Why can’t I! Oh, God, why CAN’T I die? Why can’t–-“

Her passion culminated in a shriek: she gasped, was convulsed from head to foot for a dreadful moment, tore at the bosom of her dress with rigid bent fingers, swayed; then collapsed all at once. Laura caught her, and got her upon the sofa. In the hall, Mrs. Madison could be heard running and screaming to Hedrick to go for the doctor. Next instant, she burst into the room with brandy and camphor.

“I could only find these; the ammonia bottle’s empty,” she panted; and the miserable father started hatless, for the drug-store, a faint, choked wail from the stricken girl sounding in his ears: “It’s—it’s my heart, mamma.”

It was four blocks to the nearest pharmacy; he made what haste he could in the great heat, but to himself he seemed double his usual weight; and the more he tried to hurry, the less speed appeared obtainable from his heavy legs. When he reached the place at last, he found it crowded with noisy customers about the “soda-fount”; and the clerks were stonily slow: they seemed to know that they were “already in eternity.” He got very short of breath on the way home; he ceased to perspire and became unnaturally dry; the air was aflame and the sun shot fire upon his bare head. His feet inclined to strange disobediences: he walked the last block waveringly. A solemn Hedrick met him at the door.

“They’ve got her to bed,” announced the boy. “The doctor’s up there.”

“Take this ammonia up,” said Madison huskily, and sat down upon a lower step of the stairway with a jolt, closing his eyes.

“You sick, too?” asked Hedrick.

“No. Run along with that ammonia.”

It seemed to Madison a long time that he sat there alone, and he felt very dizzy. Once he tried to rise, but had to give it up and remain sitting with his eyes shut. At last he heard Cora’s door open and close; and his wife and the doctor came slowly down the stairs, Mrs. Madison talking in the anxious yet relieved voice of one who leaves a sick-room wherein the physician pronounces progress encouraging.

“And you’re SURE her heart trouble isn’t organic?” she asked.

Her heart is all right,” her companion assured her. “There’s nothing serious; the trouble is nervous. I think you’ll find she’ll be better after a good sleep. Just keep her quiet. Hadn’t she been in a state of considerable excitement?”

“Ye-es—she–-“

“Ah! A little upset on account of opposition to a plan she’d formed, perhaps?”

“Well—partly,” assented the mother.

“I see,” he returned, adding with some dryness: “I thought it just possible.”

Madison got to his feet, and stepped down from the stairs for them to pass him. He leaned heavily against the wall.

“You think she’s going to be all right, Sloane? he asked with an effort.

“No cause to worry,” returned the physician. “You can let her stay in bed to-day if she wants to but–-” He broke off, looking keenly at Madison’s face, which was the colour of poppies. “Hello! what’s up with YOU?”

“I’m all—right.”

“Oh, you are?” retorted Sloane with sarcasm. “Sit down,” he commanded. “Sit right where you are—on the stairs, here,” and, having enforced the order, took a stethoscope from his pocket. “Get him a glass of water,” he said to Hedrick, who was at his elbow.

“Doctor!” exclaimed Mrs. Madison. “HE isn’t going to be sick, is he? You don’t think he’s sick NOW?”

“I shouldn’t call him very well,” answered the physician rather grimly, placing his stethoscope upon Madison’s breast. “Get his room ready for him.” She gave him a piteous look, struck with fear; then obeyed a gesture and ran flutteringly up the stairs.

“I’m all right now,” panted Madison, drinking the water Hedrick brought him.

“You’re not so darned all right,” said Sloane coolly, as he pocketed his stethoscope. “Come, let me help you up. We’re going to get you to bed.”

There was an effort at protest, but the physician had his way, and the two ascended the stairs slowly, Sloane’s arm round his new patient. At Cora’s door, the latter paused.

“What’s the matter?”

“I want,” said Madison thickly—“I want—to speak to Cora.”

“We’ll pass that up just now,” returned the other brusquely, and led him on. Madison was almost helpless: he murmured in a husky, uncertain voice, and suffered himself to be put to bed. There, the doctor “worked” with him; cold “applications” were ordered; Laura was summoned from the other sick-bed; Hedrick sent flying with prescriptions, then to telephone for a nurse. The two women attempted questions at intervals, but Sloane replied with orders, and kept them busy.

“Do you—think I’m a–a pretty sick man, Sloane?” asked Madison after a long silence, speaking with difficulty.

“Oh, you’re sick, all right,” the doctor conceded.

“I—I want to speak to Jennie.”

His wife rushed to the bed, and knelt beside it.

“Don’t you go to confessing your sins,” said Doctor Sloane crossly. “You’re coming out of the woods all right, and you’ll be sorry if you tell her too, much. I’ll begin a little flirtation with you, Miss Laura, if you please.” And he motioned to her to follow him into the hall.

“Your father IS pretty sick, he told her, “and he may be sicker before we get him into shape again. But you needn’t be worried right now; I think he’s not in immediate danger.” He turned at the sound of Mrs. Madison’s step, behind him, and repeated to her what he had just said to Laura. “I hope your husband didn’t give himself away enough to be punished when we get him on his feet again,” he concluded cheerfully.

She shook her head, tried to smile through tears, and, crossing the hall, entered Cora’s room. She came back after a moment, and, rejoining the other two at her husband’s bedside, found the sick man in a stertorous sleep. Presently the nurse arrived, and upon the physician’s pointed intimation that there were “too many people around,” Laura went to Cora’s room. She halted on the threshold in surprise. Cora was dressing.

“Mamma says the doctor says he’s all right,” said Cora lightly, “and I’m feeling so much better myself I thought I’d put on something loose and go downstairs. I think there’s more air down there.”

“Papa isn’t all right, dear,” said Laura, staring perplexedly at Cora’s idea of “something loose,” an equipment inclusive of something particularly close. “The doctor says he is very sick.”

“I don’t believe it,” returned Cora promptly. “Old Sloane never did know anything. Besides, mamma told me he said papa isn’t in any danger.”

“No `immediate’ danger,” corrected Laura. “And besides, Doctor Sloane said you were to stay in bed until tomorrow.”

“I can’t help that.” Cora went on with her lacing impatiently. “I’m not going to lie and stifle in this heat when I feel perfectly well again—not for an old idiot like Sloane! He didn’t even have sense enough to give me any medicine.” She laughed. “Lucky thing he didn’t: I’d have thrown it out of the window. Kick that slipper to me, will you, dear?”

Laura knelt and put the slipper on her sister’s foot. “Cora, dear,” she said, “you’re just going to put on a negligee and go down and sit in the library, aren’t you?”

“Laura!” The tone was more than impatient. “I wish I could be let alone for five whole minutes some time in my life! Don’t you think I’ve stood enough for one day? I can’t bear to be questioned, questioned, questioned! What do you do it for? Don’t you see I can’t stand anything more? If you can’t let me alone I do wish you’d keep out of my room.

Laura rose and went out; but as she left the door, Cora called after her with a rueful laugh: “Laura, I know I’m a little devil!”

Half an hour later, Laura, suffering because she had made no reply to this peace-offering, and wishing to atone, sought Cora downstairs and found no one. She decided that Cora must still be in her own room; she would go to her there. But as she passed the open front door, she saw Cora upon the sidewalk in front of the house. She wore a new and elaborate motoring costume, charmingly becoming, and was in the act of mounting to a seat beside Valentine Corliss in a long, powerful-looking, white “roadster” automobile. The engine burst into staccato thunder, sobered down; the wheels began to move both Cora and Corliss were laughing and there was an air of triumph about them—Cora’s veil streamed and fluttered: and in a flash they were gone.