A Mrs. Fanshaw, also of New York, came from the library in a tea-gown of chiffon and real lace. All were made acquainted and Pauline poured the tea. As Olivia felt shy and was hungry, she ate the little sandwiches and looked and listened and thought—looked and thought rather than listened. These were certainly well-bred people, yet she did not like them.

"They're in earnest about trifles," she said to herself, "and trifle about earnest things." Yet it irritated her to feel that, though they would care not at all for her low opinion of them, she did care a great deal because they would fail to appreciate her.

"They ought to be jailed," Langdon was drawling with considerable emphasis.

"Who, Mr. Langdon?" inquired Mrs. Fanshaw—she had been as abstracted as Olivia. "You've been filling the jails rapidly to-day, and hanging not a few."

Mrs. Herron laughed. "He says your husband and Mrs. Dumont's and mine should be locked up as conspirators."

"Precisely," said Langdon, tranquilly. "They'll sign a few papers, and when they're done, what'll have happened? Not one more sheep'll be raised. Not one more pound of wool will be shorn. Not one more laborer'll be employed. Not a single improvement in any process of manufacture. But, on the other hand, the farmer'll have to sell his wool cheaper, the consumer'll have to pay a bigger price for blankets and all kinds of clothes, for carpets—for everything wool goes into. And these few men will have trebled their fortunes and at least trebled their incomes. Does anybody deny that such a performance is a crime? Why, in comparison, a burglar is honorable and courageous. HE risks liberty and life."

"Dreadful! Dreadful!" exclaimed Mrs. Fanshaw, in mock horror. "You must go at once, Mowbray, and lead the police in a raid on Jack's office."

"Thanks—it's more comfortable here." Langdon took a piece of a curious-looking kind of hot bread. "Extraordinary good stuff this is," he interjected; then went on: "And I've done my duty when I've stated the facts. Also, I'm taking a little stock in the new trust. But I don't pose as a 'captain of industry' or 'promoter of civilization.' I admit I'm a robber. My point is the rotten hypocrisy of my fellow bandits—no, pickpockets, by gad!"

Olivia looked at him with disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your cousin, Mrs. Dumont."

"I hope so," replied Pauline. "I'm sure we all ought to be shocked—and should be, if it weren't you who are trying to do the shocking. She'll soon get used to you."

"Then it was a jest?" said Olivia to Langdon.

"A jest?" He looked serious. "Not at all, my dear Mrs. Pierson. Every word I said was true, and worse. They——"

"Stop your nonsense, Mowbray," interrupted Mrs. Herron, who appreciated that Olivia was an "outsider." "Certainly he was jesting, Mrs. Pierson. Mr. Langdon pretends to have eccentric ideas—one of them is that everybody with brains should be put under the feet of the numskulls; another is that anybody who has anything should be locked up and his property given to those who have nothing."

"Splendid!" exclaimed Langdon. And he took out a gold cigarette case and lighted a large, expensive-looking cigarette with a match from a gold safe. "Go on, dear lady! Herron should get you to write our prospectus when we're ready to unload on the public. The dear public! How it does yearn for a share in any piratical enterprise that flies the snowy flag of respectability." He rose. "Who'll play English billiards?"

"All right," said Mrs. Herron, rising.

"And I, too," said Mrs. Fanshaw.

"Give me one of your cigarettes, Mowbray," said Mrs. Herron. "I left my case in my room."

Pauline, answering Olivia's expression, said as soon as the three had disappeared:

"Why not? Is it any worse for a woman than for a man?"

"I don't know why not," replied Olivia. "There must be another reason than because I don't do it, and didn't think ladies did. But that's the only reason I can give just now."

"What do you think of Langdon?" asked Pauline.

"I guess my sense of humor's defective. I don't like the sort of jest he seems to excel in."

"I fancy it wasn't altogether a jest," said Pauline. "I don't inquire into those matters any more. I used to, but—the more I saw, the worse it was. Tricks and traps and squeezes and—oh, business is all vulgar and low. It's necessary, I suppose, but it's repulsive to me." She paused, then added carelessly, yet with a certain deliberateness, "I never meddle with Mr. Dumont, nor he with me."

Olivia wished to protest against Pauline's view of business. But—how could she without seeming to attack, indeed, without attacking, her cousin's husband?

Dumont brought Fanshaw up in his automobile, Herron remaining at the offices for half an hour to give the newspapers a carefully considered account of the much-discussed "merger" of the manufacturers of low-grade woolens. Herron had objected to any statement. "It's our private business," he said. "Let them howl. The fewer facts they have, the sooner they'll stop howling." But Dumont held firm for publicity. "There's no such thing as a private business nowadays," he replied. "Besides, don't we want the public to take part of our stock? What's the use of acting shady—you've avoided the legal obstacles, haven't you? Let's tell the public frankly all we want it to know, and it'll think it knows all there is to know."

The whole party met in the drawing-room at a quarter-past eight, Langdon the last to come down—Olivia was uncertain whether or not she was unjust to him when she suspected design in his late entrance, the handsomest and the best-dressed man of the company.

He looked cynically at Dumont. "Well, fellow pirate: how go our plans for a merry winter for the poor?"

"Ass!" muttered Herron to Olivia, who happened to, be nearest him. "He fancies impudence is wit. He's devoid of moral sense or even of decency. He's a traitor to his class and shouldn't be tolerated in it."

Dumont was laughingly answering Langdon in his own vein.

"Splendidly," he replied, "thanks to our worthy chaplain, Herron, who secures us the blessing and protection of the law."

"That gives me an appetite!" exclaimed Langdon. "I feared something might miscarry in these last hours of our months of plotting. Heaven be praised, the people won't have so much to waste hereafter. I'm proud to be in one of the many noble bands that are struggling to save them from themselves."

But Dumont had turned away from him; so he dropped into Mrs. Herron's discussion with Mrs. Fanshaw on their proposed trip to the Mediterranean. Dinner was announced and he was put between Mrs. Herron and Olivia, with Dumont on her right. It was a round table and Olivia's eyes lingered upon its details—the embroidered cloth with real lace in the center, the graceful antique silver candlesticks, the tall vases filled with enormous roses—everything exquisitely simple and tasteful.

Langdon talked with her until Mrs. Herron, impatient at his neglect, caught his eye and compelled his attention. Dumont, seeing that Olivia was free, drew her into his conversation with Mrs. Fanshaw; and then Mrs. Fanshaw began to talk with Mr. Herron, who was eating furiously because he had just overheard Langdon say: "That was a great day for pirates when they thought of taking aboard the lawyers as chaplains."

All the men were in high spirits; Dumont was boyish in his exuberance. When he left home that morning he was four times a millionaire; now he was at least twelve times a millionaire, through the magic of the "merger." True, eight of the twelve millions were on paper; but it was paper that would certainly pay dividends, paper that would presently sell at or near its face value. And this success had come when he was only thirty-four. His mind was already projecting greater triumphs in this modern necromancy by which millionaires evoke and materialize millions from the empty air—apparently. He was bubbling over with happiness—in the victory won, in victories to be won.

Olivia tried him on several subjects, but the conversation dragged. Of Pauline he would not talk; of Europe, he was interested only in the comfort of hotels and railway trains, in the comparative merits of the cooking and the wines in London and Paris. But his face—alert, shrewd, aggressive—and his mode of expression made her feel that he was uninteresting because he was thinking of something which he did not care to expose to her and could not take his mind from. And this was the truth. It was not until she adventured upon his business that he became talkative. And soon she had him telling her about his "combine"—frankly, boastfully, his face more and more flushed, for as he talked he drank.

"But," he said presently, "this little matter to-day is only a fair beginning. It seemed big until it was about accomplished. Then I saw it was only a suggestion for a scheme that'd be really worth, while." And he went on to unfold one of those projects of to-day's commerce and finance that were regarded as fantastic, delirious a few years ago. He would reach out and out for hundreds of millions of capital; with his woolens "combine" as a basis he would build an enormous corporation to control the sheep industry of the world—to buy millions of acres of sheep-ranges; to raise scores of millions of sheep; to acquire and to construct hundreds of plants for utilizing every part of the raw product of the ranges; to sell wherever the human race had or could have a market.

Olivia was ambitious herself, usually was delighted by ambition in others. But his exhibit of imagination and energy repelled her, even while it fascinated. Partly through youth, more through that contempt for concealment which characterizes the courageous type of large man, he showed himself to her just as he was. And she saw him not as an ambition but as an appetite, or rather a bundle of appetites.

"He has no ideals," she thought. "He's like a man who wants food merely for itself, not for the strength and the intellect it will build up. And he likes or dislikes human beings only as one likes or dislikes different things to eat."

"It'll take you years and years," she said to him, because she must say something.

"Not at all." He waved his hand—Olivia thought it looked as much like a claw as like a hand. "It's a sky-scraper, but we build sky-scrapers overnight. Time and space used to be the big elements. WE practically disregard them." He followed this with a self-satisfied laugh and an emptying of his champagne glass at a gulp.

The women were rising to withdraw. After half an hour Langdon and Herron joined them. Dumont and Fanshaw did not come until eleven o'clock. Then Dumont was so abrupt and surly that every one was grateful to Mrs. Fanshaw for taking him away to the west veranda. At midnight all went to their rooms, Pauline going with Olivia, "to make sure you haven't been neglected."

She lingered until after one, and when they kissed each the other good night, she said: "It's done me a world of good to see you, 'Livia—more even than I hoped. I knew you'd be sympathetic with me where you understood. Now, I feel that you're sympathetic where you don't understand, too. And it's there that one really needs sympathy."

"That's what friendship means—and—love," said Olivia.



XIII.

"MY SISTER-IN-LAW, GLADYS."

The following afternoon Dumont took the Herrons, the Fanshaws and Langdon back to New York in his private car, and for three days Olivia and Pauline had the Eyrie to themselves. Olivia was about to write to Scarborough, asking him to call, when she saw in the News-Bulletin that he had gone to Denver to speak. A week after she left, Dumont returned, bringing his sister Gladys, just arrived from Europe, and Langdon. He stayed four days, took Langdon away with him and left Gladys.

Thus it came about that Scarborough, riding into Colonel Gardiner's grounds one hot afternoon in mid September, saw a phaeton-victoria with two women in it coming toward him on its way out. He drew his horse aside to make room. He was conscious that there were two women; he saw only one—she who was all in white except the scarlet poppies against the brim of her big white hat.

As he bowed the carriage stopped and Pauline said cordially: "Why, how d'ye do?"

He drew his horse close to the carriage and they shook hands. She introduced the other woman—"My sister-in-law, Gladys Dumont"—then went on: "We've been lunching and spending the afternoon with father and mother. They told us you returned this morning."

"I supposed you were in the East," said Scarborough—the first words he had spoken.

"Oh—I'm living here now—Gladys and I. Father says you never go anywhere, but I hope you'll make an exception for us."

"Thank you—I'll be glad to call."

"Why not dine with us—day after to-morrow night?"

"I'd like that—certainly, I'll come."

"We dine at half-past eight—at least we're supposed to."

Scarborough lifted his hat.

The carriage drove on.

"Why, he's not a bit as I expected," Gladys began at once. "He's much younger. ISN'T he handsome! That's the way a MAN ought to look. He's not married?"

"No," replied Pauline.

"Why did you look so queer when you first caught sight of him?"

"Did I?" Pauline replied tranquilly. "Probably it was because he very suddenly and vividly brought Battle Field back to me—that was the happiest time of my life. But I was too young or too foolish, or both, to know it till long afterward. At seventeen one takes happiness for granted."

"Did he look then as he does now?"

"No—and yes," said Pauline. "He was just from the farm and dressed badly and was awkward at times. But—really he was the same person. I guess it was the little change in him that startled me." And she became absorbed in her thoughts.

"I hope you'll send him in to dinner with me," said Gladys, presently.

"What did you say?" asked Pauline, absently.

"I was talking of Mr. Scarborough. I asked if you wouldn't send him in to dinner with me—unless you want to discuss old times with him."

"Yes—certainly—if you wish."

And Pauline gave Scarborough to Gladys and did her duty as hostess by taking in the dullest man in the party—Newnham. While Newnham droned and prosed, she watched Gladys lay herself out to please the distinguished Mr. Scarborough, successful as a lawyer, famous as an orator, deferred to because of his influence with the rank and file of his party in the middle West.

Gladys had blue-black hair which she wore pulled out into a sort of halo about her small, delicate face. There were points of light in her dark irises, giving them the look of black quartz in the sunshine. She was not tall, but her figure was perfect, and she had her dresses fitted immediately to it. Her appeal was frankly to the senses, the edge taken from its audacity by its artistic effectiveness and by her ingenuous, almost innocent, expression.

Seeing Pauline looking at her, she tilted her head to a graceful angle and sent a radiant glance between two blossom-laden branches of the green and white bush that towered and spread in the center of the table. "Mr. Scarborough says," she called out, "character isn't a development, it's a disclosure. He thinks one is born a certain kind of person and that one's life simply either gives it a chance to show or fails to give it a chance. He says the boy isn't father to the man, but the miniature of the man. What do you think, Pauline?"

"I haven't thought of it," replied Pauline. "But I'm certain it's true. I used to dispute Mr. Scarborough's ideas sometimes, but I learned better."

As she realized the implications of her careless remark, their eyes met squarely for the first time since Battle Field. Both hastily glanced away, and neither looked at the other again. When the men came up to the drawing-room to join the women, Gladys adroitly intercepted him. When he went to Pauline to take leave, their manner each toward the other was formal, strained and even distant.

Dumont came again just after the November election. It had been an unexpected victory for the party which Scarborough advocated, and everywhere the talk was that he had been the chief factor—his skill in defining issues, his eloquence in presenting them, the public confidence in his party through the dominance of a man so obviously free from self-seeking or political trickery of any kind. Dumont, to whom control in both party machines and in the state government was a business necessity, told his political agent, Merriweather, that they had "let Scarborough go about far enough," unless he could be brought into their camp.

"I can't make out what he's looking for," said Merriweather. "One thing's certain—he'll do US no good. There's no way we can get our hooks in him. He don't give a damn for money. And as for power—he can get more of that by fighting us than by falling in line. We ain't exactly popular."

This seemed to Dumont rank ingratitude. Had he not just divided a million dollars among charities and educational institutions in the districts where opposition to his "merger" was strongest?

"Well, we'll see," he said. "If he isn't careful we'll have to kill him off in convention and make the committees stop his mouth."

"The trouble is he's been building up a following of his own—the sort of following that can't be honeyfugled," replied Merriweather. "The committees are afraid of him." Merriweather always took the gloomy view of everything, because he thus discounted his failures in advance and doubled the effect of his successes.

"I'll see—I'll see," said Dumont, impatiently. And he thought he was beginning to "see" when Gladys expanded to him upon the subject of Scarborough—his good looks, his wit, his "distinction."

Scarborough came to dinner a few evenings later and Dumont was particularly cordial to him; and Gladys made the most of the opportunity which Pauline again gave her. That night, when the others had left or had gone to bed, Gladys followed her brother into the smoke-room adjoining the library. They sat in silence drinking a "night-cap." In the dreaminess of her eyes, in the absent smile drifting round the corners of her full red lips, Gladys showed that her thoughts were pleasant and sentimental.

"What do you think of Scarborough?" her brother asked suddenly.

She started but did not flush—in her long European experience she had gained control of that signal of surprise. "How do you mean?" she asked. She rarely answered a question immediately, no matter how simple it was, but usually put another question in reply. Thus she insured herself time to think if time should be necessary.

"I mean, do you like him?"

"Why, certainly. But I've seen him only a few times."

"He's an uncommon man," continued her brother. "He'd make a mighty satisfactory husband for an ambitious woman, especially one with the money to push him fast."

Gladys slowly lifted and slowly lowered her smooth, slender shoulders.

"That sort of thing doesn't interest a woman in a man, unless she's married to him and has got over thinking more about him than about herself."

"It ought to," replied her brother. "A clever woman can always slosh round in sentimental slop with her head above it and cool. If I were a girl I'd make a dead set for that chap."

"If you were a girl," said Gladys, "you'd do nothing of the sort. You'd compel him to make a dead set for you." And as she put down her glass she gave his hair an affectionate pull—which was her way of thanking him for saying what she most wished to hear on the subject she most wished to hear about.



XIV.

STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS.

Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is the average unmarried person. She had been eleven years a wanderer; she was tired of it. She had no home; and she wanted a home.

Her aunt—her mother's widowed sister—had taken her abroad when she was thirteen. John was able to defy or to deceive their mother. But she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her fanatical nature had evolved—a minute and crushing tyranny. Therefore Gladys preferred any place to her home. For ten years she had been roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and physically and mentally near-sighted aunt. Actually her only guardian had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless self. She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do very free indeed. She had learned all that her intense and catholic curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own selecting—the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery. Her eyes had peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.

But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot. She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity. And when her mother came—as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother is a distant view. I had forgot there were such people left on earth—I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.

Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to his congenial life in New York—to his business and his dissipation. He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise—his stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a bad fright. The evening before he left he saw Pauline and Gladys sitting apart and joined them.

"Why not invite Scarborough to spend a week up here?" he asked, just glancing at his wife. He never ventured to look at her when there was any danger of their eyes meeting.

Her lips tightened and the color swiftly left her cheeks and swiftly returned.

"Wouldn't you like it, Gladys?" he went on.

"Oh, DO ask him, Pauline," said Gladys, with enthusiasm. Like her brother, she always went straight to the point—she was in the habit of deciding for herself, of thinking what she did was above criticism, and of not especially caring if it was criticised. "Please do!"

Pauline waited long—it seemed to her long enough for time to wrinkle her heart—before answering: "We'll need another man. I'll ask him—if you wish."

Gladys pressed her hand gratefully—she was fond of Pauline, and Pauline was liking her again as she had when they were children and playmates and partners in the woes of John Dumont's raids upon their games. Just then Langdon's sister, Mrs. Barrow, called Gladys to the other end of the drawing-room. Dumont's glance followed her.

"I think it'd be a good match," he said reflectively.

Pauline's heart missed a beat and a suffocating choke contracted her throat.

"What?" she succeeded in saying.

"Gladys and Scarborough," replied Dumont. "She ought to marry—she's got no place to go. And it'd be good business for her—and for him, too, for that matter, if she could land him. Don't you think she's attractive to men?"

"Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.

"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.

"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and more quickly.

Langdon strolled up.

"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.

"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising. "Take my chair." And he was gone.

"This room is too warm," said Pauline. "No, don't open the window. Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her. It was a moonless, winter night—stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.

When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the door-window opened and Langdon looked out. "Oh—there you are!" he said.

"Won't you join me?" Her tone assured him that he would not be intruding. He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down together.

"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity, and that I'm——there's nothing little enough to express the human atom where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me—for ever. A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the heel of the Great Executioner."

"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again—often, as a child—and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of—not happiness, not even content, but—courage."

They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped from the starry wing of night.

"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the earthworms."

Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide.

"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what 'to live' means."

"Then why don't you?" he asked—he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.

"Because I'm a daughter—that's anchor number one. Because I'm a mother—that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife—that's anchor number three. And anchor number four—because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them. Tied, hands and feet!"

"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite."

She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It frightens ME away from the table."



XV.

GRADUATED PEARLS.

But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses.

"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Pauline.

She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue. With an effort she added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?"

"I detest New York," replied Gladys. "And I've never enjoyed myself in my whole life as I'm enjoying it here."

So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited. She invited Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself. Only the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing, could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life—her books and her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening. A life so full of events, so empty of event. It left her hardly time for proper sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense and continuous interest—and one of them is enough to make bright the dullest pattern that issues from the Loom.

In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with Leonora.

She had no illusions about the company she was keeping in the East. To her these "friends" seemed in no proper sense either her friends or one another's. Drawn together from all parts of America, indeed of the world, by the magnetism of millions, they had known one another not at all or only slightly in the period of life when thorough friendships are made; even where they had been associates as children, the association had rarely been of the kind that creates friendship's democratic intimacy. They had no common traditions, no real class-feeling, no common enthusiasms—unless the passion for keeping rich, for getting richer, for enjoying and displaying riches, could be called enthusiasm. They were mere intimate acquaintances, making small pretense of friendship, having small conception of it or desire for it beyond that surface politeness which enables people whose selfish interests lie in the same direction to get on comfortably together.

She divided them into two classes. There were those who, like herself, kept up great establishments and entertained lavishly and engaged in the courteous but fierce rivalry of fashionable ostentation. Then there were those who hung about the courts of the rich, invited because they filled in the large backgrounds and contributed conversation or ideas for new amusements, accepting because they loved the atmosphere of luxury which they could not afford to create for themselves.

Leonora was undeniably in the latter class. But she was associated in Pauline's mind with the period before her splendor. She had been friendly when Dumont was unknown beyond Saint X. The others sought her—well, for the same reasons of desire for distraction and dread of boredom which made her welcome them. But Leonora, she more than half believed, liked her to a certain extent for herself—"likes me better than I like her." And at times she was self-reproachful for being thus exceeded in self-giving. Leonora, for example, told her her most intimate secrets, some of them far from creditable to her. Pauline told nothing in return. She sometimes longed for a confidant, or, rather, for some person who would understand without being told, some one like Olivia; but her imagination refused to picture Leonora as that kind of friend. Even more pronounced than her frankness, and she was frank to her own hurt, was her biting cynicism—it was undeniably amusing; it did not exactly inspire distrust, but it put Pauline vaguely on guard. Also, she was candidly mercenary, and, in some moods, rapaciously envious. "But no worse," thought Pauline, "than so many of the others here, once one gets below their surface. Besides, it's in a good-natured, good-hearted way."

She wished Fanshaw were as rich as Leonora longed for him to be. She was glad Dumont seemed to be putting him in the way of making a fortune. He was distasteful to her, because she saw that he was an ill-tempered sycophant under a pretense of manliness thick enough to shield him from the unobservant eyes of a world of men and women greedy of flattery and busy each with himself or herself. But for Leonora's sake she invited him. And Leonora was appreciative, was witty, never monotonous or commonplace, most helpful in getting up entertainments, and good to look at—always beautifully dressed and as fresh as if just from a bath; sparkling green eyes, usually with good-humored mockery in them; hard, smooth, glistening shoulders and arms; lips a crimson line, at once cold and sensuous.

On a Friday in December Pauline came up from Dawn Hill and, after two hours at the new house, went to the jeweler's to buy a wedding present for Aurora Galloway. As she was passing the counter where the superintendent had his office, his assistant said: "Beg pardon, Mrs. Dumont. The necklace came in this morning. Would you like to look at it?"

She paused, not clearly hearing him. He took a box from the safe behind him and lifted from it a magnificent necklace of graduated pearls with a huge solitaire diamond clasp. "It's one of the finest we ever got together," he went on. "But you can see for yourself." He was flushing in the excitement of his eagerness to ingratiate himself with such a distinguished customer.

"Beautiful!" said Pauline, taking the necklace as he held it out to her. "May I ask whom it's for?"

The clerk looked puzzled, then frightened, as the implications of her obvious ignorance dawned upon him.

"Oh—I—I——" He almost snatched it from her, dropped it into the box, put on the lid. And he stood with mouth ajar and forehead beaded.

"Please give it to me again," said Pauline, coldly. "I had not finished looking at it."

His uneasy eyes spied the superintendent approaching. He grew scarlet, then white, and in an agony of terror blurted out: "Here comes the superintendent. I beg you, Mrs. Dumont, don't tell him I showed it to you. I've made some sort of a mistake. You'll ruin me if you speak of it to any one. I never thought it might be intended as a surprise to you. Indeed, I wasn't supposed to know anything about it. Maybe I was mistaken——"

His look and voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied reassuringly: "I understand—I'll say nothing. Please show me those," and she pointed to a tray of unset rubies in the show-case.

And when the superintendent, bowing obsequiously, came up himself to take charge of this important customer, she was deep in the rubies which the assistant was showing her with hands that shook and fingers that blundered.

She did not permit her feelings to appear until she was in her carriage again and secure from observation. The clerk's theory she could not entertain for an instant, contradicted as it was by the facts of eight years. She knew she had surprised Dumont. She had learned nothing new; but it forced her to stare straight into the face of that which she had been ignoring, that which she must continue to ignore if she was to meet the ever heavier and crueler exactions of the debt she had incurred when she betrayed her father and mother and herself. At a time when her mind was filled with bitter contrasts between what was and what might have been, it brought bluntly to her the precise kind of life she was leading, the precise kind of surroundings she was tolerating.

"Whom can he be giving such a gift?" she wondered. And she had an impulse to confide in Leonora to the extent of encouraging her to hint who it was. "She would certainly know. No doubt everybody knows, except me."

She called for her, as she had promised, and took her to lunch at Sherry's. But the impulse to confide died as Leonora talked—of money, of ways of spending money; of people who had money, and those who hadn't money; of people who were spending too much money, of those who weren't spending enough money; of what she would do if she had money, of what many did to get money. Money, money, money—it was all of the web and most of the woof of her talk. Now it ran boldly on the surface of the pattern; now it was half hid under something about art or books or plays or schemes for patronizing the poor and undermining their self-respect—but it was always there.

For the first time Leonora jarred upon her fiercely—unendurably. She listened until the sound grew indistinct, became mingled with the chatter of that money-flaunting throng. And presently the chatter seemed to her to be a maddening repetition of one word, money—the central idea in all the thought and all the action of these people. "I must get away," she thought, "or I shall cry out." And she left abruptly, alleging that she must hurry to catch her train.

Money-mad! her thoughts ran on. The only test of honor—money, and ability and willingness to spend it. They must have money or they're nobodies. And if they have money, who cares where it came from? No one asks where the men get it—why should any one ask where the women get it?



XVI.

CHOICE AMONG EVILS.

A few days afterward—it was a Wednesday—Pauline came up to town early in the afternoon, as she had an appointment with the dressmaker and was going to the opera in the evening. At the dressmaker's, while she waited for a fitter to return from the workroom, she glanced at a newspaper spread upon the table so that its entire front page was in view. It was filled with an account of how the Woolens Monopoly had, in that bitter winter, advanced prices twenty to thirty-five per cent. all along the line. From the center of the page stared a picture of John Dumont—its expression peculiarly arrogant and sinister.

She read the head-lines only, then turned from the table. But on the drive up-town she stopped the carriage at the Savoy and sent the footman to the news-stand to get the paper. She read the article through—parts of it several times.

She had Langdon and Honoria Longview at dinner that night; by indirect questioning she drew him on to confirm the article, to describe how the Woolens Monopoly was "giving the country an old-fashioned winter." On the way to the opera she was ashamed of her ermine wrap enfolding her from the slightest sense of the icy air. She did not hear the singers, was hardly conscious of her surroundings. As they left the Metropolitan she threw back her wrap and sat with her neck bared to the intense cold.

"I say, don't do that!" protested Langdon.

She reluctantly drew the fur about her. But when she had dropped him and then Honoria and was driving on up the avenue alone, she bared her shoulders and arms again—"like a silly child," she said. But it gave her a certain satisfaction, for she felt like one who has a secret store of food in time of famine and feasts upon it. And she sat unprotected.

"Is Mr. Dumont in?" she asked the butler as he closed the door of their palace behind her.

"I think he is, ma'am."

"Please tell him I'd like to see him—in the library."

She had to wait only three or four minutes before he came—in smoking jacket and slippers. It was long since she had looked at him so carefully as she did then; and she noted how much grosser he was, the puffs under his eyes, the lines of cruelty that were coming out strongly with autocratic power and the custom of receiving meek obedience. And her heart sank. "Useless," she said to herself. "Utterly useless!" And the incident of the necklace and its reminders of all she had suffered from him and through him came trooping into her mind; and it seemed to her that she could not speak, could not even remain in the room with him.

He dropped into a chair before the open fire. "Horribly cold, isn't it?"

She moved uneasily. He slowly lighted a cigar and began to smoke it, his attitude one of waiting.

"I've been thinking," she began at last—she was looking reflectively into the fire—"about your great talent for business and finance. You formed your big combination, and because you understand everything about wool you employ more men, you pay higher wages, and you make the goods better than ever, and at less cost."

"Between a third and a half cheaper," he said. "We employ thirty thousand more men, and since we settled the last strike"—a grim smile that would have meant a great deal to her had she known the history of that strike and how hard he had fought before he gave in—"we've paid thirty per cent. higher wages. Yet the profits are—well, you can imagine."

"And you've made millions for yourself and for those in with you."

"I haven't developed my ideas for nothing."

She paused again. It was several minutes before she went on:

"When a doctor or a man of science or a philosopher makes a discovery that'll be a benefit to the world"—she looked at him suddenly, earnest, appealing—"he gives it freely. And he gets honor and fame. Why shouldn't you do that, John?" She had forgotten herself in her subject.

He smiled into the fire—hardly a day passed that he did not have presented to him some scheme for relieving him of the burden of his riches; here was another, and from such an unexpected quarter!

"You could be rich, too. We spend twenty, fifty times as much as we can possibly enjoy; and you have more than we could possibly spend. Why shouldn't a man with financial genius be like men with other kinds of genius? Why should he be the only one to stay down on the level with dull, money-grubbing, sordid kinds of people? Why shouldn't he have ideals?"

He made no reply. Indeed, so earnest was she that she did not give him time, but immediately went on:

"Just think, John! Instead of giving out in these charities and philanthropies—I never did believe in them—they're bound to be more or less degrading to the people that take, and when it's so hard to help a friend with money without harming him, how much harder it must be to help strangers. Instead of those things, why not be really great? Just think, John, how the world would honor you and how you would feel, if you used your genius to make the necessaries cheap for all these fellow-beings of ours who have such a hard time getting on. That would be real superiority—and our life now is so vain, so empty. It's brutal, John."

"What do you propose?" he asked, curious as always when a new idea was presented to him. And this was certainly new—apparently, philanthropy without expense.

"You are master. You can do as you please. Why not put your great combine on such a basis that it would bring an honest, just return to you and the others, and would pay the highest possible wages, and would give the people the benefit of what your genius for manufacturing and for finance has made possible? I think we who are so comfortable and never have to think of the necessaries of life forget how much a few cents here and there mean to most people. And the things you control mean all the difference between warmth and cold, between life and death, John!"

As she talked he settled back into his chair, and his face hardened into its unyielding expression. A preposterous project! Just like a good, sentimental woman. Not philanthropy without expense, but philanthropy at the expense both, of his fortune and of his position as a master. To use his brain and his life for those ungrateful people who derided his benefactions as either contributions to "the conscience fund" or as indirect attempts at public bribery! He could not conceal his impatience—though he did not venture to put it into words.

"If we—if you and I, John," she hurried on, leaning toward him in her earnestness, "had something like that to live for, it might come to be very different with us—and—I'm thinking of Gardiner most of all. This'll ruin him some day. No one, NO ONE, can lead this kind of life without being dragged down, without becoming selfish and sordid and cruel."

"You don't understand," he said curtly, without looking at her. "I never heard of such—such sentimentalism."

She winced and was silent, sat watching his bold, strong profile. Presently she said in a changed, strange, strained voice: "What I asked to see you for was—John, won't you put the prices—at least where they were at the beginning of this dreadful winter?"

"Oh—I see!" he exclaimed. "You've been listening to the lies about me."

"READING," she said, her eyes flashing at the insult in the accusation that she had let people attack him to her.

"Well, reading then," he went on, wondering what he had said that angered her. And he made an elaborate explanation—about "the necessity of meeting fixed charges" which he himself had fixed, about "fair share of prosperity," "everything more expensive," "the country better able to pay," "every one doing as we are," and so on.

She listened closely; she had not come ignorant of the subject, and she penetrated his sophistries. When he saw her expression, saw he had failed to convince her, into, his eyes came the look she understood well—the look that told her she would only infuriate him and bruise herself by flinging herself against the iron of his resolve.

"You must let me attend to my own business," he ended, his tone good-natured, his eyes hard.

She sat staring into the fire for several minutes—from her eyes looked a will as strong as his. Then she rose and, her voice lower than before but vibrating, said: "All round us—here in New York—all over this country—away off in Europe—I can see them—I can feel them—SUFFERING! As you yourself said, it's HORRIBLY cold!" She drew herself up and faced him, a light in her eyes before which he visibly shrank. "Yes, it's YOUR business. But it shan't be mine or MY boy's!"

And she left the room. In the morning she returned to Dawn Hill and arranged her affairs so that she would be free to go. Not since the spring day, nearly nine years before, when she began that Vergil lesson which ended in a lesson in the pitilessness of consequences that was not yet finished, had her heart been so light, so hopeful. In vain she reminded herself that the doing of this larger duty, so imperative, nevertheless endangered her father and mother. "They will be proud that I'm doing it," she assured herself.

"For Gardiner's sake, as well as for mine, they'll be glad I separated him and myself from this debased life. They will—they MUST, since it is right!" And already she felt the easing of the bonds that had never failed to cut deeper into the living flesh whenever she had ventured to hope that she was at last growing used to them.

"Free!" she said to herself exultantly. She dared to exult, but she did not dare to express to herself the hopes, the wild, incredible hopes, which the very thought of freedom set to quivering deep down in her, as the first warmth makes the life toss in its slumber in the planted seed.

On Friday she came up to New York late in the afternoon, and in the evening went to the opera—for a last look round. As the lights were lowering for the rise of the curtain on the second act, Leonora and her husband entered the box. She had forgotten inviting them. She gave Leonora the chair in front and took the one behind—Millicent Rowland, whom she herself brought, had the other front seat. As her chair was midway between the two, she was seeing across Leonora's shoulders. Presently Dumont came in and took the chair behind Leonora's and leaned forward, his chin almost touching the slope of her neck as he talked to her in an undertone, she greatly amused or pretending to be.

The light from the stage fell across Leonora's bosom, fell upon a magnificent string of graduated pearls clasped with a huge solitaire beyond question the string the jeweler's clerk had blunderingly shown her. And there was Dumont's heavy, coarse profile outlined against Leonora's cheek and throat, her cynical, sensuous profile showing just beyond.

Open sprang a hundred doors of memory; into Pauline's mind was discharged avalanche after avalanche of dreadful thoughts. "No! No!" she protested. "How infamous to think such things of my best friend!" But she tried in vain to thrust suspicions, accusations, proofs, back into the closets. Instead, she sank under the flood of them—sick and certain.

When the lights went up she said: "I'm feeling badly all at once. I'm afraid I'll have to take you home, Milly."

"Are you ill, dear?" asked Leonora.

"Oh, no—just faint," she replied, in a voice which she succeeded in making fairly natural.

"Please don't move. Stay on—you really must."

The other man—Shenstone—helped her and Millicent with their wraps and accompanied them to their carriage. When she had set Millicent down she drew a long breath of relief. For the first time in seven years her course lay straight before her. "I must be free!" she said. "I must be ENTIRELY free—free before the whole world—I and my boy."

The next morning, in the midst of her preparations to take the ten-o'clock limited for the West, her maid brought a note to her—a copy of a National Woolens Company circular to the trade, setting forth that "owing to a gratifying easing in the prices for raw wool, the Company are able to announce and take great pleasure in announcing a ten per cent. reduction." On the margin Dumont had scrawled "To go out to-morrow and to be followed in ten days by fifteen per cent. more. Couldn't resist your appeal." Thus by the sheer luck that had so often supplemented his skill and mitigated his mistakes, he had yielded to her plea just in time to confuse the issue between her and him.

She read the circular and the scrawl with a sinking heart. "Nevertheless, I shall go!" she tried to protest. "True, he won't send out this circular if I do. But what does it matter, one infamy more or less in him? Besides, he will accomplish his purpose in some other way of which I shall not know." But this was only the beginning of the battle. Punishment on punishment for an act which seemed right at the time had made her morbid, distrustful of herself. And she could not conquer the dread lest her longing to be free was blinding her, was luring her on to fresh calamities, involving all whom she cared for, all who cared for her. Whichever way she looked she could see only a choice between wrongs. To stay under the same roof with him or at Dawn Hill—self-respect put that out of the question. To free herself—how could she, when it meant sacrificing her parents and also the thousands shivering under the extortions of his monopoly?

In the end she chose the course that seemed to combine the least evil with the most good. She would go to the Eyrie, and the world and her father and mother would think she was absenting herself from her husband to attend to the bringing up of her boy. She would see even less of Scarborough than she saw when she was last at Saint X.

That afternoon she wrote to Dumont:

Since we had our talk I have found out about Leonora. It is impossible for me to stay here. I shall go West to-morrow. But I shall not go to my father's; because of your circular I shall go to the Eyrie, instead—at least for the present.

PAULINE DUMONT.

Two weeks after she was again settled at the Eyrie, Langdon appeared in Saint X, alleging business at the National Woolens' factories there. He accepted her invitation to stay with her, and devoted himself to Gladys, who took up her flirtation with him precisely where she had dropped it when they bade each the other a mock-mournful good-by five months before. They were so realistic that Pauline came to the satisfying conclusion that her sister-in-law was either in earnest with Langdon or not in earnest with anybody. If she had not been avoiding Scarborough, she would probably have seen Gladys' real game—to use Langdon as a stalking horse for him.

"No doubt Scarborough, like all men, imagines he's above jealousy," Gladys had said to herself, casting her keen eyes over the situation. "But there never was a man who didn't race better with a pace-maker than on an empty track."

Toward the end of Langdon's first week Pauline's suspicions as to one of the objects of his winter trip West were confirmed by his saying quite casually: "Dumont's dropped Fanshaw, and Leonora's talking of the stage. In fact, she's gone abroad to study."

When he was leaving, after nearly three weeks, he asked her when she was coming back East.

"Never—I hope," she said, her fingers playing with the close-cropped curls of her boy standing beside her.

"I fancied so—I fancied so," replied Langdon, his eyes showing that he understood her and that he knew she understood for whom he had asked.

"You are going to stay on—at the Eyrie?"

"I think so, unless something—disquieting—occurs. I've not made up my mind. Fate plays such queer tricks that I've stopped guessing at to-morrow."

"What was it Miss Dumont's friend, Scarborough, quoted from Spinoza at Atwater's the other night? 'If a stone, on its way from the sling through the air, could speak, it would say, "How free I am!'" Is that the way you feel?"

There came into Pauline's eyes a look of pain so intense that he glanced away.

"We choose a path blindfold," she said, her tone as light as her look was dark, "and we must go where it goes—there's no other ever afterward."

"But if it leads down?"

"All the PATHS lead up," she replied with a sad smile. "It's the precipices that lead down."

Gladys joined them and Langdon said to her:

"Well, good-by, Miss Dumont—don't get married till you see me." He patted the boy on the shoulder. "Good-by, Gardiner—remember, we men must always be brave, and gentle with the ladies. Good-by, Mrs. Dumont—keep away from the precipices. And if you should want to come back to us you'll have no trouble in finding us. We're a lot of slow old rotters, and we'll be just where you left us—yawning, and shying at new people and at all new ideas except about clothes, and gossiping about each other." And he was in the auto and off for the station.



XVII

TWO AND THE BARRIER.

Scarborough often rode with Gladys and Pauline, sometimes with Gladys alone. One afternoon in August he came expecting to go out with both. But Gladys was not well that day. She had examined her pale face and deeply circled eyes in her glass; she had counseled with her maid—a discreetly and soothingly frank French woman. Too late to telephone him, she had overruled her longing to see him and had decided that at what she hoped was his "critical stage" it would be wiser not to show herself to him thus even in her most becoming tea-gown, which compelled the eyes of the beholder to a fascinating game of hide and seek with her neck and arms and the lines of her figure.

"And Mrs. Dumont?" inquired Scarborough of the servant who brought Gladys' message and note.

"She's out walking, sir."

Scarborough rode away, taking the long drive through the grounds of the Eyrie, as it would save him a mile of dusty and not well-shaded highway. A few hundred yards and he was passing the sloping meadows that lay golden bronze in the sun, beyond the narrow fringe of wood skirting and shielding the drive. The grass and clover had been cut. Part of it was spread where it had fallen, part had been raked into little hillocks ready for the wagons. At the edge of one of these hillocks far down the slope he saw the tail of a pale blue skirt, a white parasol cast upon the stubble beside it. He reined in his horse, hesitated, dismounted, tied his bridle round a sapling. He strode across the field toward the hillock that had betrayed its secret to him.

"Do I interrupt?" he called when he was still far enough away not to be taking her by surprise.

There was no answer. He paused, debating whether to call again or to turn back.

But soon she was rising—the lower part of her tall narrow figure hid by the hillock, the upper part revealing to him the strong stamp of that vivid individuality of hers which separated her at once from no matter what company. She had on a big garden hat, trimmed just a little with summer flowers, a blouse of some soft white material, with even softer lace on the shoulders and in the long, loose sleeves. She gave a friendly nod and glance in his direction, and said: "Oh, no—not at all. I'm glad to have help in enjoying this."

She was looking out toward the mists of the horizon hills. The heat of the day had passed; the woods, the hillocks of hay were casting long shadows on the pale-bronze fields. A breeze had sprung up and was lifting from the dried and drying grass and clover a keen, sweet, intoxicating perfume—like the odor which classic zephyrs used to shake from the flowing hair of woodland nymphs.

He stood beside her without speaking, looking intently at her. It was the first time he had been alone with her since the afternoon at Battle Field when she confessed her marriage and he his love.

"Bandit was lame," she said when it seemed necessary to say something.

She rode a thoroughbred, Bandit, who would let no one else mount him; whenever she got a new saddle she herself had to help put it on, so alert was he for schemes to entrap him to some other's service. He obeyed her in the haughty, nervous way characteristic of thoroughbreds—obeyed because he felt that she was without fear, and because she had the firm but gentle hand that does not fret a horse yet does not let him think for an instant that he is or can be free. Then, too, he had his share of the universal, fundamental vanity we should probably find swelling the oyster did we but know how to interpret it; and he must have appreciated what an altogether harmonious spectacle it was when he swept along with his mistress upon his back as light and free as a Valkyr.

"I was sorry to miss the ride," Pauline went on after another pause—to her, riding was the keenest of the many physical delights that are for those who have vigorous and courageous bodies and sensitive nerves. Whenever it was possible she fought out her battles with herself on horseback, usually finding herself able there to drown mental distress in the surge of physical exultation.

As he still did not speak she looked at him—and could not look away. She had not seen that expression since their final hour together at Battle Field, though in these few last months she had been remembering it so exactly, had been wondering, doubting whether she could not bring it to his face again, had been forbidding herself to long to see it. And there it was, unchanged like all the inflexible purposes that made his character and his career. And back to her came, as it had come many and many a time in those years, the story he had told her of his father and mother, of his father's love for his mother—how it had enfolded her from the harshness and peril of pioneer life, had enfolded her in age no less than in youth, had gone down into and through the Valley of the Shadow with her, had not left her even at the gates of Death, but had taken him on with her into the Beyond. And Pauline trembled, an enormous joy thrilling through and through her.

"Don't!" she said uncertainly. "Don't look at me like that, PLEASE!"

"You were crying," he said abruptly. He stood before her, obviously one who had conquered the respect of the world in fair, open battle, and has the courage that is for those only who have tested their strength and know it will not fail them. And the sight of him, the look of him, filled her not with the mere belief, but with the absolute conviction that no malign power in all the world or in the mystery round the world could come past him to her to harass or harm her. The doubts, the sense of desolation that had so agitated her a few minutes before now seemed trivial, weak, unworthy.

She lowered her eyes—she had thought he would not observe the slight traces of the tears she had carefully wiped away. She clasped her hands meekly and looked—and felt—like a guilty child. The coldness, the haughtiness were gone from her face.

"Yes," she said shyly. "Yes—I—I—" She lifted her eyes—her tears had made them as soft and luminous as the eyes of a child just awake from a long, untroubled sleep. "But—you must not ask me. It's nothing that can be helped. Besides, it seems nothing—now." She forced a faint smile. "If you knew what a comfort it is to cry you'd try it."

"I have," he replied. Then after a pause he added: "Once." Something in his tone—she did not venture to look at him again—made her catch her breath. She instantly and instinctively knew when that "once" was. "I don't care to try it again, thank you," he went on. "But it made me able to understand what sort of comfort you were getting. For—YOU don't cry easily."

The katydids were clamoring drowsily in the tops of the sycamores. From out of sight beyond the orchard came the monotonous, musical whir of a reaper. A quail whistled his pert, hopeful, careless "Bob White!" from the rail fence edging the wheat field. A bumblebee grumbled among a cluster of swaying clover blossoms which the mower had spared. And the breeze tossed up and rolled over the meadow, over the senses of the young man and the young woman, great billows of that perfume which is the combined essence of all nature's love philters.

Pauline sank on the hay, and Scarborough stretched himself on the ground at her feet. "For a long time it's been getting darker and darker for me," she began, in the tone of one who is talking of some past sorrow which casts a retreating shadow over present joy to make it the brighter by contrast. "To-day—this afternoon it seemed as if the light were just about to go out—for good and all. And I came here. I found myself lying on the ground—on the bosom of this old cruel—kind mother of ours. And—" She did not finish—he would know the rest. Besides, what did it matter—now?

He said: "If only there were some way in which I could help."

"It isn't the people who appear at the crises of one's life, like the hero on the stage, that really help. I'm afraid the crises, the real crises of real life, must always be met alone."

"Alone," he said in an undertone. The sky was blue now—cloudless blue; but in that word alone he could hear the rumble of storms below the horizon, storms past, storms to come.

"The real helpers," she went on, "are those who strengthen us day by day, hour by hour. And when no physical presence would do any good, when no outside aid is possible—they—it's like finding a wall at one's back when one's in dread of being surrounded. I suppose you don't realize how much it means to—to how many people—to watch a man who goes straight and strong on his way—without blustering, without trampling anybody, without taking any mean advantage. You don't mind my saying these things?"

She felt the look which she did not venture to face as he answered: "I needed to hear them to-day. For it seemed to me that I, too, had got to the limit of my strength."

"But you hadn't." She said this confidently.

"No—I suppose not. I've thought so before; but somehow I've always managed to gather myself together. This time it was the work of years apparently undone—hopelessly undone. They"—she understood that "they" meant the leaders of the two corrupt rings whose rule of the state his power with the people menaced—"they have bought away some of my best men—bought them with those 'favors' that are so much more disreputable than money because they're respectable. Then they came to me"—he laughed unpleasantly—"and took me up into a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the earth, as it were. I could be governor, senator, they said, could probably have the nomination for president even,—not if I would fall down and worship them, but if I would let them alone. I could accomplish nearly all that I've worked so long to accomplish if I would only concede a few things to them. I could be almost free. ALMOST—that is, not free at all."

She said: "And they knew you no better than that!"

"Now," he continued, "it looks as if I'll have to build all over again."

"I think not," she replied. "If they weren't still afraid of you they'd never have come to you. But what does it matter? YOU don't fight for victory, you fight for the fight's sake. And so"—she looked at him proudly—"you can't lose."

"Thank you. Thank you," he said in a low voice.

She sighed. "How I envy you! You LIVE. I can simply be alive. Sometimes I feel as if I were sitting in a railway station waiting to begin my journey—waiting for a train that's late—nobody knows how late. Simply alive—that's all."

"That's a great deal," he said. He was looking round at the sky, at the horizon, at the fields far and near, at her. "A great deal," he repeated.

"You feel that, too?" She smiled. "I suppose I should live on through anything and everything, because, away down under the surface, where even the worst storms can't reach, there's always a sort of tremendous joy—the sense of being alive—just alive." She drew a long breath. "Often when I've been—anything but happy—a little while ago, for instance—I suddenly have a feeling of ecstasy. I say to myself: Yes, I'm unhappy, but—I'm ALIVE!"

He made a sudden impulsive movement toward her, then restrained himself, pressed his lips together and fell back on his elbow.

"I suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself,' she added.

"You mustn't say that." He was sitting up, was speaking with all his energy. "All that you were telling me a while ago to encourage me applies to you, too—and more—more. You DO live. You ARE what you long to be. That ideal you're always trying to grasp—don't you know why you can't grasp it, Pauline? Because it's your own self, your own image reflected as in a mirror."

He broke off abruptly, acutely conscious that he was leaning far over the barrier between them. There was a distant shout, from vigorous, boyish lungs. Gardiner, mad with the joy of healthy seven, came running and jumping across the field to land with a leap astride the hillock, scattering wisps of hay over his mother and Scarborough. Pauline turned without getting up, caught her boy by the arms and with mock violence shook and thrust him deep down into the damaged hillock. She seemed to be making an outlet for some happiness too great to be contained. He laughed and shouted and struggled, pushed and pulled her. Her hat fell off, her hair loosened and the sun showered gold of many shades upon it. She released him and stood up, straightening and smoothing her hair and breathing quickly, the color high in her cheeks.

Scarborough was already standing, watching her with an expression of great cheerfulness.

"Good-by," he now said. "The caravan"—his tone was half-jesting, half-serious—"has been spending the heat and dust of the day on the oasis. It makes night journeys only. It must push on."

"Night journeys only," repeated Pauline. "That sounds gloomy."

"But there are the stars—and the moon."

She laughed. "And other oases ahead. Good-by—and thank you!"

The boy, close to his mother and facing Scarborough, was looking from her to him and back again—curiously, it almost seemed suspiciously. Both noticed it; both flushed slightly. Scarborough shook hands with her, bowed to the little boy with a formality and constraint that might have seemed ludicrous to an onlooker. He went toward his horse; Gardiner and his mother took the course at right angles across the field in the direction in which the towers of the Eyrie could be seen above the tree-tops. Suddenly the boy said, as if it were the conclusion of a long internal argument: "I like Mr. Scarborough."

"Why not?" asked his mother, amused.

"I—I don't know," replied the boy. "Anyhow, I like him. I wish he'd come and stay with us and Aunt Gladys."

Gladys! The reminder made her uncomfortable, made her feel that she ought to be remorseful. But she hastened on to defend herself. What reason had she to believe that Gladys cared for him, except as she always cared for difficult conquest? Hadn't Gladys again and again gone out of her way to explain that she wasn't in love with him? Hadn't she said, only two days before: "I don't believe I could fall in love with any man. Certainly I couldn't unless he had made it very clear to me that he was in love with me."

Pauline had latterly been suspecting that these elaborations of superfluous protestation were Gladys' efforts to curtain herself. Now she dwelt upon them with eager pleasure, and assured and reassured herself that she had been supersensitive and that Gladys had really been frank and truthful with her.



XVIII.

ON THE FARM.

On his way down the bluffs to town Scarborough felt as calm and peaceful as that tranquil evening. He had a sense of the end of a long strain of which he had until then been unconscious. "NOW I can go away and rest," he said to himself. And at sundown he set out for his farm.

He arrived at ten o'clock, by moonlight, amid a baying of dogs so energetic that it roused every living thing in the barnyard to protest in a peevish chorus of clucking and grunting and quacking and squealing.

"What on airth!" exclaimed Mrs. Gabbard, his farmer's wife, standing at the back door, in calico skirt and big shawl. When she saw who it was, her irritated voice changed to welcome. "Why, howdy, Mr. Scarborough! I thought it was old John Lovel among the chickens or at the granary. I might 'a' knowed he wouldn't come in the full of the moon and no clouds."

"Go straight back to bed, Mrs. Gabbard, and don't mind me," said Scarborough. "I looked after my horse and don't want anything to eat. Where's Eph?"

"Can't you hear?" asked Mrs. Gabbard, dryly. And in the pause a lusty snore penetrated. "When anything out of the way happens, I get up and nose around to see whether it's worth while to wake him."

Scarborough laughed. "I've come for a few days—to get some exercise," he said. "But don't wake me with the others to-morrow morning. I'm away behind on sleep and dead tired."

He went to bed—the rooms up-stairs in front were reserved for him and were always ready. His brain was apparently as busy and as determined not to rest as on the worst of his many bad nights during the past four months. But the thoughts were vastly different; and soon those millions of monotonous murmurings from brook and field and forest were soothing his senses. He slept soundly, with that complete relaxing of every nerve and muscle which does not come until the mind wholly yields up its despotic control and itself plunges into slumber unfathomable.

The change of the air with dawn slowly wakened him. It was only a little after five, but he felt refreshed. He got himself into farm working clothes and went down to the summer dining-room—a shed against the back of the house with three of its walls latticed. In the adjoining kitchen Mrs. Gabbard and her daughters, Sally and Bertha, were washing the breakfast dishes—Gabbard and his two sons and the three "hands" had just started for the meadows with the hay wagons.

"Good morning," said Scarborough, looking in on the three women.

They stopped work and smiled at him, and the girls dried their hands and shook hands with him—all with an absolute absence of embarrassment that, to one familiar with the awkward shyness of country people, would have told almost the whole story of Scarborough's character. "I'll get you some breakfast in the dining-room," said Mrs. Gabbard.

"No—just a little—on the corner of the table out here," replied Scarborough.

Mrs. Gabbard and Sally bustled about while he stood in the doorway of the shed, looking out into the yard and watching the hens make their careful early morning tour of the inclosure to glean whatever might be there before scattering for the day's excursions and depredations. He had not long to wait and he did not linger over what was served.

"You've et in a manner nothing," complained Mrs. Gabbard.

"I haven't earned an appetite yet," he replied. "Just wait till this evening."

As soon as he was out of view he gave a great shout and started to run. "What folly to bother with, a foolish, trouble-breeding thinking apparatus in a world like this!" he thought, as the tremendous currents of vitality surged through him. And he vaulted a six-rail fence and ran on. Down the hollow drenched with dew, across the brook which was really wide enough to be called a creek, up the steep slope of the opposite hill at a slower pace, and he was at the edge of the meadows. The sun was clear of the horizon now, and the two wagons, piled high with hay and "poled down" to keep the loads steady, were about to move off to the barn.

"Bring back a fork for me, Bill!" he called to the driver of the nearer wagon—Bill was standing on the lofty top of his load, which projected forward and rear so far that, forward, the horses were half canopied. Against Bill's return he borrowed Gabbard's fork and helped complete the other wagon, the sweat streaming from his face as his broad shoulders swung down with the empty fork and up with a great mat of hay.

They worked alternately in the fields and at the barns until half-past eleven. Then they went into the shade at the edge of the meadow and had their dinner.

"My old woman," said Gabbard, "says that two set-down meals a day in harvest time's as many as she'll stand for. So we have dinner out here in good weather, and to the barn when it rains."

The talk was of weather prospects, of probable tonnage to the acre, of the outlook for the corn, of the health and family expectations of the mares and the cows and the pigs. It died away gradually as one man after another stretched out upon his back with a bunch of hay for an odorous pillow and his broad-brimmed straw hat for a light-shade. Scarborough was the fourth man to yield; as he dozed off his hat was hiding that smile of boundless content which comes only to him who stretches his well body upon grass or soft stubble and feels the vigor of the earth steal up and through him. "Why don't I do this oftener?" Scarborough was saying to himself. "I must—and I shall, now that my mind's more at ease."

A long afternoon of the toil that tires and vexes not, and at sundown he was glad to ride home on top of the last wagon instead of walking as he had intended. The supper-table was ready—was spread in the dining-shed. They washed their hands and sunburnt arms and soused their heads in cold water from the well, and sat, Scarborough at one end, Gabbard at the other, the strapping sons and the "hands" down either side. The whole meal was before them—huge platters of fried chicken, great dishes full of beans and corn and potatoes; plates piled high with hot corn bread, other plates of "salt-rising"; Mrs. Gabbard's miraculous apple pies, and honey for which the plundered flowers might still be mourning. Yesterday it would have seemed to Scarborough dinner enough for a regiment. To-day—he thought he could probably eat it all, and wished that he might try. To drink, there were coffee and cider and two kinds of milk. He tried the buttermilk and kept on with it.

"You must 'a' had a busy summer," said Gabbard. "This is the first time you've been with us."

"Yes," Scarborough replied. "I did hope to get here for the threshing, but I couldn't."

The threshing set them all off—it had been a record year; thirty-eight bushels to the acre on the average, twenty-seven on the hillsides which Gabbard had hesitated whether to "put in" or not. An hour after supper Scarborough could no longer hold his eyes open. "Wake me with the others," he said to Mrs. Gabbard, who was making up the "salt-rising" yeast for the morrow's baking. "I'll have breakfast when they do."

"I reckon you've earned it," said Mrs. Gabbard. "Eph says you laid it over 'em all to-day."

"Well, I guess I at least earned my supper," replied Scarborough. "And I guess I ate it."

"You didn't do so bad, considerin'," Mrs. Gabbard admitted. "Nothin' like livin' in town to take appetite away."

"That isn't all it takes away," said Scarborough, going on to his own part of the house without explaining his remark. When his head touched the pillow his brain instantly stopped the machinery. He needed no croonings or dronings from the fields to soothe him. "Not an idea in my head all day," he said to himself with drowsy delight.

Four days of this, and on the fifth came the outside world in the form of Burdick, chairman of the county committee of his party in the county in which his farm lay. They sat on the fence under the big maple, out of earshot of the others.

"Larkin's come out for John Frankfort for the nomination for governor," said Burdick.

Scarborough smiled. "Even Larkin couldn't get it for Frankfort—he's too notorious."

"He don't want to get it for him," replied Burdick. "His real man's Judge Graney."

Scarborough stopped fanning himself with his wide-brimmed straw. Judge Graney was the most adroit and dangerous of John Dumont's tools. He had given invaluable aid from the bench at several of the National Woolens Company's most critical moments. Yet he had retained and increased his popularity and his reputation by deciding against his secret master with a brave show of virtue when he knew the higher courts must reverse him. For several years Scarborough had been looking forward to the inevitable open conflict between the forces of honesty in his party and the forces of the machine as ruled by the half-dozen big corporations who also ruled the machine of the opposition party. He had known that the contest must come, and that he must take part in it; and he had been getting ready. But he had not wished to give battle until he was strong enough to give a battle which, even if he lost it, would not strengthen the hold of the corruptionists.

After he rejected Larkin's dazzling offers, conditioned upon his aloofness rather than frank subservience, he had thought the whole situation over, and, as he hinted to Pauline, had realized how apparently hopeless a fight against the machine would be just then, with the people prosperous and therefore quiescent. And he had decided to stand aside for the time. He now saw that reluctance to attack Dumont had been at least a factor in this decision; and he also saw that he could not delay, as he had hoped. There was no escape—either he must let his work of years be undermined and destroyed or he must give battle with all his strength and skill. He remembered what Pauline had said: "You can't lose!"

"No, one can't lose in this sort of fight," he thought. "Either WE win or there'll be no victory." He sprang from the fence to the ground. "Let's go to the house," he said to Burdick.

"What you going to do?" asked Burdick, as they walked toward the gate, where his horse and buggy were hitched.

"Fight, of course," said Scarborough. "Fight Larkin and his gang in the open. I'll get ex-Governor Bowen to let us use his name and canvass the state for him."

Burdick shook his head sadly.

"It ain't politics," he said. "You'll split the party; then the party'll turn and split you." And later, as they were separating, Scarborough to drive to Saint X, Burdick to go back to Marshaltown, he said: "I'll help all I can in a quiet way. But—I hope you've got your cyclone cellar dug."

Scarborough laughed. "I haven't been digging a cyclone cellar. I've been trying to manufacture a cyclone."

There were thirty-three clear days before the meeting of the convention. He wasted not an hour of them on the manufacturing towns; he went to the country—to the farmers and the villagers, the men who lived each man in his own house, on his own soil from which he earned his own living. Up and down and across the state he went, speaking, organizing, planning, inspiring—he and the coterie of young men who looked up to him as their leader and followed him in this desperate assault as courageously as if victory were assured.

Not long before the convention he paused at ex-Judge Bowen's country place and spent two hours with him in his great, quiet, cool library.

"Isn't it inspiring," Scarborough said, "to see so many young men in arms for a principle?"

The old man slowly shook his magnificent white head and smiled at the young man. "Principles without leaders go begging," he replied. "Men rally to the standard only when the right voice calls. The right voice at the right time." He laid his hand on Scarborough's shoulder with affection and pride. "If the moment should come for you to think of it, do not forget that the leader is the principle, and that in this fight the leader is not I—but you."



XIX.

PAULINE GOES INTO POLITICS.

Larkin decided that the state convention should be held at Saint X because his machine was most perfect there. The National Woolens Company, the Consolidated Pipe and Wire Company and the Indiana Oil and Gas Corporation—the three principal political corporations in the state—had their main plants there and were in complete political control. While Larkin had no fear of the Scarborough movement, regarding it as a sentimental outburst in the rank and file of the party that would die away when its fomenter had been "read out of the party" at the convention by the regular organization, still he had been in the game too long to take unnecessary chances. He felt that it would be wise to have the delegates assemble where all the surroundings would be favorable and where his ablest and confidential men could do their work in peace and quiet.

The convention was to, meet on the last Thursday in September. On the preceding Monday morning, Culver—Dumont's small, thin, stealthy private secretary—arrived at Saint X and, after making an appointment with Merriweather for half-past twelve, went out to the Eyrie to go through a lot of accumulated domestic business with Mrs. Dumont. When she in a most formal and unencouraging manner invited him to stop there, he eagerly accepted. "Thank you so much," he said effusively. "To be perfectly frank, I've been tempted to invite myself. I have some valuables with me that I don't feel at all easy about. If I should be robbed, it would be a very serious matter. Would it be asking too much of you to ask you to put a package in your jewel safe?"

"I'll be glad to do it for you," replied Pauline. "There's plenty of room—the safe's almost empty and it's ridiculously large."

"My package isn't small," said Culver. "And on my mind it weighs tons." He reached into his large bag—at sight of it Pauline had wondered why he had brought such a bag up from the hotel when his papers for her inspection were so few. He lifted out an oblong, bulky package.

"If you'll just touch that button," said she, "James will come and show you how to get to the safe."

Culver hesitated nervously. Finally he said: "I'm making a nuisance of myself, Mrs. Dumont, but would you mind going to the safe with me? I'd much rather none of the servants knew about this."

Pauline smiled and bade him follow her. They went to her private sitting-room and she showed him the safe, in a small closet built into the lower part of the book-case. "You have the combination?" asked Culver, as he put the package away.

"I see that you don't lock this door often."

"How fortunate you spoke of it!" said she.

"The combination is on a bit of paper in one of the little drawers."

Culver found it in the first drawer he opened, and handed it to her without looking at it.

"You mustn't let me know it," said he. "I'll just fix the time lock so that it won't interfere." And when he had done so, he closed the safe. As he left, he said, "I shall only bother you to let me sleep in the house. I'll be very busy all day each day I'm here." When she thought he had gone he returned to add: "Perhaps I'd better explain to you that there's forty-five thousand dollars in cash in the package. That's why I was so anxious for no one to know."

"I'll say nothing about it," Pauline assured him.

Larkin came down from Indianapolis the next day and registered at the Palace Hotel. As soon as he could escape from the politicians and newspaper correspondents in the hotel office, he went by a devious route to a room on the floor below his own and, knocking, was admitted to Culver and Merriweather. He nodded to Dumont's political agent, then said to Culver: "You've got the dough?"